17 replies to this topic

[bluevoodu]

I know this is bad to post at an Atari place.
But, I am a big fan of the Jaguar...... and I love some of the games that were released on the system Alien Vs Predator, Tempest 2000, Protector SE, Trevur Mcfur was decent, Raiden was ok (Turbo Grafx 16 had the better version though), Rayman was somewhat cool (first time I ever saw the Rayman game on a console), iron soldier 1 and 2 were awesome.... But why were so many games not that fun?

Are there going to be more GREAT games like AVP, or Tempest? It seems many carts lacked in the sound arena. I am 100% sure that the Jaguar is capable of making some killer games (side/top scroll).

I do not know much about the programming..... Are Jaguar Carts hardd to program for? or is the Space reallly limited?
I mean, even SNES games got by with an 8meg max cart.... look at UN Squadron, one of my favorite SNES games. That is one of the best side scroll shooters I have ever played. Surely a system like the Jaguar could make a pretty good side scroll shooter with good sound/graphics/and most important, Gameplay.

Are there going to be more of these games developed?

†B†V†

[eric_ruck]

The problem is that developing good games takes time and talent, both of which boil down to money, which no one wanted to spend without the guarantee of a good return.

I've never looked into Jag programming, and while rumor has it the hardware is a bit glitchy, I'm sure it's easier than some and harder than others.

Eric

[bluevoodu]

I know programming takes skill... and money is required. Do you think people would start playing their jags more if there were some better releases?

Like Neo-Geo.... There is a company making some decent games for it now... and some are new/current designs....... not just older designs released now.

IF you could get someone making some REALLY killer games, and publishing them (With Good sound..... story and GREAT gameplay), wouldn't you think that people would start playing the Jaguar more?
Which, would lead to some decent sales, which would lead to more GREAT games from these more skilled programmers... maybe?


Honestly, since the new neogeo games are coming out, more people are playing and buying the system up.

What Songbird does is really cool. I really respect them for what they do. I buy/sell their stuff because I beleive in what they do, but we need some new designs and concepts (of which I know they are working on).


IMO I would like to see more side scroll shooters. I would like to see games that could have a better sound quality (or at least recorded at a higher volume). The Jaguar has some great potential in that. It has the best ORIGINAL console port of doom. It runs pretty good compared to the 32x, 3d0, snes, etc..

†B†V†

[bluevoodu]

What started this: I was rather impressed with how Rayman was done..... especially Alien Vs Predator.

If something like these games can be created........ there is still potential for the Jaguar..... hands down.

†B†V†

[Gunstar]

I think you guys are, as many do, really selling the Jaguar short. It already has a lot of really good games other than the few you've mentioned. Sure, it has a lot of average stuff and even a half dozen or so stinkers, but there are a LOT more good games than what you've mentioned. Just ask any of the people who hang here, the lists will start coming in! I happen to think there are quite a few top quality games.

I may mention a few you already know of, but I'm just going to list some good ones off the top of my head:

Super burnout
Skiing&snowboarding
hyperforce
atarikarts
ironsoldier1&2
battlemorph CD(I really like the original cybermorph too, although that's a love it or hate it game it seems, it did win a "game of month" award back in the day)
bluelightning CD(another love it or hate it game I guess)
myst CD
highlander CD
Dragons lair cd
Braindead 13 cd
AvP
DOOM
Wolfenstein
skyhammer
Protector&special edition
Battlesphere&gold
Rayman
Pitfall
powerdriverally
I-war
UltraVortek
fightforlife
cannon fodder

and more...

[JagMX]

[b]personally i love to play just about all of the games for the Jag, huge fan of it and enjoy all the games as best i can...i even find/make fun out of Dragon and DD5, The Jag has a good amount of games that will stand out, and i like to agree with Gunstars little list there, and hes right there is more.... but also EVERY system has its bad games and the bad ones that everyone wants to forget - even the companies that made them.

[RJ]

yeah Gunstar- your list is almost exactly my collection!

[Starcat]

bluevoodu said:

I know programming takes skill... and money is required.  Do you think people would start playing their jags more if there were some better releases?

Like Neo-Geo.... There is a company making some decent games for it now... and some are new/current designs....... not just older designs released now.

IF you could get someone making some REALLY killer games, and publishing them (With Good sound..... story and GREAT gameplay), wouldn't you think that people would start playing the Jaguar more?
Which, would lead to some decent sales, which would lead to more GREAT games from these more skilled programmers... maybe?


