Morpheus23

There was a very short window. It was up for about 15 minutes. I purchased and downloaded then went back in and the game was gone. I posted some gameplay. I'm up to level 76 now and I can tell you the game is amazing. The only reason I owned a Jaguar was for Tempest 2000. But viewing this on a 4K tv is absolutely stunning. Kudos to my coding idol, Jeff Minter.

A rev. 2 Skunk Board in excellent condition is for sale. Contact me with message or send email offer to [email protected]

Since the Hillsoft page is no longer available, are the Vista tools available somewhere else? which is better to use, the falcon or Vista?

Well I have been looking for a Falcon and finally found one being sold with some musicians gear. The Falcon is MINT. I just did the 14 meg upgrade as well as a 2 gig flash drive. It has a SCSI CD drive and some Steinberg stuff. I'll probably be listing on Ebay soon. They are becoming harder to find and subequently, aren't cheap.

Do you still have this? [email protected]

I have a Toshiba 2300 in MINT condition. I am looking to buy a Samsung or RCA model or trade. [email protected]

If you remember, Atari was working on "Fight for Life" until they saw Sony's "Battle Aren Toshinden" at which point FFL was delayed. No one was doing 3D really. UBIsoft did a parallax scrolled Rayman (excellent job). The Wolfenstein 3D engine worked very well on the Jag. For the most part, early games weren't 3D though. As a matter of fact, there were only a handful of developers outside Atari that understood the architecture and technology behind Tom, Jerry, Blitter, DSP etc. to maximize the power of the Jag. Code writers were doing amazing things on the Falcon but for some reason, developers that were interested in the Jag, couldn't maximize their games to be what they truley could have been. Hence the dissappointing sales for games that were lackluster and when Sony and Battle Arena arrived, people jumped ship. I tried over the years to buy another Alpine and Stubulator and take time to write good code but I couldn't find one that worked. I'm still looking for a good unit and a Falcon as well. I used to have them all, Falcon, Stacy, ST, Developers kit, Lynx etc. At any rate, you are correct. The Jag was capable as many have demonstrated after it's demise.

The criticisms in my earlier post were directed at the community that has evolved around the Jaguar, rather than at the Jaguar itself. Understood. I was just pointing out that it wasn't public rejection, it was that the public didn't know about it. Good points you make though.

If you're enough of a contrarian to like a video game system that was as completely and decisively rejected in the marketplace as the Jaguar was, you're probably not the kind of person who cares very much about other peoples' opinions or about getting along with everybody; in fact, you probably think that you know better than the majority of the population, because you can see something worthwhile in the Jaguar that almost everyone else in the world missed. This might be one reason why the Jaguar fan base has more than its fair share of highly abrasive and belligerent personalities. First, I was a registered developer with Atari back then and the reasons the Jag suffered poor sales was because it, 1. was released with a limited inventory in 2 major markets (New York and California) with 1 game. 2 games came out from Atari relatively quick shortly thereafter that weren't that great. 2. It had absolutely no marketing behind it and it wasn't until Sony was readying it's PS1 that Atari released the Jag on a larger scale. Again, without much marketing. The whole ramp up was too late. A lack of developers early on and games that were hurried out the door didn't help. Jeff Minter (Tempest 2000), who I idolize for his talent in writing code, showed that the Jaguar was capable of really good games. The VLM was absolute genius. It wasn't the hardware that failed. It was lack of a knowledgable marketing scheme to support the Jag. When the Japanese PS1 was available, people were spending double just to get one.

It already sold. I was going to make an offer but it's sold.

No, they're not. Those prices are irrelevant today. They were selling you 14MB of RAM for $600 then because it was expensive. I haven't priced RAM lately, but you can get a 16GB SD card for $35 in 2009! The computer is only good as a novelty/collector's item today. Actually, the sellers are not fools; they are fishing for fools, and they may find one. However, the prices seem pretty crazy. I have seen "new-in-box" (claimed, anyway) for for half of that a couple years ago. You just described all of Ebay. But the Falcon, like many Atari items are, as you say, collectables. Look at the price list for rare Jaguar hardware and software. Seen any Scatboxes lately? Look at what the Alpine board and developer Jag and CD unit go for. To most, it is worthless even though it sold for thousands. It's 600 to someone who wants to experience programming on the Jag with the real deal. And as the Jaguar and Falcon become more rare, the prices will be higher for the collector that wants one.

I emailed the seller. The reserve or accepted offer limit is much lower than the buy it now price. They accept offers at 500 and above.

So the American one is $750 which is equal to £471.31 & the English one is £200 which is equal to $318.26 So really, you should just order the British one. What do you want it for anyway? If there's software inside it that can program Atari games then why not download the BIOS & buy a blank computer to use it on? You could have a lot more RAM. I mean, that wanker is selling the keyboard separately, so it's not even a complete set. You're only supposed to display what you're selling but he did close ups on the keyboard. Probably so that you buy it & then re-read the description & realise that you have to give him more money just for the keyboard. Yeah, I think it's a midi keyboard being sold separately. This is not the first time I've seen Atari Falcons selling for 500, 600, 700 on Ebay. Again, 2 websites that sell used Atari gear sell just the console for 600. It absolutely boggles my mind. Go figure.

