I remember being a lurker on GEnie BBS in 94. T-Bird was unforgettably cruel. Hopefully he received therapy and found his respect, kindness, and empathly glands. Obviously their game came out and pushed the limits of the system. They appear to be the Jaguar's anchor nowadays. I'm happy for them-- genuinely. I'm hopeful life is better. Edited to tone it down after hearing good things in the community about their Jaguar support.
I saw the Battlesphere team publicly attack people like Matthew Gosling of Zero 5 fame, Jeff Minter etc. They came across as very arrogant at the time. No matter what Battlesphere got from the hardware, it paled in comparison to what the Psygnosis team got out of the Colony Wars series on PlayStation.
I was actually pleasantly surprised by the Jag controller. I haven't played a ton with it, but I thought it felt good to use for me for what I did play.
Saying "it's 64bit where it counts" is not admitting anything delinquent. All it's saying is by videogame device standards, it's 64 bit. I had several Jaguar brochures back in 90s which stated the 64 bit data bus is what made the Jaguar a 64 bit system. It even described the processing as a "64-bit freeway". It said nothing about 64bit processors or 2x 32bit CPUs. In the end, bits don't mean anything if you don't know how to use them.
I picked up my Jaguar in November of 1993. It was still technically in the "test market" phase, not yet the nationwide roll-out, so there was a dearth of games for it until late 1994. I have almost all the games for it (not Battlesphere, I put my email address on the list of buyers then lost that address when I changed over to a better ISP, and I've hated myself ever since) and the Jag CD drive. I even have Aircars, bought when it was only offered as a mail-order game, before its wider release with the age rating on it. Yeah, I can see why Atari management decided not to publish it. I'm astounded by how much Jaguars and games are going for now. A great retro game shop in the area had a boxed one for $500 at one point, and the boxed games rarely dipped below $100. I can honestly say "I was into the Jaguar before it was cool". Favorite games are Battlemorph, I-War, Hover Strike Unconquered Lands, Ultra Vortek, Missile Command 3D, Iron Soldier, AvP, and Doom.
Yeah, I got mine for Christmas in 1993, along with Cybermorph (pack-in) and Trevor McFur (yuck, lol). I was never a huge fan, but I liked some of the stuff on it. Way too much of it was 16-bit-style quick and easy stuff that took zero advantage of the hardware. But when used well, the Jag could produce some decent quality stuff like Tempest 2000, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, AVP, Super Burnout, and some others. Like I said in the video, I have a soft spot for a few games that aren't great like Kasumi Ninja, its port of the Humans, and some other stuff. It's too bad Atari couldn't land big licensees or Japanese devs at the time. Also, that their settlement with Sega never amounted to anything.
Since the beginning of computing, the width of the main data bus has defined what bit width a system is. And a 64-bit data bus allowing two 32-bit chips to execute in parallel is actually pretty advanced. And EGM was wrong to say Atari was just adding up the “bits” of each chip, as (if so) Atari would have been claiming much more than 64-bit if that was the case, so that claim is confused. Fun fact, the Motorola 68000 chip is 32-bit internally but 16-bit externally when communicating with the rest of the motherboard. Another fun fact, the original Mattel Intellivision from 1979 was 16-bit, which proves that the width of the data bus ultimately doesn’t tell you much about how powerful a system is. I enjoyed everything else about the video though. :-)
EGM was basing their slightly sarcastic claim on the two 32-bit chips in the system that run in parallel. For the data bus width determining the system's "bitness" in the past, have to disagree there, especially since several 8-bit systems use busses that are technically 16-bits wide (C64 is one example). The Intellivision CPU is a whole different can of worms 😁 The version of the chip Mattel used primarily worked with 10-bit instructions (decles). Actually already planned on talking about that one in an upcoming video!
@@InglebardGaming Huh... I haven't heard that alleged about the C64 before, and I used the C64 as my primary system for many years. I'd watch a video on that, and will be 100% there for your upcoming Intellivision CPU video! :D But, a couple of exceptions to the rule doesn't necessarily disprove the rule. EG: the 8-88 is internally 16-bit, but the data bus is 8-bit so everyone called 8088-based PC 8-bit.
@@donpalmera What do you base that on? Everything I read online is some variation of this statement: "Internally it was a 32-bit processor, but a 32-bit address and/or data bus would have made it prohibitively expensive, so the 68000 used 24-bit address and 16-bit data lines."
@ScrapKing73 It's part of the reason it can access 64k of RAM, that's a 16-bit number. The largest 8-bit number is 256 (well, 255 when you start at 0).
I enjoyed my time with my Jag and it was nice hardware. The potential was there but with absolutely awful management and the tricky hardware it wasn't meant to be. Also, I liked the feel of the controller myself. My hands aren't huge but smaller controllers are more uncomfortable to me.
Agreed, how anyone in their right mind thought that DOOM was OK to be released in that state for the Saturn is beyond comprehension. In any case, just like the impressive DOOM Resurrection for the 32X, which wasn't totally awful to begin with, and even OptiDOOM for the 3DO improving it quite a lot, I believe at some point, Saturn will have its own improved version.
Blame John Carmack. He hates affine textures and forced the devs of Doom Saturn to scrap their engine and to program a software renderer that only used the two SH-2s and the SCU. If the devs were allowed to use VDP1&2 it would have performed similar to Duke on the Saturn
@@BurritoKingdom I heard it was just a software renderer on only one SH2 cpu. which is 28Mhz. I can believe that. VDP2 can accept geometry co-ordinates to do ground and ceiling. I don't need to tell you , you probably saw Labotomy's Slave Driver games.
@@BurritoKingdom Carmack probably assumed the Saturn could perform similar to the PS1 version (which he himself was involved in porting). PS1 Doom does software rendering but uses a trick to draw the walls using the GPU. I assume said trick won't translate over to the Saturn
I have a problem with your judgement on the controller. I am 72 years old and I bought the Jaguar the first time I saw it in a gaming store here in Louisville Kentucky at a store called videovisions. I personally have had no problems with the buttons or the joypad. I also have talked to 3 different electronics engineers and after looking at all the specs they all said it was rather unusual how they used the chips , but they all said it has a true 64 bit bus and it is capable of sending 64 bits of information over that bus. They also said it would pretty stupid to put a 64 bit bus on the jag if it was only a 32 bit system.
A lot of that is why people still debate if you can consider the Jag 64-bit to this day, 30+ years later. The data bus isn't the only thing to consider in this. And I know the debate isn't going to end now either, so I'm just going to leave all that where it is since I said my piece in the video. I'm not angry with people that disagree and won't attack them, I just don't agree with them. As far as the controller goes, again, opinions will vary. I'm pushing 50 myself and was was in my late teens when I first got the system. There have only been two controllers when I was young that physically hurt my hands to use and they were the Atari 7800 (joystick, never tried its gamepad) and the Jag. I stand by it being one of the worst first party dpads I've ever used. It really needed to be taller, it was like someone took the TG16 dpad , which was already problematic itself and amplified its issues. Playing stuff like Kasumi Ninja that required rolling motions was a nightmare for me. But again, I understand we're different and have different experiences with things. If you like it and never had issues with it, I'm not going to try to convince you its bad, but that was my experience with it and I've used a LOT of controllers over the decades.
@@InglebardGamingI have to agree with the original poster, I loved the feel of it. I was about 28 yo, I wear XL gloves. It felt perfect like a P226. The The joypad isn't as precise as a PSP but I liked it. What I didn't like was that the games were not games; they were tech demos. Graphics and game engines felt amateur at best. But at the time, being a professional 3D guy, I was happy to play with real-time 3D even if low quality, without rendering. Tempest 2000 was great but needed a spinner. I was in love with virtual racing and multi-player War birds on the Lynx at the time, and the Jag, the perfect platform to play these types of games-- didn't. AvP was the best Doom-like, but like you said good games were thin.
