Talking with Mike Fulton, Atari Jaguar tools manager

It does float! And doesn't get soggy in milk! :)

Moderator: a31chris

User avatar
a31chris
Jaguar MOD
Posts: 894
Joined: Mon Apr 01, 2013 7:09 am

Talking with Mike Fulton, Atari Jaguar tools manager

Post by a31chris » Sat Jun 21, 2014 3:53 am

I got an opportunity to talk with MIke Fulton, an ex employee of Atari Corp in the Jaguars mainstream lifecycle. He was the Developer Support Engineer Pre-Jaguar and then he was the Jaguar Tools Manager.

I shared with him different stories we had heard through the years about Atari's lack of communication with its developers. Here I am posting a brief summary of some of the anecdotes and his replies.
Mike Fulton wrote:Chris, you've got a lot of information but you're missing perspective on a lot of these things. You're looking back on them years and years later and of course certain things seem more obvious in hindsight.
I wondered to him why it seemed Atari did not communicate with its developers better and work with developers to get the bug workarounds from those who had discoverd them for the Jaguars hardware, such as the UART bug. I relayed one story where Scatologic/4play had said when they reported to Atari they had found a workaround for the UART bug they claimed Atari treated them like they were incompetent and did not know what they were talking about. They related there was no real effort to negotiate to use their UART bug workaround.*
I don't recall who those developers were, but one thing you should keep in mind is that it was very possible for developers to present a list of symptoms as part of a bug report and for that list to be incomplete or contain a few extraneous items that would confuse the issue. It's not at all unlikely that whatever they told Atari simply didn't line up with what Atari knew, or thought they knew, about the problem.

Also, it was not uncommon for developers to occasionally get in contact with some Atari engineer who played no official role in providing developer support. Those engineers would have no idea of the process we would normally follow, and in many cases the results of those conversations were never passed on to the support people, even in summary. And once having made such contacts, those developers would forever expect those people to act in a support role, completely bypassing the regular support channels.

I can understand why developers would have wanted to talk directly to those people, but that probably caused more communications problems than anything else.
>>they claim Atari wanted them to send it over so they could evaluate it or some such and took it to mean Atari may have wanted to copy the code and use it without due credit or compensation.*
I don't recall this specifically so perhaps it happened after I left Atari[Mike left Atari around sept. 95], but here's what it sounds like to me: Some developer figured out a workaround, and Atari asked them to share it, and they didn't. You say they claim Atari didn't offer them anything for it, and that's probably true, but did they ask?
Robinson Requiem guy: My only contact with Atari was a producer who had no idea how the machine worked...
The contact information for Atari's developer support people was provided in the first few pages of the main documentation, and it included our phone numbers and email addresses. If this guy thought his only contact was the producer, he either didn't look at the documentation very hard or he didn't ask the producer.

Producers would occasionally come to developer support and pass along technical questions from their developers. Unless it was something pretty simple like "tell them to download the update from the BBS" we would get in touch with the developer directly when that occurred, rather than expecting the producer to pass something back.
I talked to him about the errors in the technical docs.
I would agree that the documentation could have been better in many ways. More inline sample code, for examples, would have been great.

We tried to incorporate corrections from developers into the documentation where we could, but those reports had to be independently verified and sometimes that took time. Someone who reported a typo and expected to get back a fixed version of the docs in a few weeks was not being realistic. We released new versions of the documentation periodically, but undoubtedly not as often as some would have liked (including myself).

Also, we discovered there were many cases where the developer who ended up working with the Jag dev system and documentation wasn't the same guy who we sent everything to in the first place. When we sent out updates, they'd go to the original recipient and didn't always end up making it to the new guy.

When we found out about these situations, we'd try to add the new people to our database, but some undoubtedly fell through the cracks.
I proposed what he appropriately termed crowd-sourcing for the problems. More open communication more sharing of problems with such things as the risc compiler.
I disagree. The RISC compiler was not ready for distribution. It was not even minimally functional by any reasonable standard. If we had sent it out, today you'd be asking us why Atari was sending out broken development tools.

Seriously, can you imagine: "Hey developers, here's a new compiler for the RISC processors, but you can only use it for code that compiles to less than 2K and doesn't compare values against each other."

Please... developers would stormed Atari HQ and made the crowd outside Frankenstein's castle look like a garden party.

