Lynxpro

Furthermore, that was the era of Atari Corp when Atari Corp employees stopped bad-mouthing Warner-era Atari Inc and openly praised that company, its former engineers and programmers, and wanted to emulate them by resurrecting those glory days. Sam Tramiel still made Commodore-era analogies [like comparing the possibility for the success of the JagCD based upon how well the 1541 sold with the Commodore 64] at the Shareholders Meetings, but the gaming employees at Atari Corp during the Jaguar era were choosing to believe "Atari" would once again become a gaming powerhouse.

There's no way Tal or any of the other play testers at Atari Corp back then would've confused Mortal Kombat III with Fight for Life. No gamer would, and Tal was a gamer. I knew Tal back then from having met him a couple of times in-person. Even played some games at Atari Media Day with him back then in... I can't remember if that was Summer 1994 or 1995. Probably 1995 since Ted Hoff was in-change and was opening *hinting* that he wanted to transform Atari Corp into a software publisher. If my memory serves me correctly, he was the one who coined "Atari Interactive" since Atari Games Corp/Time Warner Interactive obviously had the rights to the "Games" moniker. Tal and others, both employees of Atari Corp as well as the passionate fans, were greatly irritated with many in the commercial gaming press [cough, EGM, cough] and their constant belittling of the Jaguar's hardware, its 64-bit'ness, etc. They also especially disliked [California tax-cheat] Trip Hawkins of 3DO. Tal had a picture of Trip cut out from an interview in his cubicle at the time that had "facts" refuting most of Trip's claims about the 3DO and his criticisms of the Jag from some press interview posted right below Trip's comments. Mortal Kombat III was a big deal at Atari Corp at the time. Even Sam Tramiel felt that was the make-it-or-break-it title for the Jag and in the end, they couldn't secure it licensing-wise. So if Tal says today MKIII was the best-looking arcade conversion for the Jag, or 2nd best behind Primal Rage, then I have no doubt that there's a version of it that was at least partially completed [an early Alpha version] for the Jag that they were play-testing at the time while keeping their fingers crossed that Sam could get the licensing secured from WMS Industries. Unfortunately, that didn't happen...

They were made with the Atari STe and Falcon030 in mind with the gamer sitting directly in front of the computer and the monitor so the cables are shorter than the Jaguar controller versions. For whatever reason, they were near impossible to get in the States at the time from Atari dealers. Much like the earlier 7800 "Euro" Pad Controllers... and the XG-1 light gun outside of the XE Game System package.

Normally, I'd say "just get 7800 Dark Chambers and forget about playing the 2600 version", but someone made a hacked version of 2600 Dark Chambers into Gauntlet. And that's friggin' sweet. I know plenty of people here and elsewhere have expressed support for the idea of hacking the A8/XEGS and 7800 versions of Dark Chambers into Gauntlet*. Maybe if a 7800 version was done, someone would investigate the possibility of making a Team Tap Adapter for Joystick Port 2 on the 7800. Since that mofo port was capable of using the 7800 Keyboard on it, the 2nd Joystick, and devices on the SIO Port built into the keyboard, it should be able to accommodate multiple joysticks...possibly even 3 of 'em. *Yes, I know, Domark/US Gold/Mindscape released an officially-licensed version of Gauntlet for Atari 8-bit but it is slowwwwwwwwwwwwww....

I've been away from AtariAge for a bit and I find this thread. This is awesome! Pac-Land was originally planned for the 7800. Suffice to say, had Atari Inc survived [meaning no Consumer Division sale to TTL], we would've had Pac-Land on the 7800 by Christmas 1985. Hell, it probably would've been the pack-in by that point too as a way to stiff Nintendo's efforts to bring the Famicom/NES to America around that time with their NYC test market. Some thoughts... the C64 version is slow! The NES version is such a$$ it leads me to speculate whether Nintendo actually paid Namco to deliberately gimp it so Super Mario Bros. would look even better. Why didn't the Atari ST version reuse the audio from the Amstrad version? What's with the Amiga version? For an ST port, it appears they shrunk the play field. Did they use all of the spare CPU cycles on DMA audio for PAULA? Yikes. Reusing Bob's BBCQ engine would be genius*. How much RAM are we speculating the game would require? What about HSC/SaveKey/AtariVox scoring support? As much as I like Single and Multiple POKEY and TIA usage, what about using the Bup chip? It should be able to play the Namco audio chip music, or the Sharp 68000's version's YM2151-based audio. Oops, I referenced the YM2151, RAM, and HSC. Finally, maybe some A8/5200 devs should be added to the fray. They also didn't get Pac-Land on their systems back-in-the-day. And I think the 1088XEL folks are working on a modern audio chip solution, if they haven't done so already. Kinda reminds me of that Commodore audio expander cartridge for the C64 that used a Yamaha chip that 99.999% of that platform's software library didn't support [although apparently some modern C64 enthusiasts have been adding audio support to certain C64 games that also had DOS ports that used AdLib audio]... *7800 Kung-Fu Master could certainly use some of Bob's code added to it. Maybe then the defeated enemies could be flung off the screen like the arcade original, since BBCQ does similar with its expert handling of the MARIA...

