Saved for and purchased an Atari Jaguar. In my view, there was no way that the "play station" would beat the Jag because Atari was a games company where as the PS was made by "Sony" and they made stereo systems. They knew NOTHING about the games industry. .....DOH!
The perception at the time was that Sony made sound systems. That was probably the most often you would see the Sony brand, so many people didn't trust the Sony "Play Station" because no one believed they knew anything about video games, being that it was not their main business, and the fact they called it a play station like we were children. We were children, but it was the '90s and we all wanted to considered to be adults by 10.
Zachary Bittner, in a lot of countries people knew about the MSX computers and those were not the smallest. Russia and Brasil for example.. Sony was a big player in that line of homecomputers. They made several MSX 1, 2 and 2+ computers. It wasn't the most populair system over the world, true but it didn't came out of nowhere. By the way Sony was back in the day a great brand when it came to video stuff, not only audio.
I was a Jag developer at the end when they stopped production. The system had some very fast elements, but most of the specs were misleading and it had some severe bottlenecks and bugs. At the 21 minute mark, the video states that the 64-bits are the sum of the 32-bits of Tom and Jerry. This isn't accurate. Tom has a full 64-bit bus and is a 64/32-bit hybrid chip.
bryede so you are a Dev and don't understand this is not how it works? Then the Genesis was 32 bits as its 68000 internally worked as 32bits . Come on now
What I said was accurate. Tom and RAM are connected by a 64 bit bus because Tom's blitter is 64-bits wide. This means the 64-bit element isn't tucked away inside some chip, but rather comes out on 64 discrete pins. You cannot simply add your chips together to claim a bigger bit size or we'd have to call the 2600 a 24-bit system. Even though the bus is 64-bits wide, the Jaguar operates more like a 32-bit system with a 64-bit blitter which is completely squandered because of the really, really slow RAM. You can write some impressive stuff on it, but working around the bottlenecks is difficult and time consuming which is why developers just ported stuff to the 68000. The Jaguar molds are now owned by Albert Yarusso of AtariAge.
Dude you're awesome! You developed for one of my most nostalgic console memories. And thanks for setting that strait. And for the info regarding the current case owners.
I know this is 3 years old but i watch all of your vids. Im having a rough time with sciatica and not really sleeping much..... this vid has just distracted me from my back pain for 40 odd mins..... i thankyou so damn much!
These types of videos are a nice thing to watch while eating. Issue is some foods now remind me of consoles and games. Tamales remind me of the Chinese Que Nintendo 64.
Jack Tramiel always seemed like the kind of guy who would walk over to your cubicle tell you that he would like to go for a "walk with you" tell you it's nothing bad then once you and him are isolated he would fire you
Those types are never as clever as they think; they’ve always done things which have allowed me to psych myself up for whats coming like the ‘we’re letting you go”. I was working in a lab and everyday we had a few in the same lab, always people at certain times; one day the Jack Tramiel type came in and i was the only one in lab (which was weird), then ‘lets take a walk’ or similar. Im thinking ‘im getting laid off’ and finally they got around to that but i was already mentally ok w/ it by that point because you can tell when things are off.
I worked for a Tramiel type (similar to Elon Musk’s mentality… just without social media to promote his inflated self-image). When things got bad and he “buddy fired” me, I told him something I had held on to for a while: I was having sex with his wife most days of every week. She worked at the company and we’d have ourselves and afternoon delight or two when the office was cleared out. Considering he was never around doing the work he should have been (can’t imagine why the company shuttered the next year after I got everything in my severance package), she and I had A LOT of sex in that place. She had already talked to all the lawyers in the area and drafted up papers by the time I told him I was her side piece, so he had to hire an attorney from out of town to represent him. The best part was when he accused me of making everything up to get back at him and I described some intimate details about her fine China and quirks during… crisis. He was served the next day with divorce papers and I lived in his house rent free with his wife until it was sold 18mo later. The pool and patio needed an industrial cleaning when we were done with it. Peter… Ummmm… yeah… I’m going to need you to work this weekend…
_"There is some interesting hardware in the shops this Christmas. There's the 3DO, the first CD superconsole. And then there's the CD-i, which lets you play movies on CD and has some nice looking games, like this new one, Chaos Control. Then we got the Neo Geo CD, which lets you play arcade fighting games in your home. And this is Jaguar, the world's first 64-bit console."_ It's quite ironic that none of those got any popularity in the end, and were quickly forgotten.
Neo-Geo CD was slightly understandable - I believe the price of the AES, the home console version of the Neo Geo, and the slow disc drive of the original CD were to blame for it's lack of sales.
Yea I had a Jaguar in 1994 / 1995. Got a Playstation in 1996 and never looked back. Alien vs Predator was (up to that point) the best game I had ever played though. After years of playing on a mega drive a FPS game was ground breaking.
By the time I saw AVP on the Jag, I wasn't in the slightest impressed. For a CONSOLE it was good, but I'd been playing Doom since 1993, Heretic and Cyclones in 1994, and Quake with the Aliens mod (which I think was supposed to be offical from Fox but it was pulled for some reason and found it's way onto the internet and some coverdiscs). But for a console, it certainly was impressive.
Incredibly thorough history. While Alien Vs. Predator is the scariest game I've ever played, Tempest 2000 is the true gem from this system; it's definitely somewhere in my top 10 games of all time.
Yep. At least Tempest 2000 has a halfway decent successor on PC though. The AvP versions for PC and PlayStation are very different games and not nearly as "scary".
Best story of the Jaguar I've read. I was software director at Hand Made Software at the time of the Jaguar and worked on the rather dodgy Kasumi Ninja but mainly in writing some of the low-level code. I remember getting the system specification document by fax (a long fax!) and drooling but the well document hardware bugs and limitations crippled the system. My memory may be flawed but I seem to remember the 68000 stopping when the RISC processors were using the bus - there was certainly huge bus conflicts. Programming the RISC CPUs made my head hurt. They had a tiny amount of RAM to themselves so you had to continually swap code in from main memory. The CD-ROM interface wasn't too hot either. It's a real shame that the hardware flaws couldn't have been weeded out by delaying the device as it could have been a contender. The demise of Atari also brought us down :-(
Dude I loved reading your comment, the understanding u have when talking about the hardware is so cool. Like I don't even know what you are talkin about but i can tell you do and to me that awesome. Im jealous!
Yeah the memory issues were why Carmack saying even just a little bit of DRAM cache for the RISC chips would have been a game changer for the system. Jaguar had some serious brute force that it also seemed determined to make UNABLE to effectively use in nearly everyway possible. It was like they distilled "frustration" into hardware form.
I was on the graphics and animation team, we had little time to develop it properly, we only had dpaint and a corel draw, so many limitations on colours, i called myself the 2 bit artist!...enjoyed doing the animations in the background for kasumi ninja!.....Hi Rob! 🙂👏🏻🇬🇧
I remember when the Jaguar first came out. I had a Sega Genesis/Sega CD and a Super Nes. I was a huge gamer (still am) and I just built my very first PC for gaming...well mainly for Doom (486 DX2). At any rate, I had heard of Atari's re-entry into the console market again and I had little interest in it. So here I am I have all the best stuff and over the summer my parents go on vacation. I was 13 at the time and wanted to spend the summer with my friends and games. Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on how you look at it my mother was not going to let me stay at home by myself for a month and a half. I begged her, I would be good and I swear no parties...she would not relent and I had to leave all of my games and big screen TV (yes I had a big screen TV in my bedroom at 13) at home while I was forced to stay with my aunt. Now she was cool and let me hang out with my friends and even told my mom that I could bring all of my games if I wanted...my mom said no. There I was no games at all and my aunt seeing my distress and knowing that I really could not go out and act like a normal child (medical condition) she wanted to help me out of my plight. She took me to the local mom and pop video rental store and said "go nuts, you'll find sonething" and find something I did. They had an Atari Jaguar for rent and before I knew it I had it hooked up and started AVP... OMG...that was like a lightning bolt cane down and struck me. I had never seen anything like that. I especially loved hearing the Predator taunt you while you were fighting aliens "Your gonna die" or "Im gonna kill you." I mean Atari did what Sega and Nintendon't. Well I kept that machine for the duration of my time there and I was so sad to see it go. My mother would not get it for me (it is understandable as i had so much) and i was...well a little sad. I was never disrespectful and always greatful to have what I had and my aunt having two daughters that were demanding jerkbags was impressed with me. She went down to the video store and bought the unit and all of his games (Cybermorph, Doom, Tempest, and AVP) and brought it too me. I still own it and I will never forget it. I still periodically play AVP and it is at least to me a 10 out of 10. This rings especially true as i remember when it was brand new and no game ever before it was like that, not even the mighty Doom. Hell, I remember bringing it to my best friends house and showing him...he, like me was a huge gamer and lost hos mind over how amazing it was for its time. It is a shame that most devs never took advantage of that beutiful hardware because she had true potential...much more to me than my 32X I got shortly after my Jaguar (Virtua Fighter and Virtua Racing were amazing though).
Aliens v predator was great Wish someone would revamp it and up the framerate that was the only downside to it the only game to ever make me jump out of my skin even when i was expecting it i believe ambient noise is far better than music in a game of this type.
@@Heliocentric Sad life....no, I'm afraid my life has been pretty great. Now that I'm an adult things have only gotten better. I met the woman of my dreams in college and she's every bit the gamer that I am (10 years younger than me as well). Our house is like one giant playpen for gamers. We are so ready for the next generation of gaming to start and we were successful in securing both machines (Series X/PS5*physical).
