+atari2600land Posted February 15, 2014 Share Posted February 15, 2014 I know it's probably way easier to burn a game onto a CD, but why haven't more people taken the time to make homebrew games on cartridges for people who don't have a Jaguar CD unit like myself? The only homebrew game I have for Jaguar is Blackout! and that's only because there was a cartridge release. Are Jaguar R1-2 carts hard to come by or something? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nonner242 Posted February 15, 2014 Share Posted February 15, 2014 Yes they are. dentist seem to gut them for torture devices. and paint them white! true story... sorta Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+CyranoJ Posted February 15, 2014 Share Posted February 15, 2014 It's considerably cheaper for us devs if you buy a CD unit instead of us buying a bunch of carts hehe j/k We've just had Elansar, Another World and Impulse X released on cart..... More cart releases are coming, promise. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jaybird3rd Posted February 15, 2014 Share Posted February 15, 2014 I wonder if the original injection molds for Atari's cartridge shells have been found. With the apparent popularity of those white Jaguar cases, it would be nice if a huge batch of inexpensive cartridge shells could also be made, provided the molds are available. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EmOneGarand Posted February 15, 2014 Share Posted February 15, 2014 I wonder if the original injection molds for Atari's cartridge shells have been found. With the apparent popularity of those white Jaguar cases, it would be nice if a huge batch of inexpensive cartridge shells could also be made, provided the molds are available. Didn't that company that was making the dental cases have it? I recall they used white jag cart shells to house the memory card for it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+remowilliams Posted February 15, 2014 Share Posted February 15, 2014 The only homebrew game I have for Jaguar is Blackout! and that's only because there was a cartridge release. Ouch. You got a cartridge, but not a game 6 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rick Dangerous Posted February 15, 2014 Share Posted February 15, 2014 Ouch. You got a cartridge, but not a game Wha? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+save2600 Posted February 15, 2014 Share Posted February 15, 2014 Wha? I think that was a nice way of saying it's not much of a game at all? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+remowilliams Posted February 15, 2014 Share Posted February 15, 2014 I think that was a nice way of saying it's not much of a game at all? Well let's just say (art and music assets aside) if I picked (one time) ten lists of ten random numbers and then charged you $100 to guess at them you probably wouldn't think it'd be much of a fun game... P.S. For anyone who actually wanted to play Lights Out, check here http://reboot.atari.org/new-reboot/rocksoff.html 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cobra Kai Posted February 15, 2014 Share Posted February 15, 2014 Cartridge shells should be able to be manufactured again now with 3D printers. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zerosquare Posted February 15, 2014 Share Posted February 15, 2014 There's no point. Empty cartridge shells can be bought from B&C for a few dollars each. Manufacturing them with a similar level of quality using 3D printing would be a lot more expensive. 5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
danny_galaga Posted February 15, 2014 Share Posted February 15, 2014 From what I can tell, it's the PCB that's the hard part. You don't even need a shell. I have Alpine Games for the Lynx, which doesn't have a shell. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+save2600 Posted February 15, 2014 Share Posted February 15, 2014 Just get yourself a Skunkboard, then every homebrew can be on a cart. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jaybird3rd Posted February 15, 2014 Share Posted February 15, 2014 From what I can tell, it's the PCB that's the hard part. You don't even need a shell. I have Alpine Games for the Lynx, which doesn't have a shell. The PCB shouldn't be any more difficult to make than any other cartridge board. It's been a while since I've looked at them, but I've got copies of Atari's original Gerber files; with modifications, they can be used as the basis for a new board design. In my experience, it's the plastic shells that are the most difficult to manufacture, mostly because of the need to tool an injection mold. Perhaps 3D printing will someday allow them to be made as economically and at the same level of quality as injection molding, but the technology isn't there yet. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cobra Kai Posted February 15, 2014 Share Posted February 15, 2014 There's no point. Empty cartridge shells can be bought from B&C for a few dollars each. Manufacturing them with a similar level of quality using 3D printing would be a lot more expensive.The technology is only improving, and you can have your own little personal 3D printer in your house now. The costs involved will only go down, and there's a finite amount of OG parts anyway. Plus you can print up any color or design you want for your stuff. 3D printing cart shells for other consoles can save time with cleaning old carts, imagine how much time Albert could save on cleaning and prepping all those 2600 donor carts. