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Dan's JagFest '99 Scrapbook

Hello everyone! I thought that some of you might find my pictures from Jagfest to be interesting, so here is my scrapbook, complete with story. Right now the pics are in black and white, but maybe I'll change that in the future. Slow modems, WATCH OUT... there are a lot of pics.

Here is a picture of me on the way to Jagfest, in the Mall Of America. My Thursday started off with about 6 hours of sleep, and ended up with about 6 hours of driving too. Gary, Max, and I thought that the Mall Of America would be easy to find and we wouldn't spend too much money. Unfortunetly, we were wrong on both accounts.

After becoming hopelessly lost in the Twin Cities, mostly by my own doing, we drove 80 miles into Rochester at about 7:30 at night. After arriving in Rochester and checking in with no trouble, Gary and Max decieded we should go exploring.

Let me tell you, Rochester is an interesting little town... mostly because of this. The Corn Water Tower. Gary and Max wanted a picture in front of it, and this is how it turned out. As I remember, Carl said it was a canned foods companies tower. Cool, nonetheless, and an interesting close to our first day in Rochester.

We arrived at the Holiday Inn where Jagfest was going to be held at 7:30 am the next morning. Unfortunetly no one was there yet. Luckily for us however, this gave us time to realize we didn't have extension cords and run to the Rochester Big KMart and get them. When we returned a few people were there setting stuff up. Max noticed we had a chalkboard by our table and had the bright idea from the old Jaguar commercials...

The enterance to Jagfest was colorful, and made the event look interesting to everyone that was at the hotel. Once the door was seen, the fun wasn't far off!

Even before people started to show up, Carl had Protector running on a large TV. Kev fired it up and showed us how it was done, not getting killed until the Meteor Shower Warning had flashed. I thought that he was an ace and I'd never get that far, but as the day wore on (and I kept playing and playing and playing...) I got to the same point as him! I'm still rather proud about that.

As the festivities began and people began to walk into the conference room, someone decieded to slip a copy of "The Cave," Atari's horrid attempt at an infomercial and surprisingly, everyone was glued. This picture is proof as people crowded around to laugh at it and wonder just why this infomercial didn't sell more Jags... At the table was the tournament sign up in which we could sign up for the tournaments that most interested us. 7800 Asteriods, VCS Super Breakout, linked Lynx Raiden and Jaguar Protector were just a few of the many tournaments.

After playing a lot of games, Scott Walters asked me about the Lynx dev.kit. I explained to him what I knew at the time, and how I had not yet had time to fix a couple small problems with it (all related to the boot up sequence). In less then an hour, Scott had fixed the boot sequence for me. Gary, having not been at my house to have suffcient putzing time on the Mig decieded that he wanted to sit down and play with it. Right now I beleive he's looking at Handebug, the dev.kits official 65C02 debugger.

Here we have a picture of Scott and Kev taking a step back from the people warring on BattleSphere. I believe that it is Scott's son on the larger TV. All I remember is that I thought I was doing okay at BS until I took him on... Once linked BattleSphere action was started, it wasn't ended until Micah took his TV's home at the end of the night.

One of the neatest moments of Jagfest was the unveiling of SkyHammer. After seeing a red-screened Jaguar twice, this beast of a game came up. Interest was high, and I managed to snap this picture while Carl was explaining what the controls and framerate were like. Needless to say, the control is good considering the type of game it is, and the framerate was better then anyone expected.

As the day went on, I started to take more pictures of random events, realizing that I still had a lot of film left. Kevin always seemed to notice me before I took it, however...

I also decieded to walk around and snap a photo from everyones tables. Somehow, I have forgotten who's table this was (I think it was Clay's?), but they had a very nice Jag rotary, as well as a comprehensive 2600 and 7800 collection. They also had some interesting video game literature. A lot of people stopped for a game of Tempest 2000 here before moving on...

This is a picture of Micah (ETHunter)'s table, including a picture of Micah whaling away at BattleSphere, which his table hosted for the entire night. Micah was doing pretty good, until Scott's little boy took over control of the other Jaguar.

This is Kev's table, which featured both SkyHammer for the Jag and a BomberMan clone for the Lynx. On top of that, he had a lot of neat advertising and promotional materials for the Jaguar, which many people found interesting to flip through. Other Jaggy oddities were a grey and blue controller, a testcartridge, the Jaguar "eyes" promotional picture CD, the Atari Launches Jaguar CD and the Jaguar stereo card.

As Jagfest continued, a lot of people knew who everyone else was on a first name basis. The center table had become a place were eight Lynx's were com-Lynxed togeter, and a lot of Slime World and BattleWheels was being played.

Here is a bunch of people at our table. Our table was off in a corner which alienated it from the mainstream, but it worked out great. A lot of people from Rochester that stopped to check out what Jagfest was congregated and tried out lots of different Jaguar games for the first time. Max, Gary and I still used our Jags to challange people, and Max was quite proud of the fact that he wiped everyone at Super Burnout.

Even after being on for more then ten hours, Protector was still drawing people to it (espically me). SkyHammer usually had at least one person watching for every person that played it. Both of these games will be wonderful releases.

With that, the day at Jagfest started to draw to a close. People started wandering off towards their homes, and the people that had traveled to get to Jagfest started to sadly pack up. Jagfest had been a wonderful trip, and Max, Gary and I are all ready to try to make it to the next one.

By the way, I still have some more pictures dwelling around, and I left out how I won the Protector tournament (BIG grin!), so I'll have to update this again sometime. If you find yourself in a picture or have any comments, please email me I left a lot of stuff out I'm sure... Thanks!

dan
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