Atari Jaguar
One of the last things out of Atari before they went belly up was the Jaguar game Console. The Jaguar was a 64 bit game console at the time most other consoles were 16 and 32 bit. Sadly Atari didn't do enough to really market the Jaguar. There are some great games for the Jaguar, and their is a community of developers still working on Jaguar games.
People wanting to develop games for the Jag have a few options.
The preferred method is an Alpine board made by Atari for
developers (this is what I use). They are very hard to find
though, and quite expensive. Another method is a hardware mod
called BJL. It is a ROM you put in your Jaguar that allows
you to
download code from your PC to the Jaguar and run them out of RAM.
It is a nice hack, but requires modifying your
Jaguar.
I took the BJL code and made an encrypted CD for the Jaguar. This CD allows you to download code to your Jaguar without doing any hardware modification to the Jaguar. You can download it here. The archive contains cdrecord for Windows, but if your using Linux or OS X you will want to download cdrecord for your OS. If you have NTI's CD/DVD software you can download an image of my BJL CD for burning with NTI's software. Click here for the image burnable with NTI's software. It should be noted since this is an encrypted Jaguar CD, you can boot it on a normal Jaguar and not need any encryption bypass mechanism.
I also made an archive of my development environment for the Jaguar. Download it and check out the read me file for setup. With this archive you should be able to develop for the Jaguar. Click here to download it.
I did a video that shows how to setup a the above Jaguar development environtment on a Windows machine, and compile my sample program below. Right click here and save this video to your system. It is about 10MB and uses the xvid codec.
I encrypted the game Black Ice White Noise for an ex-Atari developer. He has it on his website for free download. Click here to check it out.I also wrote a little sample program that shows how easy it is to initialize the Jaguar and bring up some simple text and graphics. Click here to download it.
I wrote a simple "Hello World" program for the jaguar. It is a stripped down version of the above demo. Click here to download it.
Courtesy of Gorf over on Jaguar Sector II, I have added revision 8 of the Atari Jaguar Technical reference manual. Click here to download the PDF document.
Atari 8-bit Computers
Many years ago I developed an Atari 8-bit emulator for DOS. I called it Pokey in honor of the 8-bit sound chip. It had decent compatibility, and ran some games other emulators at the time couldn't. It didn't have sound emulation though.Click here to download my old DOS based emulator Pokey.
One hack I did with this emulator was I designed a sound card that contained a real Atari Pokey chip on it. It plugged into the printer port on the users PC and the audio coming out of it went to your line in on your sound card. This gave my emulator 100 percent accurate Atari 8-bit sound. I also developed an ISA card version also. Both worked great. Since the Pokey chip also controlled the joysticks on the 8-bit computers, I could have used it to allow 4 real Atari joysticks to be used on the PC. I never mass produced the printer port or ISA cards so they never took off. I did make the specification available for the printer port version for other emulator authors. I forget who, but one author did include support for the Pokey sound card in his emulator.
Click here to download the specifications, test programs, and schematics for my Pokey printer port sound card.
Atari 16/32 bit computers
After my 8-bit Atari computers became outdated, I upgrade to the newer line of Atari computers. I started out with a 520 ST, upgraded to a Mega 2 ST, followed by a Mega 4 STE, a TT030, and last but not least a Falcon 030. I still have the Mega 4 STE, TT, and Falcon.I released a few programs for these systems over the years I used them exclusively.
One of my first programs I released was called Flasher. it was a simple program that allowed the user to configure the colors they wanted the terminal program Flash to use. Download it here.
I created some Star Trek sample files for use with a program called Gem Sound. Gem Sound basically let you attach sound files to various desktop events (opening a window, closing a window, etc). You can download my trek samples here.
I wrote a little program that runs from an auto folder on a floppy and waits 25 seconds for your hard drive to spin up, and then it reboots the computer. This was written because back in the day hard drives took a long time to spin up, and the Atari wouldn't see them on boot up and would boot from floppy. Click here to download st_hdcb.
One of my favorite hacks was my Atari Laser CPX. CPX files are control panel extensions. This program was written in 100% assembly. It monitors the status of the Atari laser printer. Click here to download it.
About the time caller ID was becoming popular I decided to write an application to take advantage of it. It is basically a program that monitors the caller ID coming from a Supra 2400 baud modem. When it sees a phone number coming in it speaks the phone number to you. You could configure it to hang up on certain numbers (private, or telemarketers, etc), and you could also create sample files that would be played with a specific number calls. Everything was also logged. It had probably the worst name in the world. IJCTSILU which stands for "I just called to say I logged you". Click here to download it.