64-bit action with Mad Butscher of
Foundation Two
For the first time ever a Jaguar meeting
was organised in Medow/Holland (5 km behind the German
border), early this November. About 16 Jaguar developers
and fans got together and had a lot of fun.
I started the journey at about 7 o'clock,
when Mr XY (Rouven Gehm) picked me up. After the usual
visit to the Fast Food temple, we reached the end of
the highway without complications. There we saw a sign
indicating a flea market close to the street. We were
only one hour late for this, so we stopped by hoping
to get some Atari stuff there. It was a really disappointing
market, only about ten stands. But Mr XY was able to
get three German VCS modules (the infamous Quelle games)
with nice titles like "Seamonster" (Seemonster),
"My Way" (mein Weg) and "Space Patrol"
(Raumpatrollie). The best thing about this market was
that it didn't cost us much time. So finally we reached
Winterswijk.
Road signs are very rare in Holland,
so we had to drive a little bit through the plain Dutch
desert, until we found Medow. There we first noticed
the well-known Atari van of MNX. The meeting was held
in a nice pub, and when we arrived, a lot of people
were busy on a lot of Jaguars. After one of the organisers
finally asked for my entrance fee, we talked a little
bit with the MNX guys Fox and TXG (Robert and Rene).
There was nobody at the meeting selling
any Jaguar stuff, so it was time enough to have some
nice chats. The most funny person was "Justclaws"
(Richard) an Englishman who lives and works in Germany,
but doesn't speak German (I like to speak my worst English
when I'm at a meeting, so this wasn't a problem). He
explained how I could program the Jaguar with the BJL
or the Alpine board. Because the Alpine board costs
about 1000 DM, I would prefer the BJL. He also showed
a lot of prototype Jaguar games, which I never heard
of before. Another interesting developer had connected
the Jaguar to a hard disk and even to a card with TOS
2.06. It was a cool moment when the well-known GEM desktop
appeared on the Jaguar. He also wrote a driver for the
old VCS paddle controllers.
Then after my head was filled with
information, I joined the rest of the people and played
a lot of Jaguar games. During this session, I recognized
someone I saw at some Neuss fairs. He hands out flyers
about a DVD player which uses the Nuon chip (Michael
Neihs of June Audio - Ed). I haven't heard about that
project for a long time, so I was impressed to hear
that it seems to be successful. At about 18:30 we were
the last ones to leave the party and drove home.
It was the first time I got in contact
with the Jaguar scene, and it was interesting to meet
new people and see that it is also very active. The
two organisers, "the DVD" (Diederick van Dijk)
and "Starcat" (Lars Hannig) did a great job.
These two guys are about 15 years old, and organised
a good meeting, I have great respect for them.
Jaguar Alpine board. Photographs
courtesy of Atari Workshop.
A small Jaguar demo made for
the party.
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