The Atari Jaguar Needs Good Games - This Week In Retro 171

The guest reveal brought a real smile to my face

Great to have you back on the show Chris!

Glad we pushed button❤ welcome back Chris you've been missed

Brilliant to have Chris back as a guest presenter. It would be lovely to see him just occasionally. Glad Neil felt he could take some time out.

Chris <3 nice to see you back. Let us make this a weekly guest.

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.

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)

@Chris.... while in the UK please also visit the Retro Computer Museum!

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.

I waved! What a lovely moment.

Great content this week, who's Neil? 😋 Thanks for the shout out re: 'Butler in a Box'.

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

Seeing Chris made my day! Glad to hear he's doing well!

What a fun surprise! Hello Chris! ❤

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.

Nice to see you again Chris. 🙂😊😁

Good to see you again Chris!

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!

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