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Classic Games (Games) Entertainment Games

Atari Jaguar-Related VR Units Show Off Virtuality 35

Posted by simoniker from the very-max-headroom dept.
Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing out videogame auction site Bidiots has a pair of Virtuality SU2000 Atari Jaguar-related VR pods for sale. These 1995-era 'virtual reality' arcade machines originally cost "$33,000 - $35,000 per seat", and the machines come bundled with compatible software titles, including Dactyl Nightmare 2, a multiplayer networked shooter in which, if you're not careful, the "awesome [eponymous] beast will pick you up in its claws, and fly hundreds of feet above the playing arena before dropping you to certain death!" A set of specifications for the SU2000 reveals more information, including exciting action shots of the device, and elsewhere, Atari Explorer has pictures of the unreleased Jaguar VR system, an "ambitious plan for a home VR headset at under $300" which used similar technology to this device.
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Atari Jaguar-Related VR Units Show Off Virtuality More

Atari Jaguar-Related VR Units Show Off Virtuality

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  • Hey! (Score:5, Funny)

    by acxr is wasted ( 653126 ) * on Monday February 09, 2004 @08:33AM (#8224458)
    Now I can pay thousands of dollars to look like a jackass, and I won't even have to look at the people laughing at me!

  • Hackers (Score:4, Interesting)

    by krymsin01 ( 700838 ) on Monday February 09, 2004 @08:48AM (#8224506) Homepage Journal
    Made famouse by the movie Hackers. (In which steven fisher uses one)
  • The game linked to in the story was on British TV. Can't remember the name of the gameshow.

    Also, does anyone remember the virtual reality WW1 flying game featuring an italian mad man in the seat behind you shouting

    "He's a getting away!"

    ? What was the name of that thing ?

    There used to be one in Bournemouth Tower Park Bowling.

    I used to love those VR things, much what arcades should be about - hardware too expensive for the individual to buy.

    ps, seen the other odd inputs such as the sword, weight mat, sk

  • Played it (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SandSpider ( 60727 ) on Monday February 09, 2004 @09:07AM (#8224594) Homepage Journal
    I played Dactyl Nightmare once when it was on tour and made it to my University. Usually people focused on the other player and did their best to avoid the Teradactyl. When I finally got my turn, I was unstoppable. The other opponent was easily dispatched time and again, but once the 'dactyl went for me. I said, "What the heck," and shot the thing out of the sky. It was reminiscent of that scene from the first Burton Batman film. Ah, good times.

    =Brian

    • Re:Played it (Score:4, Insightful)

      by toyotaboy ( 583027 ) on Monday February 09, 2004 @10:07AM (#8225070) Homepage
      I was impressed when I played it way back then. Even though the graphics were crude, the immersion made you feel sort of like you were in another world. The steel cable attached to your back was clunky, and it fixated you so you couldn't turn 360. I do remember some corporate function that had some experimental software where it took you through a few worlds (a rat on a floor, hang gliding, etc.) I would love to see VR make a comeback. Looking at the type of graphics of today, if we had VR controls it would be so much fun.
      • I am kinda surprised that nobody has released an immersive HMD _yet_. I mean, I was always under the impression back inna day that the problem was pushing 2x the polygons, not the HMD. You can't tell me that modern video cards and computers can't push a reasonable frame rate at 800x600 times two. Or was that just that dude with dreadlocks' dream, and the HMD was equally distant? Or is it out there, hanging on to the fringe? (And I'm interested in tracking HMDs, not static or shuttered HMDs..)
      • theyre still arround, just a lil more expensive, GM has a good one.

        Its from SGI. [sgi.com]

      • Sounds fun. Were the glasses stereo? Or was it the same 2D image in each eyepiece?

  • Did anyone else play it? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by quinkin ( 601839 ) on Monday February 09, 2004 @09:07AM (#8224596)
    I queued up and paid my $5 like all the other idiots...

    But the game was crap!

    I hope you can get the source and compiler, or at least get the specs. It really doesn't do the hardware justice.

    Q.

  • I remember that... (Score:5, Funny)

    by gabe ( 6734 ) on Monday February 09, 2004 @10:39AM (#8225338) Homepage Journal
    I played that Dactyl game a long time ago. From what I remember, you could see the other guy's entire body, but if you looked down, all you saw was your left hand with the "gun" in it. It wasn't really a gun so much as it was a mushroom launcher. Damn thing took 5 seconds to reload too.
    • not to mention people talking in your ears. i couldn't figure out if it was the other person run though some DSP or just a bunch of WAV files.

      i do remember being able to see my body, and i found it was quite anoying that you couldn't straif! (cource the 'mushrooms' took 20 seconds to get from the other gun to mine so i could turn and walk out of the way)

      i agree with the gripe a few posts up with the cable restricting you from turning 360 degrees. happily, i had a handler who would push me the other way wh
  • They were Amiga 3000s [emugaming.com]. An arcade here on the Isle of Palms had one. They were interesting, not so much for what they were, but what they portended for the future. Unfortunately, that future has not come to pass. Still cool stuff, though.