@@InglebardGamingThe keyboard controller was an attempt to lure developers into porting over complex simulation games from the PC to the Jaguar, these always required a lot of keyboard controls. Atari wanted people like Microprose (who began very early work on Jaguar Gunship 2000),D.I.D (TFX), Spectrum H. (Falcon) on board.
I think the reason why was because when Atari released the console with the controller, the d-pad was mushy and comfortable, while the one that Ingle talked about was the later version controller. For that one, for some reason they made it stiff. The way you can tell which one it is was the original had a gray d-pad while for the stiff one, the d-pad was black
@jakobe856 I had/have original controllers from the launch of the system in NY when it was technically a test market. I always thought the dpad was terrible on the jag pad, not even close to what Nintendo and Sega had out at the time. Definitely a thumb killer.
From what I understand, the Jaguar’s official development tools were weak and/or broken which probably helped push developers to embrace the more familiar 68000 over the custom Tom & Jerry chips.
According to Rob Nicholson of HMS, Jaguar hardware needed at least another 2 revisions to fix the bugs. As for development tools, they were terrible and when coders complained, Leonard Tramiel would blame their lack of coding skills, rather than admit the fault lay with Dev tools and bugged hardware.
Jag always seemed like the case of unexplored potential for me. I don't think a single game in its library comes close to squeezing anywhere near full power out of it. Another thing that doesn't help matters is how poor most games are in terms of presentation (with few exception). Hire artists, guys! Either that, or make Jag dev tools simple enough to be used by artists themselves, kinda like GameMaker or Godot.
It definitely had potential for greater things. There were some interesting approaches to the hardware and it was pretty good at 2D stuff unlike some other systems of the era (3DO). It had definite issues holding it back, though, like the procesing cost of texture mapping... that alone would have kept it behind the curve against polygonal games on other systems. I would really have liked to see some of that 2D power exploited and more stuff like Super Burnout that had sort of that super scaler look.
@@InglebardGamingCommercial titles like Skyhammer, Iron Solider 2 etc pushed the system, hard, Doom by John Carmack's own admission, could of been better if coded from the ground up for the hardware. Battlesphere and WTR Racing ciders have admitted there would be slight performance increases with further optimisation to their game engines, but look at Hoverstrike.. The CD version saw code moved to the GPU and only a minimal increase in frame rate performance.
LOL! That is hilarious! And since that evil Theranos president Elizabeth Holmes liked to dress like Steve Jobs with the black turtle neck sweaters, you gotta get an Apple Pippin angle in there somehow.
Sales guy tried to stop me from purchasing a Jaguar. Wish I had listened to him. McFur wasn't all that fun despite being an R-Type clone. So much promise. Bad marketing, so--so games and no controller stick.
Oh boy...I could tell stories..but I will spare you all. Still have my Jaguar and JagCD. Many games including many homebrew turtles and conversions. Have Battlesphere Gold. Atari was in a tough spot at the time. Juggernauts like Sega and Nintendo has far more resources at in the 90's. I am grateful and glad Atari took one last try. There are some good and decent games for the system. Unfortunately some are complete garbage...(Checkered Flag). Don't think JagVR would have saved it. Maybe had it been released in 94 along with the CD unit. Both were too little too late despite enhancing the system.
There was a website (possible atari site? I can't remember) selling the Jaguars and the CD for $49 each around 1995/96 so I ordered 1 of each. I ended up getting 2 Jaguars. I emailed them saying I wanted a Jaguar and a Jag CD. They told me to keep the 2nd Jaguar and sent me the CD Unit next day. I still have them 😁 they were already dying or dead but I still had fun with em
Yeah, they were deeply discounted toward the end, a few places were clearancing them out. I'm pretty sure Tiger Direct was one of the big ones, was it them?
#7- the case ended up being bought by AtariAge - so when Atari bought AtariAge last year...the case is now home. I would expect to see a Jag mini in the future.
Yeah, it definitely has atmosphere. I made a lot of progress in it but never finished it. I find it really hard to stick with games that have no in-game music, the silence just makes them seem dull to me after a while. Still, I think I'll see it through one of these days.
@@InglebardGamingI played all 3 campaigns to completion at the time, The Marine is definitely the strongest, the Predator one is OK, but the Alien one is far too flawed. Regarding no in-game music on the game.. AVP producer Purple Hampton, Retro Gamer magazine issue 57, page 30. "In some instances what may have been a limitation turned into an identifying feature in the game. So when we found that the memory limitations weren't going to let us have a movie-like symphonic score, we opted to go the other direction, and create an eerie soundscape from the ambient space station noise. The result added a lot of dramatic tension and captured the spooky feeling of being alone - until a threatening Predator clicking sound appeared nearby."
I had a jaguar, and while I didn't love it, it had some fun with it. Had way more fun with it than the damn gamecube. Now THAT is a system I regret getting.
As usual, not much was news, but there were still crumbs of shiny new things that I didn't know despite decades of study. The best part, from the perspective of someone who never got in breathing distance of a real one, was the description of how it feels to actually use that controller. I was an Intellivision fan, back in the day. My nostalgia was never going to steer me right. Complaints? None that aren't pedantic nitpicks. The screen ratio was only an issue when the tiny car sprite kept transforming as it changed directions. Also, no mention of the CRY palette? It blew me away when I finally got my hands on Atari 50th. It's the one decisive advantage it had over the Playstation. Jeff Minter's update to Tempest isn't as impressive without it. Like I said, pedantic nitpicking. My own list doesn't exist, and it wouldn't be anywhere near as good. Thank you for making these, so we don't need to. One last thing: What were the other rumored names for the Midsummer project? So far as I know, Puma was just a joke?
Awesome video. I had a Jaguar on release back in the day but only ever owed Doom, AvP, and the pack-in game Cybermorph. For me, it was the cheapest way to play Doom at a decent frame rate. My PC of the time being lacking. I have one again now, and even my favourite game AvP feels disappointing to revisit. I want to love the Jag. I really do. But even in the context of the time it doesn't hold up well. I think it's best left as a memory.
Yeah, Jag came out at a weird time of transition in gaming and Atari didn't really get the direction where everything was going (texture mapped polygons) and obviously weren't exactly the best at business in general. It could have been saved by top tier games, but that just wasn't meant to be. There are still some good games on Jag, but frankly the PlayStation and Saturn had vastly superior libraries.
I used to own a complete retail collection (including cd stuff) that I bought brand new. I got my buddies into the system and showed them a unique perspective on gaming. Good times!
Always wanted one and ended up buying one years after it's demise but before it became sought after as I paid $50 for one brand new. Not too long ago I purchased the Game Drive and the re-released pro controller(an official pro controller price had skyrocketed by this time). Was eventually wanting to add it to my games setup and start playing that was until the BigPEmu was released, so now all my original hardware Jaguar stuff is nicely boxed and unused & any time I feel like playing the Jag I use the emulator.
Great video with some lesser known bits! I do think it’s very possible that the final version of “Fight for Life!” could have played quite a bit better than the released version since optimization usually comes at the end of development, but it’s unlikely the models, graphics or animation would have been improved on.
Thanks! Personally I don't think there's anything salvageable in Fight for Life, that game is just a disaster from start to finish. They really needed a team of programmers instead of relying on one (they did have other people doing some of the graphics and music and stuff at least). The gameplay in it is just embarrassingly bad, even if the stories were true, that I didn't talk about, that it was accidently labeled for "review" instead of "preview"... it should never have been shown off in the state it was in. But that's just my opinion, anyway!
