So glad to see Chris on the show, even as a guest. The 'on screen' chemistry of Neal, Dave, & Chris, along with Duncan's hard work in post production really makes this show work. I hope to see more guest visits of Chris. :)
Sorry to hear that Neil couldn't make it, but really glad to see that Dave was making sure that the "Show must go on". Fantastic to see Chris back as a special guest. Cracking work lads ! Thanks for another brilliant show
Saturday morning.: "This is what they want!" Software was transmitted on TV in the UK in the 1980s during the likes of Tomorrow's World, Database and 4 Computer Buffs using all sorts of strange methods. FM radio - or VHF as it was known back then - also broadcast software - Radio 4 after closedown and during a a few commercial radio shows. Telesoftware was available from Ceefax for those posh users with a BBC Micro, Disk Drive and Modem.
I'm from Slovenia (ex. Yugoslavia) and my first two computers, Atari 800XL and later Atari 520 STM were smuggled from Germany. If I remember correctly, radio Student broadcasted ZX Spectrum games every Saturday at 12:00 noon. Recorded couple of times, but didn't have Spectrum to try it out. Besides smuggled computers, we were also only able to get pirated games and programs.
Thanks for showing some love for the Jag! Did not expect to see my pic show up at 30:40. :) Hard to believe that was 25 years ago already! Some really good aftermarket games for the Jag: Protector SE Asteroite Towers II Enhanced (2023 release) Rebooteroids Jumping at Shadows (2024 release)
There were SO many hardware bugs in the Jaguar that just couldn't be fixed. That, along with the difficulty in programming, and lack of dev tools, is what killed it.
I'm pretty sure they could be fixed, but any games written to work on revised hardware wouldn't work on the initial version, and writing around the bugs would make fixing the hardware pointless. As I've said before, Atari would have needed to delay release or recall or offer free replacement of the consoles to resolve the situation. They didn't have the money which is why they rushed release of known flawed devices in the first place.
@@TheUAoB the bugs would have been fixable with more time, but you simply cannot navigate broken hardware with software. There's a reason only demos show off "what it's capable of" while no single piece of software can recreate what's in demos and integrate them into actual gameplay. Jumps in software cost cycles... Lots of cycles.
@@archive3do769 I agree. My point was Atari couldn't *afford* to put it out the door broken, and fix it later. Technically they could have fixed it before release with a delay to get it right or made a hardware revision and a recall. Either option would have been possible but Atari were done. *If* they had got the hardware fixed or the bugs weren't real showstoppers they may have had a something to save the company with, but they put what they had left into marketing a lemon instead!
@@TheUAoB Doesn't help their CEO was as impatient as a rabid dog. The engineers told him they needed just a little longer, but he seemed like he just didn't care. To be honestly with you I think it was just a scheme by the tamriels to file bankruptcy and sell the company to make off with some loot before they lost it all like they did with the first gaming market crash.
Hi This week in retro, I remember those times, also the game was very popular in former Yugoslavia, and I know this worked (recording it from the radio, for my friend, not me). The scene Commodore and ZX Spectrum (and also beloved Amstrad) was very strong. Especially with strong magazines like Moj mikro (My micro), Računari (Computers), Svet kompjutera (World of computers) and if my memory serves me, not only this game was broadcasted through the radio😁 We had also very strong pirate scene, which is unique for this region. Also retro books are being published about that in Slovenia as Prva bitnost (First bits, as origin of computing scene here). Proud to be part of that. Keep on the good work, I am watching you every week❤. Klošar bratje (like a Flea maket brothers)😂 Tibor & boys
regarding Amiga to Playstation ports, well, there is that one game with the little creatures with green hair that you have to guide to the exit. I can't remember the name of it now, but I think it was quite a popular one. True Pinball was also a port of Pinball Illusions.
Great to see Chris! And was that a Dragon/TRS80 loading noise in the background when he appeared!!! Great show as always and an awesome suggestion about downloading a speccy game at the end!
I definitely remember when they broadcast Amstrad or Speccy games over FM radio in the UK. It must have been around 1986 or 1987. I don't recall the radio station, but I remember Dad waiting for the broadcast, which was quite late at night. He recorded it onto tape, then we loaded it into a Speccy I think? There was also a light sensor that used to stick to the corner of the TV (a lot like the Action Max), and for a very short time in the late 80s, a TV show would "broadcast" a game or demo. That was more likely for the CPC. (we had an Olivetti PC1 and CPC 6128 around 1985, then I got a Speccy +2 around 1986 or 1987, so that was the first one with a tape deck. Technically we had a C64 as well, but it was sold when I was about three. sigh. lol)
I'll have to try to find the light sensor thing now. I'm convinced it's not just the Mandela Effect. I recal Dad having more trouble with the light sensor thing than with recording off the radio. lol Our FM signal wasn't amazing back then, so we had to have the antenna placed just right. The main transmitter was at Crystal Palace, apparently, and we were in Essex. The TV signal was even worse, so every house had to have an aerial on the roof, and somtimes a UHF booster in the loft.
