Gunstar

Actually, I have the Antic magazine and article right here. March '88, volume 6, number 11, page 36. Also, actually, it is/was a very unbiased article, which was very fair across the board and the author actually suggested, in an Atari magazine, that the NES and SMS did seem to edge out the XEGS, although he also concluded that this may merely be because most ot the XEGS games were re-hashed older 8-bit tiltes compared to the newer ideas and graphics on the other systems, in the end he says that they are all good systems and no matter which you choose, you will get a good deal. He badsically states that he thought the NES had the best graphics, the SMS games were more sophisticated, but that the XEGS was the only one with the ability to become a full-fledged computer with a huge existing cartridge library and with the addtion of a disk drive, it go even larger. Although by the time of this article, I believe the NES had a substancial library itself, with the SMS not too far behind. I tell you though, I think he was wrong about the NES having the best graphics and about the SMS having the most sophisticated games. I always felt the SMS had far superior graphics than either of the others, and that the disk-based games of the XE, like the LucasFilm games and others were far superior to the graphics of NES cartridges too! As for sophistication in games, what about classics like M.U.L.E or Ultima series, Alternate Reality, and even Flight simulator (which was on XEGS cart). But that's just my humble opinion.

I loved it! I use to play it all the time on my 130XE! Personally, I loved the "line graphics" better known as "Vector" graphics, the fore-runner to todays Polygons, the same thing for all intents and purposes, except vector graphics were indeed wire-frame only. The only version I ever played was the Atari 8-bit version, so I don't know how it compared to the C64 or any other systems, I did think it was very cool on the Atari 8-bit version that they let you choose between the High-res graphics or the low-res faster&smoother graphics. Although while the low-res was indeed quite a bit faster&smoother, I didn't think the high-res was all that slow. At least it allowed 48k 800 users to play it too, and wasn't just for those with 64k+. I never did finish the game myself, I did manage to find one building out in the "outback," but I never was able to figure out the conclusion or get to the space station. the hint book said it had something to do with that spider-web in that one hall, but I never did figure that out. I sure there was a lot I didn't figure out, but I still enjoyed it very much. Do you know of any strategy/hint/cheat guide to use to finish the game? Or do you remember what to do and could tell me? I'd love to play again if I can actually finish it. Did the sequel ever come out on the 8-bit Atari? I know it did for the ST and probably the C64 and Amiga...I forget what it was called off-hand though. But I did love that game! I'll take 3D worlds, even if in wire-frame and low frame-rates anyday over 2D games! The whole concept of the 3rd dimension and first-person-view makes up for the simple graphics in my book! With a little imagination, these type of games could always make me feel like I was really there, really involved, and not just playing a video game in a disconnected-from-the-game-world way. It felt like me there, not just controlling some sprite on a computer monitor. I guess that's why I am so glad the video games of the last decade have become mostly 3D; it's great to play a 2D classic style game once in a while, and I still love them, but the immersion possibilities that the imagination can lead you too with 3D virtual worlds is what keeps me coming back for more, day after day, year after year, even though I'm supposed to be "grown-up" and "mature" and not playing with "toys" anymore...BAH! if that's the way it has to be, then I'll be immature as long as I'm alive!

Well, Stone, I happen to be borrowing Randy Femrite's test cart at the moment, I haven't really given the built-in Cybermorph a close look, but I will do so before I return it, comparing it to my 2meg version, and post the results of that comparison. :wink:

I don't know if you have a Jagcd or not, or if your planning on getting one, but I do have one game double that I'm willing to trade for either Syndicate or Theme Park. It's Myst, it comes complete and in good condition with everything but the OUTER box (it has the cd "folder"). PM me if your interested ( I bought another copy of the game just for the missing outer box, being a collector). I prefer having everything, but I don't currently have Syndicate or Theme Park in my collection and even a cart is better than nothing. I feel they are worth about the same, at least to me they are...

Your not the first person to encounter this "problem," many people over the years, especially those who bought the game used, without the manualand/or the overlay have reported this "problem." It's easy to hit the 2 button accidentally when your switching shoulder weapons using the 1&3 buttons. I'm almost positive this is the experience you are having, since it has been brought up quite a few times over the years. If it happens again, just hit the 2 button and I'm sure your problem will be corrected. On the other hand, I highly reccomend learning to use the "expert" controls as they make the game much more fun and enjoyable and allow a lot of advance attack and defensive manuevers...not to mention it just looks so cool checking out the 3D perspective when looking to the side, and shooting rockets, etc. There are some other "advanced" controls that you may or may not be aware of in the Iron Soldier games, that I think does cause some complaints about the apparent "slowness" or "unresponsiveness" of the game, which some people are also unaware of because they either do not have the manual, or did not care to read it; If you press buttons "A" and/or "C" while turning/looking around, the speed of your turn is improved dramatically, holding only one button down or the other while turning, will allow you to look left&right or up&down about twice as fast as when not holding these buttons (I do forget offhand which button works for UP&DOWN vs. LEFT&RIGHT, but a quick test will reveal this to you).But, if you hold BOTH A&C down, the speed of the turning will be increased approximately three-fold. This helps quite a bit when trying to locate targets quickly. FYI.