From PRGE's website, it appears The Brewing Academy will be there on the floor...

The 5200 is the most stylish looking console of all time. It's as if Bang & Olafsson [sic] designed its case. Just about every "problem" with the 5200 which led to its cancellation was due to Warner's interference. Atari's engineers wanted the 5200 to be backwards-compatible with the 2600. The Warner picked management team dismissed it by stating consumers wanting to buy the most advanced console wouldn't want to play their old games on it. Atari's engineers wanted the joysticks to self-center from the start. Warner's picked management team said "no". Despite all of the problems with the 5200, it was catching up with Colecovision's sales and was projected to ultimately surpass it but then Warner forced Atari Inc to cancel the 5200 in favor of the 7800 that GCC was designing. Although very powerful, the 7800 was a cost-reduced console that was much cheaper to manufacturer than the 5200 was [whether or not the "5100" "5200 jr" would've made it to the market place]. The cancellation of the 5200 led Atari Inc to also cancel Dan Kramer's in-progress ProLine Controller additions. He was working on a 5200 Driving Controller [based upon Atari's Pole Position arcade controls] and planned to do a 5200 Yoke Controller [based upon Atari's Star Wars arcade yoke] after that. The 5200's cancellation also scrapped plans for an actual arcade quality joystick too, a 5200 Kids' Controller, a 5200 Musical Keyboard, and other accessories. Atari Inc had also designed a self-centering joystick, the CX52L, but it wasn't released and the later Atari Corp apparently forgot about it too. The best reasons to own the 5200 today are its awesome CX53 Trak-Ball Controller [designed by Dan Kramer], the AtariMax SD Cartridge Adapter, several A/V Mods including the RGB mods, and numerous adapters for using different controllers with it. A lot of unreleased titles from the bygone era have been released, most famously Tempest which the original 5200 programmer Keithen Hayenga finished up a few years ago to much acclaim in the community, not to mention new home brew titles and conversions from the Atari 8-bit computer line.

If you have an old Series 2 TiVo with Home Media Option, you should be able to record your 5200 video that way, then transfer the video over to a PC. There were ways of scrubbing the proprietary hooks out of the video files so they could play as standard MPEG-2 content. Granted, I haven't messed with any of that since about 2006.

It's no mystery. Atari Corp did this in 1984-86. They were doing whatever it took to sell off their inherited inventory* to pay to finish up developing the ST, paying all of their loans to Warner, keeping the doors open, and paying GCC for the 7800. They sold a lot of these in bundles through the early editions of the Atari Explorer magazine. If someone could link to one of those magazines to here, you'll see the ads where Atari Corp mentions this as a big feature improvement. And the key point is the Atari Corp label instead of the Atari Inc label. Teenretrogamer lucked out here with this. *The inherited inventory could've been unsold NOS consoles as well as refurbs. Either way, factoring modding them basically made them refurbs...

The programmer who created Klax on the 5200 recently announced himself on Facebook as its creator. I forget which Atari group it was in. It would be nice to have these options available again. There's also folks who buy the cartridges and boxes for display but then use ROMs on their actual hardware via the likes of the AtariMax SD Adapter. [not to mention all of the people who play using emulators]. Modern "Atari" wouldn't have been the company complaining about Klax. That would be WB Games since Klax was by Atari Games Corp/Tengen/Time Warner Interactive which was merged into WMS Industries/Midway and once again is owned by Time Warner/Warner Media's WB Games division. The kicker being AT&T now owns Time Warner. Amusing since in the early 1980s, there were extremely wishful-thinking rumors that Atari Inc was going to buy AT&T. I'd like to play Klax on the 5200. Loved it on the Lynx, loved it on the Sega Genesis [Tengen's version on the NES is also good], and I love playing the arcade ROM in the Midway Collection on my Sony PSP. I haven't had the pleasure of playing it on the Atari ST or the unreleased/incomplete 7800 version as of yet...

Nice! I also have one of Grips03's modded NeoGeo sticks for the 5200. Speaking of Pac-Man on the 5200, if you haven't done so already, get Tep392's Pac-Man Arcade! It's awesome. He also has an Atari 8-bit version of it too.

Dave Comstock apparently gave up on it multiple times. He was working on the Atari 8-bit version, which would've then had to be converted to the 5200. He was dismayed over the single POKEY sound chip compared to the original arcade version, and RAM constraints. I guess nobody informed him of the Dual POKEY upgrades for A8 in the past couple of decades. He has a 2-part interview over at the Antic Atari 8-bit Podcast.

