Jaguar Connexion 2003

by Nick Harlow and Richard Stevens

Talk about Lost in France (hit single for Bonnie Tyler for those who don't know), this was set in rural, I mean very rural Ile de France, or was it Picardy, or was it Champagne? I didn’t know, both my navigator (Richard Stevens) and I were lost.

We had merrily set out to catch the 02:00 ferry to Calais and a have a nice gentle drive down to Paris, then turn east and viola we should have been there. Needless to say while we came off on the right junction of the A4, I took the wrong turning off it. After driving around for a while we were tempted to ask for directions as the whole of the region was covered in very dense fog, which was slowing our journey and making road signs difficult to read. But after spotting two locals with bloody big guns we decided to move on. Shades of The Hills Have Eyes or what.

Anyway we found the place and well sited it was too, the village can't have more than 250 people living in it, but the hall was really well designed and had easy loading access. Pocket (organizer) helped and arranged the unloading of the Tardis (some of you who know me, know what I mean).

Just at the entrance was a bench showing off several games mags edited fully or in part by Pocket and very interesting they looked, too. I wonder if they would be worthwhile translating into English?

On display were two (yes count 'em) CT60s. Not bad out of only 150 made. One lucky person owning one is Jean-Paul Mata, also known as ProToS. It seems after talking to both Jean-Paul and his friend Lucas they have had a interesting time getting the CT60 compatible. Jean-Paul has a 72 MHz CT60 and can't seem to run MiNT but Lucas has an accelerated 100 MHz CT60 and can run MiNT.

Other little problems have arisen but on the positive side running MP3 and DivX has to be seen to be believed. Also for programs like Inshape and Neon, extremely fast performance. I think both gentlemen are very happy with their purchases and are spending a lot of time finding out what does and doesn't run. For example, MetaDOS will not run unless you remove TT RAM flags but hey that's half the fun of owning the CT60. You will get dirty (metaphorically) getting to know the quirks of your baby. The baby is always growing with new patches and fixes from a host of loving parents. This baby (OK last time for that metaphor) is going to grow, let's keep watching. So keeping this in mind I played a very impressive Quake on his CT60 with frame rates between 8 and 22 frames per second. Nice!

For For those with Jaguar and Alpine interest, we had a couple of programmers showing their demos and ideas which included a very nice texture mapped 3D floating environment just begging for some sprites and action as a background. More demo stuff was shown and hopefully we might see some results commercially at a later date. Of course, Jaguar games were in abundance and most popular seemed to be Power Drive Rally and Cannon Fodder.

Falcons were in evidence but apart from one constantly formatting a hard disk I didn't see too much of them.

A Lynx table also allowed you to play solo or networked practically any Lynx game you could think of. Also by the side of the hall was a very interesting display of Atari style goodies from the 2600 up to 800 and ST and Lynx and Jaguar. A couple of very interesting boxed items caught my eye, an original boxed 2600 and a specialist joystick (flight, I think).

Unfortunately I wasn't able to check this out more closely as the display went on Sunday. Should have been quicker. But I did see a nice display of Lynx badges displayed, plus some interesting CDs on Atari game music.

A modified (OK, hacked) Xbox with practically every game environment you know was claiming a lot of attention and I discovered a sneaking liking for Puzzle Fighter, which I am still trying to work out. The game didn't look difficult maybe one for the Reservoir Gods to look at for the Falcon.

Competitions included Battletris, which had a strong competitive field lead by Kad and I... if I stayed longer it probably would have been us in the final especially since we both had highest scores. Less worthy of mention from an English point of view was Warlords, one person slaughtered and I came second in my group, didn't continue with this as I felt somewhat outclassed. We did have Nuon games, and 2600 classic games as well, in fact anything you fancied could be played. The most attended game was Samba De Amigo on a Dreamcast played at 02:00 showed the rhythm of the night in a way I don't really want to remember.

Highlight for me was finally meeting Jean Marie Rocque, founder of Silmarils. We talked for a little while and he explained French bankruptcy law to me. Gave me a couple of ideas which I will talk about to relevant people later and maybe, just maybe we might have some Jaguar/Atari news.

I must mention the hard work done by the organizers of the show, especially Arethius who organized the food. It was superb, we had a buffet lunch with salami, meats, vegetables and fresh bread and for dinner at 22:00 we had an absolutely unbelievable mixture of beef, rice and vegetables (I wonder if this was in honour of Les Rost Bif, who were visiting? No I didn't think so), the show has given me some ideas for JagFest UK. Thanks guys.

The trip home, we set out late but made up some time on the toll roads and then about 150 miles out of Calais I got stopped on the A4 for speeding. Not too much in the way of defence, 180 km/h in a 130 zone. But the nice officer mentioned cent trente km/h and let me on my way. Result or what!

MyAtari magazine - Feature #5, November 2003