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Willard Posted February 16, 2014 Share Posted February 16, 2014 (edited) alot of homebrew releases are being published on cart, there are actually very few of them that haven't been. I think the ones that are CD only generally either need the extra space or were small projects and devs feel that there would be very limited demand for a cart version at the price they'd need to charge to get the same margin as they make off a CD release (like $20-$30 more depending on packaging quality). plus it adds the hassle of making the carts and the up-front investment in components. maybe the jagtopus minimizing the effort in a made to order option will encourage devs to offer at least cart-only versions of their cd projects for those who can't live without them. but really for some CD games the price is already as high as i think alot of people would be willing to pay, considering the devs consciouosly design them to be budget releases. adding $20 markup for cart components won't make them any more attractive. Edited February 16, 2014 by Willard 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zerosquare Posted February 16, 2014 Share Posted February 16, 2014 The PCB shouldn't be any more difficult to make than any other cartridge board. It's been a while since I've looked at them, but I've got copies of Atari's original Gerber files; with modifications, they can be used as the basis for a new board design.The PCBs themselves aren't the problem; the 16-bit EPROMs chips they require are (they're getting rarer and more expensive). That's why SCPCD and I designed the Jagtopus boards using modern flash memory chips. The technology is only improving, and you can have your own little personal 3D printer in your house now. The costs involved will only go down, and there's a finite amount of OG parts anyway. Plus you can print up any color or design you want for your stuff. 3D printing cart shells for other consoles can save time with cleaning old carts, imagine how much time Albert could save on cleaning and prepping all those 2600 donor carts.3D printing has become a lot more affordable in the last few years, but it's still too expensive for mass production, and low-quality when compared to injection molding. If you want to have cartridges with different colors, you can create a silicone mold (using an original shell as a model) and have them made out of colored resin. We did try this, the result is pretty nice, but at 10 per cart it's too expensive for regular games. And the mold has to be replaced every 100 carts or so because it wears out (unlike aluminium molds, but those are a lot more expensive). 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zerosquare Posted February 16, 2014 Share Posted February 16, 2014 BTW, here's a picture of a cartridge that's been made using a silicone mold and white resin: 7 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
danny_galaga Posted February 16, 2014 Share Posted February 16, 2014 The PCBs themselves aren't the problem; the 16-bit EPROMs chips they require are (they're getting rarer and more expensive). That's why SCPCD and I designed the Jagtopus boards using modern flash memory chips. 3D printing has become a lot more affordable in the last few years, but it's still too expensive for mass production, and low-quality when compared to injection molding. If you want to have cartridges with different colors, you can create a silicone mold (using an original shell as a model) and have them made out of colored resin. We did try this, the result is pretty nice, but at 10 per cart it's too expensive for regular games. And the mold has to be replaced every 100 carts or so because it wears out (unlike aluminium molds, but those are a lot more expensive). This is what I was getting at. I know an actual PCB board is nothing to make (I got 100 made for my Jaguar rapid fire controllers for instance). I just recall people reusing old carts (Cybermorph or summink?) instead of making new because of limited availability of a chip. This has happened with some old arcade boards too, although I know at least some have developed daughter boards with new chips that plug in where the old chip went. Defender is a good example. But I digress! It must be simpler with the Lynx because there are quite a few new games on new carts. And I assume my Zaku cart even has a new housing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sh3-rg Posted February 16, 2014 Share Posted February 16, 2014 alot of homebrew releases are being published on cart, there are actually very few of them that haven't been. I think the ones that are CD only generally either need the extra space or were small projects and devs feel that there would be very limited demand for a cart version at the price they'd need to charge to get the same margin as they make off a CD release (like $20-$30 more depending on packaging quality). plus it adds the hassle of making the carts and the up-front investment in components. maybe the jagtopus minimizing the effort in a made to order option will encourage devs to offer at least cart-only versions of their cd projects for those who can't live without them. but really for some CD games the price is already as high as i think alot of people would be willing to pay, considering the devs consciouosly design them to be budget releases. adding $20 markup for cart components won't make them any more attractive. It looks like you've misread the Jaguar collector scene and the demand for games ( -whatever- they may be) on cartridge and how or why people make and put out games. I can't think of any dev that puts the financial return from sales into any other equation than