As a kid I remember seeing a huge stack of Jaguar boxes all lined up at Woolworths and really wanting it even begging my Dad to get me one for Christmas, luckily he followed the advice of one of his work mates and got me a Mega Drive instead.
@@bubsy3861 yeah, I know I’ll never get an amiga cd32 because eBay scalpers want hundreds of dollars for it. It also ships from out of the country so god knows how long that’ll take. And for what? A piece of fucking shit that needs a paperweight to even run? Hell no
I'm glad I never jumped in the Jaguar bandwagon. I just stuck to the big ones in the 90s; Super Famicom and Sony PlayStation. Probably my only console faux pas was the Sega Dreamcast in the late 90s.
I have to admit. When i first saw AvP on games master in '94 I literally shit my pants! I could not believe the graphics. I didn't get to play that game till the early 2000's when I saw a Jaguar console and a copy of this game in a charity shop for £20. I'd already played the pc version but this was in some ways better. It has so much atmosphere and character going for it. I enjoyed every second of it and its still my favourite AvP game so far.
I guess the lesson here is that complex hardware is always bad. Sega Saturn also had complex hardware that was difficult to use. The PS3 was also said to be a lot more complex than the Xbox 360 because the processors were symmetrical.
I for one hated the lack of music in DooM. But I do highly recommend the Wolfenstein 3D port. Its basically the SNES version of the game, with it's set of levels, but the graphics have been upscaled and there is no censorship. Really good renditions of the PC version's music too.
I dunno. I actually prefer the Jaguar port to the 3DO port, simply because of the music. I never cared for the 3DO's orchestrated verison of the Mac port's soundtrack.
Me too! Always thought playing without music on PC was a more creepy experience...ah the days of my first pc. Mitac 486 DX2 66MHZ on Windows 95 a bit later on. Had OS2 WARP it sucked balls.
@@eval_is_evil I loved OS2 Warp! Best OS to run DOS apps on! But guess what? Windows NT was sort of based on it, and by extension, so was 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1 and 10 (the NT reference is even present up to Windows Xp, just start a prompt and type ver).
I love the irony that the music from Nuclear Plant is playing despite the fact that the Jaguar version was one of the only releases of the game that didn't have music
Where I got my game dev start that lasted around 10 years. Not sure they covered it in the video but it was relatively hard to develop on. Had hardware bugs that would make the dev board desync while debugging, the worst was that the 68K chip was originally designed to just be a misc control, joystick reading, etc., but from a GPU & SPU memory controller bug their code could only run from internal RAM (not the main/system one). I made a mini GPU disassembler to dump out Atari's own code to find the little fix idioms/patterns they were using. #1 they probably needed their own "Mario", "Zleda", "Sonic" etc., that Atari didn't have. Was fun though. Working with Jack Tramiel, "Purple", and meeting Jeff Minter, etc. It's too bad that era of Atari died before there could be a 2.0 version..
High voltage software created an LRU cache set up for the GPU and DSP and along with an GPU/DSP GCC Atari had developed that HVS ironed some bugs out with. They put it altogether into a system where they coded in C on the GPU/DSP and overlays were taken care of automatically. All totally transparent to the programmer. www.3do.cdinteractive.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=3356#p37117 They tried to tell Atari about what they accomplished but Atari ignored them.
I think the bit wars was at the beginning of its end once the PlayStation came out. Seemed at that point, the only people left that thought the bits were still relevant, were the Nintendo 64 fanboys. Between my getting sick and tired of the bit wars, my unfortunate exposure to Superman 64, and....cartridges, when everyone else was moving to optical media, I wanted nothing to do with that machine.
akihiro kina on the contrary the N64 contoler was the first to have an analog stick and a rumble pac. It looked weird but worked great with games like mario and zelda oot.
The 'Alien vs. Predator' title was the first time I recall being able to play all sides of that particular universe. It was a pretty well-done game for its time, and I still like it today. The modem was too little, too late. 'Doom' was fun in co-op, but the deathmatch mode was kinda flat.
Lol i remember the jaguar. Sitting next to a n64 in the store, it was hilarious how bad that thing was. The graphics looked terrible and the controller was completely idiotic. It even felt cheap to hold it.
My friend Kris and me both had PC's back in 1995. We link up by null serial and play everything that was good all weekend, most weekends, from 95 to 98, before we started to find local LANS. He always had a top end machine, spared no expense, and I did okay buying smart in the mid range. Kris shared a bedroom with his brother, who had a Sega Saturn. Before I introduced Kris to PC's, he and his brother would be playing Street Fighter, Virtua Fighter together all the time. Once me and Kris moved to serial linked Doom and Big Red Racing however, Kris never played 2play with his brother Craig anymore. And Craig didn't care, he called us geeks, and sat alone on his console. He even bought a Jaguar, and laughed at our PC's, telling us his machine was 64bit and far better. A few months later though, and the golden era of PC's hit. Suddenly, whenever Craig turned his big neanderthal looking head around, he'd see us hacking our way through Hell in Diablo, or breaking through walls with vampires in Dungeon Keeper, or sending helicopters full of commandos into each others bases in Command And Conquer. Suddenly, Craig spent more time watch US play, than he did playing his Jaguar. It was inevitable. I think what made his mind up was Starcraft. When that game came out, it was a matter of weeks before Craigs Jaguar was in on the top shelf in the corner, and a brand new gaming PC was sitting at his desk. I had to network us together in DOS and Windows, which was a pain to learn, but I managed. And he never looked back. He's never owned a console since. I always thought Aliens vs Predator looked bad, but that was because of AlienQuake and whatnot running in 3D enhanced mode on our PC's. For a console, for it's time, the Jaguar WAS impressive. It made the mistake sometimes of trying to be something other than a console. Which I think is why the Wii is probably the best console series ever. It never tried to be a PC. It knew it was a console, and they produced console games for it, and I've always owned one alongside my PC. There was a lack of game for the Jag too, and they were expensive. I'd explained to Craig one day, when he said to me PC's were far too expensive, that if he added up everything he'd spent on his Saturn and Jaguar (including gmaes and controllers and Prima books), he could have a PC twice as fast as mine. I was kind of annoyed when he actually bought a PC that WAS twice as fast as mine! XD
Good in--depth review of the Atari Jaguar, I always knew this machine would fail. The Sega Mega Drive had the better playable games and graphics than the Jaguar.
The Jaguar could have been a 2D game powerhouse but instead they decided to release a torrent of shit 3D games when the technology clearly wasn't capable of running the games decently. At the time the concept of 3D games was very exciting but i bet most people who played didn't have as much fun as they thought they would.
Not to mention that while 3d games still have a future right away were used to display real world things like digital photos and walking advertisements (3d Racing games). Gaming is still fighting it and now Mario has a gun. Watch out everyone.
nah, the jaguar was, in retrospect, toast from the get-go. There was a great public demand for 3D that the Saturn and in particular the Playstation filled. Even a great 2D system would have been nowhere in light of what was already coming down the pipeline. Add to that an Atari with no money and I don't think anything could really have saved it.
Actually Alien vs Predator was really good and in my opinion the best version of the game on any platform including PC - bar none. Better than on PlayStation later on I'd say. Even when you had just an ordinary TV set hooked up to your Jaguar while playing that game... you'd jump off from your chair if you suddenly heard something behind you on your right or left... the sound was done really well. The 3D was texturemapped and quite good as Jaguar games go, I'd say on par with or better than PC and Amiga at the time. That's not to say that most games were like that. In fact most 3D games royally sucked on the Jaguar (lilke Cybermorph and Battlemorph), but some like AvP and Hoverstrike CD were actually quite decent if not really good. AvP was promising because they had promised you could use your Atari Lynx as a controller and its display as a secondary display in the game (like for the motion tracker or as a dashboard in racing games etc). Unfortunately that never happened. Nintendo picked up on the idea and did something similar later on though.
I never felt this was a missed opportunity new digital media was coming out already the CD32 could have really make its mark philips had its cd system Dreamcast i think these systems are the lost potential more than the jaguar. What a time to be alive man
Is this Icon of Sin the one I think it is ? As the one hanged on my wall yours looks like the limited edition poster. I prevented mine from spouting spawncube by placing glass in front of it :)
I still have PTSD from the mid-90's gaming scene. So many abominations and abortions during this period. Of course, things eventually picked up again with the PS1 & N64, but still. I still don't get why they thought it be a good idea to make so many remakes of early 80's classics for a console that emphasized it's 64-bit hardware.
I had an Amiga 500 and i never had problems with not enough great games. Then got a PC and i was MDK-ing and NFSing like crazy. Never touched home consoles until wii (awful!) ,ps3(great) and ps4(awesome). I can sympathize with you though but N64 was so bloody awful back then,at least to me and most people i knew
It was explained in this video. You could just do a port of a 32 bit game that used the Motorala 68000 processor only which required almost no effort for the developer.
They may have been shitty and unforgivingly bad, but you have to admit, a lot of them were downright weird and creative at times. Today's video game market caters to a more sensitive demographic, and usually follow the same shit that's been done a hundred times. Maybe with a little variation. Plus the constant remakes or 'Remastering' of older games.
I was working at a KayBee toy store when this came out - and then a few months later they were on clearance - I remember this being the fastest crash and burn of any system I ever saw.
@vctjkhme Virtual Boy is the system I remember the most that crashed and burned QUICK. It felt like within in a matter of months it went from it's debut to HEAVY discounts. I remember getting mine for 29.99 at EB Games.