Honestly, since the new neogeo games are coming out, more people are playing and buying the system up.

What Songbird does is really cool.  I really respect them for what they do.   I buy/sell their stuff because I beleive in what they do, but we need some new designs and concepts (of which I know they are working on).


IMO  I would like to see more side scroll shooters.  I would like to see games that could have a better sound quality (or at least recorded at a higher volume).  The Jaguar has some great potential in that.  It has the best ORIGINAL console port of doom.  It runs pretty good compared to the 32x, 3d0, snes, etc..

†B†V†

Hi !

Maybe I can answer some of your questions....

The reason why there are quite some crap jaguar games are atari's fault.
They did a lot of mistakes on the Jaguar. They didn't manage to make the system popular to developers. (All really important game developers at that time like capcom, square, electronic arts etc. etc. were focused on the other systems and didn't really care about the Jaguar.

However the big problem with the Jag was that there was no real quality control. Nintendo for example had a great quality control (you'll never find a nintendo game with the quality seal that is bad).

However Atari just cared about a high game count, that made them release also those bad ports and crappy 3d games like supercross 3d.
Obviously they didn't understand that it is better to have few good games than many of crap games.

However I feel the same way as you: I would love to see more good shooters on the Jag as well. That is why I started developing a new 2D shooter for the Jaguar.

It is called "Star Alliance - Battle for Earth" and will have sidescrolling levels and also some vertical scrolling levels.

You can find more infos here: http://www.atari-jag..._inv/index.html

Or on http://www.starcat-dev.de


Regards, Lars.

[LinkoVitch]

Just had a quick look at the in production screenshots StarCat and it looks shiney.

I am about to start developing some new Jag games with local Jag fans. Hopefully they will end up in peoples great games lists. Our aim is to do it for fun, not profit. I have always loved coding on my ST all them years ago, and even though I spend 90% of my time at work writing code in C, it's just not the same as cracking open your 8th can of coke and slaving away over DevPac till 4am

Hopefully our games should be quite polished as I am incredibly fussy about such things.

Oh, and one game I think shows the Jag off nicely for a scrolling platform stylee game is Pitfall the Mayan adventure. Gorgious graphics, very smooth animation, bit of story and variation. and I find very playable! one of my fave Jag games.

Perhaps to help the developer community we could produce a list of people willing to help in Jag devel? Artists, musicians, coders etc. Then people could have a one stop shop of people who are good at what they do (or at least view peoples porfolios and decide who to ask), and make the games that little bit better?

Hmmm

[Gregory DG]

Starcat said:

However the big problem with the Jag was that there was no real quality control. Nintendo for example had a great quality control (you'll never find a nintendo game with the quality seal that is bad).

However Atari just cared about a high game count, that made them release also those bad ports and crappy 3d games like supercross 3d.
Obviously they didn't understand that it is better to have few good games than many of crap games.

As one who has programmed the Jaguar, wouldn't you say another reason not all Jaguar games are not A++ games is because the programming tools were not up to snuff? Or that the hardware was buggy? Or that just a few small additions to the hardware would have helped a lot?

John Carmac wrote: If the Jaguar had dumped the 68k and offered a dynamic cache on the risc processors and had a tiny bit of buffering on the blitter, it could have put up a reasonable fight against Sony.

[LinkoVitch]

greg@tat said:

As one who has programmed the Jaguar, wouldn't you say another reason not all Jaguar games are not A++ games is because the programming tools were not up to snuff? Or that the hardware was buggy? Or that just a few small additions to the hardware would have helped a lot?

John Carmac wrote: If the Jaguar had dumped the 68k and offered a dynamic cache on the risc processors and had a tiny bit of buffering on the blitter, it could have put up a reasonable fight against Sony.

From what I have heard from a PSX developer friend of mine the PSX is not an easy system to work with either. But it did have the might of SOny's PR backing it, which obvioulsy helped it along. Atari are rekown for not having very good Marketing.

RE John Carmac, I think because he wrote one of the first 1st person shooters that people listen to him far too much. Perhaps if he had written his code differently Doom on the Jag would have been better? And how many hardware systems has he designed? what he said may be true for some aspects of games, but I doubt all. I am sure dropping developers into a completely alien system would turn a lot away instantly.

