Lost Dragon

Or Rockstar were behind the score 🤣 https://www.gamespot.com/forums/games-discussion-1000000/edge-magazine-exposed-rockstar-too-freelance-write-29301555/

Don't blame me, that's how it was presented in the last article i ever saw on the system: https://issuu.com/michelfranca/docs/retro_gamer____132 P24 onwards, talks of system being re-launched to go head to head with the NES and Master System, lack of promotion etc. Call it mothnalling, projects put on hold, whatever, that's how the magazine presented it in an historical feature. They had a resident Atari proof reader. To be fair though, they also claimed Lynx Gauntlet III was a conversion of the coin op Gauntlet, rather than a stand alone title renamed and this in a feature on the Tramiel era Atari. I was constantly shot down whenever i questioned the Atari coverage in the magazine, so if it's good enough for them to claim it.. 🤣

Mean Machines did this and presented the CGI cut-scenes of Alien Trilogy as actual in-game shots, when the Previewed it as a future Saturn title. Think it was UK magazine, MEGA that claimed the Sega CD had no custom hardware for Sprite Handling etc.

Sega telling Japanese Press Saturn was to have a 64-bit Graphics chip, then moaning as press didn't know if it should be referred to as a 32-bit or 64-bit system, so Sega called it a multiprocessor console 😅 Hewland International (the Producers of Gamesmaster) TV Show, asking for and being given an early, unfinished version of AvP without all of the Aliens etc populating the levels. It was explained to them that this needed to be born in mind for any review.... They then ignored these facts requests reviewed the game, 84% and lost both EPROM's of it, Atari gave them. Various press taking the mock up shots of Tomb Raider, which Core Design told them were mock up's and presenting them as real and announcing title was headed to both Jaguar CD and 3DO, cue the infamous false claim Tomb Raider started life on the Jaguar CD.

And lest we forget.. Edge 4/10 Jaguar AVP, they went onto do a making of... years later The Rev Stuart Campbell giving Jaguar Defender 2000 3/10, he wrote a similar review for ST Format Magazine, both under Future publishing.

I believe some of the Deathwatch screens might also be new? Knew i made the right decision giving the Lynx Rolling Thunder and Vindicators documents from Scott, to Frank to investigate further. It's been a long journey, but Frank has delivered in spades here.

Going to have to call Frank Mr Atari now the book is out 😊 Atari coverage includes : Atari:cannonball 1976 Owen Rubin Time Bomb, 1977 2 page on Atari Brain Game 1978 8 pages on 2600 Boggle 1978 Boxer 1978 Captain Sea Hawk 19786 page feature MINI Golf 19780 Wolf Pack 4 pages Sebring 1979 8 page feature.. Akka Arrh 1982 Keystone Kannonball 2600,Activision1983 Blaster Atari 5200 1984 Safire Scott Adam's A8 1984 Millipede 26001984 7800 Rescue on Fractalus and quotes from Lars Jensen 10 Pages on ST Charlie Chaplin US Gold 1988 Last Ninja ST and A8, plus other platforms 12 pages.. Heart Of Yesod ST etc 6 pages Dick Special ST etc 16 pages Solar Jetman ST and others 12 pages Green Lantern ST etc 14 Pages Daffy Duck, Inc ST 12 Pages LYNX Vindicators 10 pages LYNX Rolling Thunder 10 pages Jaguar Deathwatch 16 pages.

That's the response i had from multiple sources at Atari UK during the 400/800 XL/XE era. Tramiel had no interest in pushing the hardware as a games platform, he wanted it pushed for serious users. All the press reports of renewed support from software houses after he had offloaded the unsold 800 XL"s to UK Electrical high street chain, was just nonsense. The staff at Atari UK had to do everything off their own backs to try and get games support from publishers for the A8 range. If not for likes of Red RAT, English Software, Zeppelin, Tynesoft, US Gold etc, the A8 scene would of been even worse over here. Ocean sat on Head Over Heels for years, had no interest in the XEGS, Imagine farmed out the conversion of Green Beret.. Domark came close to not releasing Star Wars after Zeppelin coded it for them. Gremlin Graphics gave it token support. Once Atari saw the NES capturing huge market share, the 7800 was taken out of storage, given minimal advertising and support. We had an absurd situation in the UK with Atari having the 2600 Jr, XEGS and 7800 all trying to compete for the same, limited 8-bit console market share, same games on all 3 platforms in some cases, no new, big name titles.. Tramiel thinking because the system's were cheaper than their rivals, they'd sell better, it was never going to happen. You combine that with Atari announcing new hardware far too early.. CD ST console..