It's romantic in hindsight to think that the problems could have been crowd-sourced away, but the reality is that if we had sent it out as-is, it would have been nothing more than a time-wasting distraction for almost every single developer who looked at it.

Let me anticipate a question: "So why did you give HVS the compiler, then?"

We didn't. They got it directly from Brainstorm. BS occasionally did stuff like that, despite our asking them not to any number of times. In this particular case, it turned out well, but more often than not it simply caused confusion because developers would end up reporting bugs related to versions of the tools that Atari hadn't even seen yet.
I asked him why Ken Rose did not know about the compiler and he was an in-house developer who now builds and targets compilers for a living. He also had lots to say about having to work completely in asm and the lost money and man hours that cost Atari. I reasoned that Ken Rose would of went through the problem like a hot knife through butter.
As to Ken's not knowing about the RISC compiler at the time, that's entirely likely. I don't know how many more times I need to repeat the idea that the RISC compiler was an uncompleted project in the very early stages and not ready for distribution. Ken was working on a specific game project. There was no reason he would have been made aware of new tools before they were ready for distribution.

Eric Smith knew about the issues with the RISC compiler at some point. I saw Eric on a daily basis and we talked all the time. Furthermore, those issues also affected assembly programming, just in a different way.

You keep talking about the situation like we had the "broken RISC compiler" hidden in a drawer for a year or two, but from the start of the project to the point where figuring out a workaround for the hardware problems became any sort of bottleneck was really no more than a couple of months at most. We didn't pull people like Eric Smith off their other projects because we were paying Brainstorm, who were very competent, to work on this stuff.

In *HINDSIGHT*, I would say that it's possible if Eric been pulled off his other projects (multiple) and been tasked to work on the compiler stuff, he might have been able to come up with something. The same is probably true of Ken Rose and a number of other engineers. But the conventional wisdom within Atari at the time was that there wasn't any way to create a reliable workaround for some of these issues. The fact that we had Brainstorm working on the project in the first place was something of a "Hail Mary" effort, hoping they'd be able to come up with something nobody else had thought of.

High Voltage Software being able to come up with what they did was totally unexpected. Whatever hopes we'd earlier had for a miracle solution had gone away by then.
Thank you for your time Mike. I just wanted to share with you some of the stories we have heard and take this opportunity to communicate what we the public have been hearing about for 20 years.
We're every bit as much as part of the "public" as you are, and we've heard all this stuff many times before. Most of the time we (or I) simply don't bother responding because it really, really, really doesn't matter any more.
I also asked him about MK3 and what he knew about it. He says he knew nothing about it.

*Going by memory here and summarizing. If my anecdotes are incorrect please get hold of me and I can retract/correct the statements.
What came after the Jaguar was the PS1 which for all it's greatness, ushered in corporate development and with it the bleached, repetitive, bland titles which for the most part we're still playing today. - David Wightman

User avatar
a31chris
Jaguar MOD
Posts: 894
Joined: Mon Apr 01, 2013 7:09 am

Re: Talking with Mike Fulton, an ex-Atari employee

Post by a31chris » Sat Jun 21, 2014 4:07 am

I also asked Mike what he may of known about the rumors that Sonys deep pockets held back the release of Rayman to wait for the PSX version to be finished.
Mike Fulton wrote:There's really only one way that a game would have been held back for non-tech issues, and that's if they got to a late alpha or beta stage without ever having gotten title approval.
What came after the Jaguar was the PS1 which for all it's greatness, ushered in corporate development and with it the bleached, repetitive, bland titles which for the most part we're still playing today. - David Wightman

MikeFulton
3DO ZERO USER
Posts: 19
Joined: Sat Jun 21, 2014 5:26 am

Re: Talking with Mike Fulton, an ex-Atari employee

Post by MikeFulton » Sat Jun 21, 2014 6:26 am

A few clarifications or extra details on a few things...

As regards Ken Rose, probably about the only thing I knew about Ken at the time we both worked at Atari was that he was a game programmer working on Black Ice, White Noise. We later worked together at VM Labs, and I became aware of his talents with the GCC compiler when he worked on the NUON version. However, I had no clue about that when we were both at Atari.

I'm not sure it would have mattered if I did know about Ken's expertise, however. I mean, I was perfectly aware of Eric Smith's experience working on various GNU tools, and I probably would have looked to him first anyway. But the simple fact is that we weren't looking for someone within Atari to work on the compiler stuff. Most of the tools for Jaguar originally started out in-house, but we contracted Brainstorm to work on the tools specifically so that our own people could be free to concentrate on their main projects.