First off, I said "SEEMS" which is NOT a direct accusation, but infered, but I've noticed that many people, including myself, can use refresher courses in english comprehension in some areas. Second, I know how to spell words correctly in most cases, such as "fragile," it's merely a matter of being a TYPO in 99% of my spelling errors, and even in editing, these things can be overlooked, I see typo's in published books and other media all the time, it just happens sometimes, so I'm hardly concerned over a few typos in an unpolished posting. Third, I'm sorry you took offense personally, but unfortunately, not everyone is as careful and/or concerned about the quality of the job they do, and I have personally had FAR more experiences with damaged goods through the USPS than any other parcel service I've ever used. Maybe it's bad luck on my part, but that's how it's been and I stick firmly beside what I stated in my post above. If you don't like it, maybe you can help to improve service and care in handling at the USPS, if not, tuff. Suck it up and do your job with excellence knowing that at least you are putting forth a quality effort. I'm sure the problems I've had were indeed accidents and not truely intensional, I was being sarcastic, but that doesn't change the fact one bit that these "accidents" did occur and my packages DID arrive damaged on many occasions through the USPS, and when using UPS or Fedex or Airborn express, I have NEVER recieved damaged goods yet and they have always arrived much quicker as well. I'm happy to pay the so-called "higher" price to ensure lack of damage. Personally, while standard postal rates are generally cheaper, I've found UPS or FEDEX 2nd day shipping to be far more reasonable and safe over Priority mail. I always check for the cheapest rates at the optimum service, and Priority mail has been the highest price point and/or slowest service on NEARLY every occasion. I'm sorry you take offense at my personal experience truths. I still use Priority mail quite often for my parcels, but only because of the convenience of the Post office being closer to home, I just always use sturdy boxes (yes, priority mail boxes are quite sturdy), but I also make sure, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I do a secure and protective a packing job as I possibly can, regardless of the service I choose to use. Unfortunately, everybody who sends parcels do not take the same care I do, and often, product is damaged in transit, regardless of who is to blame.

Definately A, B, C and D for me, not sure about the last ones. But, as far as "A" is concerned; I collect for a lot of systems, both classic and current, now(when Atari was in business I was die-hard Atari all the way), and I think every system I own has some of A: coolest games ever. Every system ever made, in my book, as both some very cool games and some very bad games. My first collection choices are always good games that are unique to a particular system, second, any unique games to that system good, bad or average, and finally, for games that are on multiple systems, I either get the best version, regardless of system, or if they are all pretty much on a par, I either get the Atari version, or which ever version I find cheapest/first, if not available on Atari. Of course when The Jaguar first came out, I did think the new games for it like AvP, Tempest 2K, Iron Soldier, etc., etc. were the best games ever at the time, and many still hold true to that even today.

I was aware that the Japanese use a form of NTSC, but is it 100% compatible with US NTSC? After all, Japanese power grids run at 100hz as opposed to the 60hz standard in the US... Couldn't a problem stem from this difference in power cycles?

NVRMND

ATOS supports task switching and the high-res 320x200 graphics work fine and actually look kind of like a Macintosh or ST, just a sort of "junior." Much better by far that the classic GEOS for the C64 or Diamond GOS. BUT, it's a 16meg operating system so requires a harddrive to operate from either connected to the ATARI or using the PC's with A.P.E&SIO2PC cable. Also, A.P.E has the enhanced WARP+ OS which is fantastic and the mod allows swithching between ALL ATARI OS's 800-XE-WARP if you want, the combination of APE/SIO2PC, ATOS and WARP OS is fantasic, works wonderfully, has TONS of killer Apps, and is 99.9% compatible with all Atari software as far as running a game on non-ATOS app and then returning to the ATOS desktop like one does with Mac,ST, Amiga or PC's. It also works great without the WARP OS too.

