Tyrant

Since Im in london, I'll have a look at some hotel prices (for function rooms and normal hotel rooms. I admit they might be quite scarry, but only way to know is to ring up and ask . I like the name JagFest UK, and no, we're not in europe, we stand proudly apart from europe, while our government might want us to be, we resist. Good idea. Does anybody have any idea how many people went to the last E-JagFest? Clearly we're not aiming to fill Olympia, but I'd like to have a guess at the number of people coming.

I worked out that you can sidestep just after posting that hehe. A real shame I dont have a pro controler tho, its too far to reach with ones thumbs for pratical use. Ho hum, yet more expense, unless I make my own... hmm.... maybe time to get out a catalogue and plan a whole new controler type =) (no, this is not a serious idea, dont ask when I'll be selling them.... unless.... if someone knows how to get molded plastic cases made up very very cheaply it could be workable)

Its gone to me While I've only played it for an hour or two, I love it. Im not sure I like the way all corners are square, and it'd be nice if you could sidestep, but I love it. I also find it really cute the way aliens have to prepare marines for implantation in order to get extra lives / restart points. Great game, easy to get lost and not know what your ment to do, and yes, the random placement is kinda weird, especially when 3 marines and a predator were right behind me at the begining of the game one time (like one square behind the start point). But still, gorgeous game, everyone should have one, especially if its in the absolutely PERFECT condition Stone's one was, thanks.

This all sounds great. Might I suggest tho that we rent a small hall somewhere, perhaps in a hotel, and get a whole load of tv's either from the same people or from an electronics rental shop, that way we can get lots of nice large screens all the same, and shouldnt cost too much. Depending on how many people decide to come any costs involved can be shared out easily enough by charging a few quid for entrance. Or we could convince ppl selling stuff to share the costs out (yes, that includes me if the costs arnt too much and enough ppl come and buy rotaries).

Sounds fun, I wish I had either Aircars of BSG, I'll be sure to come along anyways tho. Why limit it to UK fans tho? if you held it in London, its much easier for all those european types to come over. If you ask me nicely (and supply a tv), I'll bring along my Jag, Tempest2k, and a coupple of rotary controlers to demonsrate / sell. Why not? Aim big. There's a LOT of fans in europe, lots of them in England I think, lets get them all together for some serious gaming, trading, and meeting/greeting.

It might take up a few meg of storage, and a tiny bit more cpu time, but I think this would really enhance the rarity guides... (I dont think it'll eat enough resources to be an issue anyway). If you could add an extra column to the guides, filled with checkboxes, and a button at the bottom to submit the data back to the server, where its stored, either on a cookie, which would cost bandwidth, or a tightly organised file on the server, which would cost only hard drive space which is plentiful on most servers. As the script then buils the rarity guide pages, it checks the users cookie to see if he's logged into the site, and if so, pulls his data file, for each line that has been checked before, the checkmark is set again, and the background colour of the row is changed (or an icon could be added). In this way, users are able to use the list as a record of which games they already own, and which they have yet to find. I think it would be a very useful feature, since I tend to forget which Jaguar games I own and which I need to find still, and there are only 78 Jag titles in the guide (I think its complete tho, some protos and things are missing but they're almost unique). I cant imagine how much of a hard time 2600 collectors must have keeping track of what they still need to get. Anyways, Im sure this change can be worked into the script very easily, and shouldnt cost many server resources.

The problem with hindsight is its allways 20/20 vision. If we'd known the Jag would die, yet keep its cult following, we'd all have kept every review, game, bit of obscure knowladge etc, we could get hold of. Hell, if, before the jaguar had been launched, we'd have known it would have been such a flop and yet how uber it is, and everyone who is now on this board worked to hype it up, publicise it and so forth, who knows Atari might still be here. Again tho, hindsight is a wonderful, and terrible thing. A man could spend his whole life wishing he could go back and do things differently.

Your quite right about the indicator bar, it has no use and I wish they made one without it, but they dont and its such a lovely knob (no crude jokes please).

Just when you think life cannot possibly get more bizare, you get an email like this one: Obviously I told him that I wouldnt ship anything in advance of the auction ending, he kindly let me repost the email here. Now I think about it tho, if anyone wants to pay me £100 for one I'd be happy to make one specially to sell to them (money is money after all =)

Hehe, no refunds, but I am in your debt (in the spiritual, non-monetary, way) for that wonderful review you gave it, thanks.

I think it all comes down to how well shielded it is. Using STP Im sure you could make very long cable runs with minimal signal degredation.

Because a lot of people want them, and I think it very unfair for people to check the board, find that there's a new one they could buy, but that someone has already bought it and they have to wait until I finish making another one and put it up. I use eBay to be fair, so that everyone who wants one can place a bid and have a chance of getting one. I wont make a waiting list either, for the same reason as above, if I say I'll take say 10 names to go on a waiting list, the next 10 people who are lucky enough to see the post and reply will get one, but everyone in different time zones, or who only check the board once a day, or even once a week, wont even know the list exists until its already full and they've lost out. There is no perfect way to sell a small quantity of items to a larger number of people, but I think auctions are the best, there are 5 days in which you can buy it, so everyone who wants one should be able to see its there and place a bid. It does also have the added advantage that I can get more money if more people bid and a bidding war starts, but the old adage applies... an item is only worth what people are prepared to pay for it. Im not out to make a huge proffit from these, but money is allways an issue in modern life unfortunatly and the more people are prepared to offer me for them, the more likely I am to make more.

I just put up the auction for the next controler. You can find it here, on eBay.co.uk or on eBay.com. Its only a 5 day auction so it will end on monday. If anyone has any questions feel free to post them in this thread, email me, or leave a private message here on the boards. Good luck and happy bidding.