If finding someone internally to work on the compiler workarounds had been considered at the time, it would most likely have been something I would be working on myself. There were a few other tools that I maintained myself, rather than Brainstorm. Some of the DOS-based tools, and also the Mac-based CINEPAK movie conversion tool.

As regards Mortal Kombat 3, I don't recall anything about a development project getting underway while I was still there, but we may have been talking to Midway about doing it. Since the arcade version came out in '95 it's likely that the Jaguar stuff happened after I left Atari at the end of September.

With reference to the later post about Sony, it might make more sense that Chris asked me the question when you know that after leaving Atari, I was "Senior Developer Support Engineer" at SCEA from early '96 through late '98. My main speciality through most of that time was the original Performance Analyzer which was used to help developers find problem spots in their code.

--

Can't make any promises about further responses, but I'll try to keep an eye out here as time permits.

Mike

User avatar
a31chris
Jaguar MOD
Posts: 894
Joined: Mon Apr 01, 2013 7:09 am

Re: Talking with Mike Fulton, an ex-Atari employee

Post by a31chris » Sat Jun 21, 2014 7:03 am

You should consider getting ahold of Andreas and adding your picture to this list.

http://www.vmlabs.de/team.htm

I understand you worked with Scott LeGrande? He said that Souchay guy was crazy.
What came after the Jaguar was the PS1 which for all it's greatness, ushered in corporate development and with it the bleached, repetitive, bland titles which for the most part we're still playing today. - David Wightman

User avatar
NeoGeoNinja
3DO ZERO USER
Posts: 343
Joined: Sun Apr 14, 2013 5:42 pm

Re: Talking with Mike Fulton, an ex-Atari employee

Post by NeoGeoNinja » Sat Jun 21, 2014 10:14 am

Great thread Chris/Mike.

It's always nice to hear things from (pretty much) the horses mouth, especially when concerning a console as maligned as the Jaguar.

Although, only being a 'gamer level' individual, some of the technical aspects are completely lost on me (RISC compilers, UART bugs... etc).

Interesting read, nonetheless.

Thank you to you both for your time :)

User avatar
a31chris
Jaguar MOD
Posts: 894
Joined: Mon Apr 01, 2013 7:09 am

Re: Talking with Mike Fulton, an ex-Atari employee

Post by a31chris » Sat Jun 21, 2014 2:56 pm

UART bug is just the technical name for the chip that runs the Jaglink for Doom and stuff. This bug is what causes Doom to crash and reset itself due to 'interference from playing a game in hell'.
What came after the Jaguar was the PS1 which for all it's greatness, ushered in corporate development and with it the bleached, repetitive, bland titles which for the most part we're still playing today. - David Wightman

MikeFulton
3DO ZERO USER
Posts: 19
Joined: Sat Jun 21, 2014 5:26 am

Re: Talking with Mike Fulton, an ex-Atari employee

Post by MikeFulton » Sat Jun 21, 2014 7:04 pm

a31chris wrote:You should consider getting ahold of Andreas and adding your picture to this list.

http://www.vmlabs.de/team.htm
I hadn't known he put that up. I'll have to dig up a good picture from those days and send it to him.
a31chris wrote: I understand you worked with Scott LeGrande? He said that Souchay guy was crazy.
Yes, I worked with Scott LeGrand (no "e" at the end), mainly with regard to the NUON's OpenGL-ish graphics library that he created. I don't think I've seen him in person since the VM Labs days, but we're FB friends these days... :D

Francois Souchay worked on NUON's wavetable-based synthesizer library and he was indeed a wacky guy. Haven't seen him since those days.

MikeFulton
3DO ZERO USER
Posts: 19
Joined: Sat Jun 21, 2014 5:26 am

Re: Talking with Mike Fulton, an ex-Atari employee

Post by MikeFulton » Sat Jun 21, 2014 7:23 pm

NeoGeoNinja wrote:Great thread Chris/Mike.

It's always nice to hear things from (pretty much) the horses mouth, especially when concerning a console as maligned as the Jaguar.

Although, only being a 'gamer level' individual, some of the technical aspects are completely lost on me (RISC compilers, UART bugs... etc).

Interesting read, nonetheless.

