A photo diary by TXG

The year 2003 seems to be the year for the Jaguar. There were four JagFests in one year in Europe and it started with JagFest UK.

This time I went to E-JagFest 2K3, it was the third edition of this E-JagFest and I was really looking forward to this meeting because this time some developers would be there as well. The meeting started at 08:00 so I needed to wake up very early because it was more than two hours' drive from the Netherlands to this place in Germany.

I started to travel to Fox-1 of MNX and after some good strong coffee we started to drive to Germany. The trip to the meeting was pretty good, not much traffic but we saw some police so we could not drive faster than was allowed. On the way Fox-1 was watching a DVD on my laptop just to stay awake. When we arrived at the meeting place at 08:30 there were already a lot of people there.

We began to unpack our Atari Jaguar stuff and at 09:00 we were done. I placed two blue Atari flags in the room and one Jaguar banner, so I felt more at home.

I connected my developer's Jaguar and developer's CD-ROM and Alpine board and showed some demos and other programs to some visitors.

I liked this meeting from the start and talked to many people and that's something very nice at an event like this. I was waiting for Nick of 16/32 Systems to arrive because he always brings nice Jaguar goodies with him and he is also a nice person to meet. After a while he arrived and we all helped him unload his car. This time he brought lots of great things. When people think Jaguar CD-ROM drives are rare, they could see Nick had at least six new ones for sale.

But that was not all, he also brought lots of brand new Jaguar games and Lynx games, and some developer Jaguars and Alpine boards. It's good to see there are still people supporting Atari this way. I bought a Phase Zero cartridge and a JAGADS CD. This CD is pretty cool, it's a movie CD that runs for one hour on a Jaguar. It's a good example of how real-time video could look on the Jaguar. I was very impressed with this CD.

Later when I looked around the room I noticed a nice painted Jaguar in a flight case.

Next to this Jaguar was Starcat with his Jaguar development kit. He showed a demo of his latest game, it's a graphic adventure called Eerievale. The game ran from CD and the pictures were of very good quality.

Starcat gave me a demonstration of what the game could do. It was controlled by a normal joypad or an Atari ST mouse connected to the second joystick port.

Here some exclusive screen-shots of this game:

Mad Butscher organized game competitions on Atari 8-bit (Multi Worms) an eight-player snake game and Checkerd Flag with six linked Lynx systems. The game on the Jaguar competition this time was Ultra Vortek, one of my favorite games. I won the first match but didn't practice a lot. Fox-1 of MNX did make it to the finals so he did a good job.

But there was of course more to see - I noticed this Atari 2600 hand-held, I only read about it before but it did look super cool.

Matthias Domin was showing his Ethernet/flash cartridge for the Jaguar and showed this Jukebox menu. It allows you to load a game you select from a menu directly into the flash and then run it. He showed a CD with 42 games. The nice option of this Jukebox menu is that when you select a game you see a small picture of this game in the right corner.

Then Starcat Developments presented the soundtrack they will use in Star Alliance - Battle for Earth. Everybody took the time to listen to the audio tracks. I liked them very much.

And of course the audio track was played on an Atari Jaguar CD-ROM drive with the nice VLM effect.

Later that day, Fox-1 of the MNX crew bought a 2 MB Alpine for his Jaguar. Now we have two Alpines. Although it's only a 2 MB Alpine, it's enough for loading demos and most ROMs. It's something very nice to play with. When you have used it you will never want to live without it.

And of course people could play games there. Some people played Battlesphere, others played just the games they bought.

The meeting, for me, was a success. I met so many Jaguar fans and had a good time. At 19:00 we had to leave the room after putting everything in the car, we went to a small restaurant with about ten people to eat and drink something and of course talk about more Jaguar stuff, about 23:00 we travelled back to the Netherlands and arrived safely back home. The E-JagFest was a big success, I have seen lots of things and I hope there will another meeting next year.

txg@myatari.net

MyAtari magazine - Feature #3, December 2003