Personaly Mr Carmac winds me up to me he is the bill gates of the gaming world. Completely unfounded, just my personal opinion.

And I think most hardware has bugs in it. The 68K CPU in the ST had bugs in it, one reason some stuff failed on other Atari machines with later revisions like the 030, Motorola fixed the bug which some software was using.

The Jag was the first console launch for Atari for a long time, it was also on a budget so it's bound to have a few cockups in there. End of the day the games are what make a system succesful, not how many MIPS it's core runs at, or how many polygons it can draw, but it's games.

[Starcat]

greg@tat said:

Starcat said:

However the big problem with the Jag was that there was no real quality control. Nintendo for example had a great quality control (you'll never find a nintendo game with the quality seal that is bad).

However Atari just cared about a high game count, that made them release also those bad ports and crappy 3d games like supercross 3d.
Obviously they didn't understand that it is better to have few good games than many of crap games.

As one who has programmed the Jaguar, wouldn't you say another reason not all Jaguar games are not A++ games is because the programming tools were not up to snuff? Or that the hardware was buggy? Or that just a few small additions to the hardware would have helped a lot?

John Carmac wrote: If the Jaguar had dumped the 68k and offered a dynamic cache on the risc processors and had a tiny bit of buffering on the blitter, it could have put up a reasonable fight against Sony.

Hi !

Of course the Jaguar hardware itself and the dev tools were are a reason why it failed. But I said that often already and didn't want to start another flame war, so I guess I just mentioned the other things.

John Matthieson admitted in that interview that was posted here a week ago or so that not including texture mapping hardware was a huge mistake.
I think if they had fixed the biggest bugs, added texture mapping hardware and maybe fixed a few other problems it would have been much more powerful.

Some better dev tools would have been helpful as well. Although the tools aren't too bad. They could be better, but are acceptable.

But I'm sure that in the early Jag years, dev tools were a big problem.


Regards, Lars.

[Starcat]

Hi !

Quote

From what I have heard from a PSX developer friend of mine the PSX is not an easy system to work with either.  But it did have the might of SOny's PR backing it, which obvioulsy helped it along.  Atari are rekown for not having very good Marketing.

PSX coding is for sure underestimated by many Jag fans. I think there is NO system that is easy to code. And if you want to push a system to its limits it is always difficult, not important whats system.

Quote

RE John Carmac, I think because he wrote one of the first 1st person shooters that people listen to him far too much.  Perhaps if he had written his code differently Doom on the Jag would have been better?  And how many hardware systems has he designed? what he said may be true for some aspects of games, but I doubt all.  I am sure dropping developers into a completely alien system would turn a lot away instantly.

I think John Carmac knows what he is talking about, but maybe he simply didn't say it excactly that way... or maybe he meant something else.
One thing is for sure, Hardware wise the PSX is far ahead of the Jag.

Quote

Personaly Mr Carmac winds me up to me he is the bill gates of the gaming world.  Completely unfounded, just my personal opinion.

And I think most hardware has bugs in it.  The 68K CPU in the ST had bugs in it, one reason some stuff failed on other Atari machines with later revisions like the 030, Motorola fixed the bug which some software was using.

Don't be too sure about that... I have looked a bit into other systems dev environments as well and I have not found any Bug lists for example for PSX or SNES. If there are bugs, they are for sure not big, otherwise there would be docs about it.
Also keep in mind that Intel called back their first pentium series, because it had a tiny bug when doing divisions at several numbers behind 0...(not exactly sure if it was division... and maybe this sounds strange, because I don't know how to translate this
However the bug was tiny and they called it back to release a fixed version.

Quote

The Jag was the first console launch for Atari for a long time, it was also on a budget so it's bound to have a few cockups in there.  End of the day the games are what make a system succesful, not how many MIPS it's core runs at, or how many polygons it can draw, but it's games.

Yes. That is true. That is the reason why systems like SNES, Genesis, Neo Geo but also PSX and Game Cube are some of my very favorite systems... There are so many great games on them.

But as Atari didn't really have a quality control on their games, they released a lot of bad games. I'm sure a lot more people would respect and like the Jaguar if atari didn't release games like supercross 3d...

Well, that can't be changed anymore. But what we can do is creating new high quality games :-)

And I'm working hard to make Star Alliance - Battle for Earth one of those high quality games.


Regards, Lars.