Thank you to you both for your time :)
RISC = Reduced Instruction Set Computer, meaning the processor has a relatively simple set of instructions compared to more traditional processors like the Intel 80x86 family. I'm not sure the NUON processor technically qualified as RISC, but that's how we always thought of it.

UART = Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter, basically a chip for managing serial communications like a network connection. This is how consoles talked to each other for multiplayer games. The Jaguar's custom UART had a bug where it would sometimes fail and have to be reset and re-initialized before it would work again.

User avatar
The Laird
3DO ZERO USER
Posts: 65
Joined: Tue Sep 17, 2013 9:04 pm

Re: Talking with Mike Fulton, an ex-Atari employee

Post by The Laird » Mon Jun 23, 2014 10:36 pm

Interesting stuff, I always like hearing stories from real Atari people. A certain convo I saw on Facebook involving BJ West and none other than Leonard Tramiel recently was fascinating! :mrgreen:

It amazing how many new stories keep coming out from those days, the one thing that I have always found most amazing when I interview people is how much love they seem to have for the Jaguar and how fondly they remember it, when it was nothing but problems for Atari. I still talk with guys like Darryl Still, David Wightman, Fred Gill and Wayne Smithson about the Jaguar regularly.

MikeFulton
3DO ZERO USER
Posts: 19
Joined: Sat Jun 21, 2014 5:26 am

Re: Talking with Mike Fulton, an ex-Atari employee

Post by MikeFulton » Wed Jun 25, 2014 6:46 am

The Laird wrote:Interesting stuff, I always like hearing stories from real Atari people. A certain convo I saw on Facebook involving BJ West and none other than Leonard Tramiel recently was fascinating! :mrgreen:
That's how I got pulled into this! :D

User avatar
a31chris
Jaguar MOD
Posts: 894
Joined: Mon Apr 01, 2013 7:09 am

Re: Talking with Mike Fulton, an ex-Atari employee

Post by a31chris » Thu Jun 26, 2014 7:42 am

Do you know what company Atari used for its commercial advertising? I want to find the actor who played the mad preacher in the Doom commercial and have a chat with him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFeZSbA1XOg
What came after the Jaguar was the PS1 which for all it's greatness, ushered in corporate development and with it the bleached, repetitive, bland titles which for the most part we're still playing today. - David Wightman

User avatar
a31chris
Jaguar MOD
Posts: 894
Joined: Mon Apr 01, 2013 7:09 am

Re: Talking with Mike Fulton, an ex-Atari employee

Post by a31chris » Thu Jun 26, 2014 8:00 am

Re-reading the Black Ice/White Noise interview it was Faran Thomason who says he was the producer in charge of:

MK3
Baldies
NBA Jam
Supercross
Mindripper(hey isn't this the one that had Christopher Walken in it? Sonofabitch I LOVE THAT GUY!)
Barkely Basketball
Brett Hull Hockey
There might have been a Batman title in there as well.
Atari bought several Accolade Akklaim title and he was working on those.(Good to hear I guess. Smart move on Atari's part if too late.)
What came after the Jaguar was the PS1 which for all it's greatness, ushered in corporate development and with it the bleached, repetitive, bland titles which for the most part we're still playing today. - David Wightman

MikeFulton
3DO ZERO USER
Posts: 19
Joined: Sat Jun 21, 2014 5:26 am

Re: Talking with Mike Fulton, an ex-Atari employee

Post by MikeFulton » Thu Jun 26, 2014 10:26 pm

a31chris wrote:Re-reading the Black Ice/White Noise interview it was Faran Thomason who says he was the producer in charge of:

MK3
Baldies
NBA Jam
Supercross
Mindripper(hey isn't this the one that had Christopher Walken in it? Sonofabitch I LOVE THAT GUY!)
Barkely Basketball
Brett Hull Hockey
There might have been a Batman title in there as well.
Atari bought several Accolade Akklaim title and he was working on those.(Good to hear I guess. Smart move on Atari's part if too late.)
I have no idea what companies may have been involved with the commercial production.

Yes, Faran was a producer at Atari. I don't remember specific projects though. And keep in mind that being a "producer" for a third party title isn't quite the same thing as being a producer of an in-house project.