Technically yes, I should have clarified the 7800 was the last 'new' console Atari made before the Jag since the XE is an extension of their older 8-bit computer line and uses the same hardware of the 65XE.
@@MarginalSC I'm the oddball for sure, but would take a Jaguar port of Pit Fighter over Mortal Kombat. When I first saw PitFighter in the Arcades, its really was impressive- the first time I was confused as to how it looked so "real"- at the time.
@@johnwayne9933 I like Pitfighter. It's a product of its time and SF2 eclipsed those older brawlers, but Pit Fighter was the most advanced and well designed brawler of its time. Getting a proper home port that could handle the scaling etc (and doesn't have the weird run too fast timing issue of the Williams Arcade Collection) would be amazing.
@@MarginalSC Yep, the PS2 version plays way to fast, the best fix is still the Genesis or Emulation. But, I would have loved to see this on the Jaguar, and being an Atari Corp arcade game, just would seem to be where it belongs, "Pitfighter" really seems to fit with Jaguar's "odd-man out" vibe for sure.
I could never understand why any game would possibly be released without gameplay music... Like just why? Especially when there is music in the start screen/other parts of the game.
Atari never quite got out of its old ways of the 2600. I still consider the option not to have the POKEY as the sound chip for the 7800, and instead keep the TIA only was one of Atari's biggest mistakes. But regarding Doom, to be fair, I can remember playing it with Beck's Odelay album playing. The PC even had the option of sound effects only, And really, the PC is by far the best way to play Doom.
@@InglebardGamingin the case of AVP, a full, orchestral soundtrack had been planned, but there simply wasn't room on even the bigger cartridge Atari finally signed off on. Purple Hampton has stated this.
I think the Jaguar was the first game system to have 64 bit processors in it and a 64 bit data data but but a True 64 Bit system it was not. It was 64 bits where the System Designers thought it needed to be to make the most out of the Ram they were using. It was enough 64 bit to keep the debate going for alot longer then it needed to be but I think in the end most everyone will admit - the Jaguar is not a real 64 bit system.
Ah, I thought I did when I mentioned the good games on the system, I wrote it in my original script, anyway. But that game is Super Burnout and it's definitely one of the better Jag games once you get used to the controls and the extreme sliding on the corners.
They tried to get third party support. But really, what did they have to entice them with? The units sold of the hardware was very low, manufacturing cartridges for it cost way more than CDs for the other systems that were already out (3DO) or on the way (Saturn and PlayStation), and it quickly developed a rep for substandard games. For Atari to have done things right, they would have needed way more money than they had to put into the Jag, they would have needed some people with real industry know how-how and experience and they would have had to secure a few big name third-party games as exclusives. Imagine if they'd had exclusive rights to say Mortal Kombat II even just for 6 months. Or if they had the exclusive console Doom for a year and had time to polish it up and add solid in-game music and maybe improved performance a bit.
So good thing about the Jaguar is JRISC. JRISC has kinda low cycle efficiency, but a deep pipeline for a fast clock. Atari should have allowed a clock multiplier (skipped the clock halver in Jerry) for the core : integer ALU (Logic and Add) (not MUL, DIV, or Shift, Load Store). Instruction decode , pure register access. Two instructions share a 32 bit word. So fetch already runs at the slower clock. Also I don’t understand what the problem is with caching. JRISC only needs a code cache. ScoreBoard and loadP are powerful for data. But a real code cache with lines is mandatory for C-language. Intel 486 and SH2 have a 4 associative cache. N64 has a single associative cache , why? If the Jaguar was 64 bit, it could use quads of 64-bit phrases. 3 phrases store data, and on phrase stores 3 addresses of 21 bit each . 21 is enough. The address bus from the 68k only has 23 bit. With 4x16 bits, the cache only needs 21. And the address of the cacheline is also some bits of the address. So could store 20 bits, plus a counter to replace slots round robin. Address 0 is never cached.
I don't Wether you can still get them but someone was making a Bluetooth adapter so you could connect t your favourite modern day controller to your Jag
At that time itanium could have worked. DRAM access needed 2 or 4 cycles. JRISC register file only has one read port. GBA ARM CPU has two register write to store the result of a 32x32 multiplication. Wouldn’t it be nice to store this in a 64 bit register?Multiply and accumulate on 64 bit. So a 64 bit instruction would fetch operands from regfile, DRAM, SRAM, division unit, and writeBack register (as it does now), but you could use the long instruction word to select bits from all these. Condition flags for vector elements. Load instruction in parallel. Double Float instructions naturally defined by bitfields. 32 bit immediate values would fit in. MIPS and RISCV need special instructions for this.
Jaguar could have used its 16 bit instructions, but try to run 4 in parallel. Solve all the dependencies with some clever logic and execute in as few cycles as possible-mostly Superscalar.
x86 (and its 64-bit counterpart) use variable instruction lengths, this makes decoding a lot more complicated than other systems, where instructions are fixed length (which are easier to decode since you always know where the next instruction starts without decoding the last one, but may need multiple instructions to achieve what a single x86 instruction does). Long mode (in other words running the CPU in 64 bit mode) matters because it means you can address more than 4 GB memory. For the x86 architecture, it also means having more general purpose registers available. This is a big deal because x86 originally only had 8 such registers, as opposed to 16 on the 68000 and 32 on PowerPC and ARM.
@@Phredreeke It may take more RISC instruction to write by hand by the assembly programmer than with a CISC, but it does not matter at execution because the CISC will do multiple RISC internally. Also with Risc-V assembler there are multiple pseudo-instruction that the assembler will convert for you into a sequence of instructions. RISC is the only possible future of computing because decoding instructions on CISC require more metal and transistors than actually exectuting the instructions. Also with prediction branching, CISC becomes a nightmare internally. CISC belong to the past, RISC is the only possible future of computing.
@@Phredreeke Arm in the Archimedes has 16 registers as does the SH2 in Sega consoles. Yeah, I don’t know why people love variable instruction length on 8bit CPUs .
I don't think Sam had the foggiest idea of what he was doing. Every Atari exec of the era seemed to be scrambling around like a chick with its head cut off. There was no real strategy, there was no quality control on the software, there was no vision for the platform. It was just "Hey we made this thing, now lets find someone to make games for it!" I feel like if Atari had real vision for the Jag, and worked to make sure that the original games for it were much higher quality and emphasized the things that made the hardware unique, they would have had a real shot. Bonus fact that I almost included in the video: Atari sued Sega and won during this era (technically there was a settlement), with Sega having to invest in and end up owning a piece of Atari. As part of a resultant agreement, they could have ported up to five Sega games to the Jaguar and Sega could have cross licensed up to five Jag games. Not a single game ever came out of this agreement on either system. Atari could have, for example, made their own versions of Saturn games like Virtua Fighter, Virtua Racing, Daytona (yeah, right), or maybe more realistically 2d stuff like Astal or Guardian Heroes. The only stipulations were the games had to be over a year old and couldn't be a mascot or something weird like that. I don't know why they never did this, I suspect it was a lack of developers that could take on and produce these projects.
@@InglebardGamingAs an Atari 800XL, then 520STFM owner, 2600 owner before that, the old saying about Tramiel era Atari rang true.. Why buy an Atari machine today, when the Tramiels will only annouce a newer, more powerful machine, tommorrow. Tramiel era Atari loved to get free press by announcing new hardware that was either vapour ware.. CDST, Panther, ST Console.. Or never lived upto the hype, the Amiga beating STE, lied about sound channels, weaker Blitter, still only 16 colours on screen.