Jaguar was a good system, ahead of its time, and crippled by some bad decisions from the company that made it. Neo-Geo was an incredible tech powerhouse that blew away anything else on the home market, but was ungodly expensive for same market. The best of all the unloved consoles however, was the Dreamcast. It was simply amazing and to this day i still consider it a travesty that it didn't succeed.
The Jaguar was garbage, and as a kid who got one at launch, I knew it even then. I had to pretend to be all excited about it around my parents because I felt guilty for the money they spent. I was asked more than a few times why I wasn't using it (I was usually playing SNES instead). They probably figured it out too.
It is interesting that the video game in dustry did not take notes on "HOW TO NOT BUILD YOUR NEXT GENERATION CONSOLE!" The Atari Jaguar was a mess for developer to fully utilize its graphic potentials and due to gamings early days, trying to over compensate things was not at all a wise move considering the lack of advanced experience avaible. With that was cornerstone for a blue-print notice - Sega did the VERY SAME mistake with the Saturn and combined processors and stuff to get a difficult mess for developers to develop games for to its fullest potential. That makes TWO future references..... And then Sony of all companies does similar with the PS3 console and even if not as big mess, near all studios outside of Sony themselves struggles in the early years of the systems to make games and resulted with ports that crashed, bugged out or froze etc. Something that made many developers for the first time turn there attention to there rival the Xbox 360 to develop for and then port them to the PS3.
i'm sure myself from the future stopped myself from buying this console i even pre ordered it lol. i went to the shop to pick it up and guess what the guy said it was delayed i then said its ok i take the deposit. i waited for the ps1 to come out so i held my money for months then finally i got a ps1 on launch day walked into the shop i was the only customer back in the day there wasn't no big cues walked in walk out with my console. i saved up so much money i could get 3 games i had tekken 1, disk world, loaded. Plus my console was a A serial number which is highly sort after it could play copies i still use it now. But i replaced the lens a few times but its still going strong.
Atari was still active and several games were in development after 97'. I was there. So you're reporting is off my friend. You also left out when Midway bought us out.
*If I had a hundred thumbs to rate this video up with, I would gladly do it. This is so great. Documentary length, great info, great research, technical, in-depth, pleasant narration, easy to understand, well-rounded... excellent. Great job my man. You are one of the reasons I love TH-cam and TH-camrs who focus on retro gaming. Proud of ya.*
Watching this again after seeing someone's comment on another video. I realise that the Jaguar was ahead of it's time in some ways. From what I've gleaned, the GPU was an early version of a programmable pipeline which most games now use with shaders.
software renderer were always programable. The blitter is where the pixel shader pipeline resides. Or would. Of course Atari messed up here. Of course GPU -> blitter is a kinda pipeline. But on PC and Dreamcast and 3do this was just CPU -> blitter . Not what we understand as programable pipeline. Was hardware T&L ever fixed? It looks like this on Playstation.
Main CPU is MC68000, along with "Tom" and "Jerry" 32-64 bits chips that provide the exact 64-bit bus... So, it's still a 16-bit console with 64-bit addressing bus...
For those of us that were around at the time it was released, I would definitely not have considered the Jaguar a 'lesser-known' system. The console magazines and electronic stores at the malls hyped the hell out of it...it was a big deal. And it was an even bigger deal that it turned out to be a disappointment among the gaming community.
Not over here... there was not a single ad on TV. Only peoplw familiar with Atari knew of its existence and it was NOT available in stores generally, only by mail order or from one of the few surviving Atari dealerships.
I still love my jag and play on it regularly, AvP my favourite. I've had it since launch it's gave me no problems. You just had to be around at the time to get it. I love my ps4 and pc but I still like to go all retro on Atari ST, Amiga, Jag, snes, mega drive.
remember wanting to get one SO much,but could never find one,then a few years later finding em in the bargain bin,thinking oh a jaguar!,the buying more games for my ps1,finally played avp decade later was a epic game,the games showcased at the end ...we needed that in 1994!
As an Atari Jaguar owner since 1995, I just have to say... BRAVO. I'm usually very weary of Atari Jaguar TH-cam videos, because most of them talk about how much it or Atari sucked or how the CD peripheral looks like a lavatory, and I had enough of that in high school. This video, however, was well done indeed. It's a very comprehensive look at the history of the console, its place in the market, the chances it had to really make a name for itself (along with how it failed almost every time), and most of the history of the Atari Corporation- all in 40 minutes. It approached the story of the console with a sense of respect but also frank realism. Magnificent. It was like reliving my childhood and teenage years all over again. And thank you for the positive look at the Jaguar's controller. I truly believe that those who lament about the controller only saw pictures of it or something... or maybe my hands are just the right size, I dunno. I tried out the Jaguar VR prototype 20 years ago at an Atari Jaguar Festival here in the US, and it's definitely cool for its time. Certainly not the same level of even the early Oculus headsets (and definitely heavier), but it got the job done. It would have been a game changer not just for the Jaguar, but for VR as a medium. Shame it never got released. Also... respect and condolences to the family and friends of Curt Vendel and John Skruch- both of whom passed since the release of this video. Dang- now I want to fire up my copy of BattleSphere. Keep up the excellent work.
to this day i still think yhe Atari Lynx was super underrated and under developed for. it was a sweet little handheld. its funny how the gameboy was king despite numerous competitors having far better portable systems, but people go where the games are i guess.
Size and battery life were massive factors. A friend of mine had the original model as a kid and he struggled to fit it into his backpack, let alone a pocket. It'd last on 6 (I think) AAs for about 2 hours or so, so you were normally tethered to a powerpoint, making it pretty useless as a portable device.
can we stop the daft battery comments! I know they were no 'Game and Watch' but you could quite easily get 6 hours from those 6 batteries! If you want to play for 6 hours straight then the games have got to be pretty good... well obviously they were.. Battery Solution was quite easy to solve.. I personally got 3 sets of rechargeable batteries.. 1 set in the console 1 ready to go and the 3rd set back in the charger.. or in the bag!
Picked up two Jaguar demo cabinets at an auction. Didn't come with the console itself but it did have a great sound system built in and space for a monitor and so forth. Both cabinets were promptly refitted to hold PlayStations and were used very successfully for that purpose. Extremely fond memories of those cabinets and the work I put into the conversion. It's as close as I've ever owned to something like an actual arcade console. The build and materials were just like an arcade machine and it even smelled like one. Great memories.
Seriously glad I found your channel. There were so many questions I had around the history and happenings of these consoles while growing up. You've provided such a well transitioned historical reference to such a massive faction of nerddom.
What killed the Jaguar is that it's hype didn't live up to the reality. If it wasn't such an expensive machine, it might have gotten away with it, but cheaper machines had better capabilities and this was immediately obvious once you got to use it.
Sorry, I lol'd when they mentioned the name of the Epyx handheld gaming system. I don't know who thought it was a good idea to call this thing the "Handy"
beard/moustache trimmers are designed to take care of small patches. nose-hair trimmers work well, too, and are easier to manipulate. but dude's a programmer, he likely doesn't give a rat's ass in the end. get it? GET IT?!?! haha :D
I had the luck to play AvP and Doom on the Jaguar console. AvP had an incredible atmosphere, just the sound of the motion sensor raised your heart rate. Very rare that a game ever pulled me in like that again. BR Thomas PS I liked the controller too, much better than these mini things from SNES, Sega or PS, I never could understand the criticism
You know, the SNES' Ricoh 5A22 CPU was 16bit, but it had an 8bit data bus... So if you do the math the SNES was 8bit. By Atari logic. Good thing bits really don't matter... too bad we didn't know that in the early 90s
My Cousins had every console, & yet we kept playing the Jag! lol! But honestly, I loved all the consoles around that time. Dreamcast, Saturn, Greystation, Jag & then the N64 took it to another level. Today, I favour the PS4 over the Xbone. And Nintendo have dumbed their games down for a new generation of halfwits. But I still miss Atari's cool ideas & musical focus in gaming. The Atari Jaguar shall be missed.
Atari's arrogance in their last years, especially considering the tone of the marketing campaign, is truly astounding. A lot of tall talk for a company that was actively bleeding out. A shame, too, since now we know what the Jaguar is truly capable of. Man, all those "what-ifs" when considering what might have happened what competent executives been involved at Atari during this time period. Massive kudos to both Hasbro and Curt Vendel for keeping the console alive after the end of Atari, even if ever so slightly by a very loyal and niche community, with their unlocking development for the console. This sort of attitude needs to be held more often by companies whose consoles have long since faded into either "retro" status or obscurity. But then again, if they did that, what would be the point of releasing a miniaturized version of said console years down the road to cash-in on those sweet nostalgia points.
Sam Tramiel spent so long trash talking rival systems, flicker on high end Amiga High Resolution modes, the fact the Megadrive used a 68000 CPU (ohh the irony there when developers just used that as it was familiar to them in the Jaguar), the Saturn was a pooch, the GB sucked, the Super Famicom wouldn't sell in USA, Commodore was the little c company, yet Atari's next big things always arrived late, more expensive than originally annouced and underpowered and i say that as an Atari user for years. THE SITE wasn't an Amiga beater, the Falcon was crippled.
Thanks for that Frank Drebin clip. The Jaguar was one of those consoles I sat back & watch die, like the 3DO & 32X. I waited for confirmation that Mortal Kombat 3 was being developed for 1 of those 3 & I was going to try talking my parents into helping me get whichever one had it, but none of them got it, my SNES version was pretty good & the Playstation got the highest quality port that I played at my friend's house so I ended up saving money in the long run for the N64. Worked out good. The Mario 64/Pilotwings experience will never be forgotten
My cousin had a Jaguar and I only had a Sega Genesis. I remember playing his Jaguar and thinking it really just looked and played like my Sega but with a ugly, uncomfortable controller.
