Some more news regarding Native shmup for Atari Jag...

[PC Engine Fan X!]

Here's an old link that talks about the Native shmup demo for the Jaguar:

http://alive.atari.org/alive2/native.php

At the "World of Atari" expo held in the summer of 1998 in Las Vegas, a programmer brought in a developer Jag console and his laptop on the final day of the expo. He asked me if I wanted to try it out. He booted up the laptop and the data was d/l'ed on to a flash Jaguar cart. I was treated to some cool spectacular opening credits animation which lead to the first level with an end-stage boss. There was both sound and music playing in the background. I was blown away by how cool it was. Running at a silky smooth 60 frames-per-second framerate...can't get any better than that. Too bad that Native demo was never finished. The Native demo at the WOA'98 expo was displayed on a 20" Sharp TV monitor using RCA composite video output -- that was all that the WOA'98 staff had at best to display the Jaguar gaming wares which kinda sucked at the time. (It's perfectly understandable though.) The real treat/kicker was being able to try out Battlesphere almost a year and a half before it was officially released by Scatological (formerly known as 4Play). Glad to have tried out this Native demo as it was meant to be played, complete with sound and music. ^_~

Fast forward to sometime later, B&C Computer Visions did release Native demo on a CD-Rom disc but requires an Jaguar Bypass Cart to play it. The only minor gripe is that there isn't any sound effects nor any BGM tunes either. Looks awesome and razor-sharp when piped out through low-res 15kHz sync rate with a Japanese Scart cable setup and fed through an XRGB-2 setup. ^_~

Here's an eBay auction for a Jag Bypass Cart with free included Native demo disc if you'd like to try it out on your Jaguar with JagCD interface:

http://cgi.ebay.com/Bypass-Cart-CD-Encr ... 7C294%3A50

It's seems that Duranik just needed a JagCD dev kit and all would be well. Oh well...Native is regulated to Jaguar vaporware for now. It sure would be interesting to see if Carl Forhan of Songbird Productions could create some new stages for Native. ^_~

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[antares]

I was a huge Jaguar Fan at that time and worked to get a complete Jaguar collection. Being a shmups fan too and Native also looked absolutely amazing it was kind of the game of my dreams back then

The demo is pretty cool but you clearly feel that it represents an early stage of development of the game. But it had much potential.
There where also pictures of later stages and bosses floating in the internet when Native was still in development but afaik later it turned out those where mock ups and the game was far less from completion than everyone hoped.
I guess the chances of Native ever beeing released are beyond zero as it would require much more work than just adding a few levels.

[PC Engine Fan X!]

Yeah, I had briefly heard about this newfangled Jag demo of Native a few months before the WOA'98 expo took place. But for it to suddenly make a very late surprise apperance on the last day...that was quite something special indeed. ^_~

You could immediately tell that the coders were really into crafting another high-quality arcade-like shmup for the Jag platform with this Native demo. My mouth was open the entire time playing it...definitely jaw-dropping inducing. ^_~

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[pixeljunkie]

the demo is pretty bare-bones. I played it awhile back when I still had a proper Jag setup. The graphics and everything looked really promising, but I seem to remember no hit-detection, etc. It was barely a proof of concept, honestly. Made for some amazing screenshots though. If this game had been finished, I might still have a Jag.