User avatar
Walter_j64bit
3DO ZERO USER
Posts: 125
Joined: Fri Jul 03, 2009 11:39 pm

Re: Talking with Mike Fulton, an ex-Atari employee

Post by Walter_j64bit » Fri Jun 27, 2014 12:41 pm

Thanks Mike, Chris, I like reading about the workings of Atari.
I just wander what would Thunderbird would had said about all this.

User avatar
The Laird
3DO ZERO USER
Posts: 65
Joined: Tue Sep 17, 2013 9:04 pm

Re: Talking with Mike Fulton, an ex-Atari employee

Post by The Laird » Fri Jun 27, 2014 9:03 pm

MikeFulton wrote:
The Laird wrote:Interesting stuff, I always like hearing stories from real Atari people. A certain convo I saw on Facebook involving BJ West and none other than Leonard Tramiel recently was fascinating! :mrgreen:
That's how I got pulled into this! :D
Indeed, myself and Marty had a very good chat about it!

User avatar
T2KFreeker
3DO ZERO USER
Posts: 1241
Joined: Wed Feb 07, 2007 6:41 am
Location: Parts Unknown

Re: Talking with Mike Fulton, an ex-Atari employee

Post by T2KFreeker » Sat Jun 28, 2014 6:50 pm

a31chris wrote:Re-reading the Black Ice/White Noise interview it was Faran Thomason who says he was the producer in charge of:

MK3
Baldies
NBA Jam
Supercross
Mindripper(hey isn't this the one that had Christopher Walken in it? Sonofabitch I LOVE THAT GUY!)
Barkely Basketball
Brett Hull Hockey
There might have been a Batman title in there as well.
Atari bought several Accolade Akklaim title and he was working on those.(Good to hear I guess. Smart move on Atari's part if too late.)
No, no Christopher Walken in Mind Ripper. It does, however, have Lance Henriksen in it though. The Horror Film buff in me had to point that out. Ended up as a made for HBO horror movie presented by Wes Craven. For those that are wondering what became of the project.
This is a stick up! Put all of your 3DO games in the bag and nobody gets hurt!

txg/mnx
3DO ZERO USER
Posts: 18
Joined: Wed May 21, 2014 6:52 pm

Re: Talking with Mike Fulton, an ex-Atari employee

Post by txg/mnx » Sun Jun 29, 2014 2:39 pm

Hi Mike,

Do you still have floppy's somewhere dusting away with source material from that era?
Maybe you got sources for the MAC cinepak tool.

I recently bought a MAC G4 just to run that little proggy :-)

User avatar
a31chris
Jaguar MOD
Posts: 894
Joined: Mon Apr 01, 2013 7:09 am

Re: Talking with Mike Fulton, an ex-Atari employee

Post by a31chris » Sun Jun 29, 2014 4:07 pm

txg/mnx wrote:Hi Mike,

Do you still have floppy's somewhere dusting away with source material from that era?
Maybe you got sources for the MAC cinepak tool.

I recently bought a MAC G4 just to run that little proggy :-)
His sources have been buried in a warehouse for 20 years and he's doubtful the CDr they are on is any good anymore.
What came after the Jaguar was the PS1 which for all it's greatness, ushered in corporate development and with it the bleached, repetitive, bland titles which for the most part we're still playing today. - David Wightman

User avatar
a31chris
Jaguar MOD
Posts: 894
Joined: Mon Apr 01, 2013 7:09 am

Re: Talking with Mike Fulton, an ex-Atari employee

Post by a31chris » Sun Jun 29, 2014 5:51 pm

MikeFulton wrote:A few clarifications or extra details on a few things...

With reference to the later post about Sony, it might make more sense that Chris asked me the question when you know that after leaving Atari, I was "Senior Developer Support Engineer" at SCEA from early '96 through late '98. My main speciality through most of that time was the original Performance Analyzer which was used to help developers find problem spots in their code.

--

Can't make any promises about further responses, but I'll try to keep an eye out here as time permits.

Mike
We have a few electrical engineers in the community. I wonder how complicated it would be to make something like this performance analyzer for the Jaguar? Since you used the term 'original' I'm assuming there were later versions of this that were possibly better?
What came after the Jaguar was the PS1 which for all it's greatness, ushered in corporate development and with it the bleached, repetitive, bland titles which for the most part we're still playing today. - David Wightman

MikeFulton
3DO ZERO USER
Posts: 19
Joined: Sat Jun 21, 2014 5:26 am

Re: Talking with Mike Fulton, an ex-Atari employee

Post by MikeFulton » Mon Jun 30, 2014 2:06 am

a31chris wrote:
txg/mnx wrote:Hi Mike,

Do you still have floppy's somewhere dusting away with source material from that era?
Maybe you got sources for the MAC cinepak tool.

