AtariAge Forums: Jay Silverheels - Viewing Profile

Someone has uploaded the entire series (1 season) of Whiz Kids to YouTube.

I've watched a few episodes here and there. They're good for a bit of nostalgia. According to www.starringthecomputer.com, a 1200xl makes an appearance in episode 9, which I haven't seen yet.

The nostalgia starts with Episode 1 part 1 here.

This post is in response to the following quote found in this thread.

Gorf, on Mon Sep 1, 2008 3:03 AM, said:

I've tried to stay out of this fight, but I can remain silent no longer. Let it be known that I am ever vigilant against Aquarius defamation. The Aquarius deserves better than these nonchalantly flung disparaging remarks. They are hurtful and completely unnecessary. The Aquarius was abandoned at birth. Mattel denied paternity, and as a bastard orphan, it is unable to defend itself. That is why I will stand as the self-appointed guardian against the type of exploitative libel, which you seem so intent to inflict upon this innocent and underappreciated machine. Every time you spout this kind of filth against the Aquarius, its rubber chiclet keys get shaded just ever so slightly bluer than before. It weeps.

From this day forward, the Aquarius shall be no man's punching bag! It will NOT go quietly into the night! It shall stand proudly upon the hilltop as a beacon of hope to the oppressed. Let its upswept design inspire all men to code upon it. It came from Hong Kong, so that others might code.

I challenge all closed minded platformists to download the Aquarius emulator, and compare the graphics and sound to the same Intellivision titles. The answer is clear.

Press RETURN key to start.

Aquraius: Smart enough to be simple.

When it comes to protecting the Aquarius, it's: Game, the f@*# ON!

Well,

I tried to go to Jaguar Interactive to complain about AtariAge being down. However, my post kept getting blocked as spam. I tried watering the post down to the bare message of:

"That popular Fuji internet place is down." But that still got blocked as spam.

I became so enraged that I vowed to give up my worldly posessions in order to pursue a life of spam and internet porn. I since calmed down and have given up on the spam thing. I probably won't give away my stuff, either.

I put this under "Dedicated Systems", because the latest Pac Man incarnations have been plug-n-plays. This item is truly dedicated:

It's a Pac Man Christmas, Charlie Brown!

You don't know me without you have read a page by the name of Jaguar Interactive II; but that ain't no matter.

I sorely miss those old days, but I've been lurking here for several years without a post. Yesterday, I found an old harddrive stuck in a desk drawer, and decided to glean any useful files before the drive died forever. I found this old post from JI2, which I saved for obvious reasons; it was posted on my 25th birthday! Actually, it was a pretty exciting announcement for those who'd been watching the Remaining Code Percentages on the 4Play charts dwindle over the years.

I thought y'all might enjoy this tale for yourselves.

This post was made by Mr. Scott Le Grand, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I have seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Nolan Bushnell, or Ralph Baer, or maybe the UA.

It's too bad more of JI2 wasn't archived...


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It's show time...

Posted by 4Play West (209.239.201.64) on July 18, 1998 at 23:34:23:
In Reply to: Re: PEOPLE OF EARTH, YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE... posted by Interglatic Planatary on July 18, 1998 at 23:22:39:


In the Beginning

On September 23rd, 1993, my roommate (who I believe Bill thinks was
Doug Engel) and I were invited by Bill Rehbock to come up to Glendale,
California to see the very first video games running on the Atari
Jaguar. Besides playing a really crude edition of Checkered Flag,
we pitched a space combat game called "Singularity" which we indicated
could better be called Star Raiders 2000. Bill told us that the name was
already taken, but that he'd get back to us. One month later, we met
Tom Harker across the Internet and he agreed to act as our interface to
Atari and I conned^H^H^Hvinced my wife (then fiancee) Stephanie to write
the soundtrack. In November, I drove and Tom flew to Santa Cruz and we met
for the very first time. Tom was here to trade away the 8 bit line
of ICD tools for a cool 1950s monster mobile. The next day
we drove up to Sunnyvale, navigated our way to 1190 Borregas
avenue and played Tempest 2000 and Cybermorph for the first time.

Big time! We're on our way and making it...

