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ejagfest photos & mini reoprt


sh3-rg

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I swear the place should have been leveled, NOTHING worked :P

Nice pics !

Maybe all theses equipment have drink too much beer on saturday :P ?

Did you have some snow during your return trip ?

 

 

Btw, it was really nice to meet and (mostly) listen you, even with discussing would have been great too. I need to improve my english "quick understanding" skills before next time :D

 

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Linkovich has upped his photies, so take a look!

 

And while I'm here, here's a little diary of the 3 days we were away...

 

6:40am 26-11-10

 

Set out into town to catch the train to Manchester... 20 seconds to spare as I got stuck in a queue behind a dozy girl wanting to know everything one could possibly know about rail passes.... GRRRRR! Finally squashed myself in there with all those poor people off to work and 1 stop later I'm waiting outside Oxford Road for Mug & Linko's car to arrive. Thing is he's already waiting for me over the road at The Lass - d'oh! 10 minutes later I've received a text telling me where to be & linko is on the way in the car. So he pulls up, with Gaztee in shotgun and a boot already pretty full of all kinds of jaguar stuffs... somehow we manage to fit our stuff in there as well & away we go!

 

Think it's probably around 9:00am now, on the motorway, heading South. Too many late nights with Fallout New Vegas are taking their toll... 6 or so hours more driving before we reach the ferry from Dover to Dunkirk. Nothing major holds us up so we're there in plenty of time. Nothing remarkable at the ferry terminal except for a vending machine containing not your usual snickers & mars bars but flash drives & usb mice... all at prices that reward you for being a forgetful eejit but luckily none of us have any use for it.

 

I think we were all pleasantly surprised with the ferry - for £33 total we were expecting to have to be strapped to the outer deck with only the seagulls for company, but it's all rather nice really and they even have tall cans of Guinness for those not driving. Once we get passed the initial wrong-side-of-the-road driving fun there's no stopping linko & his barge - not even some pretty heavy snow through much of Belgium. About another 4 hours or so later & we arrive in Kaarst, check in, sample a beer in the bar & go off in search of something to eat - we arrive too late to eat in the hotel ;)

 

We found McDonalds via iPhone and we're all happy - Gaztee manages to win more free food & drink with his purchases - a sign of things to come? Back to the hotel, propped up against the bar and it's almost time to wake up for ejagfest already... eek!

 

The other three managed to get up & eat some breakfast, then head off for some sight seeing before the short trip to the party place - I took the stay in bed option. Back at the hotel and Fadest appears! Seems he heard us arrive the night before - oops! Still, we manage to appease him with a lift to the venue. When we arrive it seems only a couple of orgos are present and we have a choice of places to set up... that is, once we've unpacked all Gaztee's Atari stuff & also the just arrived Nick of 16/32.

 

Gaz has games, boxes, overlays & mugs(!) for the collectors, he's got his jag, digs out his skunk board (minty virgin fresh, later broken in by a bit of Doom/Doom 2 hackery). Pride of place sees his Freeze co-jag arcade board (proto?) hooked up to linko's mini supergun. The games turns out to be a kind of inverted Columns meets Puzzle Bobble on Ice. At first it appears to be quite easy, but there's more to it & later levels show the character's special moves to make it much more strategic than initially guessed. Luckily there's a puzzle mode that offers a change of pace from the frantic button bashing & shouting associated with the normal game. They also gave some air time to Gaz's completely non-jag, non-atari Pleiad(e)s board - something is stopping the coin input registering so we can't do anything but watch the first level and later listen to the music (once linko spots a dodgy connection on the board). Painter carts are a big hit & they all find new homes. Space War 2000 gets some play at Gaz's machine, too, using the overlay on the pad.

 

A little further along & my mini jag set-up sits dwarfed by the enormity of ejagfest. At various times it plays a little SuperFly DX, a preview of the cart version currently in progress, Rebooteroids (an asteroids clone CJ quickly wrote as an excuse to learn how to do stuff with CRY gfx - this should end up as an Easter egg somewhere or in a multicart perhaps, with some proper level progression, scores and the usual stuff that makes a game a game and not a quick demo). The fruits of Neo's Doom WAD explorations, "Doom 2", sees some air time and has to be relocated to other machines to let people temporarily spend a bit of time with it. He made a quick 'ejagfest' version with a special level at the beginning, but it seems a little buggy & without Internet access we resort to the Outline version. SoulStar, the other game Neo is on a mission to see completed, gets a showing, lots of determined play especially from Peter and most of the game is eventually seen... it doesn't make it all the way to the end unfortunately but at least he seems happy to have explored more of the game.

 

Next up we have Fadest and he has so much to show he has to rent a little space on the Lynx compo table! Here we have some French magazines (Revival, an ST mag and a Jaguar cheats mag), two of his boxed games and two Lynxes up and running even more games! Back on his table proper his Jag switches between running Matmook's Ladybugged, Another World and other goodies. He later demos these to the crowd with a very well done presentation, footage of which should appear soon as long as he gives the OK :) Mug also checks out the little games built into the BJL ROM here.

