JEO 43/46
One other thing we did was interlacing. The Jaguar hardware is
supposed to support an interlaced display. Atari even claimed this in
their advertising material. Developers, though, were told not to use
interlacing, and the information on how to use it was removed from
Jaguar programming material.  Apparently, there was some difficulty in
the interlace hardware; it generated "ugly color bars" or some such.
Not knowing this (we somehow missed the prohibition) we wrote
interlace code anyway, which didn't exhibit any artifacts. At first,
Atari people refused to admit our demo was using interlacing. They
thought we were doing something else that only looked like
interlacing. When we told them how our demo worked, they grudgingly
admitted we were doing interlacing - and then refused to admit that it
worked.
We continued talking with Atari, sending them project ideas, for
almost six months. Our contact person left Atari (we don't think it
was directly related to us) and we never seemed to get anywhere after
that. It always seemed like we were just a week away from having a
contract... Finally, in January of 1997, after they'd laid off almost
everyone, they told us they were not accepting any new contracts.
//// Hope
At this point we weren't really sure what to do, so we sort of fumbled
around a bit, kind of half-heartedly working on our long-forgotten
polygon engine. But then an old acquaintance dropped by on vacation
and talked to us about a project he was thinking of doing. We liked
the idea, and we didn't have anything promising of our own (after a
couple of months of looking), so we agreed. And that's basically what
we've been doing since February of 1996. It's our big secret project
that we can't talk about (yet). But it's almost ready for release.
//// tsd Today
Neither I nor Bryan are currently engaged in any Jaguar development at
all; we do not even have the Alpine any more.  We do not intend to
work on any Jaguar projects in the future (unless someone with a ton
of money decides to pay us up front for such work). We are working for
ICD, but again, *we* are not working on anything Jaguar-related. ICD
and 4Play *are* still working on BattleSphere, of course; we are not
connected with that effort, and are doing other things.
I don't want anyone to get their hopes up that maybe someone is
working on a 2600 emulator. We did have a working emulator, running
nine different games, at very close to the speed of the original 2600
(it was hard to measure exactly). (I say nine, even though the web
page says six, because our first demo contained three games; Jay
Patton asked us to send a newer demo with more games, so we did. I
don't remember the first three games we included.) Many parts of the
emulator did not work, but due to the nature of the 2600, the 6507 CPU
emulator must be almost completely finished and perfected before any
recognizable display can be seen. I'm fairly sure we have an Alpine
image somewhere, and of course we still have the source code. We also
still have the TT/Falcon demo of Combat on floppy, although I haven't
checked that floppy in years so it could be bad.
Atari never paid us for any of the work we did (we never signed a
contract with them). Nobody else has worked on our "Virtual VCS" code.
I keep it because I never throw *any* source code away. :) The current
version of BattleSphere does use the Julia fractal morpher code that I
wrote to learn the Jaguar system, and that appeared as a title screen
to the Virtual VCS demo. We also still have the source code to all the
other demo programs we wrote for the Jaguar (IFS morpher, Mandelbrot
zoomer, interlace demo). We do have a demo tape we made from this
material, although it is inconvenient to make copies of it.
... They tore out my heart and stomped that sucker flat.
--- JetMail 0.99beta22
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