No. And although there was some talk within Atari Inc about doing a Colecovision module - it would've been completely possible to have done so since it used standard chips - it would've been inserted into the cartridge slot like the existing 2600 Piggyback Parasite Adapter and the unreleased 7800 Adapter. CPUWiz has the specs but the 5200 Expansion Port - like the later 7800 Expansion Port - apparently has too low of bandwidth to be useful like that. At one point, Atari planned on releasing a musical keyboard accessory for the 5200 just like Commodore did for the C64 and Mattel did for the Intellivision 2. From what Curt has said elsewhere, the unreleased Atari 5100 [the "5200 jr"] dropped the Expansion Port. It would be cool - and I say this about the 7800 Expansion Port too - if there was enough bandwidth to support a Y Connector to add 2 more joystick ports like what was commonly done with the Atari ST and the Amiga through their Parallel Ports. That way, the 2-Port 5200s could support 4 controllers if certain games were modded to support the scheme. If the bandwidth is there for the joysticks, then that would mitigate the lack of ability to use the MultiJoy adapters that are used in Atari 8-bit land. Not that there's a burning desire amongst the community but everything helps. Before anyone brings up the unreleased 7800 Keyboard to try to refute the low-bandwidth claim, it didn't connect to the 7800 Expansion Port; it connected to Joystick Port 2. Port 2 has high speed bidirectional communication abilities. According to Curt, GCC designed a proprietary chip to power it that handled the keyboard input, the SIO Port, and the pass-thru Joystick Port that the Keyboard featured. Curt speculated that Atari Corp probably planned to do something similar to support their planned port of MIDI Maze to the 7800 because it would've been lame had it only been 1 or 2 player - a la Ballblazer - on the same screen instead of multi-player like the original ST version, the XEGS/Atari 8-bit port, and, of course, BPS' licensed version [FaceBall 2000] for practically every released non-Atari game system on the market at the time. What the 5200 could really use, and I'm sure some will chime in and say "just get an Atari 8-bit computer instead", is an internal memory expansion upgrade. 64K, 128K, 256K, 512K, or above. That would certainly aid in converting more A8 games - and, ahem, demoes - to the platform. Well, that and a 1MB ROM Cart design. And then A8 Space Harrier could be ported. SIO would also be nice for MIDI Maze. Many such hypothetical upgrades would require drilling holes into the case but people are already doing that for video and power mods anyway.

Do tell. It would certainly improve the quality of this thread.

All true. Plus his "legendary" soldering skills. Still, those dust doors are flippin' sweet. He also bragged a few months back that he had figured out a super cheap way - if I recall, less than 5 euros, supposedly - to get the 5200's analog joysticks to self center. But then he got booted from 3 different Atari themed Facebook groups for being an insufferable braggart and also swiping the "UAV" name from Bryan on here at AA for his own video mod before he was able to reveal his finding. If he was actually going to do so and not try to commercialize it first.

Well, that never stopped the Intellivision's fan base....

What's the size of the current ROM?

Isn't that Ralf Puckner's company? The Jaguar dust doors he makes look pretty cool...

Saturn, I was reading your signature block and read that impressive number of WAD files you've converted over to JagDOOM. Have you ported over the Atari Corp WAD which renders the 1196 Borregas Avenue HQ and has the "Don't Mess with the Tramiels!" Easter Egg in it?

MIDI MAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZEEEEEEEEEE... Sure, the rights are an issue, and one could argue that using the JagLink or CatBox/ScatBox Network makes it unnecessary but having a MIDI adapter and that game would mean the Jag could theoretically be included in a MIDI MAZE ring with STs and Atari 8-bits. There seems to be a revival of interest on YouTube for proving 16 GameBoys can be connected with adapters to play the licensed non-Atari platform adaptation FaceBall 2000 in a ring. Personally, I find it amusing FaceBall 2000 runs so clunky on a 1989 Nintendo GameBoy than MIDI Maze does on an Atari 8-bit computer/XEGS whose chipset primary comes from 1978/79, but I digress.

At the very least, getting to use the multi-button JagPads on the Jaguar with the ports is a huge plus since very few - if any - ST games have been modded to support the ST Power Pads/JagPads when used on an Atari STe or Falcon030...unfortunately. There's been a lot of work in that scene over the years to get various games to work with different versions of TOS, with different memory configurations and CPUs, with different monitors [monochrome], on ST systems [STe, TT, Falcon030, etc] that the games didn't previously work on, and installing on hard drives, but adding support for the JagPads has been a huge disappointment there.

Sounds like you want the DPad from the Atari 7800 EuroPad Controllers. They had a removable thumbstick. Perhaps the first thumbstick actually crafted to cup the thumb [the thumbstick on the earlier SMS Pads didn't do that].

On behalf of all ST owners, please take all of the SF354s instead.

Okay, let's cannibalize Amiga PAULA chips and use them in 7800 carts then. After all, Atari Inc. financed the completion of the Amiga Lorraine chipset which they planned to use in their "Mickey" 16-bit console for release at Christmas 1985. Considering the 7800's cartridge slot supports external CPUs, RAM, sound chips, and graphics chips, it's not much of a thought exercise to imagine that Atari Inc would've had an XM-ish "Mickey" upgrade available for the 7800 at that time had our time line not ending up sucking so hard...

We'll get the word out in the 5200 group on Facebook for those 5200 fans who [unfortunately] do not visit AtariAge. Any success with a 5200-adapter for the Jag [Pro] Controllers yet, Starwander?