No, that's not the reason SNK claimed it was 24-bit. I did an 11 Facts video on the Neo Geo, too and talk about that as point number 1. Spoiler: it has a 24-bit address bus. Also, if we were going to go by the example of a 68000 plus a z80 equalling a 24-bit system, then loads of arcade games would be 24-bit, everything on system 16 or cps I for example, as well as the Sega Genesis and plenty of other platforms. It was a very common configuration.
That's pretty much how many of the consoles back then did the math. it was the sum total of the chipset used. Thus, you have two main processors that were 32 bit, so working together = 64 bit.
@@InglebardGaming - The Jaguar did, with using dual 32-bit CPUs. And it is possible that loads of arcade games could be 24 bit. There was no exact math, and there are many technicalities in all the old consoles and arcades. After all, the Intellivision had a 16 bit CPU, even though most would consider it at best an early 8 bit console. So the math has always been a bit fuzzy and depending on what the companies wanted to focus on what the console's main capabilities were to highlight to the public.
Jaguar was a fantastic scam, I, like many poor victims, remember "Avoid to the ground" and "Were did you learn to fly" with horror. My only sweet memory is Tempest, then I back to Saturn
Is Doom on the Jaguar 3D? It doesnt appear to have the slight distortion of a 2.5 raycast engine. You can tell when you study the in game movement and look at corners and ceiling edges. I notice the same difference when using Zdoom and switching from software to the 3D renderer.
By the same rationale, because 99.99% of N64 games never fully utilized the console's 64 bit capabilities, and the ports sent to it were developed in 32 bit, then the N64 was not a 64 bit console because no one used its 64 bit capabilities. Heck, the Game Cube was developed with 32 bit tech because no one was using 64 bit tech because 32 bit was just good enough. As it is, 64-bit didn't get fully realized until the 2010's when multicore processors and computers needed more than 4 GB RAM to be able to keep up with growing demands of 3D modeling, animations, and graphics. Also when talking about chips and chip sets, consider that it's ridiculous to compare an Pentium i5 9th generation to an i5 14th generation, and more so to say the Pentium II is just as good, or exactly the same as both i5 chips because they're all Pentium chips. Because that's what a lot these echo chambers on the retro gaming YT channel seen to be doing these days, regurgitating the same Wki talking points without even a thought about what went into decades of development on the chips that improved how they worked over time.
Agreed! It was basically just a video crapping on the system by regurgitating talking points that people who have never actually researched the system properly always spew. So boring.
Echo chamber? Not exactly. As a Jag owner from the start I know the system has its die hard defenders and what the community is like. I even talked about how interesting the aftermarket/homebrew scene is on the system and showed the in development MK port. I didn't bring up the N64 at all because this video wasn't about the N64. If I ever end up doing a video on that system it'll be treated fairly and claims by Nintendo would be evaluated against the tech in the system and what they actually did with it. I wasn't easy on Nintendo in my SNES video, so I'm really not sure what your point was here in bringing up the N64.
Yeah! The guy who made it didn't do any research at all! He definitely didn't provide links, or direct quotes or citations in the description! He definitely didn't show actual magazine articles during the video! And what, no brand new information on this system that was discontinued 30 years ago? Ridiculous! I mean, he couldn't have done any research at all!
Here are the things that are 64-bit on the Jaguar. The data bus, the blitter and the object processor (the latter two both incorporated in the Tom chip). The data bus doesn't correlate to the CPU's bitness. The original Pentium had a 64 bit data bus, most computers nowadays have a 128-bit data bus (assuming you have two or more RAM modules plugged in), and the Xbox Series X has a 320-bit data bus. As for the blitter and object processors, both of those are fixed function. Doom has already been mentioned as repurposing the CPU in the Jerry chip for collision detection instead of music. You can't do that with the blitter or object processor.
@@InglebardGaming - The N64 mention was a comparison in reasoning, in rationale, not about it being covered in the video. The point is that both were 64-bit systems, even if they had 32 bit capabilities, even if the majority of games at the time were already being developed in 32-bit even before being ported onto the consoles, so they never realized any of the 64-bit capabilities on the majority of the games because there was no point to, because 32 bit looked good enough. Heck, a lot of devs would still be running 32-bit XP on their computers even to this day because 32-bit tech had such a longstanding legacy reach of most of a decade. That was not the atmosphere in the 90's when the Jaguar came out, when a new computer you might of bought from Best Buy was already behind the curb of the rapidly growing tech at the time. Even with game consoles, We had the PC engine that was questionable if it was indeed 16-bit, and it could be argued that it wasn't a 'true' or 'fully' 16-bit console, to the Dreamcast that claimed to be 128 bit. Never mind that even today there is no such thing as a 128 bit operating system, unless it's somewhere still being worked on under some code project we have yet to hear about. The point is, even if the Jaguar was 'fully' or 'tuly' 64 bit, people were not programming for it, nor were there any dev kits capable of utilizing 64-bit.
What I like about the Jaguar that is not present in the Playstation 1 or Sega Saturn is that the Jaguar is a cartridge based 32 bit machine. This means that you can plug in a cartridge like the Game Drive, which has an FPGA on it and use this to increase the performance of the Jaguar. So if you really want to see the Jaguar truly deliver 64 bits, you can do this by programming a custom CPU within the FPGA of the Game Drive flash cart and give the jaguar some extra power. No joke.
@@Mrshoujo before we had the emulator. Workstation? At least a TT had a reasonable price unlike the SGI based development system for N64. I like how the development kit basically just has the full memory (RAM) and cartridge space (ROM) before Tramiel cuts down on cost and reduces it for the consumer console.
Atari statement at the time : Ted Hoff from Atari being asked the questions. AEO] Did you have anything to do with the decision to rework Fight for Life? [Ted] Not really. You did. My staff was telling me what the onliners were saying based on early magazine reviews and I thought the gamers spoke clearly on what they want. [AEO] How many programmers were working on that title, given that its Japanese counterparts usually have teams of programmers on such projects? Also, what is to become of FFL now? [Ted] Francois Bertrand is working with Bill Rehbock and his staff to review their needs on that project. Enough work has to be done that many parts of it will need to be reviewed anew. Since it clearly will not be something ready this Holiday season, I’m demanding that no hasty decisions to be made. Ted Hoff A reworked prototype of FFL was sent to ECTS for showing with the intentions… of getting feedback from the developer community for comment. we are… encouraged by the response and an update will be forthcoming.
Inglebard. You have to look at what a 64 bit number actually _is._ It goes up to 4 billion. That's pretty much it. Useful for big gigantic numbers. But that's just big numbers. Not that useful. Nintendo's first 64 bit console is the Switch! It's made by NiVidia so it's overengineered. The Jag _is_ 64 bit's where it counts. Which is the size of the bus. A bus bandwidth of 64bits is a real number that is used in the system alot and it goes to working ram. Do Tom and Jerry have 64bit instructions? Maybe not, I couldn't confirm it. But it's irrelevant as the only 64bit thing about the N64 is a couple of instructions and registers that made development more difficult and could arguably be considered a bug. Put there 100% for marketing purposes. Meanwhile, the Jag has that bus so both chips and the cpu _can_ operate at full speed independently without a buffer through a very impressive full and true 64bit bus pipeline. The N64 had a 9bit system bus I think, how weird is that?
"the main cpu of the unit...thr 68K which, is regarded as a 16bit processor..." Because it has a 16bit external bus and ALU (bit's counted per cycle) but _does_ have 32bit instructions that take two cycles to process. Making it a hybrid, as the Z80 was an 8/16bit hybrid and the SNES is an 8/16 hybrid. Although the instructions in the SNES are purely for show because it has an 8bit external bus.