  • I had these (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Jjeff1 ( 636051 ) on Monday February 09, 2004 @11:30AM (#8225824)
    I worked at a place that leased 4 of these things for like 5 years. They were pretty rough. They broke all the time. Eventually the company we leased them from went out of business. We were left trying to get custom made cables to get them working again.

    The company I worked for was in a mall, they went out of business, probably for spending thousands of dollars and stupid stuff like this.

    As I recall, the system was basically a 486 with 2 big video cards, they had something like 4 40mm fans on each card.

    Eventually we had 4 machines, with 2 sitting never used because we scavenged them for parts.

    Personally I could never use the thing. The way the headset fit on me I could never get the proper 3D view.

    • Re:I had these (Score:4, Informative)

      by samdu ( 114873 ) <(moc.hcetninor) (ta) (udmas)> on Monday February 09, 2004 @12:44PM (#8226556) Homepage
      If I recall correctly, the PCs were simply for network communication. The real engines of these beasts were the Amigas. Primative? By today's standards, yeah, but oh the promise they showed for the future. Alas, VR is dead on the vine. I still dig the idea of throwing on an immersive headset and completely abandoning the real world for a bit to blast away at baddies in a full 360 degree artificial reality. :(

      • I still dig the idea of throwing on an immersive headset and completely abandoning the real world for a bit to blast away at baddies in a full 360 degree artificial reality. :(

        I always wanted to watch a VR porno.

        LK

  • Why is Virtual Reality such vaporware? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sodade ( 650466 ) on Monday February 09, 2004 @11:53AM (#8226058)
    Ah the heady days of the early 90's. VR was coming, and fast. Jaron Lanier (VPL) was in every issue of Mondo2000 (the precursor to Wired mag). The Dactyl-nightmare VR game (that was just one of the games) was just a taste of what was to come - they had one on the UC Berkeley campus and there was a long line all the time - soon after, I convinced the owner of the campus-side computer store I managed to lease one (me and my buds became the midnight VR crew). The $300 home VR gaming system was on its way. I had four different business plans based on this stuff. This was going to be the beggining of the transhuman revolution. I was going to learn how to juggle in VR - Jaron Lanier said so. Somehow, the whole thing just disappeared. VPL was sold to some French company, the gaming console never came, Mondo2000 gave way to Wired and the whole thing went poof. WHY??? I dunno. Maybe because VR makes people naseous? I remember being pretty sick after some 3am dactyl sessions, but I thought that it was just because the displays were laggy. Today's 3d shooters make me want to puke and always give me a headache, but I figured that is because I am looking at a 2d display. Maybe the military didn't want their tech going into the layman's hands? Conspiracy theorys anyone? Anybody out there know the rest of the story? Any links to current projects? With the advances in computing/graphics power, the stuff they were doing with 100k SGIs should be doable on 1k AMD boxen. Why isn't this stuff reality?
    • Correction: Mondo2000 never had anything to do with Wired. Wired is a cheap, mainstream rip-off of Mondo2000. For a while there, they were on the stands at the same time. Mondo always beat out Wired for my geek magazine money because it was truly bleeding edge while Wired was more current events with a dash of the future thrown in to placate the true geeks. I was going to throw in a link to mondo2000.com, but apparantly the site is down, though DNS still resolves it, so the domain must still be registered w
    • Why isn't this stuff reality?

      I suspect that a big reason is that no one ever developed a headset with a high enough resolution/field of view/refresh rate to truly approximate "reality".

      I don't think that LCDs exist yet that can. VR was an idea that was ahead of its time. We couldn't produce affordable hardware that could push enough pixels, and we didn't have small displays with a high enough resolution.

      We have the pixels available now, thanks to 3DFX, NVIDIA and ATI, but we're still a few years away on
  • It wasn't Dactyl nightmare that I played, but it was some other VR game at a local arcade.

    The game was very boring. It basically consisted of you standing on this conveyor belt, shooting at whatever you could in the sky. I accdientally shot my co-player a couple of times.

    It wasn't worth the money at all. The arcade that had it shut down(they only had 2 units). This was around 1996.

    As for Mondo 2000, I had several issues. in hindsight, it was a rather bland magazine. Too many Ana-Voog like things in it(sh
  • Then Ill be happy BattleTech was one of the best "VR" games to bad it cost so damn much.
  • I always wondered why the game manufacturers never tried more VR games, or at least high-end multi-player games, with experiences you simply could not get at home. The arcade manuf. simply gave up when they realized that the public was not buying into yet another Tekken/Mortal Kombat/Street Fighter sequel, which is sad. Arcades should be a place where you go to have fun that you simply cannot have at home. At worst I had hoped that the arcades would have the same situation that movies do now. Essentiall
  • ...that the VR scene has lost it's history.

    First off, the Virtuality units were originally made by W Industries, Ltd (or LLC?), who later became Virtuality, Inc, now they are called something else (if they are still around - last I checked was a year or so ago). The original Virtuality pod, the SU1000 (for Stand Up - there was a sit-down racer style pod, as well) - was powered by an Amiga 3000 with a custom CD-ROM drive (I assume SCSI based), and custom graphic boards. This pod was released by W Industries.

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