the one that tells them there's a realistic chance they will break even or better. It's a completely false assumption to think that putting out games on CD is all about raking in piles of money. When you put out a game on a pressed CD, there's a minimum volume to be ordered... afterall, you're using the very same facilities and services that retail games and music use... this isn't sticky tape and scissors in the back room stuff. You have to recover the cost of a very large amount of fully complete units vs sales nowhere near that. You have to factor in a realistic sell through and investment return. A sensible figure to work with, I've found, is 1/10th - i.e. your costs per unit are not that for a single unit, but rather ten times that. Put that in the context of a single cartridge game. I can make a game on cart with an investment of 1 board, one insert, one label, one box and price it accordingly. There's very little risk with that scenario... if only 10 people want to buy it, only 10 get made. With CD releases, you end up relying on 3rd parties taking a stock from you and trickling out the sales (they take the units at a lower cost and essentially get handed-off a portion of the risk) and you're relying on doing the same yourself or through your publisher. That might work well for one or two releases, but look what happened in the Inty scene where a publisher stuffed all 3rd parties with stock... they got lumbered with unsellable boxes of games (over-saturated, there's nobody there to buy them). Money is tied up in a single title for as long as it takes to break even. You can be lucky and do a Kobayashi Maru and ship multiples of your estimates of units to gamers and 3rd parties, or you can end up with something like Jagware Collection that, understandably not having much "new" to the existing userbase, takes its sweet time to fill in that hole you made for yourself. When people start talking about pressed CDs costing very little per unit, they're not looking at things from a realistic position... they're often looking up the prices for duplication from workshop outfits vs real replication in pressing plants, spindle packed duplicated CD-Rs vs pressed discs DVD cased with printed disc, printed insert and cello wrap... and when it comes to CD-R duplication vs pressed replication, we all know that's a risky game to play with the Jaguar CD. I've had companies pretend to have access to the workshop floor and come back to me scratching their head because "this CD you sent... my device can't read the format".. they're trying to image your burned image. Idiots. You need to find a real outfit who can put your physical disc into their glass mastering machine and make a real zeroes and ones 1:1 clone, not some middleman with an imaging device FTPing your data to the servers of that factory, adding in so much potential for fail. The real considerations devs make when deciding to make a game for cart or CD are far more to do with the games themselves and how they might work than a number of units they guess they might sell and the stacks of cash they could reign in if it's offered in one format vs another. And what people will and won't be prepared to pay, some kind of notion that devs are making games people wouldn't dare touch if they were cart-based rather than CD-based because there's a line of quality that CDs and cart games inherently fall either side of, that they're somehow shovelled-out budget-level games toCD nad awesome Magnum Opera to cartridge... well... that's a mightily arrogant stance and just as flawed as the rest of your assumptions. People threw money at a cartridge game that consists of randomly clicking boxes until the "game" tells you you've won... and some even bought it twice - on both formats! The very same people! They bought another gameplay-lacking "preservation pack" cartridge of old data and binaries as you well know. The notion that there is some kind of quality filter of crappy CD releases vs superior cartridge excellence is utter nonsense and the real-life practicalities of putting out games in the various formats are not things to be guessed at and passed off as fact for the guys who are not involved and reading this forum out of interest. EDITED FOR CLARITY, 11:57 GMT 6 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Willard Posted February 16, 2014 Share Posted February 16, 2014 (edited) ..... The real considerations devs make when deciding to make a game for cart or CD are far more to do with the game itself and how it might work than number of units they guess they might sell if it's offered in one format or another. .... so in your opinion why do devs decide to publish on CD rather than cart? Edited February 16, 2014 by Willard Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sh3-rg Posted February 16, 2014 Share Posted February 16, 2014 so in your opinion why do devs decide to publish on CD rather than cart? Because they can? 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Willard Posted February 16, 2014 Share Posted February 16, 2014 nice explanation. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sh3-rg Posted February 16, 2014 Share Posted February 16, 2014 nice explanation. Pose a more searching question and I'll respond appropriately. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+CyranoJ Posted February 16, 2014 Share Posted February 16, 2014 Its obviously because their games are not up to the awesome quality of unfinished betas or *shock* Blackout/Mad Bodies and thus need CDs....... 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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