One of the best all-around videos about the Jaguar and its early history. Many thanks... I hope to see more incredible development as this machine just gets better with age.
Those poor TV lifestyle video game hosts must have stuffed backs by now with all that leaning on counters they did. Put some bricks under the telly!!!!
All devs that had a konix development kit, said that the real world performance of the system was less than stellar. It didn’t come near to the performance the specs where telling.
56 Titles?!? AvP isn't bad but it also isn't a Magnum Opus! 🙄 There's only like 12 titles worth playing and/or owning but HomeBrewers are still making games for it and AtariAge recently added ST, XEGS and 7800 ports for it so I guess I wouldn't mind collecting one. Barely a 250,000 units sold!?!?! The Virtual Boy sold 770,000 units and that was a Failure! 🙄😳🤨😆
I was at high-school when this came out. I remember the "64-Bit" controversy and arguing with another kid who had one for Xmas. I knew both his parents had their own cars so I just asked him how big the engine was on his dad's, he said "2.0L Turbo mate", and then his mum's, he said "She's just got a 1.0L Fiesta"....hence, I said "Well according to Atari then your parents own a 3 litre car"
The Jaguar got its joypads from the STe and Falcon. The enhanced joypad ports on the STe/Falcon were used on the Jaguar. The Falcon did not get it's DSP from the Jaguar either. None of the Jaguar tech is in the Falcon.
Correct. The Falcon used an Motorola 56001 as a DSP and it was implemented differently compared to the Jaguar. Technically, the Falcon had a Harvard architecture. For the most part. Sadly, very few developers realized the full potential of the DSP, opting to use it for sound only in most cases, and unlike the TT, Atari decided NOT to add an FPU as standard (it was optional). Despite its cut down design compared to the oriiginal TT (fully 32-bit) the Falcon was a pretty nice and zippy machine (but the TT was faster and had nice expandability through VME slot). Interesting factoid: apparently one of the designs for a casing for the Falcon was later used by Sony as the case design for the Playstation 2.
Another interesting bit regarding the Jaguar's early afterlife: "Time Warner had also licensed the Jaguar architecture for the arcades, where it was known as the "CoJag". These systems were basically Jaguar chipsets with extra memory and some other enhancements, and resulted in the arcade games Area 51, Maximum Force, and an unreleased puzzle game called Freeze. Stock Jaguars were also used as controllers for several kiddie ride games such as Skycopter II, Speedster II, and Spaceguy. These kiddie rides were deployed outside of stores such as K-Mart, various supermarkets, and Chuck E. Cheese." While maybe not the most glamorous end to the system, it's pretty neat to consider how it continued to find use in very unexpected places.
It was really the games. Rayman, Doom, Wolfenstein for example where excellent on the Jaguar. If this woul dbe the norm the system could have been quite successful.
mugenjouproject yep, the Shovelware and snes ports it got did it no favors. Atari should have spent that marketing budget on some developers to make quality software titles for it instead, since "64 bits' advertised itself.
mugenjouproject yep, the Shovelware and snes ports it got did it no favors. Atari should have spent that marketing budget on some developers to make quality software titles for it instead, since "64 bits' advertised itself.
I keep coming back to this vid. it's such quality content and a great story of a flawed console. I remember the Jaguar64 boxes sitting in my local toy store collecting dust, being priced lower and lower every 6 months. I should've bought one...
If they were half as good as the cars. No, the Jaguar was not that strong. It's graphics could not even compete with the snes and the super fx chip. It's amazing that they were trying to do VR for consumers.
Unpopular Opinion nah the 3d capabilities were better. Asshitty as Cybermorph's draw distance is, it at least runs at a buttery smooth 60 fps, Star Fox is running at like 15 tops, and hear in mind it was a launch title that didn't use much of its power and also didn't have any CPUs built into the cart like the SuperFX did. That said Atari should have probably released the Panther instead in 91, maybe they could have stood a chance since they clearly weren't utilizing the Jaguar hardware enough anyway and they still had some brand recognition then that was further dwindled in 93.
The Jag was more powerful than the SNES+SuperFX chip in every way. Atari just didn't have the time or money to develop AAA games to take proper advantage of it.
Oh wicked man! Always seeing this video around, but just realised the Leftover Culture Review made it into the resources section! Really appreciate the link man, and all the hours and hours of effort that go into making a video like this. Such amazing quality. Thank you.
I bought one of these in 1996 really cheap from an EB games store. I already had a PS1 and a Sega Saturn, so I didn't buy this for it's stunning 3D graphics. I bought it for three reasons. First it was cheep. Second was for Tempest 2000. And third was for the virtual light machine. Tempest was one of my favourite games ever, and the 2000 version has an awesome soundtrack. Many an evening in Uni was wasted getting wasted and playing Tempest 2000, or just tripping to the VLM. That Jeff Minter is a great designer and programmer.
Saved for and purchased an Atari Jaguar. In my view, there was no way that the "play station" would beat the Jag because Atari was a games company where as the PS was made by "Sony" and they made stereo systems. They knew NOTHING about the games industry. .....DOH!
They certainly came out of nowhere!
Sony actually had a videogame team called Sony Imagesoft, and they made and published some games on the Nes, Genesis or Snes.
Chris Winter, Sony made several MSX computers so they did know a bit about making hardware.
The perception at the time was that Sony made sound systems. That was probably the most often you would see the Sony brand, so many people didn't trust the Sony "Play Station" because no one believed they knew anything about video games, being that it was not their main business, and the fact they called it a play station like we were children.
We were children, but it was the '90s and we all wanted to considered to be adults by 10.
Zachary Bittner, in a lot of countries people knew about the MSX computers and those were not the smallest. Russia and Brasil for example.. Sony was a big player in that line of homecomputers. They made several MSX 1, 2 and 2+ computers. It wasn't the most populair system over the world, true but it didn't came out of nowhere. By the way Sony was back in the day a great brand when it came to video stuff, not only audio.
I was a Jag developer at the end when they stopped production. The system had some very fast elements, but most of the specs were misleading and it had some severe bottlenecks and bugs. At the 21 minute mark, the video states that the 64-bits are the sum of the 32-bits of Tom and Jerry. This isn't accurate. Tom has a full 64-bit bus and is a 64/32-bit hybrid chip.
bryede so you are a Dev and don't understand this is not how it works? Then the Genesis was 32 bits as its 68000 internally worked as 32bits . Come on now
What I said was accurate. Tom and RAM are connected by a 64 bit bus because Tom's blitter is 64-bits wide. This means the 64-bit element isn't tucked away inside some chip, but rather comes out on 64 discrete pins. You cannot simply add your chips together to claim a bigger bit size or we'd have to call the 2600 a 24-bit system. Even though the bus is 64-bits wide, the Jaguar operates more like a 32-bit system with a 64-bit blitter which is completely squandered because of the really, really slow RAM. You can write some impressive stuff on it, but working around the bottlenecks is difficult and time consuming which is why developers just ported stuff to the 68000. The Jaguar molds are now owned by Albert Yarusso of AtariAge.
shaolin95 It was actually 16-bit
Dude you're awesome! You developed for one of my most nostalgic console memories. And thanks for setting that strait. And for the info regarding the current case owners.
Now if i'm not mistaken, are you the guy who made Virtual VCS? The unreleased 2600 Jag emulator? 'cause your account's name is familiar ;-)
I know this is 3 years old but i watch all of your vids. Im having a rough time with sciatica and not really sleeping much..... this vid has just distracted me from my back pain for 40 odd mins..... i thankyou so damn much!
I hope that you are having an easier time now!
Feel better !
These types of videos are a nice thing to watch while eating. Issue is some foods now remind me of consoles and games.
Tamales remind me of the Chinese Que Nintendo 64.
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Walking and standing really helps. Sitting is bad. Also try 2 or 3 pillows.
Jack Tramiel always seemed like the kind of guy who would walk over to your cubicle tell you that he would like to go for a "walk with you" tell you it's nothing bad then once you and him are isolated he would fire you
"I'd like to have a chat with you.."
Those types are never as clever as they think; they’ve always done things which have allowed me to psych myself up for whats coming like the ‘we’re letting you go”. I was working in a lab and everyday we had a few in the same lab, always people at certain times; one day the Jack Tramiel type came in and i was the only one in lab (which was weird), then ‘lets take a walk’ or similar. Im thinking ‘im getting laid off’ and finally they got around to that but i was already mentally ok w/ it by that point because you can tell when things are off.
Hello Peter, what's happening... Yeahhh we're gonna need to talk about the TPS reports
I worked for a Tramiel type (similar to Elon Musk’s mentality… just without social media to promote his inflated self-image).
When things got bad and he “buddy fired” me, I told him something I had held on to for a while: I was having sex with his wife most days of every week. She worked at the company and we’d have ourselves and afternoon delight or two when the office was cleared out.
Considering he was never around doing the work he should have been (can’t imagine why the company shuttered the next year after I got everything in my severance package), she and I had A LOT of sex in that place.
She had already talked to all the lawyers in the area and drafted up papers by the time I told him I was her side piece, so he had to hire an attorney from out of town to represent him.
The best part was when he accused me of making everything up to get back at him and I described some intimate details about her fine China and quirks during… crisis.