Well, when I look at games like SW2k, BI/WN, Skyhammer, etc. I think we are seeing textures easily comparible to early PSX games, possibly even better, they sure don't seem to get a blocky when you get up right next to them as most PSX games do! IMHO.

Are you aware of all the options that are not readily noticable at first? go through the menues and when you highlite stuff, move both left and right to see all options. Also, you may already know, but once you complete a level, if you just select "play bell" from the menu again and don't touch anything else, it will take you to the next "level" with more&tuffer enemies and will keep track of you points. new enemies will show up there are quite a few. I've lived through about 15-20 levels with a top score of about 200-250,000 before dying or the game crashing on me before. lots of cool enemies come out. I did a FULL review&strategy guide for it, tells you how to read the radar and all instruments etc., as well as running through the menus, unfortunately I always forget who's site it was posted on, so if anyone remembers, leave a link, I'll see if I can locate it in my bookmarks again...Found it! here's the link: http://www.metalstuff.com/area64/frames.html Heath Anderson added in the graphics and pics, so it's a joint effort and thankyou again Heath for hosting it at your site!

Is the GBA's ARM chip the same or from the same "line" of chips as the 3DO's?

the buildings and trees, etc. are full 3D, running on a 3D engine, but the people and cars, etc. are all sprites with a top-down view. So it's not full 3D in the sense of Driver or GTA3, but is is 3D, just not total 3D...kind of like the original Duke Nukem', it had the 3D buildings and such with the FPS view, but the characters and a lot of objects were just "3d" sprites (pre-rendered sprites with several different "angles") but technically, 2D. The Jaguar could pull of the game using all sprites with parallax scrolling and other "distortion" techniques that would look just as good to the untrained eye. personally, I think it could do it with textured polygons just like the PSX did, it's not like it needs a ton of them on screen at once with that top-down view, no worries about horizon clipping and such, personally, I don't think GTA1 or 2, even GTA2 on the DC couldn't be done on the Jaguar too, they just don't show that many polygons on screen at once, and the Jaguar has just as much memory as the PSX (RAM), IIRC, but it could be done either way, convincinly, as far as I'm concerned. It would take years and years of development time though, unless some rich Jaguar-enthusiast benefactor gave a large endowment to a large group of Atari programmers to get together and do it, with such a producer behind them, this would of course be a money pit for the producer, who would only be doing this for the love of Atari&Jaguar...unlikely, I'd do it, but I'm not rich...I know a few others who would too, if they had the money...

yeah, I'm still pissed about the IS2 game I ordered back in '96 that came crushed from GoAtari, although it really wan't their fault as it was packed in a cardboard box with styrofoam peanuts and stuff, if was clearly the Post offices fault, they must have stepped on it or ran it over with truck or something...can't trust the US postal service to send anything undamged regardless of packing, and if you mark it fragil, it seems they go out of their way to make sure it gets damaged! I also recieved a Attack of the Mutant Penguins that was supposed to be in mint conditon, crushed, but that was a case of seriously poor packing by the guy I traded it from (only padded envelope!). But it pisses me off just as much when I see people here say they *had* stuff I need, but say "oh, I just threw it away because I figured the box wan't important!

If your a person who is just into the Jag or any other atari machine just to play the games, and you don't care about boxes or manuals or ANYTHING Atari related, contact me for the sale or donation of the item before you throw it away and another piece of Atari memoribilia is lost forever! EVERY SCRAP IS IMPORTANT TO SERIOUS COLLECTORS AND HISTORIANS!!!

BAD, bad, bad, bad move! I would have given you AT LEAST $5 apiece for the Cybermorph and AvP boxes alone, if not more, since I need them desperately for my collection. NEVER throw them out, that is sacreligious to Jaguar collectors or collectors in general, and you just might recover a substancial amount of what you spent on the game just by selling your unwanted boxes to those who care! Now that's one less box of each of those games in the world for us collectors to obtain! To ANYONE who gets games in the future and doesn't care about boxes DO NOT THROW THEM AWAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I WILL PAY GOOD MONEY FOR THEM, IF ONLY TO SAVE THEM FROM DESTRUCTION!!!!!!!!!!!!