Let me break out my nerd card here. Um actually, the biggest 64-bit unsigned integer is 18,446,744,073,709,551,615, which is 18+ quintillion. The largest 32-bit unsigned integer is just over 4 billion. I teach IT, btw 😁 Just about every early console manufacturer engaged in bit shenanigans back in those days. Still, I don't think by any realistic measure that Jag can be considered a 64-bit system considering so many of its limitations. I haven't looked enough into the N64 to talk confidently about its technical side at this time. Maybe sometime down the road!
I think the fact the N64 bus is 9bit says it all. The Jaguar architecture was hampered primarily by not having many eyes on it and actual bugs from the Trameil school of product design. But remember the bus is really important because every time you add a bit you add the possibility of more data per cycle to move. The fact the N64 has such a small bus bit is because the bandwidth is compensated by a fast clock rate. So you see that the two risc cpu's and the 68kcpu are working together genuinely. So by that fact alone, the bit rate of the system if 64bit and it's pretty clear really. Adding an instruction like in the SNES does not matter because the data is going to need two cycles to move the data through the external bus eventually and the clock speed/bit width is the speed of the bus.
Every contemporary newspaper article I've read from the time said distribution was part of the deal. One example: www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-06-29-fi-8269-story.html
@InglebardGaming Distributing implies that retailers contacted IBM to order products. I am 99% sure that never happened. Retailers ordered product through Atari.
@@InglebardGamingThe official statement at the time: IBM, working with a 30-month contract worth $500 million, will be responsible for component sourcing, quality testing, console assembly, packaging and distribution, and will build the system at its Charlotte, N.C., facility. The motherboard will come from an IBM-approved manufacturer, said Herbert Watkins, director of application solutions manufacturing at IBM Charlotte.
If only the jahduo was released, and if atari did came up with atari classics with many of their 8bit games on it including nintendo & sega games on it as well, i definitely would,ve loved the atari jaguar, what a misopertunity from atari to NOT releasing the atari jaduo because that 2 in 1 combo atari jaguar system could,ve compeated waaay better against the playstation,sega saturn and the N64, But also because the atari jagduo looks waaay more cooler then the atari jaguar, And yes that’s right, as a atari fan i dare to say that the atari jaguar just looks ugly, it’s just as ugly looking as the nec super grafix 16 system,yug.
When the Panther is so buggy, why did the Jaguar end up with its object processor? Whoever thought it would be great idea for videoDMA to have write permission to DRAM???
@@TheLairdsLair Sprite is like C64 , where the sprite patterns for the line are loaded 1:1 into shift registers. Then the C64 can expand them in x direction on the fly without hogging memory. Lynx only has a blitter. It loads patterns from RAM and stores them in RAM. This is shared RAM, so it does not care if it is written to or read from. Nothing is idle. SRAM has no fast page mode. So what of these do you mean? Jaguar has a linebuffer like the SEGA Genesis. Just the genesis draws to the buffer in horizontal retrace, while Jaguar has a double buffer for a better duty cycle.
@@TheLairdsLair According to Jeff Minter, the Panther's sprite hardware was very similar to the object processor in the Jaguar, to the point where both had the same limitations. Putting too many sprites on a single scan-line, for instance, would require too much time to draw the line and caused a "tearing" effect in the affected row. Ah, I always wondered when exactly the buffers swap. Now I just need to find out if the earliest the buffers swap is when the last pixel has just been drawn. How did Atari manage the async event? Pixel clock is not system clock, but better should exactly be in sync on both borders.
@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 research? I only research first hand for money it seems, and not about games . To relax I depend on stuff discussed in forums. There is no clear explanation why Atari had Jaguar vs that other console. How difficult is a hybrid design or to merge designs? So there may have been alternative designs as in small details. Jaguar has JRISC. For me it looks like they cut out the middle man for sound. It is not a fundamental change. It explains the low quality integration.
My dude, don't start off by telling me you owned a Jaguar back in 93; that does not lend credibility to your opinion so much as it tells me you make bad purchasing decisions.
Depends on when you bought it. I still kick myself for not getting one, and a Jag CD back when you could get the packaged bundles with a choice of games for nearly half the price of the main console on its own when it was new.
Great video I didn't know a lot about Jaguar consoles, they were never sold in my country, and I am 1 of those people that mocks anyone that owns an Atari game console 😂
Never ask a woman her age, a man his salary or an Atari fan how many bits the Jaguar is
I remember being a lurker on GEnie BBS in 94. T-Bird was unforgettably cruel. Hopefully he received therapy and found his respect, kindness, and empathly glands.
Obviously their game came out and pushed the limits of the system. They appear to be the Jaguar's anchor nowadays. I'm happy for them-- genuinely. I'm hopeful life is better.
Edited to tone it down after hearing good things in the community about their Jaguar support.
I saw the Battlesphere team publicly attack people like Matthew Gosling of Zero 5 fame, Jeff Minter etc.
They came across as very arrogant at the time.
No matter what Battlesphere got from the hardware, it paled in comparison to what the Psygnosis team got out of the Colony Wars series on PlayStation.
I was actually pleasantly surprised by the Jag controller. I haven't played a ton with it, but I thought it felt good to use for me for what I did play.
Saying "it's 64bit where it counts" is not admitting anything delinquent. All it's saying is by videogame device standards, it's 64 bit. I had several Jaguar brochures back in 90s which stated the 64 bit data bus is what made the Jaguar a 64 bit system. It even described the processing as a "64-bit freeway". It said nothing about 64bit processors or 2x 32bit CPUs. In the end, bits don't mean anything if you don't know how to use them.
I picked up my Jaguar in November of 1993. It was still technically in the "test market" phase, not yet the nationwide roll-out, so there was a dearth of games for it until late 1994. I have almost all the games for it (not Battlesphere, I put my email address on the list of buyers then lost that address when I changed over to a better ISP, and I've hated myself ever since) and the Jag CD drive. I even have Aircars, bought when it was only offered as a mail-order game, before its wider release with the age rating on it. Yeah, I can see why Atari management decided not to publish it.
I'm astounded by how much Jaguars and games are going for now. A great retro game shop in the area had a boxed one for $500 at one point, and the boxed games rarely dipped below $100. I can honestly say "I was into the Jaguar before it was cool". Favorite games are Battlemorph, I-War, Hover Strike Unconquered Lands, Ultra Vortek, Missile Command 3D, Iron Soldier, AvP, and Doom.
Yeah, I got mine for Christmas in 1993, along with Cybermorph (pack-in) and Trevor McFur (yuck, lol).
I was never a huge fan, but I liked some of the stuff on it. Way too much of it was 16-bit-style quick and easy stuff that took zero advantage of the hardware. But when used well, the Jag could produce some decent quality stuff like Tempest 2000, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, AVP, Super Burnout, and some others. Like I said in the video, I have a soft spot for a few games that aren't great like Kasumi Ninja, its port of the Humans, and some other stuff.
It's too bad Atari couldn't land big licensees or Japanese devs at the time. Also, that their settlement with Sega never amounted to anything.
Since the beginning of computing, the width of the main data bus has defined what bit width a system is. And a 64-bit data bus allowing two 32-bit chips to execute in parallel is actually pretty advanced. And EGM was wrong to say Atari was just adding up the “bits” of each chip, as (if so) Atari would have been claiming much more than 64-bit if that was the case, so that claim is confused.
Fun fact, the Motorola 68000 chip is 32-bit internally but 16-bit externally when communicating with the rest of the motherboard.
Another fun fact, the original Mattel Intellivision from 1979 was 16-bit, which proves that the width of the data bus ultimately doesn’t tell you much about how powerful a system is.