Whilst never a fan of this on any platform. I think you were quite generous with the Playstation version. I bent the coder, Nick Pekking's ear about it at the time, as well as what became of Playstation Unreal.. Nick: What my team and I did with Duke Nukem 3D on the PlayStation wasto convert the PC’s Build engine to use the PlayStation’s texture rendering hardware, i.e. to draw vertical strips using the 3d renderer. This meant that we were able to exactly replicate the unusual perspective and game mechanics used on the PC. Convertors on other game platforms (e.g. the Saturn) adapted the game to their own game engines, giving slightly better performance at the risk of losing a lot of the fun and detail of the game. As an example, Sony’s testers found a level design bug in the first level of the game which a million-plus PC players had never noticed (a section of one wall was slightly too thin, so players were able to ‘force’ their way through it). As far as Unreal/PlayStation goes, the less said the better. I’m sure others will have kind words to say about GT Interactive and Epic, but you won’t find any here.

The scrolling issues could to a degree, be overcome by clever coding routines. It was the awful sound chip i had issues with, coming from the 800XL and the C64. Ocean musician, Jonathan Dunn said the Sinclair Spectrum +3, which had a similar AY chip, had superior sound, as that had a buzzer, which could be put to good use 😂 I was a 520STFM owner for a number of years, i never saw it as a poor man's Amiga, more the ZX Spectrum of it's time, a view many in the commercial games industry reinforced.

And here in the UK, it was a Sinclair QL beater, cue the brief but bitter war of words between Sir Clive Sinclair and Atari.

I've personally always viewed the Panther in a similar light to that of the Konix Multisystem, press hyped up as a killer system, but then you look at the ports from other 16-bit systems and all you saw were more colorful versions of old Amiga titles. And i think the sprites on Konix Hammerfist are smaller than the Amiga version.

There's also still the rumour Atari were looking to drop it's custom soundchip, one of it's most powerful features, to save costs.

The software in development was lacking, to be brutally honest. An RPG which had started life on the Konix Multisystem Another version of Shadow Of The Beast. An update of Pong Some original titles by Rob Zybdel, he can't remember what they were. Jeff Minter planning to do his take on Star Raiders Tiertex planning to convert Strider II HMS used ST Elite to test the hardware, but Atari wouldnt grant them the license for it on the Lynx, so unlikely it would of made it to Panther. Your not going to make inroads without some big name titles and killer apps from the start.

Here is wisdom. Very similar situation with myself, bought the Jaguar day one, very much enjoyed AVP, DOOM, Rayman, Syndicate, T2K and I. S But as time went on and Atari started releasing titles in an unfit state, just to get product on the shelves, interest dropped rapidly off. The Jaguar CD offered little more than the VLM and more storage, nice as Battlemorph and H.S:U. L looked, they weren't enticing enough.

Guildo H. Who created 1 level of the Panther RPG, The Crypt, before project was canned.. From a technical standpoint Panther did put Mega Drive and SNES to shame, I remember. They were getting a bit long in the tooth already, especially compared to some of the things you started seeing on the Amiga. The Panther was like an Atari ST on steroids with a console design, meaning without the operating system overhead. Even though the architecture was very different than that of the ST-line of computers, it was following the same lean and mean approach. The architecture had quite a bit in common with Atari’s Lynx, if I recall correctly, and had some powerful incredibly sprite hardware that exceeded Sega’s and Nintendo’s capabilities. However, with the Jaguar’s accelerated development schedule, I think they were smart to cancel Panther and shift focus to Jaguar instead.

You'd have to ask the article writers for why they made claims about Psygnosis having a development kit, DOMARK doing Pit Fighter etc etc, it created a lot of Red Herrings when i looked into it on behalf of GTW. Same applies for those who deliberately took early Jaguar footage captures of Cybermorph and passed it off as Panther screens.. I'd guess the need to present some imagery to go with the incorrect claims? A lack of credible research?