I just Googled about the "TV light sensor" thing, and realized it's a very hard thing to search for. I have no idea what the system was called, but I'm sure it existed. I know there were Teletext adapters available for some machines like the Beeb. But this was definitely a sensor which stuck to the corner of the screen. It might have been at the top-right corner, where the "Ad break" scrolling bars usually sit?
Apparently the small square before adverts is called a "Cue mark". Or, more commonly known as a "Cue dot" in the UK, I think. The UK uses the IBA standard Cue dot. I haven't found a single page on Google yet, about broadcasting / loading games via the Cue dot. lol I'll have another search later, I'm determined to find something.
To answer Dave's question about interesting ways to copy data to a computer: I don't know if this counts as interesting, but it took a long time to do and the story is even more long-winded. A long time ago, I played a shareware 'fish tank simulator' on the Amiga, and lovingly cared for two colourful polygonal fish named 'Susan' and 'Bob'. I wanted to save a screenshot of the fish happily swimming around - at about 5 fps - but I didn't have a disk and only had a dot matrix printer. I could have printed a monochrome picture and stuck that on the wall, but what about Susan's fabulous red and cyan colours, or Bob's black and orange tail and the pond weed and pebbles in all their glory? So... I printed the screenshot as a UU-encoded ASCII file. As I recall, it used 8 sheets of paper, all filled with closely-packed tiny dot matrix characters. I printed these using the 'compressed' font (I didn't want to waste paper or ink). For anyone not familiar with UU-encoding, it was a scheme to transfer binary files over a 7-bit connection. It's part of a package called 'UUCP' (Unix-to-Unix copy). The printout was stored with many others, and these went with me to my next home, and then were stored for some years. In 2015, I found the crumpled UU-encoded printout (20 years old) and thought that it would be a good idea to restore the screenshot - just out of curiosity. Not having OCR software, I typed in every character of the 7 pages of random-looking ASCII. It took three days to type them all, because I stopped after every page and did something else - otherwise, the repetitive tedium would drive me batty. The end of the tale: it worked! Once again, there were Bob and Susan, happily nibbling on a bit of digital food, before I turned the lights out (the virtual aquarium had an automatic lighting control, but I preferred controlling the lights myself). Note, there's a difference between a back-tick and a single quote.. and tilde characters can be almost unrecognisable when printed with a fading ribbon. With no error correction, I had to just try various combinations of characters until the line was accepted. As I recall, there's a one-byte checksum with UU-encoding. Amiga: Amiga 500, 1.5MB Printer: Radio Shack DMP106
I was in my early teens at the time but I've never heard of radio broadcast games, but do remember BBC programs being broadcast over TELETEXT. I' made some half-way decent games for the Vectrex a few years ago and have started coding for the VIC-20 and ATARI 2600 but when I looked at doing something for the Dreamcast, the step-up in difficulty was huge! Not just in what you have to put into the graphics but also the relative complexity of the hardware. It's a big ask for a single person or small group doing stuff in their spare time. I remember getting my first mobile phone from work in the early'ish nineties, a brick with a massive telescopic antenna, and my wife phoning my mum to say we were in the can on out way to visit, and my mum said "don't be silly how can you call from the car" fast forwards a few years and we all had mobiles and already didn't think anything of it!
Great to see you again on the show Chris. Ironically I have just acquired a pretty much mint condition Jaguar and invested in a RetroHQ Game Drive fort it. I'm waving! 👋😁
25°C sounds lovely! We're set to hit 38°C/100°F this weekend, which is just the start of a long, boiling summer here in the desert. Nice to see Chris back, too!
We already get excellent playable games that look nice, despite the small community: Wyvern Tales 2, Asteroite, Jumping atg Shadows, Gravitic Mines, Las Strike, XenoWIngs, Doom Slayer Edition, Towers II EE. The gamejam is nice, but the dev community is alive and very productive for a over a decade now and it it considerably grew the recent years.