I enjoyed everything else about the video though. :-)
EGM was basing their slightly sarcastic claim on the two 32-bit chips in the system that run in parallel.
For the data bus width determining the system's "bitness" in the past, have to disagree there, especially since several 8-bit systems use busses that are technically 16-bits wide (C64 is one example).
The Intellivision CPU is a whole different can of worms 😁 The version of the chip Mattel used primarily worked with 10-bit instructions (decles). Actually already planned on talking about that one in an upcoming video!
68000 is not 32bit internally. It has 32bit registers etc but it works on at most 16bits at a time.
@@InglebardGaming Huh... I haven't heard that alleged about the C64 before, and I used the C64 as my primary system for many years. I'd watch a video on that, and will be 100% there for your upcoming Intellivision CPU video! :D But, a couple of exceptions to the rule doesn't necessarily disprove the rule. EG: the 8-88 is internally 16-bit, but the data bus is 8-bit so everyone called 8088-based PC 8-bit.
@@donpalmera What do you base that on? Everything I read online is some variation of this statement: "Internally it was a 32-bit processor, but a 32-bit address and/or data bus would have made it prohibitively expensive, so the 68000 used 24-bit address and 16-bit data lines."
@ScrapKing73 It's part of the reason it can access 64k of RAM, that's a 16-bit number. The largest 8-bit number is 256 (well, 255 when you start at 0).
I like the controller.
Study a block diagram on the Jaguar architecture. The data bus is a full 64-bits wide.
I prefer DOOM without music.
Hated the PC MIDI music, but man the Playstation music, baby crying etc, added amazing atmosphere.
I enjoyed my time with my Jag and it was nice hardware. The potential was there but with absolutely awful management and the tricky hardware it wasn't meant to be. Also, I liked the feel of the controller myself. My hands aren't huge but smaller controllers are more uncomfortable to me.
Agreed, how anyone in their right mind thought that DOOM was OK to be released in that state for the Saturn is beyond comprehension. In any case, just like the impressive DOOM Resurrection for the 32X, which wasn't totally awful to begin with, and even OptiDOOM for the 3DO improving it quite a lot, I believe at some point, Saturn will have its own improved version.
Blame John Carmack. He hates affine textures and forced the devs of Doom Saturn to scrap their engine and to program a software renderer that only used the two SH-2s and the SCU. If the devs were allowed to use VDP1&2 it would have performed similar to Duke on the Saturn
@@BurritoKingdom I heard it was just a software renderer on only one SH2 cpu. which is 28Mhz. I can believe that. VDP2 can accept geometry co-ordinates to do ground and ceiling.
I don't need to tell you , you probably saw Labotomy's Slave Driver games.
@@BurritoKingdom Carmack probably assumed the Saturn could perform similar to the PS1 version (which he himself was involved in porting). PS1 Doom does software rendering but uses a trick to draw the walls using the GPU. I assume said trick won't translate over to the Saturn
I have a problem with your judgement on the controller. I am 72 years old and I bought the Jaguar the first time I saw it in a gaming store here in Louisville Kentucky at a store called videovisions. I personally have had no problems with the buttons or the joypad. I also have talked to 3 different electronics engineers and after looking at all the specs they all said it was rather unusual how they used the chips , but they all said it has a true 64 bit bus and it is capable of sending 64 bits of information over that bus. They also said it would pretty stupid to put a 64 bit bus on the jag if it was only a 32 bit system.
A lot of that is why people still debate if you can consider the Jag 64-bit to this day, 30+ years later. The data bus isn't the only thing to consider in this. And I know the debate isn't going to end now either, so I'm just going to leave all that where it is since I said my piece in the video. I'm not angry with people that disagree and won't attack them, I just don't agree with them.
As far as the controller goes, again, opinions will vary. I'm pushing 50 myself and was was in my late teens when I first got the system. There have only been two controllers when I was young that physically hurt my hands to use and they were the Atari 7800 (joystick, never tried its gamepad) and the Jag. I stand by it being one of the worst first party dpads I've ever used. It really needed to be taller, it was like someone took the TG16 dpad , which was already problematic itself and amplified its issues. Playing stuff like Kasumi Ninja that required rolling motions was a nightmare for me.
But again, I understand we're different and have different experiences with things. If you like it and never had issues with it, I'm not going to try to convince you its bad, but that was my experience with it and I've used a LOT of controllers over the decades.
@@InglebardGamingI have to agree with the original poster, I loved the feel of it. I was about 28 yo, I wear XL gloves. It felt perfect like a P226. The The joypad isn't as precise as a PSP but I liked it.
What I didn't like was that the games were not games; they were tech demos. Graphics and game engines felt amateur at best. But at the time, being a professional 3D guy, I was happy to play with real-time 3D even if low quality, without rendering.
Tempest 2000 was great but needed a spinner. I was in love with virtual racing and multi-player War birds on the Lynx at the time, and the Jag, the perfect platform to play these types of games-- didn't. AvP was the best Doom-like, but like you said good games were thin.
@@InglebardGamingThe keyboard controller was an attempt to lure developers into porting over complex simulation games from the PC to the Jaguar, these always required a lot of keyboard controls.
Atari wanted people like Microprose (who began very early work on Jaguar Gunship 2000),D.I.D (TFX), Spectrum H. (Falcon) on board.
I think the reason why was because when Atari released the console with the controller, the d-pad was mushy and comfortable, while the one that Ingle talked about was the later version controller. For that one, for some reason they made it stiff. The way you can tell which one it is was the original had a gray d-pad while for the stiff one, the d-pad was black
@jakobe856 I had/have original controllers from the launch of the system in NY when it was technically a test market. I always thought the dpad was terrible on the jag pad, not even close to what Nintendo and Sega had out at the time. Definitely a thumb killer.
From what I understand, the Jaguar’s official development tools were weak and/or broken which probably helped push developers to embrace the more familiar 68000 over the custom Tom & Jerry chips.
According to Rob Nicholson of HMS, Jaguar hardware needed at least another 2 revisions to fix the bugs.
As for development tools, they were terrible and when coders complained, Leonard Tramiel would blame their lack of coding skills, rather than admit the fault lay with Dev tools and bugged hardware.
Jag always seemed like the case of unexplored potential for me. I don't think a single game in its library comes close to squeezing anywhere near full power out of it.
Another thing that doesn't help matters is how poor most games are in terms of presentation (with few exception). Hire artists, guys! Either that, or make Jag dev tools simple enough to be used by artists themselves, kinda like GameMaker or Godot.
It definitely had potential for greater things. There were some interesting approaches to the hardware and it was pretty good at 2D stuff unlike some other systems of the era (3DO). It had definite issues holding it back, though, like the procesing cost of texture mapping... that alone would have kept it behind the curve against polygonal games on other systems.
I would really have liked to see some of that 2D power exploited and more stuff like Super Burnout that had sort of that super scaler look.
@@InglebardGamingCommercial titles like Skyhammer, Iron Solider 2 etc pushed the system, hard, Doom by John Carmack's own admission, could of been better if coded from the ground up for the hardware.
Battlesphere and WTR Racing ciders have admitted there would be slight performance increases with further optimisation to their game engines, but look at Hoverstrike.. The CD version saw code moved to the GPU and only a minimal increase in frame rate performance.
Maybe Theranos could have bought the Jaguar mold for their imaginary product too?
LOL! That is hilarious! And since that evil Theranos president Elizabeth Holmes liked to dress like Steve Jobs with the black turtle neck sweaters, you gotta get an Apple Pippin angle in there somehow.
Sales guy tried to stop me from purchasing a Jaguar. Wish I had listened to him. McFur wasn't all that fun despite being an R-Type clone.