[Starcat]

LinkoVitch said:

Just had a quick look at the in production screenshots StarCat and it looks shiney.  

Thanks a lot :-)

LinkoVitch said:

I am about to start developing some new Jag games with local Jag fans.  Hopefully they will end up in peoples great games lists.  Our aim is to do it for fun, not profit.

That is for sure the right reason to start coding Jag. I think if all Jag coders would agree to work on freeware games and not sell anything, the Jag would already have much more and better games, because there would be much more support between the developers...

Just imagine bug free network games due to Scatoligic's network code etc. But because they all spend a lot of time and effort into that stuff they protect it. Which is just normal for comercial products.

LinkoVitch said:

I have always loved coding on my ST all them years ago, and even though I spend 90% of my time at work writing code in C, it's just not the same as cracking open your 8th can of coke and slaving away over DevPac till 4am

Hopefully our games should be quite polished as I am incredibly fussy about such things.

Oh, and one game I think shows the Jag off nicely for a scrolling platform stylee game is Pitfall the Mayan adventure.  Gorgious graphics, very smooth animation, bit of story and variation.  and I find very playable!  one of my fave Jag games.

Yes, that is a kind of game, that suits the Jag well. Rayman is cool as well.

LinkoVitch said:

Perhaps to help the developer community we could produce a list of people willing to help in Jag devel? Artists, musicians, coders etc.  Then people could have a one stop shop of people who are good at what they do (or at least view peoples porfolios and decide who to ask), and make the games that little bit better?
Hmmm

The problem with that is simply, that there are no people who have free time to work on more projects.

All remaining Jag developers either have projects or already lost interest in the Jag and its scene, exactly because so many are just interested in money.

Although I can understand that... Comercial systems can be found everywhere... A good freeware comminuty is something really rare.


Regards, Lars.

[LinkoVitch]

Starcat said:

PSX coding is for sure underestimated by many Jag fans. I think there is NO system that is easy to code. And if you want to push a system to its limits it is always difficult, not important whats system.

I heard that Nintendo made the GameCube very easy to code in relation to other consoles. Idea being if it's easy more people would use it, I think it's a PowerPC core and then some whizzy stuff ontop. Don't know for sure, don't know anyone who has developed for it (well I have developed a numb arse from playing on it a few times, and that was very easy )

[LinkoVitch]

Starcat said:

LinkoVitch said:

I am about to start developing some new Jag games with local Jag fans.  Hopefully they will end up in peoples great games lists.  Our aim is to do it for fun, not profit.

That is for sure the right reason to start coding Jag. I think if all Jag coders would agree to work on freeware games and not sell anything, the Jag would already have much more and better games, because there would be much more support between the developers...

Just imagine bug free network games due to Scatoligic's network code etc. But because they all spend a lot of time and effort into that stuff they protect it. Which is just normal for comercial products.

Not sure how I plan to release stuff yet, So far I am looking at ways to make my own carts (I just think the idea of releasing stuff on a cart is nice, just nice to be able to slot it in a console and say "I made that"). Although we don't plan on charging the Earth for them, just price of parts and a little bit extra for time spent building it.

Also think carts make the game more accesible to people, not everyone has the ability to use ROM files, whereas anyone can use a cart.

OO I can't wait to get stuck in developing stuff.

Spose the ultimate development would be to design a whole new system based on the Jag and release that heheh the GNU Atari Console

[bluevoodu]

Starcat,

Your game is looking rather cool!
........ I think its cool that you are developing a game for the Jag, something that I would like to do, but I do not have near the time to do so.

IF..... you could get a different (not your Star Alliance) sidescroll shooter to play somewhat like an R-type, raiden, or UN squadron....... add fear factory type music......... along with some decent visual... that game would be AWESOME!!!
I do not remember the name of the jag proto, but I saw an awesome jag sidescroll shooter for the jag that had some VERY good visuals, and it was boasted to have 60fps frame rate....

I play guitar..... if I could record some guitar riffs that you could repeat for the songs.. that would be cool. Although, I would have to run my guitar direct into the computer (which does not offer ..... very good sound... I could make is sound somewhat good)

I guess.... I am not content with the jag games, thats why I want to see more




†B†V†

[bluevoodu]

I want to play that star alliance.... the more I look at it, the more I want it

I also make bryce 5 images.... if you can use those, I can try to make you some........ of mountain scenes...etc.

†B†V†