 

Matthias Domin & co are next in line, a large iMPULSE X banner gives a subtle hint as to what he will demonstrate later. Lots of WIP packaging for the game and level discs can be seen as well as his old proto Ethernet cart! The Internet seems to still function the last I checked and the world hasn't ended, so it seems MAC address concerns didn't bring an end to everything we know and love as some had predicted once upon a time. Hooray! Later, Clicks! and Impulse X are demoed in person by Matthias, again if he allows us to put the video up at some point we will do so. Nobody should be in any doubt about these games now, as long as he gets the time we'll see the games :) Unfortunately he has to hit the road pretty soon, but manages to chat with Gaztee about packaging technicalities before making for home.

 

The other demonstration was rather an interesting one. Lars Starcat gave us some insight into his whole Eerievale project. It has obviously gone under a few revisions and the current project, encompassing his written work, takes a different approach to things. In contrast to what we'd seen before, we were presented with a new game with a character controllable via a cursor. The graphics were a kind of WIP version being used during development. The character could be moved around on screen using the cursor with the selected action. This was all running on the PC - to me this seems a very sensible approach to the game design. The PC offers all the flexibility & resources one could want when going through the creative processes. Getting things up & running here, refining and tweaking, allowing the game to evolve in this environment can only be seen as a sound approach. From here, porting to the Dreamcast should be a rather trivial affair. Then the real hard work of porting to the Jaguar can begin ;) It's clearly a well thought out approach, Lars should be applauded for all his work so far & use of all his experience in setting out a plan of attack that gives him and his team every opportunity of success. If they were to blindly plough all their resources straight into the Jaguar at this point they would be hitting technical stumbling blocks left, right & centre all the time - this isn't a great way to allow your creativity to flourish. Working something back to Jaguar from a completed or feature-locked PC/DC game will be much less stressful and will result in a better finished product. It should also hopefully allow for some much-needed funds to come through from the much easier/cheaper to produce PC & DC & allow for some investment in the costlier to produce Jaguar version. We also learned that the game would be episodic - not to say that it will be reach us over multiple releases, more to say that there will be definite chapters in the stories. There's so much promise here, Lars really understands the world he's created and having the game & books as companions should allow for some interesting experiences. It's a labour of love and we all wish him and his team all the best! I have to take the time to go back over the presentation soon, I'm sure I don't have the whole theory 100% correct in my mind, but for now this will have to do :) Again, I'll let Lars give us the OK to share the presentation video as this was intended as a presentation to those present.

 

Next to Lars, R(obert) Demming had a couple of interesting machines to look at. First up was his unbelievably pimped 8-bit Atari. I lot track of exactly what there was here - a VBXE video board, stereo sound, twin sound chips, RGB output board... there was more, I got lost! The real shame was his laptop didn't have the correct drivers to allow him to get some stuff running on it... :( But he did have a couple of secret weapons. His brilliant Dingoo, which when running a Lynx emulator with Checkered Flag showed how a great game can be even more enjoyable on more modern hardware. He also had something I'd never seen before - at first it looked like a standard console-in-a-pad machine... but this was different! A Sega Megadrive with an SD card slot... two banks of flash ROM to which you can send games from the SD card. Plug & play into the TV. Very quirky, hard and odd to actually play, but undeniably interesting stuff! His laptop was almost as big as my desk, but that's a different story :)

 

Further along was a Jaguar with a cased skunk board in the slot. beneath was the latest build of Atari Owl's game, showing the textured insides of a building and a character model that did much more than the few short videos I'd seen previously. the character could be rotated to reveal lots of detail and moved around to demonstrate a pretty impressive textured scene. There was nobody present when I passed by and not being one to stick his nose in where it doesn't belong, I only had a quick shuffle about & watched as linkovich did similarly. I didn't get to see the voxel engine at work which was a shame as I'd not seen it before either, Lars had to make a move earlier than I had anticipated and I missed the change to chat with him in person about his & Owl's prods. Oh well, there's always next year... :/

 

Things from here are a little fuzzier... I remember seeing an odd Jaguar cart here on top of a Lynx case. Interesting stuff here and there. One of those computers we don't like to talk about sat on the corner - it made Thorsten shout a lot & I could only think that's what you get when you go over to the dark side... asking for trouble :) Of course, this was the Kick Off machine, an Amiguuurgh.... Amiguuuuhhh...... Ammmuuurrrgh.... you get the idea ;)

 

More Jaguars, 4 or 5 of which were networked to play Aircars and BS, sat on the following tables. A laptop with some very tidy looking joysticks played host to a lot of 2D 1-on-1 fighter action... oddly, nobody took out a copy of Kasumi ninja for a comparison :) A very nice Atari machine sat on these desks played some patched Atari ST demos, filling the air with some much-needed ym2149 love... ah, if I closed my eyes it was just like being at Outline, Fried Bits or Error in Line.