So much promise. Bad marketing, so--so games and no controller stick.
Oh boy...I could tell stories..but I will spare you all. Still have my Jaguar and JagCD. Many games including many homebrew turtles and conversions. Have Battlesphere Gold. Atari was in a tough spot at the time. Juggernauts like Sega and Nintendo has far more resources at in the 90's. I am grateful and glad Atari took one last try. There are some good and decent games for the system. Unfortunately some are complete garbage...(Checkered Flag). Don't think JagVR would have saved it. Maybe had it been released in 94 along with the CD unit. Both were too little too late despite enhancing the system.
There was a website (possible atari site? I can't remember) selling the Jaguars and the CD for $49 each around 1995/96 so I ordered 1 of each. I ended up getting 2 Jaguars. I emailed them saying I wanted a Jaguar and a Jag CD. They told me to keep the 2nd Jaguar and sent me the CD Unit next day. I still have them 😁 they were already dying or dead but I still had fun with em
Yeah, they were deeply discounted toward the end, a few places were clearancing them out. I'm pretty sure Tiger Direct was one of the big ones, was it them?
There's a website still operating for everything ATARI . Best Electronics .
#7- the case ended up being bought by AtariAge - so when Atari bought AtariAge last year...the case is now home. I would expect to see a Jag mini in the future.
AVP was awesome and creepy, definitely was a must play at rhe time. I remember playing as the marine and being freaked out when hearing the Predator.
Yeah, it definitely has atmosphere. I made a lot of progress in it but never finished it. I find it really hard to stick with games that have no in-game music, the silence just makes them seem dull to me after a while.
Still, I think I'll see it through one of these days.
@@InglebardGamingI played all 3 campaigns to completion at the time, The Marine is definitely the strongest, the Predator one is OK, but the Alien one is far too flawed.
Regarding no in-game music on the game..
AVP producer Purple Hampton, Retro Gamer magazine issue 57, page 30.
"In some instances what may have been a limitation turned into
an identifying feature in the game. So when we found that the
memory limitations weren't going to let us have a movie-like
symphonic score, we opted to go the other direction, and create
an eerie soundscape from the ambient space station noise. The
result added a lot of dramatic tension and captured the spooky
feeling of being alone - until a threatening Predator clicking sound
appeared nearby."
I had a jaguar, and while I didn't love it, it had some fun with it. Had way more fun with it than the damn gamecube. Now THAT is a system I regret getting.
Well, can't agree there myself, but if that's how you feel that's how you feel!
As usual, not much was news, but there were still crumbs of shiny new things that I didn't know despite decades of study.
The best part, from the perspective of someone who never got in breathing distance of a real one, was the description of how it feels to actually use that controller.
I was an Intellivision fan, back in the day. My nostalgia was never going to steer me right.
Complaints? None that aren't pedantic nitpicks. The screen ratio was only an issue when the tiny car sprite kept transforming as it changed directions. Also, no mention of the CRY palette? It blew me away when I finally got my hands on Atari 50th. It's the one decisive advantage it had over the Playstation.
Jeff Minter's update to Tempest isn't as impressive without it.
Like I said, pedantic nitpicking. My own list doesn't exist, and it wouldn't be anywhere near as good.
Thank you for making these, so we don't need to.
One last thing:
What were the other rumored names for the Midsummer project?
So far as I know, Puma was just a joke?
Awesome video. I had a Jaguar on release back in the day but only ever owed Doom, AvP, and the pack-in game Cybermorph. For me, it was the cheapest way to play Doom at a decent frame rate. My PC of the time being lacking. I have one again now, and even my favourite game AvP feels disappointing to revisit. I want to love the Jag. I really do. But even in the context of the time it doesn't hold up well. I think it's best left as a memory.
Yeah, Jag came out at a weird time of transition in gaming and Atari didn't really get the direction where everything was going (texture mapped polygons) and obviously weren't exactly the best at business in general. It could have been saved by top tier games, but that just wasn't meant to be. There are still some good games on Jag, but frankly the PlayStation and Saturn had vastly superior libraries.
I used to own a complete retail collection (including cd stuff) that I bought brand new. I got my buddies into the system and showed them a unique perspective on gaming. Good times!
It was definitely unique! I have a good amount of the carts myself.
Always wanted one and ended up buying one years after it's demise but before it became sought after as I paid $50 for one brand new. Not too long ago I purchased the Game Drive and the re-released pro controller(an official pro controller price had skyrocketed by this time). Was eventually wanting to add it to my games setup and start playing that was until the BigPEmu was released, so now all my original hardware Jaguar stuff is nicely boxed and unused & any time I feel like playing the Jag I use the emulator.
Fantastic video...for a quasi proud owner of the jaguar itself
Ha, thanks, my quasi-proud Jag owning friend!
Great video with some lesser known bits! I do think it’s very possible that the final version of “Fight for Life!” could have played quite a bit better than the released version since optimization usually comes at the end of development, but it’s unlikely the models, graphics or animation would have been improved on.
Thanks! Personally I don't think there's anything salvageable in Fight for Life, that game is just a disaster from start to finish. They really needed a team of programmers instead of relying on one (they did have other people doing some of the graphics and music and stuff at least). The gameplay in it is just embarrassingly bad, even if the stories were true, that I didn't talk about, that it was accidently labeled for "review" instead of "preview"... it should never have been shown off in the state it was in. But that's just my opinion, anyway!
I thought the XEGS was the last system before the Jag.
Technically yes, I should have clarified the 7800 was the last 'new' console Atari made before the Jag since the XE is an extension of their older 8-bit computer line and uses the same hardware of the 65XE.
Enjoyed this, thanks for sharing
Glad you enjoyed it!
This homebrew Mortal Kombat port looks serious!
The Jaguar would benefit a lot from an AJDK ;)
Be interesting to see how it comes out and if he moves onto a better game like MK II if he ever finishes MK I!
@@InglebardGaming Something like Pit Fighter would be interesting.
@@MarginalSC I'm the oddball for sure, but would take a Jaguar port of Pit Fighter over Mortal Kombat. When I first saw PitFighter in the Arcades, its really was impressive- the first time I was confused as to how it looked so "real"- at the time.
@@johnwayne9933 I like Pitfighter. It's a product of its time and SF2 eclipsed those older brawlers, but Pit Fighter was the most advanced and well designed brawler of its time. Getting a proper home port that could handle the scaling etc (and doesn't have the weird run too fast timing issue of the Williams Arcade Collection) would be amazing.
@@MarginalSC Yep, the PS2 version plays way to fast, the best fix is still the Genesis or Emulation. But, I would have loved to see this on the Jaguar, and being an Atari Corp arcade game, just would seem to be where it belongs, "Pitfighter" really seems to fit with Jaguar's "odd-man out" vibe for sure.
I could never understand why any game would possibly be released without gameplay music... Like just why? Especially when there is music in the start screen/other parts of the game.
Agree completely. It should have been a priority, IMO, playing games in silence or with just sound effects makes them seem more boring.
Atari never quite got out of its old ways of the 2600. I still consider the option not to have the POKEY as the sound chip for the 7800, and instead keep the TIA only was one of Atari's biggest mistakes. But regarding Doom, to be fair, I can remember playing it with Beck's Odelay album playing. The PC even had the option of sound effects only, And really, the PC is by far the best way to play Doom.
@@InglebardGamingin the case of AVP, a full, orchestral soundtrack had been planned, but there simply wasn't room on even the bigger cartridge Atari finally signed off on.
Purple Hampton has stated this.
@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 it would have been a much better experience with music.
@@InglebardGamingThe right kind of music, maybe..
Atari should get the Darwin Award for putting a 16bit CPU in there.