Well, Im assuming by 31 you get the lightning... thingies... they're pretty evil... after that you end up with double ones of those which split into two when shot, add fuseballs to that (how are you ment to shoot a fuseball?) and things are getting mildly interesting. The most nasty thing I've met so far tho are the mirrors, which reflect your shots back at you, you wont meet them until the 60's tho, but ouch they're hard.

I made my BJL cable (actually a gender-changer case that plugs onto a straight cable) using empty D shells with plug in pins. You buy the shell, then buy the pins seperatly, crimp them onto the cable and push them into the shell, where the lock in place. Very efficient and no soldering needed at all. Also you end up with plugs with pins only where they're needed which looks cool.

Take a look at this thread (yes ok, I admit it, Im too lazy to go plug in my Jag to see what my best score is hehe).

I stand corrected.

Ideas never die (even the bad ones). I was thinking tho, it shouldnt be *too* dificult for someone to create a fairly simple game engine, a game of this type dosnt require much code, well showing the movie clips is quite a bit, but the logic is minimal, and with a group of drama students (it seems lots of people here are at uni's), it wouldnt be too hard to put together a game or two in the genre so we can all see what it could have been like. Also being relatively simple code-wise, it could be just the project all those people who have enthusiasm but little tallent for assembly coding are looking for (not tyring to put anyone down, I cant code in assembly yet either lol).

This thread revolves arround sprites, but nobody seems to have defined for the non programers what a sprite is, and what the alternatives are. I might be dumbing things down too much, but I think if things are explained at the most simple levels, its a lot easier to understand, and understanding complex subjects can feel like standing on shifting sand if the lowest most simple concepts arnt explained clearly first. A sprite is a small bitmap picture, blitted (transfered) onto the screen. Every frame of animation for a character, from every direction it can be viewed, is a different sprite, and takes up space in the data section of the cartidge. The process of transfering the sprite in traditional environments is called a blit, or a bit block transfer, which meens you copy a block of bits, representing the pixels of colour, from the data buffer, into the screen buffer. There are other ways to draw graphics, the most important being polygon based 3D (or can be 2D using polly's), in which every face (triangle) of an object is stored as just a few numbers, then rotated, scaled, and drawn by the chips. The process by which Jaguars get their data onto the screen is somewhat different from "traditional" systems, which had an area of memory into which the programer copied any graphics he wanted, then the graphics hardware read that memory and send the data to the monitor. In essence, the screen was norhing more than an area in memory much the same as the data buffers the sprites were stored in. The Jaguar dosnt do things that way (although it can be done). Inside the Jag is the Object processor, which reads an object list from memory, and does what the list tells it. This normally meens just drawing things to the screen, although there is a very simple programing and logic element too. Therefore the screen in a Jaguar consists of a list which the programer has to build, and the graphics hardware then accesses all sprites, draws polygons, etc, on its own, doing what the list tells it to but doing a much more complicated job than on say, an Atari ST where it just has to copy one big screen sized bitmap block of memory out to the monitor. However, if you set up your object list to contain just one, screen sized bitmap object, you can use the more traditional way to blit your sprites to the screen object, then let the object processor just send the whole screen to the tv as one object. There are advantages and disadvantages to both systems, but unless your a creative programer its not very easy to combine both at once. The Jaguar's Blitter chip (part of Tom) is virtually unused when working entirely with a complex object list, and when using a simple, single screen objest list, the object processor is largely wasted, leaving the blitter to do almost all the work of getting the screen ready to be drawn. Hope that helped explain things to anyone who is a little unsure. Oh, and please forgive any mistakes, it is almost 5am, my neck hurts, and Im very tired.

Wow, someone has found a use for Mac's, Im amazed! (hehe, no offence intended, I just really dont get on with Apple's). Very very interesting. with this kind of knowladge, a very simple engine, a camcorder and some half way acceptible actors, we could finally see some new interactive movie type games (am I right that none were released besides the readysoft cartoon ones which never work on my system?).

Finally someone else who hates graphical smilies! Thankfully there's a checkbox to disable them on this board, and an option in your profile to default to having it checked. What really pisses me off tho is on msn messenger... if you turn off the smilies there you get the text entered as you should... except a lot of the icons dont have a meeningful text representation, so you get (A) for a face with an angel's halo, which should be something like o:-) and you get some truely bizare ones like (}) which I think is ment to represent a hug... never seen the icon for it tho. Anyways, thanks again for the long replies and friendly nature, Im sure I'll enjoy reading more of your insights, stick arround, its a nice board here.

As I've said before, anything played multiplayer in a room with friends is great fun. Oh and what exactly are you looking for in exchange for that AvP? I have a couple of shrinkwrapped Doom's and 6 shrinkwrapped Troy Aikman NFL Footballs that I'd be happy to trade for it, and quite a lot of control pads too, all shrinkwrapped.

The keyboard arrived today, looks to be in great condition, a couple of keys had small marks on them which came off easily. I havnt yet plugged it in to test but I hope to be wizzing arround in interphase as soon as I finish all the other things I have to do. who knows, with a mouse port that works I might actually get to finish it some day. Anyways, this is the AtariAge equivalent of an eBay positive rating.

Hi Symmetry, can you tell us a little about yourself? who you are, how you know so much Jag programing and when you'll be releasing your next game? (hehe). Seriously tho, nice to find yet another expierenced friendly coder popping up out of the woodwork, one day I'll get the time to learn myself, but I use high level languages so much its very hard to drop down to assembly.

Nah, load full IWAD's off CD, PWADS are lacking many things, like the ability to load new flats I think (floors) and sprites. While we're in dream land tho, lets get it reading DeHacked files too so we can change every inch of the game, just have a raw engine on cart and make your own games on CD =)