Look at the price of this one. Also, I priced it at an Atari store out in California. It sells online refurbed for 699 with 14 meg. Long live Atari http://cgi.ebay.com/Atari-Falcon-030-Compu...%3A1%7C294%3A50

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI...3#ht_500wt_1182 Looks like a pretty complete setup.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI...3#ht_500wt_1182 Looks like a pretty complete setup.

I caution anyone buying a Jag dev kit with Alpine. Actually it wasn't the Alpine that was the problem. It was the consoles. The whole lot of them had corrupt ROM. They supposedly flashed the ROM from masters they had but the consoles still had problems.

I was #157 and did NOT expect to get one, so I was very pleased that I got an email and gladly sent my payment. After buying 3 developer jags with Alpine boards and not ONE of them working properly, I am truly grateful for the work Tursi and Kskunk have done. I dunno...for some reason I felt compelled to write that. Good work.

Everyone has their favorites. So it's only laughable to those that like Highlander. I only stated how I feel about the games. There are people that don't like Tempest. I'm not one of them but they are out there. Anyway, the point was not to irritate Highlander, Baldies, or VidGrid lovers. It doesn't change the fact regarding the Jags and Atari's demise.

This game was the start of the downfall of the Jaguar. The fact that is was supposed to be ready near release and was'nt anywhere close. Fine...wait and get a better product, right? Atari so screwed themselves. This was the game that needed to be perfect, could have been and clearly was a rush job. I know it took much longer but the result was clearly one of the Tramiels not willing to wait, probably forgone the testing and blew it big time. This was the game that needed to be done right and it was'nt. Imagine if the controls were at least proper and the game play was there.....this could have caused serious underwear changes at Sega.The frame rate is fine....that would have been overlooked had the controls actually felt like a car and not a lead blcok. Not the Jaguar's fault but the development team and Atari management (or I should say more accurately mis-management.) You're right. I don't know if this was the start of the downfall or not but clearly it didn't help. I only have 3 games on CD. I've never played them until last week. Highlander, Baldies, Vid Grid. What a waste. An embarrassing release on the part of Atari and even more so for the developers. Donkey Kong Country on the SNES was graphically better and played better. The demise of the Jaguar was the game quality != & < hype. As I said, there's only a few games I play on the Jaguar. One is Tempest 2000 the others were made after Atari went under. Until I actually get my working Jag stub (hopefully in a day or so) I won't be able to test my coding skills. Not that I expect to resurrect the Jag platform, but demos like Native showed real talent in the homebrew community. Atari was always on a RUSHED schedule. The Falcon and Jaguar could have had more impact on the world than they did.

That's exactly right. The problem was not with the Jaguars technical specs (well, a small part). It was the lack of knowledge to leverage the strengths of the Jag. It was Atari pushing developers to expedite the process just to get new titles out. This is all very well documented elsewhere on the net. That was the Jags demise. When the "polished" Playstation games came out, the launch games were top notch. Anyway, not wanting to bore anyone with repetitive comments. The Jaguar truly was the better "hardware" before the PS1.

I was developing a custom database program on the ST for a private company. We probably had some of the first ST's and those huge 10 Mb hard drives. I learned to program in C and GEM. I still have my Mark Williams C for the ST. Later on, I dabbled in assembler. So, with the Jag, my goal is to dive into assembler more and write something that graphically stands out. I've got a few ideas but We'll see how it goes. Gotta get the dev kit working first.

Some will not like my comments so I'll preface this with...I am a Jaguar fan. I just bought the dev kit...again and hope to start coding as soon as the Alpine replacement gets here. That said, I don't think any game really showed what the Jag is capable of. Some games really looked good and we all know which ones. But back when the Jag was released, I was commuting from Pennsylvania to Connecticut and often stayed in hotels. I saw the Jag was released in New York and bought one with Cybermorph and Trevor Mcfur. It was fun for a while but after a couple of months with no new games I saw an ad for the Playstation in a Japanese import store. I bought the Japanese version 6 months before it's release in the US. I bought Battle Arena Toshinden and one other. I put the Jag in a box for months. It wasn't until games like Tempest 2k and AvP came out that I became interested in the Jag again. To me, most of the games didn't look any better than 32 bit or some 16 bit games. And I know why because I was registered developer with Atari and Commodore at the time. There were a lot of issues with Atari back then and the Jag could have been (should have been) better. Poorly marketed, 3rd party support etc, blah blah...we all know the story. I think the homebrew community knows more about the Jag than most developers did. Jeff Minter is my coding idol and I've watched his work for years and I consider him one of the finest programmers....period. The Jag VLM is my favorite incarnation. I'm hoping some homebrew efforts like those here will bring some really good games to the small but loyal Jag community. There are many talented coders on this forum as well as others. I hope I can turn out something worthwhile on the Jag and the Falcon. I mean, look at the Falcon. Some of the best stuff I've seen came out years after Atari was gone.

I know it's been a while but, I can send a ROM or ABS file to the Alpine but I can't get it to run. I must be doing something wrong.

Yes. That's right. There was a black guy who said he was JFK. That was funny.