Treasures from the past for the Atari Jaguar CD
Added 2021-02-19 11:08:39 +0000 UTC
We are already halfway through February. Can you believe it?
Due to popular demand I want to share with you some more treasures from the past.
I’ll start with my Jaguar CD releases, which also include the Jaguar demos of my Eerievale game.
Ocean Depths
This was my first CD release back in 2004 and the first homebrew CD release to be encrypted, meaning it could be played on a regular Jaguar CD unit, like official games.
It happened to be a lucky time for the development community that the official Atari encryption key files and tools were discovered. So I was happy to make use of them.
Ocean Depths was the first release based on the EerieEngine, my own custom Adventure game engine, which supported a mouse and could load additional data off the CD.
Rather than being a single game, this was a compilation with an animated menu.
The name of Ocean Depths refered to a relaxing animation and slideshow of underwater scenes. The puzzle game JagMIND was also included and it featured the first demo of Eerievale.
JagMIND: Bomb Squad
My second CD release came in 2006. It was a community requested reimagination of my JagMIND game. It was a puzzle game in which the player has to disarm a bomb by entering number codes. A display indicated how many digits were correct or if a number was part of the code at all. This way the player could cleverly figure out the code.
There also was a two player deathmatch mode in which two hackers faced off against each other.
Lost Treasures
My third and final CD release came in 2007. Again, this was a community request.
It contains all of the prototypes of games I had worked on up to this point. Many of which were not accessible anymore.
Some games were shown in different stages of development.
The most important titles were: Star Alliance (a scrolling shooter), JagWorm (a game inspired by Snake), Juiced (a game inspired by Joust) and the Eerievale demo of 2004.
There were also a few more mini games.
Eerievale Demo 2004
Around 2010 I released this demo to the community due to popular demand as a download. It was the last demo of my adventure game for the Jaguar, before creating a new EerieEngine from scratch to allow for multi platform support.
All of these CD releases are available as DiscJuggler images. You can burn it using a demo of DiscJuggler that can be found using your favorite search engine.
I hope you enjoy these glimpses into my early homebrew game development years.