He was served the next day with divorce papers and I lived in his house rent free with his wife until it was sold 18mo later. The pool and patio needed an industrial cleaning when we were done with it.
Peter… Ummmm… yeah… I’m going to need you to work this weekend…
@@G18999 That's EXACTLY what came to my mind!
_"There is some interesting hardware in the shops this Christmas. There's the 3DO, the first CD superconsole. And then there's the CD-i, which lets you play movies on CD and has some nice looking games, like this new one, Chaos Control. Then we got the Neo Geo CD, which lets you play arcade fighting games in your home. And this is Jaguar, the world's first 64-bit console."_
It's quite ironic that none of those got any popularity in the end, and were quickly forgotten.
It's just about the games. That's all that matters
Neo-Geo CD was slightly understandable - I believe the price of the AES, the home console version of the Neo Geo, and the slow disc drive of the original CD were to blame for it's lack of sales.
Neo Geo is pretty legendary. There was no other way to get that kind of arcade quality at home and for fighting game fans, it was quite massive
Philips CDi was the first CD Console 1991. 3DO was in the end of 1993.
@@NintenDub You're not wrong. If the Atari Jaguar or 3DO or CD-i had the PS1's library we'd be playing CD-i 5 games right now.
Yea I had a Jaguar in 1994 / 1995. Got a Playstation in 1996 and never looked back. Alien vs Predator was (up to that point) the best game I had ever played though. After years of playing on a mega drive a FPS game was ground breaking.
Zero Tolerance?
@@RandomInnVGMs Right on. Zero Tolerance is one of the best unknown console FPS games ever.
By the time I saw AVP on the Jag, I wasn't in the slightest impressed. For a CONSOLE it was good, but I'd been playing Doom since 1993, Heretic and Cyclones in 1994, and Quake with the Aliens mod (which I think was supposed to be offical from Fox but it was pulled for some reason and found it's way onto the internet and some coverdiscs).
But for a console, it certainly was impressive.
That was easily the best Atari Jaguar video I've ever seen. Fantastic work.
Except one problem...a large part of it talked about their 1980s systems. I didn't come here for a full history on Atari...just the Jaguar.
@@AdamsDuhStuff It's called context. If you don't like it, make one yourself or gtfo! Bitching, constant bitching.
Stefan Homberger agreed
*AVGN has entered the chatroom*
This video lasted longer than the jaguar did
LOL
So did the the time it took me to write this comment.
lmao good one
Your avatar says you are a Nazi.....allegedly. ok signs are evil. Welcome to 2019.
HA!
Incredibly thorough history. While Alien Vs. Predator is the scariest game I've ever played, Tempest 2000 is the true gem from this system; it's definitely somewhere in my top 10 games of all time.
Yep. At least Tempest 2000 has a halfway decent successor on PC though. The AvP versions for PC and PlayStation are very different games and not nearly as "scary".
Best story of the Jaguar I've read. I was software director at Hand Made Software at the time of the Jaguar and worked on the rather dodgy Kasumi Ninja but mainly in writing some of the low-level code. I remember getting the system specification document by fax (a long fax!) and drooling but the well document hardware bugs and limitations crippled the system. My memory may be flawed but I seem to remember the 68000 stopping when the RISC processors were using the bus - there was certainly huge bus conflicts. Programming the RISC CPUs made my head hurt. They had a tiny amount of RAM to themselves so you had to continually swap code in from main memory. The CD-ROM interface wasn't too hot either. It's a real shame that the hardware flaws couldn't have been weeded out by delaying the device as it could have been a contender. The demise of Atari also brought us down :-(
Dude I loved reading your comment, the understanding u have when talking about the hardware is so cool. Like I don't even know what you are talkin about but i can tell you do and to me that awesome. Im jealous!
That's awesome! I kinda like Kasumi Ninja to be honest :-)
Yeah the memory issues were why Carmack saying even just a little bit of DRAM cache for the RISC chips would have been a game changer for the system. Jaguar had some serious brute force that it also seemed determined to make UNABLE to effectively use in nearly everyway possible. It was like they distilled "frustration" into hardware form.
I was on the graphics and animation team, we had little time to develop it properly, we only had dpaint and a corel draw, so many limitations on colours, i called myself the 2 bit artist!...enjoyed doing the animations in the background for kasumi ninja!.....Hi Rob! 🙂👏🏻🇬🇧
Kudos to Hand Made Software for their Atari Lynx games. Awesome Golf and Loopz (unreleased) are two of my favorites for the system.
I remember when the Jaguar first came out. I had a Sega Genesis/Sega CD and a Super Nes. I was a huge gamer (still am) and I just built my very first PC for gaming...well mainly for Doom (486 DX2). At any rate, I had heard of Atari's re-entry into the console market again and I had little interest in it.
So here I am I have all the best stuff and over the summer my parents go on vacation. I was 13 at the time and wanted to spend the summer with my friends and games. Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on how you look at it my mother was not going to let me stay at home by myself for a month and a half. I begged her, I would be good and I swear no parties...she would not relent and I had to leave all of my games and big screen TV (yes I had a big screen TV in my bedroom at 13) at home while I was forced to stay with my aunt. Now she was cool and let me hang out with my friends and even told my mom that I could bring all of my games if I wanted...my mom said no. There I was no games at all and my aunt seeing my distress and knowing that I really could not go out and act like a normal child (medical condition) she wanted to help me out of my plight. She took me to the local mom and pop video rental store and said "go nuts, you'll find sonething" and find something I did. They had an Atari Jaguar for rent and before I knew it I had it hooked up and started AVP...
OMG...that was like a lightning bolt cane down and struck me. I had never seen anything like that. I especially loved hearing the Predator taunt you while you were fighting aliens "Your gonna die" or "Im gonna kill you." I mean Atari did what Sega and Nintendon't. Well I kept that machine for the duration of my time there and I was so sad to see it go. My mother would not get it for me (it is understandable as i had so much) and i was...well a little sad. I was never disrespectful and always greatful to have what I had and my aunt having two daughters that were demanding jerkbags was impressed with me. She went down to the video store and bought the unit and all of his games (Cybermorph, Doom, Tempest, and AVP) and brought it too me. I still own it and I will never forget it. I still periodically play AVP and it is at least to me a 10 out of 10. This rings especially true as i remember when it was brand new and no game ever before it was like that, not even the mighty Doom. Hell, I remember bringing it to my best friends house and showing him...he, like me was a huge gamer and lost hos mind over how amazing it was for its time. It is a shame that most devs never took advantage of that beutiful hardware because she had true potential...much more to me than my 32X I got shortly after my Jaguar (Virtua Fighter and Virtua Racing were amazing though).
What a sad life.
Aliens v predator was great Wish someone would revamp it and up the framerate that was the only downside to it the only game to ever make me jump out of my skin even when i was expecting it
i believe ambient noise is far better than music in a game of this type.
@@Heliocentric sad? sounds pretty dope to me - he got his jag!
@@Heliocentric
Sad life....no, I'm afraid my life has been pretty great. Now that I'm an adult things have only gotten better. I met the woman of my dreams in college and she's every bit the gamer that I am (10 years younger than me as well). Our house is like one giant playpen for gamers. We are so ready for the next generation of gaming to start and we were successful in securing both machines (Series X/PS5*physical).
great story. i had similar systems growing up.
As a kid I remember seeing a huge stack of Jaguar boxes all lined up at Woolworths and really wanting it even begging my Dad to get me one for Christmas, luckily he followed the advice of one of his work mates and got me a Mega Drive instead.
Well... Jag actually have a small library of games but must if them are good. Anyway its good that you don't get amiga cd32 XD
@@bubsy3861 yeah, I know I’ll never get an amiga cd32 because eBay scalpers want hundreds of dollars for it. It also ships from out of the country so god knows how long that’ll take. And for what? A piece of fucking shit that needs a paperweight to even run? Hell no
I think there was a reason there was a huge, untouched stack of them lol.
I remember them being sold off for £50 at the end and still not shifting.
I'm glad I never jumped in the Jaguar bandwagon. I just stuck to the big ones in the 90s; Super Famicom and Sony PlayStation. Probably my only console faux pas was the Sega Dreamcast in the late 90s.
I have to admit. When i first saw AvP on games master in '94 I literally shit my pants! I could not believe the graphics. I didn't get to play that game till the early 2000's when I saw a Jaguar console and a copy of this game in a charity shop for £20. I'd already played the pc version but this was in some ways better. It has so much atmosphere and character going for it. I enjoyed every second of it and its still my favourite AvP game so far.
Games Master!!!
you literally shit your pants?
@@MicahTheZombie with excitement, yes! Those graphics were revolutionary in those days... To me at least!
Same blew me away!!
@@tomroberts5805 You mean 'figuratively' not 'literally'.
The 90s were a strange time for systems and ppl getting confused on the concept of 16-32-64 bit games/systems.
Wow, kudos, this is incredibly well documented and researched, good job!
Emmanuel Florac Kubos
I guess the lesson here is that complex hardware is always bad. Sega Saturn also had complex hardware that was difficult to use. The PS3 was also said to be a lot more complex than the Xbox 360 because the processors were symmetrical.
I for one hated the lack of music in DooM. But I do highly recommend the Wolfenstein 3D port. Its basically the SNES version of the game, with it's set of levels, but the graphics have been upscaled and there is no censorship. Really good renditions of the PC version's music too.
If you got a 3DO, it has the best version of Wolfenstein 3D everrrrrr
I dunno. I actually prefer the Jaguar port to the 3DO port, simply because of the music. I never cared for the 3DO's orchestrated verison of the Mac port's soundtrack.