We walked away that day with a very early prototype of AvP,
along with a deal for 2 development systems. By then the game had
been renamed to "Star Battle", in honor of a game I had written on a
high school mainframe back in 1980 about which I still get email
now and then. On December 24, we received our first alpine board in
dysfunctional condition in a Fedex box. After several frantic phone
calls, we were sent a second, functional alpine board and Doug kept the
first in order get medieval upon it with a soldering iron. Within
a week, we both had working development systems and the evolution of the
game that became BattleSphere began. The kicker is that since there was
no backing of any sort for this game, we would have to develop it entirely in
our spare time while maintaining full-time day jobs. Our advice: Don't do
this. Our original estimates were that we could have the entire game coded in
12-18 months. Bzzzzt! Wrong! We had yet to encounter the black hole that was
Atari developer support, as well as a myriad of inexplicable bugs
and random flaky development tools.

They like us, they really like us!

6 months later, we showed off the very first demo of the
polygon engine at SCES '94. The demo makes an appearance in the
AEO SCES '94 Video, for those of you collecting BattleSphere Trivia and
anyone there could see we ought to have sued the pants off of Nintendo
over the N64 logo, but of course, they must have thought of the thing
first, they're Nintendo. Things went well, but I wish it had been a
playable demo by that time, but c'est la vie, we were just getting introduced
to some of the many jaguar hardware bugs and part-time development already sucked.
Six months later at WCES '95, there was sound, the first pass at the
music engine, primitive collision detection, and a simple game involving
rescuing animated astronauts. The game was now called "BattleSphere".
This is really starting to take too long, isn't it?

Trouble ahead, trouble behind...

5 months after that, BattleSphere had its last trade
showing at the very first E3. This was the first place
we ever demonstrated networked dogfighting. It was a resounding
success and numerous professional aviators commented on
the quality of our flight engine compared to what they
could play on the PC and other systems. This demo almost never
happened, because a insiduous bug in the hardware forced some last
minute rewriting practically on the show floor. Of course, the
real star of E3 was the Playstation unveiling, but we
were happy with our reception. After all, at this point,
the fat lady was clearing her throat for her Atarian
anthem.

They said we were daft to build a castle in the swamp!

At this point, we realized we were behind schedule. I
decided to take 3 months off and Doug took a month's worth
of accumulated vacation time off from work and go full time
on game development. From July through September, BattleSphere
became my one and only obsession. In that time, we went
from a primitive dogfight engine to networkable deathmatching
with the infamous subsumption architecture AI. A fun footnote
here is that but 2 days after we got the AI marginally running, a
mysterious request came from Atari for a demo. We sent it off, only
to find out later that they secretly put the badly behind Battlesphere
head to head with the completed Space War 2000 in a focus group.
Guess who won and who got cancelled? This pattern repeated itself in
October when Atari demanded working networking code from us on
a Friday, to be provided by the following Monday, for incorporation
into Iron Soldier II or it wouldn't have networking. Ah, the
fun final days of Atari. However, we now had a solid demo for
showing off to potential backers of a PC or PSX edition and the
search for a future past Atari began.

Is there life after death?

Although we knew at this point that Atari was pining for the
fjords, we decided that BattleSphere was not enough of a game to
actually release the thing (in retrospect, this was a BIG BIG BIG
mistake). So now, we commenced development of the play modes. Atari
died in January, 1996 and the Gauntlet play mode first appeared in
March of that year. It was soon followed by the BattleSphere
and training play modes, and that took us into early 1997 since
we still didn't have any funding for a PC version, despite a one year
search leading to 10 or so pitches with big publishers who just couldn't
grok the networking, the 3D, the jaguar, or some random combination of the
above (or possibly our failure to closely resemble the current trendy
genre). In March of 1997, I quit my science career, leaving behind 8
years of dedicated research. It was painful and we once again considered
releasing BattleSphere at that point. However, we faced the concorde
fallacy that we had already put too much time into the thing so why not
make the Alone Against the Empires play mode and call it a day.
This play mode was completed by October of 1997, and there's
nothing like it on any other platform. And that's when the
playtesting began. It's oh so much fun to put a game into
beta when you have no money. Thankfully, a dedicated crew of
playtesters put their own free hours into the thing and now,
8 months later, BattleSphere is finished.

And on day 1745, God said "Ship it already!"

Oh, you thought this was the end of the story? BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Silly you, now we have to get the sucker encrypted and produced
so it will actually run on other people's jaguars. But, it will
happen. And when some twit naysayer tells you it won't, just
remember how many times they said we'd never finish the thing.

May your urine be fresh and frothy!

Scott Le Grand
Doug Engel
Stephanie Wukovitz
Tom Harker

Team "The Mess that is BattleSphere"