I recently bought a MAC G4 just to run that little proggy :-)
His sources have been buried in a warehouse for 20 years and he's doubtful the CDr they are on is any good anymore.
You misunderstood, Chris. Whatever I have is in my storage unit, but it's been less than a year since it would have gone in there.

I definitely would have the sources of the Mac Cinepak tool, since that was my code... but no clue where to find it these days.

MikeFulton
3DO ZERO USER
Posts: 19
Joined: Sat Jun 21, 2014 5:26 am

Re: Talking with Mike Fulton, an ex-Atari employee

Post by MikeFulton » Mon Jun 30, 2014 2:49 am

a31chris wrote:We have a few electrical engineers in the community. I wonder how complicated it would be to make something like this performance analyzer for the Jaguar? Since you used the term 'original' I'm assuming there were later versions of this that were possibly better?
I don't know if a PA of this type could be bolted on to an existing system that wasn't designed with the idea in mind. I doubt it because I don't think a lot of the bus signals it needs to captured are made available anywhere on a regular motherboard. The PSX PA had a lot of extra connectors and stuff on it and the motherboard was probably 3x the surface area of a regular PSX motherboard.

When the third generation of the PSX dev hardware came out, the DTL-H2700 was essentially a dev system/PA on a card. That was when it finally became available to developers, although it was quite expensive like $20k IIRC. It was a lot smaller than the original PA but it was still a completely different layout from a regular PSX.

The original PSX performance analyzer was basically a PlayStation laid out onto a different motherboard and combined with what amounted to a bus logic analyzer which could save whatever signal was on the various system buses at any given time. When triggered, all of these signals would be saved to a memory buffer large enough to hold about 8 seconds of information. The information saved could tell you a lot about what was happening in the system, if you knew how to interpret it.

You could see when the CPU was loading code or data from main memory into the CPU's internal cache, which could give you clues about how to arrange the different parts of your program in memory so accessing memory could be done less often. It would show when the GPU was reading items from an object list in main memory for rendering. Because the PSX doesn't *really* have 3D hardware, when you rendered polygons to the screen you needed to do them in order according to depth, so that the furthest objects were done first, and closer objects last. This was done by maintaining a list of all of the GPU primitives that needed to be drawn that kept them in the correct order according to Z-depth. Without getting into great detail, that list usually needed to have a fair number of NOP objects that acted as placeholders, and one of the tricks of efficient rendering on PSX was to avoid having so many NOP objects that the GPU bogged down accessing objects that didn't do anything, versus having too few placeholders in the list that you had to spend more time processing it to put things in the proper place. It would also show when you were transferring texture data into/out of GPU memory, which could lead you to discover inefficiencies with how your textures were being handled.

And so on...

There were exactly 5 of the original Performance Analyzers built. They were hand-built and considered somewhat fragile and expensive, which is why they weren't made available to developers. We had two at SCEA and the other three were at SCEI. One of the two at SCEA sat on my desk, and the other was in a special guest office we maintained for when developers would come in to run their code on the machine. We only let either machine out of the office on a single occasion, when I hand-delivered it to Square for a temporary loan.

Operating the PA wasn't hard... you basically just ran the software, ran your PSX code either by downloading it or booting off a CD/HD, played the game until you got to the part you wanted to capture, then you pushed the trigger button at approximately the right moment to start the bus signal capture.

Interpreting the results, however, was the big trick to the whole thing. The capture software gave you a very raw look at the data but it took a trained eye and a bit of experience to figure out what the numbers meant, and why the same numbers for one thing could be good or bad depending on other things. I started doing the PA stuff just a few weeks after I started at SCEA, because the guy who was doing it already was going to be leaving and they needed someone who could replace him at that task. Then I trained with the guy from SCEI who conceived the whole thing and wrote the capture software. Later, I wrote my own custom software that would take the output from the capture software and save it into a database so that the values could be compared with previous tests on other programs. Eventually I had that program able to recognize a lot of things and generate a preliminary report which I would then finish off by hand.