No offense, but what you've just said here is pretty dumb. Towers II really has very little info to save. Just character stats, inventory slots, and quest vars. Automap is not saved. It's reconstructed using best-guess based on the quest vars. Theme Park layouts, OTOH, can have thousands of objects on them. Every ride, every tree, every signpost, every path square, every chunk of fencing... it all has to be saved. Considering that most Jag carts only had 128 bytes of NVRAM, there's no way they could have done a meaningful savegame. First off, there is no need to call what I said as Dumb, it's only a theory and it's perfectly legit. It is quite possible to compress the data to fit most of the important stuff in that nvram. Regardless, there are plenty of ways to get around it like keeping track of everything via code like I ALSO suggested, look at the other Bullfrog title, Syndicate, it also save quite a bit of information and as a matter of fact I do think all the stuff that is save in Towers II is impressive considering the 128bytes. I still believe Theme Park could have had a decent save routine regardless of what you think.

correct! S-video is superior to "composite" video which is better than RF. RGB is better than S-video, so it does depend on whether the scart cable is using a composite signal or RGB. Personally, I have the option of using either my RGB Atari monitor or S-video on my TV and while the monitor picture is a little bit better, it is not enough of an improvement over my TV's S-video for me to put up with the smaller 13" screen as opposed to my 26" inch display or 36" display of my TV's. I'll take the S-video which is quite clear and sharp and the bigger screen over the RGB monitor anyday, or even the picture I get from a SVGA monitor playing games on my PC. S-video still rocks on a large TV!

Is there someplace where the actual cyberspace and spider patrol demos can be downloaded for running on the ST? I don't want a quicktime movie of them, I want the REAL thing! I've been searching for the cyberspace demo ever since I got my ST. I remembered seeing ads about it years ago and drooling over the pics and descriptions, wishing I could afford an ST at the time. Now I want to see them in action! PLEASE HELP IF YOU CAN! (not to mention I have a 28k connection, so downloading those HUGE quicktime movies is out of the question!)

hmm...if that is indeed the Jaguar 2 pictured above, and it was supposed to be compatible with the jaguar, then how would you play the games that require the keypad with those controllers? I'm pretty sure they would have had a cd drive on it too. I don't believe that's a Jaguar 2. Although it does look cool. But I just seriously doubt they would have gone back to a cart only system after releasing the Jagcd and everyone else (except Nintendo) was doing cd...it would be quite a kludge trying to attach the Jagcd to that...If it was not Jaguar compatible, then I might lean toward believing that it is indeed the Jaguar 2. It seems too convenient to me that there is no sign of any Atari or Jaguar markings on it anywhere, and that even the powerpack is turned upside down as to show no labelling there either, and the plugs to the controllers are conveniently hidden too...is that supposed to be the unit that the Atari Historical society has on hand? I definately will need more than that picture to believe it's a Jaguar 2. Looks more like some Genesis knock-off to me, notice the 4 pins that you can see on the one controller port? That's a ded give away that it's a 9-pin connector too, they would not have reverted back to those either I don't believe. I say that's some Hong Kong clone or something of a Genesis/32X or something...

yeah, I have a few of those...I sent a bunch of mag clippings to both Albert and Clint Thompson, so these all should be available for your viewing pleasure someday...although it has been a VERY long time since I sent them to Albert here at AA, so you'll probably see them up on Jagcube long before they get around to putting any of it up here... (which is why I sent them to Clint, figured theyed finally get put up with him; nothing against you guys Albert, but I know you have a TON of stuff to do with all things atari, and not just Jaguar stuff to get up on the site) It certainly isn't worth much I wouldn't think...maybe I should start stripping the rest of my magazines of old ads and trying to sell them on E-bay if this guy actually gets bids...

What's wrong with a game being "European?" I'll take a European game over Japanese one any day! They make a lot more sense to me in most cases and don't seem nearly as childish/trivial in the storylines and animation/graphics. Not to mention run-of-the-mill; hardly any original titles come out of Japan (though there are a few).

Unfortunately, if you give a copy in confidence, to just one untrustworthy person, then it can spread like wild fire and you end up cutting your legs out from under yourself (if your trying to release a professional quality product). Although I think most Jaguar fans appreciate a quality release for their collections.

I don't think it would be a problem due to memory constraints, just look at a game like Towers II, it saves a TON of stuff, like it should, being an RPG...it's probably more of a case of short-sightedness, or just not giving a d*mn. I know that Bullfrog (Peter Molyneux-did I spell his name right?) was never too impressed with doing games on the Jaguar (he said so in several articles), not because he thought the system sucked necessarily, but he though Atari management sucked and the system wasn't going anywhere. It could be a case of not caring to put the extra effort into the projects and just getting them done per required contract, although, I'm not even sure Bullfrog did the actual port(s). Both Syndicate and Theme Park could have been much better graphically and in other ways; like many games on the Jag, they certainly didn't take full advantage of the hardware. Even a simple passcode type of save could have worked to place object in the correct areas, it's not like the game would have to have room to save every pixel of your park...