Great episode. Loved the intro 😂 also, at the start of the show, the multiplayer games Chris was playing, that would be really cool. Never played Falcon in multiplayer 😮
I don't remember software being transmitted by radio. But I do remember a short basic program for the ZX81 being broadcast on tv on 'tomorrow's world'. From what I remember when you run the program it asked you to enter your name then printed a message listing the tomorrow world hosts and you. Very cool at the time
Yeah, *Demon Seed* was also a Sci-Fi with the usual Hollywood site gags and jump scares while building up tension. In the end tech created by humans got advanced enough to recreate itself in human form. Of course this ending is the hook for a sequel, but that didn't happen so much back then without major changes, like movie name changes, etc. IMO.
Distributing software via radio would need a crap-tonne of error-correction to have any sort of reliability. Look at digital TV broadcasts. Those have tonnes of error-correction, using much newer codes, and the signal still occasionally picks up enough interference to beat the code.
For the person looking to get Lemmings running nowadays, surely introducing them to exodos would not only allow them to play Lemmings but a whole heap more games they might never have had the chance to previously.
If you look at the Jaguar's exclusive indie content you'll realise that they're all doing things that 16-bit systems can't. The resolution is always higher on the Jaguar. Reboot's system-exclusive titles all run at 60fps with no slow-down. The Jaguar always has more on-screen colours. The sound quality is better on the Jaguar. Jumping At Shadows from Reboot is doing things that even the mighty Rayman didn't do on the Jaguar, and is well worth looking into if you haven't seen it already. NBA Jam on the Jag is far closer to the arcade game than the 16-bit ports. Even the Amiga ports that featured on the Jaguar during its commercial lifespan run faster with no slowdown, have a higher resolution, way more colours, and better sound quality than their 16-bit counterparts. The Jaguar is a 32-bit system with a few 64-bit features. Its strengths lie in 2D and flat-shaded 3D graphics. This year Jag E--Fest will reveal a decent number of great-looking games for the console.
@@DaveMoorland-zv3tn I seen the at shadows game. I might get it depends on the price. But because it has some lighting effects not seen on Rayman don't mistake it for being on par with it. And 60fps well it should be considering how small everything is and how little seems to be going on.
Jumping At Shadows is one of the most technically impressive Jaguar 2D games for me. It does more with the system than Rayman. Three layers of parallax, CRY lighting and transparencies, and super smooth 60fps gameplay. The graphics are superb. It looks like a modern indie game Xenowings, Doom Slayer Edition, Tony Montezuma's Gold, Hammer Of The Gods, Wyvern Tales 2, and many more are coming to the console this year. New games from Songbird, and two 3D games from Dr Typo. One of those games will be playable with V.R. using BiGPemu. 2024 will be great for the system.
For 3D, Battlesphere is an impressive showcase for the Jaguar (which is also playable online using BigPRmu with up to 32 players). BigPEmu has a patch for Chequered Flag that adds HD, 60fps, and improved handling. MCD3D with V.R. is also cool, on BigPEmu.
@@KarlHamilton the developer of the Jaguar himself stated that in an Interview. But even without that, Cybermorph was designed specificly for the hardware features of the Jag, like gouraud shading. Please Show us evidence how you are debunking known facts. Otherwise its better for you to shut up, my friend!
A Jaguar game that I think showed Jaguar's strengths is the unfinished Livewire by Black Scorpion Software. It's reminiscent of Loaded in terms of the gameplay and visuals but runs far more smoothly (locked at 60fps). The game uses a 2.5D graphics engine that takes advantage of the Jaguar's multi-layered parallax, using polygons as walls between the parallax layers. It was shaping up to be a very impressive game, but unfortunately, the developer lost the code and development tools. Some excellent-looking games were coming to the Jaguar just before it was discontinued that were more 5th Gen than 4th Gen that you should also look into. Most are playable on BigPEmu. For me, if a developer made a game using a 2.5D engine similar to that found in Livewire for the Jaguar, I think more gamers would take an interest in the Jaguar. Phear, which eventually became Tetrisphere, is another great example of what could have come to the Jaguar had it survived 1996.
Here are a few more that were almost ready for release on the Jaguar before the console was discontinued: Space War 2000 Atari Accelerator Dactyl Joust Brett Hull NHL Deathwatch Phase Zero Conan Black Ice White Noise There are more too, and plenty of videos on RU-vid cover games like these on the Jaguar. Space War 2000 is visually impressive.