Sherbert's World of Schlock - It did look crispy & smooth... with music too!
Me too! Always thought playing without music on PC was a more creepy experience...ah the days of my first pc. Mitac 486 DX2 66MHZ on Windows 95 a bit later on. Had OS2 WARP it sucked balls.
@@eval_is_evil I loved OS2 Warp! Best OS to run DOS apps on! But guess what? Windows NT was sort of based on it, and by extension, so was 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1 and 10 (the NT reference is even present up to Windows Xp, just start a prompt and type ver).
I love the irony that the music from Nuclear Plant is playing despite the fact that the Jaguar version was one of the only releases of the game that didn't have music
Just discovered this channel. Absolutely bloody brilliant. Top work. The definitive guide to this weird era in game culture.
Where I got my game dev start that lasted around 10 years.
Not sure they covered it in the video but it was relatively hard to develop on.
Had hardware bugs that would make the dev board desync while debugging, the worst was that the 68K chip was originally designed to just be a misc control, joystick reading, etc., but from a GPU & SPU memory controller bug their code could only run from internal RAM (not the main/system one).
I made a mini GPU disassembler to dump out Atari's own code to find the little fix idioms/patterns they were using.
#1 they probably needed their own "Mario", "Zleda", "Sonic" etc., that Atari didn't have.
Was fun though. Working with Jack Tramiel, "Purple", and meeting Jeff Minter, etc.
It's too bad that era of Atari died before there could be a 2.0 version..
High voltage software created an LRU cache set up for the GPU and DSP and along with an GPU/DSP GCC Atari had developed that HVS ironed some bugs out with. They put it altogether into a system where they coded in C on the GPU/DSP and overlays were taken care of automatically. All totally transparent to the programmer.
www.3do.cdinteractive.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=3356#p37117
They tried to tell Atari about what they accomplished but Atari ignored them.
The bit wars ended with Dreamcast. GPU's took over.
I think the bit wars was at the beginning of its end once the PlayStation came out. Seemed at that point, the only people left that thought the bits were still relevant, were the Nintendo 64 fanboys. Between my getting sick and tired of the bit wars, my unfortunate exposure to Superman 64, and....cartridges, when everyone else was moving to optical media, I wanted nothing to do with that machine.
I never got into N64 because they had one of the worst controllers.
WellBeSerious12 n64 had good games but a horrible controller that only would make sense in a flying game....
akihiro kina are you 10 years old?
akihiro kina on the contrary the N64 contoler was the first to have an analog stick and a rumble pac. It looked weird but worked great with games like mario and zelda oot.
The 'Alien vs. Predator' title was the first time I recall being able to play all sides of that particular universe.
It was a pretty well-done game for its time, and I still like it today.
The modem was too little, too late. 'Doom' was fun in co-op, but the deathmatch mode was kinda flat.
Lol i remember the jaguar. Sitting next to a n64 in the store, it was hilarious how bad that thing was. The graphics looked terrible and the controller was completely idiotic. It even felt cheap to hold it.
My friend Kris and me both had PC's back in 1995. We link up by null serial and play everything that was good all weekend, most weekends, from 95 to 98, before we started to find local LANS. He always had a top end machine, spared no expense, and I did okay buying smart in the mid range. Kris shared a bedroom with his brother, who had a Sega Saturn. Before I introduced Kris to PC's, he and his brother would be playing Street Fighter, Virtua Fighter together all the time. Once me and Kris moved to serial linked Doom and Big Red Racing however, Kris never played 2play with his brother Craig anymore. And Craig didn't care, he called us geeks, and sat alone on his console. He even bought a Jaguar, and laughed at our PC's, telling us his machine was 64bit and far better.
A few months later though, and the golden era of PC's hit. Suddenly, whenever Craig turned his big neanderthal looking head around, he'd see us hacking our way through Hell in Diablo, or breaking through walls with vampires in Dungeon Keeper, or sending helicopters full of commandos into each others bases in Command And Conquer. Suddenly, Craig spent more time watch US play, than he did playing his Jaguar. It was inevitable.
I think what made his mind up was Starcraft. When that game came out, it was a matter of weeks before Craigs Jaguar was in on the top shelf in the corner, and a brand new gaming PC was sitting at his desk. I had to network us together in DOS and Windows, which was a pain to learn, but I managed. And he never looked back. He's never owned a console since. I always thought Aliens vs Predator looked bad, but that was because of AlienQuake and whatnot running in 3D enhanced mode on our PC's. For a console, for it's time, the Jaguar WAS impressive. It made the mistake sometimes of trying to be something other than a console. Which I think is why the Wii is probably the best console series ever. It never tried to be a PC. It knew it was a console, and they produced console games for it, and I've always owned one alongside my PC.
There was a lack of game for the Jag too, and they were expensive. I'd explained to Craig one day, when he said to me PC's were far too expensive, that if he added up everything he'd spent on his Saturn and Jaguar (including gmaes and controllers and Prima books), he could have a PC twice as fast as mine. I was kind of annoyed when he actually bought a PC that WAS twice as fast as mine! XD
Classic Craig
Jaguar was a bag of shit. But I wish we still had as many system choices as we did in the 90's.
DejaVoodooDoll I think he means "game consoles" not mobile/ handheld devices and PCs lol
DejaVoodooDoll I love my Vita!
@DejaVoodooDoll Sony's piss-poor decisions was the Vita's demise it's a shame though, what a lovely device!
@DejaVoodooDoll :
There was also a nVidia machine for a while: Shield
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Shield_(set-top_box)
www.nvidia.com/en-us/shield/
Atari lacked the means that Nintendo, Sony, Sega or even 3do had access to. Not entirely their fault.
Good in--depth review of the Atari Jaguar, I always knew this machine would fail. The Sega Mega Drive had the better playable games and graphics than the Jaguar.
The Jaguar could have been a 2D game powerhouse but instead they decided to release a torrent of shit 3D games when the technology clearly wasn't capable of running the games decently. At the time the concept of 3D games was very exciting but i bet most people who played didn't have as much fun as they thought they would.
Not to mention that while 3d games still have a future right away were used to display real world things like digital photos and walking advertisements (3d Racing games). Gaming is still fighting it and now Mario has a gun. Watch out everyone.
Very true. The only games worth playing were Tempest 2000, Alien vs Predator and Doom. The rest of the games were complete shite.
nah, the jaguar was, in retrospect, toast from the get-go. There was a great public demand for 3D that the Saturn and in particular the Playstation filled. Even a great 2D system would have been nowhere in light of what was already coming down the pipeline. Add to that an Atari with no money and I don't think anything could really have saved it.
r3playretro quake, counter strike, half life, epic games, unreal, arena, etc
Actually Alien vs Predator was really good and in my opinion the best version of the game on any platform including PC - bar none. Better than on PlayStation later on I'd say. Even when you had just an ordinary TV set hooked up to your Jaguar while playing that game... you'd jump off from your chair if you suddenly heard something behind you on your right or left... the sound was done really well. The 3D was texturemapped and quite good as Jaguar games go, I'd say on par with or better than PC and Amiga at the time.
That's not to say that most games were like that. In fact most 3D games royally sucked on the Jaguar (lilke Cybermorph and Battlemorph), but some like AvP and Hoverstrike CD were actually quite decent if not really good.
AvP was promising because they had promised you could use your Atari Lynx as a controller and its display as a secondary display in the game (like for the motion tracker or as a dashboard in racing games etc). Unfortunately that never happened.
Nintendo picked up on the idea and did something similar later on though.
I never felt this was a missed opportunity new digital media was coming out already the CD32 could have really make its mark philips had its cd system Dreamcast i think these systems are the lost potential more than the jaguar. What a time to be alive man
Got one question for you: Where did you learn to fly?
Is this Icon of Sin the one I think it is ? As the one hanged on my wall yours looks like the limited edition poster. I prevented mine from spouting spawncube by placing glass in front of it :)
FUCK, you beat me to it >:)
/thread. Nice one buddy! You've put me to rest.
Who taught YOU how to drive?
Icon of Sin UGH! You beat me to it.
The Lynx was originally called "The Handy"? Makes me wonder what some other names they considered could have been. Maybe the BJ or The Quicky?
Mind's eye is still one of my favourite tracks ever, videogame or otherwise!
Thank god for the Atari 50 anniversary collection for having jaguar games
I still have PTSD from the mid-90's gaming scene. So many abominations and abortions during this period. Of course, things eventually picked up again with the PS1 & N64, but still.
I still don't get why they thought it be a good idea to make so many remakes of early 80's classics for a console that emphasized it's 64-bit hardware.
Today's videogame industry is filled with remakes and reboots too.
I had an Amiga 500 and i never had problems with not enough great games. Then got a PC and i was MDK-ing and NFSing like crazy. Never touched home consoles until wii (awful!) ,ps3(great) and ps4(awesome). I can sympathize with you though but N64 was so bloody awful back then,at least to me and most people i knew
cheap money...
It was explained in this video. You could just do a port of a 32 bit game that used the Motorala 68000 processor only which required almost no effort for the developer.
They may have been shitty and unforgivingly bad, but you have to admit, a lot of them were downright weird and creative at times.
Today's video game market caters to a more sensitive demographic, and usually follow the same shit that's been done a hundred times. Maybe with a little variation. Plus the constant remakes or 'Remastering' of older games.
I was working at a KayBee toy store when this came out - and then a few months later they were on clearance - I remember this being the fastest crash and burn of any system I ever saw.
