1990’s Atari Test Department Computers

Up for auction is a machine from Atari Headquarters in the early 90s. It’s from the Test Department, which was at the time testing Lynx and Jaguar titles.

I’ll leave the technical specs to the auction, but here’s the important part:

Now for the kicker. This machine appears to be either Hank Cappa’s, or Joe Sousa’s machine while he worked at Atari in the early to mid 90’s. They were both members of the Atari Test Department! On the hard drive are what appear to be tons of test related files and documents from the Atari Lynx and Jaguar days. There appears to be a full Jaguar development kit on there also. We frequently had to download ROMs to the Jag with the TT and an Alpine board. Look for the picture below involving the “JAGBIN” directory. The documents on this machine appear to be mainly various flavors of test reports or related docs. There are some other interesting documents in there such as Aliens vs. Predator level object layout docs, and a strange “Apology” document. Check some of the many screenshots below. If you would like me to take pics of anything specifically from the machine please let me know and I would be happy to do so.

Looking at the pictures there’s some crazy documents, but it would be very interesting to see what someone with some dev experience could pull off of the machine.

Auction here

The seller also has a similar auction for a ATARI MEGA STE 4 w/ 50MB HD & Lynx/Jaguar ROMs, Files! which ends shortly.

Now for the kicker. This was Tom Gillen’s STE while he worked at Atari in the early to mid 90’s. He was the Manager of the Atari Test Department! On the hard drive are what appear to be tons of files and documents from the Atari Lynx and Jaguar days. There are ROM files, employee timecard files, test reports, email logs, BBS directories, instructions/marketing materials for unrelease Lynx and Jag games (Lynx Raiden, Daemonsgate, more!), A PARTICULARLY AWESOME EXCHANGE BETWEEN TOM GILLEN AND JEROME STRATCH, etc. Check some of the many screenshots below. It even includes bug and test reports on the ACTUAL JAGUAR CHIPSET! Please note the 30 or so images below are my first batch of images. If you would like me to take pics of anything specifically from the machine please let me know and I would be happy to do so. Two things I will be taking pictures of this evening are the root of the C drive and some of the BBS files. There are two different BBS directories, and if I recall correctly, this also doubled as the BBS machine that developers would dial into in order to upload the latest builds of the games currently in test.

Seen via AA.