User avatar
NeoGeoNinja
3DO ZERO USER
Posts: 343
Joined: Sun Apr 14, 2013 5:42 pm

Re: Talking with Mike Fulton, an ex-Atari employee

Post by NeoGeoNinja » Mon Jun 30, 2014 8:59 am

MikeFulton wrote:There were exactly 5 of the original Performance Analyzers built. They were hand-built and considered somewhat fragile and expensive, which is why they weren't made available to developers. We had two at SCEA and the other three were at SCEI. One of the two at SCEA sat on my desk, and the other was in a special guest office we maintained for when developers would come in to run their code on the machine. We only let either machine out of the office on a single occasion, when I hand-delivered it to Square for a temporary loan.
Interestingly, Squaresoft are a company who have always been considered on being of the 'in-crowd' at Sony, whatever that means.

Basically, Squaresoft were (apparently, as is often mentioned, although I don't play RPG's etc myself) able to achieve astounding results with the hardware that other devs struggled to meet the standards of.

It was often thought that the likes of Japanese developers Squaresoft and Namco were given some sort of 'leg up' with regards to the PS1's hardware that enabled them to achieve such impressive results at the time.

Given that Namco and Squaresoft were both VERY key in the PSX's rise to prominence, such conspiracy theories aren't that hard to arrive at.

No chance you lent Namco one of these "PA's" while you were at it by any chance? Maybe Namco & Square shared one!

Hahaha... :mrgreen:

MikeFulton
3DO ZERO USER
Posts: 19
Joined: Sat Jun 21, 2014 5:26 am

Re: Talking with Mike Fulton, an ex-Atari employee

Post by MikeFulton » Fri Jul 04, 2014 10:21 pm

NeoGeoNinja wrote:
MikeFulton wrote:There were exactly 5 of the original Performance Analyzers built. They were hand-built and considered somewhat fragile and expensive, which is why they weren't made available to developers. We had two at SCEA and the other three were at SCEI. One of the two at SCEA sat on my desk, and the other was in a special guest office we maintained for when developers would come in to run their code on the machine. We only let either machine out of the office on a single occasion, when I hand-delivered it to Square for a temporary loan.
Interestingly, Squaresoft are a company who have always been considered on being of the 'in-crowd' at Sony, whatever that means.

Basically, Squaresoft were (apparently, as is often mentioned, although I don't play RPG's etc myself) able to achieve astounding results with the hardware that other devs struggled to meet the standards of.

It was often thought that the likes of Japanese developers Squaresoft and Namco were given some sort of 'leg up' with regards to the PS1's hardware that enabled them to achieve such impressive results at the time.

Given that Namco and Squaresoft were both VERY key in the PSX's rise to prominence, such conspiracy theories aren't that hard to arrive at.

No chance you lent Namco one of these "PA's" while you were at it by any chance? Maybe Namco & Square shared one!

Hahaha... :mrgreen:
The PA loan I referred to was one of the two at the SCEA offices in Foster City, CA to the Square office in Los Angeles (Manhattan Beach). The game that the team there was working on turned out to be Parasite Eve. They were very secretive about it because apparently it was a huge thing in Japan, although frankly I'd never heard of it before, at the time.

It's possible there was a similar arrangement in Japan but that's not what I was referring to and I have no knowledge of anything like that.

We didn't ever loan the stand-alone PA to Namco, although we did analyze games from them. Tekken 3 comes to mind, although frankly I don't know what they were hoping to accomplish... it was already running at 60 fps pretty consistently when I saw it. It was pretty much a poster child for good performance.

User avatar
NeoGeoNinja
3DO ZERO USER
Posts: 343
Joined: Sun Apr 14, 2013 5:42 pm

Re: Talking with Mike Fulton, an ex-Atari employee

Post by NeoGeoNinja » Sat Jul 05, 2014 1:17 am

MikeFulton wrote:We didn't ever loan the stand-alone PA to Namco, although we did analyze games from them. Tekken 3 comes to mind, although frankly I don't know what they were hoping to accomplish... it was already running at 60 fps pretty consistently when I saw it. It was pretty much a poster child for good performance.
Fair enough. I guess Namco were just particularly good at their PS1 games out of the gate. Convenient and helpful that BOTH Square and Namco were considered the best of the best in terms of extracting optimum performance from the PS1, as Namco were competing onside with SEGA's juggernaut Arcade conversions to Saturn and previous SNES fans were looking to the PS1 for their future Final Fantasy adventures after Squares default to Sony.