I worked for a toy chain in that same era. I think the prior Atari 7800 may have crashed even quicker?
@vctjkhme Virtual Boy is the system I remember the most that crashed and burned QUICK. It felt like within in a matter of months it went from it's debut to HEAVY discounts. I remember getting mine for 29.99 at EB Games.
Oh how I miss kaybee
I purchased one during those clearance days...sold it, I probably should have kept that. :)
So I did the math. My PC, with its eight x86-64 CPU cores, is actually a 512-bit machine. Bitchin!
I did the math and got a Super Nintendo and then a Playstation and wasn't dissapointed
Back then a PS1 and SNES is all one needed... Just like today PS4 and Switch is all one needs...
Rex Holes
Bypassed mathematician and get Nintendo Ultra PlayStation for science technology.
@@w0nd3r6 Yeah no, a PC and a Switch is much better
I could give one flying the f word about pc gaming sorry buddy and for me its consoles for life mainly playstation
@@w0nd3r6 Too bad, you are missing out. I own several consoles and a PC. PCs are a great gaming platform and always have been.
Chock full of great info. Hearing "jag-yew-ahr" was just icing on the cake.
Jaguar was a good system, ahead of its time, and crippled by some bad decisions from the company that made it. Neo-Geo was an incredible tech powerhouse that blew away anything else on the home market, but was ungodly expensive for same market. The best of all the unloved consoles however, was the Dreamcast. It was simply amazing and to this day i still consider it a travesty that it didn't succeed.
you make the best retro video game documentaries.
great job.
The Jaguar was garbage, and as a kid who got one at launch, I knew it even then. I had to pretend to be all excited about it around my parents because I felt guilty for the money they spent. I was asked more than a few times why I wasn't using it (I was usually playing SNES instead). They probably figured it out too.
I remember that ad! "The fun is back, oh yesiree; it's the twenty-six hundred from Ah-tar-ee!" Hahaha! Amazing!
It is interesting that the video game in dustry did not take notes on "HOW TO NOT BUILD YOUR NEXT GENERATION CONSOLE!"
The Atari Jaguar was a mess for developer to fully utilize its graphic potentials and due to gamings early days, trying to over compensate things was not at all a wise move considering the lack of advanced experience avaible.
With that was cornerstone for a blue-print notice - Sega did the VERY SAME mistake with the Saturn and combined processors and stuff to get a difficult mess for developers to develop games for to its fullest potential. That makes TWO future references.....
And then Sony of all companies does similar with the PS3 console and even if not as big mess, near all studios outside of Sony themselves struggles in the early years of the systems to make games and resulted with ports that crashed, bugged out or froze etc. Something that made many developers for the first time turn there attention to there rival the Xbox 360 to develop for and then port them to the PS3.
i'm sure myself from the future stopped myself from buying this console i even pre ordered it lol. i went to the shop to pick it up and guess what the guy said it was delayed i then said its ok i take the deposit. i waited for the ps1 to come out so i held my money for months then finally i got a ps1 on launch day walked into the shop i was the only customer back in the day there wasn't no big cues walked in walk out with my console. i saved up so much money i could get 3 games i had tekken 1, disk world, loaded. Plus my console was a A serial number which is highly sort after it could play copies i still use it now. But i replaced the lens a few times but its still going strong.
Atari was still active and several games were in development after 97'. I was there. So you're reporting is off my friend. You also left out when Midway bought us out.
*If I had a hundred thumbs to rate this video up with, I would gladly do it. This is so great. Documentary length, great info, great research, technical, in-depth, pleasant narration, easy to understand, well-rounded... excellent. Great job my man. You are one of the reasons I love TH-cam and TH-camrs who focus on retro gaming. Proud of ya.*
Watching this again after seeing someone's comment on another video. I realise that the Jaguar was ahead of it's time in some ways. From what I've gleaned, the GPU was an early version of a programmable pipeline which most games now use with shaders.
software renderer were always programable. The blitter is where the pixel shader pipeline resides. Or would. Of course Atari messed up here. Of course GPU -> blitter is a kinda pipeline. But on PC and Dreamcast and 3do this was just CPU -> blitter . Not what we understand as programable pipeline. Was hardware T&L ever fixed? It looks like this on Playstation.
21:43 Prodigy- Their Law ( great song)
22:00 - Check out that uni ...ddaaayyyuuummmmm
Main CPU is MC68000, along with "Tom" and "Jerry" 32-64 bits chips that provide the exact 64-bit bus... So, it's still a 16-bit console with 64-bit addressing bus...
For those of us that were around at the time it was released, I would definitely not have considered the Jaguar a 'lesser-known' system. The console magazines and electronic stores at the malls hyped the hell out of it...it was a big deal. And it was an even bigger deal that it turned out to be a disappointment among the gaming community.
Not over here... there was not a single ad on TV. Only peoplw familiar with Atari knew of its existence and it was NOT available in stores generally, only by mail order or from one of the few surviving Atari dealerships.
Not gonna lie that commercial with the monster using the lifeless arm of the guys mother to get his attention is pretty terrifying
"Atari was seemingly doing their best to negate them."
More like: Atari created shitty circumstances and expected everyone to agree with them.
I still love my jag and play on it regularly, AvP my favourite. I've had it since launch it's gave me no problems. You just had to be around at the time to get it. I love my ps4 and pc but I still like to go all retro on Atari ST, Amiga, Jag, snes, mega drive.
God bless u for showing clips from 'bad influence' and 'gamesmaster'! Those shows defined the 90's for many British gamers ♥️
Everyone knows that N64 was KING during this era! One game to the rule them all! _Golden Eye 64_
Ahm ps1
remember wanting to get one SO much,but could never find one,then a few years later finding em in the bargain bin,thinking oh a jaguar!,the buying more games for my ps1,finally played avp decade later was a epic game,the games showcased at the end ...we needed that in 1994!
As an Atari Jaguar owner since 1995, I just have to say... BRAVO.
I'm usually very weary of Atari Jaguar TH-cam videos, because most of them talk about how much it or Atari sucked or how the CD peripheral looks like a lavatory, and I had enough of that in high school. This video, however, was well done indeed. It's a very comprehensive look at the history of the console, its place in the market, the chances it had to really make a name for itself (along with how it failed almost every time), and most of the history of the Atari Corporation- all in 40 minutes. It approached the story of the console with a sense of respect but also frank realism. Magnificent. It was like reliving my childhood and teenage years all over again.
And thank you for the positive look at the Jaguar's controller. I truly believe that those who lament about the controller only saw pictures of it or something... or maybe my hands are just the right size, I dunno.
I tried out the Jaguar VR prototype 20 years ago at an Atari Jaguar Festival here in the US, and it's definitely cool for its time. Certainly not the same level of even the early Oculus headsets (and definitely heavier), but it got the job done. It would have been a game changer not just for the Jaguar, but for VR as a medium. Shame it never got released.
Also... respect and condolences to the family and friends of Curt Vendel and John Skruch- both of whom passed since the release of this video.
Dang- now I want to fire up my copy of BattleSphere. Keep up the excellent work.
to this day i still think yhe Atari Lynx was super underrated and under developed for. it was a sweet little handheld. its funny how the gameboy was king despite numerous competitors having far better portable systems, but people go where the games are i guess.
of course. games sell hardware
Batteries. Same for the game gear.
Size and battery life were massive factors. A friend of mine had the original model as a kid and he struggled to fit it into his backpack, let alone a pocket. It'd last on 6 (I think) AAs for about 2 hours or so, so you were normally tethered to a powerpoint, making it pretty useless as a portable device.
AntiPseudo i had a power adapter it was a pain in the ass but i loved that damn thing.
can we stop the daft battery comments! I know they were no 'Game and Watch' but you could quite easily get 6 hours from those 6 batteries!
If you want to play for 6 hours straight then the games have got to be pretty good... well obviously they were..
Battery Solution was quite easy to solve..
I personally got 3 sets of rechargeable batteries..
1 set in the console
1 ready to go and the 3rd set back in the charger.. or in the bag!
Picked up two Jaguar demo cabinets at an auction. Didn't come with the console itself but it did have a great sound system built in and space for a monitor and so forth. Both cabinets were promptly refitted to hold PlayStations and were used very successfully for that purpose. Extremely fond memories of those cabinets and the work I put into the conversion. It's as close as I've ever owned to something like an actual arcade console. The build and materials were just like an arcade machine and it even smelled like one. Great memories.
Recently, Doom for Jaguar was updated, and now has music :)
lol took only,what, 30 years or so? ;)
Seriously glad I found your channel. There were so many questions I had around the history and happenings of these consoles while growing up. You've provided such a well transitioned historical reference to such a massive faction of nerddom.
I wanted a Jaguar so bad when it came out.
Then I got a Sega Genesis, and forgot all about the Atari!
What killed the Jaguar is that it's hype didn't live up to the reality. If it wasn't such an expensive machine, it might have gotten away with it, but cheaper machines had better capabilities and this was immediately obvious once you got to use it.
Sorry, I lol'd when they mentioned the name of the Epyx handheld gaming system. I don't know who thought it was a good idea to call this thing the "Handy"
I remember when this video came out still your best work. All these early videos are fantastic nostalgia nerd is one of the best on TH-cam imo
that dudes uni brow tho
beard/moustache trimmers are designed to take care of small patches. nose-hair trimmers work well, too, and are easier to manipulate. but dude's a programmer, he likely doesn't give a rat's ass in the end. get it? GET IT?!?! haha :D
knew it would be the top comment lol
I only came to the comments to mention that, but see I am a day late and a dollar short :P
That’s what stuck with me most about his entire video.