ATARI Owl's famous texture-mapped 3D/voxel generated r.p.g demo is highly impressive. However, texture-mapped 3D games on the Jaguar would just take too long to make and ultimately run poorly due to the constraints and quirks of the hardware. Flat-shaded 3D with some textures here and there is the kind of 3D that the Jaguar can do well. Battlesphere Gold is a prime example of this and runs at a high frame rate. Chequered Flag could be optimised to run smoother on the system, as the game was probably rushed to release by ATARI. For all the hate the Club Drive receives, it runs smoothly on the system. Iron Soldier 1 and 2 also showcase the pinnacle of 3D on the Jaguar, as the game runs at a decent frame rate. Skyhammer is great, but the performance suffers due to the amount of texture mapping used, and that's evident in all of the Jaguar's texture-mapped 3D games. For me, I'd like to see more arcade ports, super-scaler, Doom-esque fps, updated/enhanced 16-bit games (Power Drive Rally is a great example of this), 2.5D games, 32-bit console and computer 2D game ports to the Jauar, and decent free-roaming and on-rails flat-shaded 3D games for the console, and I believe *this* is where the console's strengths truly lie.
There were people pirating games in the UK by broadcasting them over amateur radio. A lot of my early 8-bit game library was aquired that way. (I've also seen it done over CB but there was a much higher chance of the broadcast being interrupted.)
Six months isn't all that much time to learn a to develop on a new system like the Jaguar, especially since it's a system that leans heavily on hardware-specific coprocessors. It took me a good six months of reading just to learn the basics of the Commodore Amiga platform, let alone starting to code on it. Of course there are many people smarter than me but still... it's not an easy deadline. 9 or 12 months would be better.
I don't think i could live without Alexa. Use timers alot when cooking. Its my alarm in the morning. Bedroom and bathroom lights can be switched off whilst not getting out of bed. Usefull for appliances like electric blankets, heaters and immersion
The Jag, 3D0, Saturn, and PS1 were all released within a year of each other. How different that was to the two-cheeks-on-the-same-arse Xbox and PS5 era in which we live, now. At least we once had a choice.
Playing modulated data as audio over a podcast is unlikely to end well, for the same reason that putting analog broadcast static through MPEG compression turns it into a blocky mess. The compression algorithms do not cope well with randomness and lots of transitions. That's the reason fax and modem connections have to be handled specially on VoIP systems.
@@ThisWeekinRetro With a high enough bitrate, it might still work. Would just need users to be aware that streaming in YT's 360p mode might be a lost cause. ;-) I don't know what podcast hosts impose on audio quality. Several 'casts that I listen to are... uh... obviously frugal. You can hear the compression artifacts even with simple speech. Those would probably massacre data as audio. But whether that's a decision made by the production team or Apple Podcasts, I don't know, so if you have the option to ratchet it up for that one show... what do you have to lose? :-)
Coming from PC flight sims, Cybermorph was very impressive for 1993! More details and smooth color shading with gouraud shading. Every game magazine thought it was impressive technically! Draw distance was ok for the time, not by today standards of course. Iam not sure you guys have proper insight in the evolution of 3d graphics, its the chronology stupid! ;-) I dont think the Gamejam would do anything groundbreaking as the current games are already quite good and the best official games mostly show off what the machine was capable to do. The Jaguars power in 3D is overestimated by many, especially dismissing 2D games generally as "16 bit" makes not a lot of sense and is far away from the technical level those games actually display. If you look at most homebrew 3D stuff, e.g. Dr. Typo, its rather simple game concepts, and he is one of the few who was able to pull off anything proper 3d on the machine. The 2D games show much more complex game design and are proper games to play for hours. Its not true those games only used the CPU and not the risc cores or custom chips. Anyway, I hope we will see some magic, but I would keep my expectations at a realistic level.
Regarding the computer program broadcast. I remember doing this with my father. It’s on RU-vid. “Tomorrow’s World”. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-jeKWMXuSGCc.htmlsi=88R53pPookKtkSHa I can’t remember if it worked at the time. I have a vague memory of needing to do something to fix it.
Nobody but nobody who presents a retro gaming podcast is capable of mentioing the Jag without dropping a "do the math". There must be a retro gaming broadcasting law that they all adhere to? Now let me return to my blast processing.
its a bit late for good jaguar games ain't it. tempest 2000 was the one game. I feel like that kind of games is the strength of jaguar. but, tempest 2000 is great on a as well pc, doesn't need that powerful of a pc either just the same sort of you'd buy when jaguar came out. for amiga ports to playstation, well, worms is one ain't it. there's probably few others but worms originates as an amiga game.