 

We ate and had a few drinks in the bar/restaurant part of the building, very tasty stuff and the best party-place food I've ever had by a long, long way. The coffee from here with accompanying biscuits did the job perfectly, in fact they ran out of the stuff in the evening so business must have been brisk. Once it got down to just the last few attendees remaining it was time to leave. After some goodbye/great to meet you/see you next year type stuff, it was back off to the hotel where myself, Gaztee, Linkovich, Mug & Fadest saw out the rest of the evening. Lots of blurry photos and even blurrier memories, stories of the 'good old day's of the ST and Fadest's realisation that we were all much easier to understand as the beers went down were the main features of the evening. Of course, this increase in understandability saw an equal and opposite decline in actual content of any worth I'm sure... as the photo of gaztee licking Linko's head proves (OK, probably only pretending, but it's the though that counts ;). Fadest has sensibly grown out of the use of alcohol, unfortunately the other 4 of us did a grand job of reinforcing the 'Englishman abroad' stereotype :D Only kidding, there was no real fighting and only one of the Christmas displays was taken out of action overnight.

 

So there you have my take on ejagfest 2010. Lots of cool Atari fans, all having fun, all enjoying each others company with not a prank to be seen or a bad word to be heard. A really cool meeting of genuine Atari fans all sharing info on their projects and having fun playing Atari. - make sure to visit in 2011, I'll try my best to be there!

 

 

 

 

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Nice pics !

Maybe all theses equipment have drink too much beer on saturday :P ?

Did you have some snow during your return trip ?

 

 

Btw, it was really nice to meet and (mostly) listen you, even with discussing would have been great too. I need to improve my english "quick understanding" skills before next time :D

 

I'd say 'too much' is about right, certainly from my personal point of view :) Yes, I felt just as broken as one of these machines for half the day!

 

There wasn't much snow on the way back, it was fog that tried to ruin things this time.

 

Yes, sorry for being ignorant drunken Englishmen at you, trust me, you didn't miss much quality discussion and luckily Linkovich's Beermat Flipping is a universal language all of its own... hope it wasn't all too distressing for you, it was really great to meet & chat with you. Next time bring more of the Jagware Frenchies & I'll try to persuade some of the non-Frenchies ;)

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You have my Go for releasing the video ;)

 

About friday night, in fact, I was waiting for you but didn't know what you look like. I saw a first group of 4 englishmen but obviously, it wasn't you. Then I get back to bedromm and spend 1 hour to make the skunboard driver work on my netboot :( I played a bit and start thinking of sleeping when I heard you. I had a quick look at your car, saw it has inverted control command and lots of stuff in it...

Saturday morning, I saw Gaztee & Linkovitch Atari TShirt at restaurant but the english part of my brain was not awaken yet :D

 

After the show, I saw a kind of miracle, we all know the proverbial german sense of efficiency, and english sense of anticipation. This is probably in a bar that this will give the best combination of talents :D At a time, you even had a spare beer in front of you, while you even haven't start the one before :D

But you know, the great thing about not drinking alcohol is that you remember everything the day after. On the other side, this is also the worst part of not drinking :poulpe: . Yes, I remember that you skinhead typical brits are in fact heavy metal fans that use to have 3 feet long hairs and a spectrum at home when they were young, not mentionning muguk passion for bubblegum machines when he was young :blush:

 

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But you know, the great thing about not drinking alcohol is that you remember everything the day after. On the other side, this is also the worst part of not drinking :poulpe: . Yes, I remember that you skinhead typical brits are in fact heavy metal fans that use to have 3 feet long hairs and a spectrum at home when they were young, not mentionning muguk passion for bubblegum machines when he was young :blush:

 

Yea! Mug the thug we'll have to call him now :) And there's nothing wrong with having had a Spectrum... can't say the same for the long hair & music taste of a certain gentleman to my left ;)

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Yea! Mug the thug we'll have to call him now :) And there's nothing wrong with having had a Spectrum... can't say the same for the long hair & music taste of a certain gentleman to my left ;)

 

ahem!

 

grakez.jpg

 

I am the one on the right! (although that was a few years ago)

 

\m/ MEEETTAAAAAALLLL!!!! :D

 

Good review squire, certainly was a blooming good weekend, biggest down side was the noxious fumes we had in the car on the drive home.. Think we have a contender for the roof rider next year :D

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Posting some videos to my youtube account, only 3 so far (checkered flag medals, Owl Project and fadest presentation). While the video is mostly OK (apart from my lack of skillz with the camera) the audio suffers from a lot of background noise, so don't expect too much. I'll continue to go through the videos and post them. If anyone knows Matthias, maybe you could ask if it's OK to post his presentations? I'm currently trying to convert Lars' presentation to something small enough to make it easy to get to him, after that I'll let him decide if it's worth doing something with (fairly poor sound quality on that one, too).

 

shpearg youtube channel - sort by date on the right or see if the ejagfest playlist is available

 

 

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