Mev Dinc on why he turned the Panther down: MEV:I believe it must have been around 1991, we had started developing our First Samurai title around this time... I guess at the time Atari was also challenging the Amiga with their Atari ST. Most of us developers believed the Amiga was superior to the ST, but we did a very good version of First Samurai on it. Maybe at the time I felt Atari wasn’t capable of challenging the other hardware manufacturers although they were one of the early pioneers.

OTo answer the question of how powerful the hardware was, let's let those who worked on it answer.. Rob Nicholson, HMS : The Panther had a pathetic amount of RAM. Maybe 128K. Certainly not enough to create two bit-maps as big as the whole screen and implement standard double buffering. I think there was 32K of static RAM for the display list. This was a good idea as it sped up generation of the display. The same system was used on the Jaguar but the object processor was beefed up and made more flexible to handle other features such as read-modify write (for shadows etc). Unfortunately, on the Jaguar the display list was in normal DRAM which meant the whole system stopped when the video processor wanted to access memory. It also meant that on the Jaguar, the advantages of page mode RAM where accessing the next byte/word along was often defeated as different devices (display, blitter, 68k and GPU etc) kept reading from different pages. Jeff Minter :"Hmmm - well I certainly never had it displaying 65,535 sprites simultaneously! The sprite hardware was a lot like the OLP on the Jag, and had similar limitations - putting too many sprites on one scanline would cause "tearing" where the OLP had insufficient time to traverse the entire list during the time of a scanline. Also, sprites that were scaled up would take twice the bandwidth of standard, unscaled sprites, ISTR. I did a demo with this whopping great dinosaur about 2 screens high, a couple of ground planes and 40 bouncing, scaling antelopes that bounced along the ground. ISTR that if you had too many beasts land at the one time, you'd get a bit of tear at the bottom of the screen. You could do some nice warping though by using an IRQ per scanline to twiddle scaled sprite params... had some nice stuff with wibbly, colour-cycling Mandy images that warped and scrolled, ISTR..." \ (:-) - Y a K /

The Falcon couldn't of been released any earlier. Atari used manufacturing plants in the Far East as they were cheaper than those in the USA. Falcon machines from the first 2 production runs failed Q. A testing, which delayed the Falcon launch. It was later found the Q. A machines were at fault, not the Falcons.

No worries. It's a situation that's been made worse by people putting screens of the Jaguar footage in Panther articles and others stating as fact the only Panther games in development were... and not being aware of just actually what was in development or used to test development machines.

Keypad was there as Atari wanted to get more complex simulation games like Falcon, Gunship 2000 etc converted to the Jaguar. These required a lot of keyboard controls.

Your getting confused with early Jaguar footage 😊 Sources from ATD, Atari Corp, Imagitec Design etc have all confirmed NO Jaguar titles started life on Panther. Panther RPG, The Crypt however, was carried over from the Konix Multisystem.

Assuming your talking of something in the style of Cybermorph, but not actually Cybermorph as that's been confirmed by ATD and Atari Corp to of been built from ground up for the Jaguar. People passing off footage for early Jaguar version as Panther footage, caused a lot of misinformation. You'd probably be looking at something like Revenge Of Starglider on the equally ill-fated Konix Multisystem : http://www.konixmultisystem.co.uk/index.php?id=games&content=starglider#start

The more i look back into Jaguar AVP and interviews given by both sources within Rebellion and from the likes of Jane Whittaker, both parties are as bad as each other when it came to detailing events when interviewed. https://archive.org/stream/Gamefan_Vol_2_Issue_06#page/n129/mode/2up Jasson Kingsley appears to take credit about doing Atari Star Raiders on the Atari 800..that’s Doug Neubar.. He then tells a story of Atari approaching them after seeing their 3D Engine on PC Eye Of The Storm. Yet... Chris Kingsley claims they went to Atari with a Dragons vs Viking Longboat tech demo, trying to secure contract to do a Falcon title, got given the Jaguar contract instead. https://metro.co.uk/2017/12/04/25-years-of-rebellion-from-alien-vs-predator-to-2000-ad-and-beyond-7129407/amp/ Same claim made in Gamestm interview a while back. Clearly a lot of bad blood between all parties, but an awful lot of contraindications given in interviews by both as well.