The level of near-parity Namco were able to accomplish with their Arcade (System 11 & 12) counterparts, throughout, was very impressive. SEGA had a lot more to do by comparison (Model 2 conversions) on, arguably, inferior hardware, but they too did admirably (FVipers, VF2, LBronx etc).

It's a shame Namco never included the original Tekken Tag Tournament on the PS2 disc as an unlockable. Not a lot of people know how different the Arcade counterpart looks to the PS2 revision...

User avatar
a31chris
Jaguar MOD
Posts: 894
Joined: Mon Apr 01, 2013 7:09 am

Re: Talking with Mike Fulton, an ex-Atari employee

Post by a31chris » Sun Jul 13, 2014 5:31 am

MikeFulton wrote:
a31chris wrote:You should consider getting ahold of Andreas and adding your picture to this list.

http://www.vmlabs.de/team.htm
I hadn't known he put that up. I'll have to dig up a good picture from those days and send it to him.
Did you ever get around to sending this in? I wouldn't mind seeing that added to the collection.
What came after the Jaguar was the PS1 which for all it's greatness, ushered in corporate development and with it the bleached, repetitive, bland titles which for the most part we're still playing today. - David Wightman

MikeFulton
3DO ZERO USER
Posts: 19
Joined: Sat Jun 21, 2014 5:26 am

Re: Talking with Mike Fulton, an ex-Atari employee

Post by MikeFulton » Sat Jul 19, 2014 7:17 pm

a31chris wrote:Did you ever get around to sending this in? I wouldn't mind seeing that added to the collection.
No, not yet. I don't have any good pix that aren't 10+ years old... :)

User avatar
a31chris
Jaguar MOD
Posts: 894
Joined: Mon Apr 01, 2013 7:09 am

Re: Talking with Mike Fulton, an ex-Atari employee

Post by a31chris » Wed Oct 08, 2014 2:57 am

MikeFulton wrote:
a31chris wrote:Did you ever get around to sending this in? I wouldn't mind seeing that added to the collection.
No, not yet. I don't have any good pix that aren't 10+ years old... :)
Is this a pic of you from back in the day?
Angus .png
Angus .png (482.61 KiB) Viewed 29415 times
What came after the Jaguar was the PS1 which for all it's greatness, ushered in corporate development and with it the bleached, repetitive, bland titles which for the most part we're still playing today. - David Wightman

MikeFulton
3DO ZERO USER
Posts: 19
Joined: Sat Jun 21, 2014 5:26 am

Re: Talking with Mike Fulton, an ex-Atari employee

Post by MikeFulton » Thu Oct 23, 2014 10:28 pm

a31chris wrote:Is this a pic of you from back in the day?
Is that from FIGHT FOR LIFE?

User avatar
NeoGeoNinja
3DO ZERO USER
Posts: 343
Joined: Sun Apr 14, 2013 5:42 pm

Re: Talking with Mike Fulton, an ex-Atari employee

Post by NeoGeoNinja » Thu Oct 23, 2014 11:18 pm

MikeFulton wrote:
a31chris wrote:Is this a pic of you from back in the day?
Is that from FIGHT FOR LIFE?
Nah, it's from Kasumi Ninja, which, whilst hard to believe, is actually better than Fight for Life!...

User avatar
a31chris
Jaguar MOD
Posts: 894
Joined: Mon Apr 01, 2013 7:09 am

Re: Talking with Mike Fulton, an ex-Atari employee

Post by a31chris » Fri Oct 24, 2014 12:42 am

NeoGeoNinja wrote:
MikeFulton wrote:
a31chris wrote:Is this a pic of you from back in the day?
Is that from FIGHT FOR LIFE?
Nah, it's from Kasumi Ninja, which, whilst hard to believe, is actually better than Fight for Life!...
I couldn't resist. We were chatting on Facebook about Fulton being a Scottish name and what part of Scotland his family was from.

On a related sidenote I always said if I was Scottish I would definitly have a Kilt and wear it every now and then. Just recently found out the Irish also wear Kilts, though usually solid colors. And the Scots wear plaid.

So I'm buying me an Irish Kilt since I'm half Irish. They are expensive though.
What came after the Jaguar was the PS1 which for all it's greatness, ushered in corporate development and with it the bleached, repetitive, bland titles which for the most part we're still playing today. - David Wightman

Post Reply