So who is that guy?
I had the luck to play AvP and Doom on the Jaguar console. AvP had an incredible atmosphere, just the sound of the motion sensor raised your heart rate. Very rare that a game ever pulled me in like that again. BR Thomas
PS I liked the controller too, much better than these mini things from SNES, Sega or PS,
I never could understand the criticism
I played the VR system at E3 95. For its time it was amazing!
You know, the SNES' Ricoh 5A22 CPU was 16bit, but it had an 8bit data bus... So if you do the math the SNES was 8bit. By Atari logic. Good thing bits really don't matter... too bad we didn't know that in the early 90s
Wicked unibrow at 21:55
The definition of sexy
mootbooxle Seeing another synth guy on a retro games channel - hell yeah. Heh.
mootbooxle Pussy destroyer
Fancy bumping into you here!
mootbooxle He used to have 2 eyebrows, until he shaved to top one off.
My Cousins had every console, & yet we kept playing the Jag! lol! But honestly, I loved all the consoles around that time. Dreamcast, Saturn, Greystation, Jag & then the N64 took it to another level.
Today, I favour the PS4 over the Xbone. And Nintendo have dumbed their games down for a new generation of halfwits. But I still miss Atari's cool ideas & musical focus in gaming.
The Atari Jaguar shall be missed.
*Nice piece of history ✅😎*
Atari's arrogance in their last years, especially considering the tone of the marketing campaign, is truly astounding. A lot of tall talk for a company that was actively bleeding out. A shame, too, since now we know what the Jaguar is truly capable of. Man, all those "what-ifs" when considering what might have happened what competent executives been involved at Atari during this time period.
Massive kudos to both Hasbro and Curt Vendel for keeping the console alive after the end of Atari, even if ever so slightly by a very loyal and niche community, with their unlocking development for the console. This sort of attitude needs to be held more often by companies whose consoles have long since faded into either "retro" status or obscurity.
But then again, if they did that, what would be the point of releasing a miniaturized version of said console years down the road to cash-in on those sweet nostalgia points.
Sam Tramiel spent so long trash talking rival systems, flicker on high end Amiga High Resolution modes, the fact the Megadrive used a 68000 CPU (ohh the irony there when developers just used that as it was familiar to them in the Jaguar), the Saturn was a pooch, the GB sucked, the Super Famicom wouldn't sell in USA, Commodore was the little c company, yet Atari's next big things always arrived late, more expensive than originally annouced and underpowered and i say that as an Atari user for years.
THE SITE wasn't an Amiga beater, the Falcon was crippled.
Lol that alien vs predator was not really 3D. I’m not stupid I can see clearly pre rendered sprites there. That was not true 3D at all.
Thanks for that Frank Drebin clip. The Jaguar was one of those consoles I sat back & watch die, like the 3DO & 32X. I waited for confirmation that Mortal Kombat 3 was being developed for 1 of those 3 & I was going to try talking my parents into helping me get whichever one had it, but none of them got it, my SNES version was pretty good & the Playstation got the highest quality port that I played at my friend's house so I ended up saving money in the long run for the N64. Worked out good. The Mario 64/Pilotwings experience will never be forgotten
My cousin had a Jaguar and I only had a Sega Genesis. I remember playing his Jaguar and thinking it really just looked and played like my Sega but with a ugly, uncomfortable controller.
One of the best all-around videos about the Jaguar and its early history. Many thanks... I hope to see more incredible development as this machine just gets better with age.
Those poor TV lifestyle video game hosts must have stuffed backs by now with all that leaning on counters they did. Put some bricks under the telly!!!!
This was a splendid documentary. Thanks for posting it for everyone to enjoy.
gotta love that unibrow or (monobrow) on the guy at around 22 minutes.. how could anyone let that happen?
I suppose you wouldn't worry about your unibrow if you don't ever talk to girls.
the guy to his right lost his shoes at some point
the interview was done in our house. none of us were wearing shoes. =]
close, but no. =] i'm the one on the left.
@@i-never-look-at-replies-lol Browed Union
I've just had two parts of my spine removed and I've hammered your videos brilliant brilliant stuff
Tje Jaguar really needed that killer app they never got.
All devs that had a konix development kit, said that the real world performance of the system was less than stellar. It didn’t come near to the performance the specs where telling.
The Jaguar logo sure kicks ass though.
56 Titles?!? AvP isn't bad but it also isn't a Magnum Opus! 🙄 There's only like 12 titles worth playing and/or owning but HomeBrewers are still making games for it and AtariAge recently added ST, XEGS and 7800 ports for it so I guess I wouldn't mind collecting one. Barely a 250,000 units sold!?!?! The Virtual Boy sold 770,000 units and that was a Failure! 🙄😳🤨😆
The best part of this video? The classic commercials!
I was at high-school when this came out. I remember the "64-Bit" controversy and arguing with another kid who had one for Xmas. I knew both his parents had their own cars so I just asked him how big the engine was on his dad's, he said "2.0L Turbo mate", and then his mum's, he said "She's just got a 1.0L Fiesta"....hence, I said "Well according to Atari then your parents own a 3 litre car"
No Jaguar game looked 4X better than the 16 bit consoles, most were on par or slightly better than 16 bit consoles.
The only one that really stands out is rayman.
The Jaguar got its joypads from the STe and Falcon. The enhanced joypad ports on the STe/Falcon were used on the Jaguar.
The Falcon did not get it's DSP from the Jaguar either. None of the Jaguar tech is in the Falcon.
Correct. The Falcon used an Motorola 56001 as a DSP and it was implemented differently compared to the Jaguar. Technically, the Falcon had a Harvard architecture. For the most part. Sadly, very few developers realized the full potential of the DSP, opting to use it for sound only in most cases, and unlike the TT, Atari decided NOT to add an FPU as standard (it was optional). Despite its cut down design compared to the oriiginal TT (fully 32-bit) the Falcon was a pretty nice and zippy machine (but the TT was faster and had nice expandability through VME slot). Interesting factoid: apparently one of the designs for a casing for the Falcon was later used by Sony as the case design for the Playstation 2.
This was wonderful! Exhaustively accurate, and there were a few details even I was ignorant on. Any plans to do one of these videos for the Dreamcast?
this is one of your best videos: great combination of personal storytelling, facts, and a tight subject viewed comprehensively
Where did you learn to fly?
Another interesting bit regarding the Jaguar's early afterlife: "Time Warner had also licensed the Jaguar architecture for the arcades, where it was known as the "CoJag". These systems were basically Jaguar chipsets with extra memory and some other enhancements, and resulted in the arcade games Area 51, Maximum Force, and an unreleased puzzle game called Freeze. Stock Jaguars were also used as controllers for several kiddie ride games such as Skycopter II, Speedster II, and Spaceguy. These kiddie rides were deployed outside of stores such as K-Mart, various supermarkets, and Chuck E. Cheese." While maybe not the most glamorous end to the system, it's pretty neat to consider how it continued to find use in very unexpected places.
It was really the games. Rayman, Doom, Wolfenstein for example where excellent on the Jaguar. If this woul dbe the norm the system could have been quite successful.
mugenjouproject yep, the Shovelware and snes ports it got did it no favors. Atari should have spent that marketing budget on some developers to make quality software titles for it instead, since "64 bits' advertised itself.
mugenjouproject yep, the Shovelware and snes ports it got did it no favors. Atari should have spent that marketing budget on some developers to make quality software titles for it instead, since "64 bits' advertised itself.
I keep coming back to this vid. it's such quality content and a great story of a flawed console. I remember the Jaguar64 boxes sitting in my local toy store collecting dust, being priced lower and lower every 6 months. I should've bought one...
When I played this, I never could shake the feeling That I was playing something that was only a slight upgrade from the super FX chip!
It's basically exactly that, better than Sega SVP or Nintendo SFX Chip II 3D polygon performance and limited texture mapping
This is really well done! I especially like the period interviews that I had never seen or heard of before.
If they were half as good as the cars. No, the Jaguar was not that strong. It's graphics could not even compete with the snes and the super fx chip. It's amazing that they were trying to do VR for consumers.
Unpopular Opinion nah the 3d capabilities were better. Asshitty as Cybermorph's draw distance is, it at least runs at a buttery smooth 60 fps, Star Fox is running at like 15 tops, and hear in mind it was a launch title that didn't use much of its power and also didn't have any CPUs built into the cart like the SuperFX did. That said Atari should have probably released the Panther instead in 91, maybe they could have stood a chance since they clearly weren't utilizing the Jaguar hardware enough anyway and they still had some brand recognition then that was further dwindled in 93.
The Jag was more powerful than the SNES+SuperFX chip in every way. Atari just didn't have the time or money to develop AAA games to take proper advantage of it.
yeh but he's doing coding that few people even did for another 20 years..
Oh wicked man! Always seeing this video around, but just realised the Leftover Culture Review made it into the resources section! Really appreciate the link man, and all the hours and hours of effort that go into making a video like this. Such amazing quality. Thank you.
I bought one of these in 1996 really cheap from an EB games store. I already had a PS1 and a Sega Saturn, so I didn't buy this for it's stunning 3D graphics. I bought it for three reasons. First it was cheep. Second was for Tempest 2000. And third was for the virtual light machine. Tempest was one of my favourite games ever, and the 2000 version has an awesome soundtrack. Many an evening in Uni was wasted getting wasted and playing Tempest 2000, or just tripping to the VLM. That Jeff Minter is a great designer and programmer.