Looks longingly at my totally mint boxed and complete (with hardware dongle and OST CD) copy of Battlesphere Gold.
You a real one for this
I think the Jaguar was the first game system to have 64 bit processors in it and a 64 bit data data but but a True 64 Bit system it was not. It was 64 bits where the System Designers thought it needed to be to make the most out of the Ram they were using. It was enough 64 bit to keep the debate going for alot longer then it needed to be but I think in the end most everyone will admit - the Jaguar is not a real 64 bit system.
You didn't mention the motor cycle. Racing game. They had. It was actually 32 bit game. At 60fps
Ah, I thought I did when I mentioned the good games on the system, I wrote it in my original script, anyway.
But that game is Super Burnout and it's definitely one of the better Jag games once you get used to the controls and the extreme sliding on the corners.
Trading in my jag for PS1 was the best decision I’ve made in my life
look at the value of the systems today, I am not so sure.
@@Tolbat I had 6 years of great video gaming in my childhood, totally worth it. Besides eBay prices aren’t that bad for the jag.
@@stevenchan3822I did exactly the same, sold my Jaguar at a great loss, bought a UK PlayStation on launch, wisest thing I ever did, gaming wise
If Atari put a better CPU in the system and fixed the memory defects and courted more third party support maybe it would have had a chance
They tried to get third party support. But really, what did they have to entice them with? The units sold of the hardware was very low, manufacturing cartridges for it cost way more than CDs for the other systems that were already out (3DO) or on the way (Saturn and PlayStation), and it quickly developed a rep for substandard games.
For Atari to have done things right, they would have needed way more money than they had to put into the Jag, they would have needed some people with real industry know how-how and experience and they would have had to secure a few big name third-party games as exclusives. Imagine if they'd had exclusive rights to say Mortal Kombat II even just for 6 months. Or if they had the exclusive console Doom for a year and had time to polish it up and add solid in-game music and maybe improved performance a bit.
So good thing about the Jaguar is JRISC. JRISC has kinda low cycle efficiency, but a deep pipeline for a fast clock. Atari should have allowed a clock multiplier (skipped the clock halver in Jerry) for the core : integer ALU (Logic and Add) (not MUL, DIV, or Shift, Load Store). Instruction decode , pure register access.
Two instructions share a 32 bit word. So fetch already runs at the slower clock.
Also I don’t understand what the problem is with caching. JRISC only needs a code cache. ScoreBoard and loadP are powerful for data. But a real code cache with lines is mandatory for C-language.
Intel 486 and SH2 have a 4 associative cache. N64 has a single associative cache , why? If the Jaguar was 64 bit, it could use quads of 64-bit phrases. 3 phrases store data, and on phrase stores 3 addresses of 21 bit each . 21 is enough. The address bus from the 68k only has 23 bit. With 4x16 bits, the cache only needs 21. And the address of the cacheline is also some bits of the address. So could store 20 bits, plus a counter to replace slots round robin. Address 0 is never cached.
I became interested in this new games console upon release, but the controller looked ugly.
Thank you, ugly games pad for saving me money.
Ha, well there you go, you found a positive angle on it.
I don't Wether you can still get them but someone was making a Bluetooth adapter so you could connect t your favourite modern day controller to your Jag
I've never tried one, but they're still available. Looks like they're about $50.
Modern consoles are 64 bits, but never actually use 64 bits instructions. Games use 32bit floats for the GPU.
At that time itanium could have worked. DRAM access needed 2 or 4 cycles. JRISC register file only has one read port. GBA ARM CPU has two register write to store the result of a 32x32 multiplication. Wouldn’t it be nice to store this in a 64 bit register?Multiply and accumulate on 64 bit. So a 64 bit instruction would fetch operands from regfile, DRAM, SRAM, division unit, and writeBack register (as it does now), but you could use the long instruction word to select bits from all these. Condition flags for vector elements. Load instruction in parallel. Double Float instructions naturally defined by bitfields.
32 bit immediate values would fit in. MIPS and RISCV need special instructions for this.
Jaguar could have used its 16 bit instructions, but try to run 4 in parallel. Solve all the dependencies with some clever logic and execute in as few cycles as possible-mostly Superscalar.
x86 (and its 64-bit counterpart) use variable instruction lengths, this makes decoding a lot more complicated than other systems, where instructions are fixed length (which are easier to decode since you always know where the next instruction starts without decoding the last one, but may need multiple instructions to achieve what a single x86 instruction does). Long mode (in other words running the CPU in 64 bit mode) matters because it means you can address more than 4 GB memory. For the x86 architecture, it also means having more general purpose registers available. This is a big deal because x86 originally only had 8 such registers, as opposed to 16 on the 68000 and 32 on PowerPC and ARM.
@@Phredreeke It may take more RISC instruction to write by hand by the assembly programmer than with a CISC, but it does not matter at execution because the CISC will do multiple RISC internally. Also with Risc-V assembler there are multiple pseudo-instruction that the assembler will convert for you into a sequence of instructions. RISC is the only possible future of computing because decoding instructions on CISC require more metal and transistors than actually exectuting the instructions. Also with prediction branching, CISC becomes a nightmare internally. CISC belong to the past, RISC is the only possible future of computing.
@@Phredreeke Arm in the Archimedes has 16 registers as does the SH2 in Sega consoles. Yeah, I don’t know why people love variable instruction length on 8bit CPUs .
It seems as though "Atari" (Sam?) was always more interested in making a better machine than focusing on what was on hand.
I don't think Sam had the foggiest idea of what he was doing. Every Atari exec of the era seemed to be scrambling around like a chick with its head cut off. There was no real strategy, there was no quality control on the software, there was no vision for the platform. It was just "Hey we made this thing, now lets find someone to make games for it!"
I feel like if Atari had real vision for the Jag, and worked to make sure that the original games for it were much higher quality and emphasized the things that made the hardware unique, they would have had a real shot.
Bonus fact that I almost included in the video: Atari sued Sega and won during this era (technically there was a settlement), with Sega having to invest in and end up owning a piece of Atari. As part of a resultant agreement, they could have ported up to five Sega games to the Jaguar and Sega could have cross licensed up to five Jag games. Not a single game ever came out of this agreement on either system. Atari could have, for example, made their own versions of Saturn games like Virtua Fighter, Virtua Racing, Daytona (yeah, right), or maybe more realistically 2d stuff like Astal or Guardian Heroes. The only stipulations were the games had to be over a year old and couldn't be a mascot or something weird like that.
I don't know why they never did this, I suspect it was a lack of developers that could take on and produce these projects.
@@InglebardGamingAs an Atari 800XL, then 520STFM owner, 2600 owner before that, the old saying about Tramiel era Atari rang true..
Why buy an Atari machine today, when the Tramiels will only annouce a newer, more powerful machine, tommorrow.
Tramiel era Atari loved to get free press by announcing new hardware that was either vapour ware..
CDST, Panther, ST Console..
Or never lived upto the hype, the Amiga beating STE, lied about sound channels, weaker Blitter, still only 16 colours on screen.
The Neo geo Aes was billed as 24 bit (motorola 68K 16 bit and the zilog 80 was 8 bit)
No, that's not the reason SNK claimed it was 24-bit. I did an 11 Facts video on the Neo Geo, too and talk about that as point number 1. Spoiler: it has a 24-bit address bus.
Also, if we were going to go by the example of a 68000 plus a z80 equalling a 24-bit system, then loads of arcade games would be 24-bit, everything on system 16 or cps I for example, as well as the Sega Genesis and plenty of other platforms. It was a very common configuration.
That's pretty much how many of the consoles back then did the math. it was the sum total of the chipset used. Thus, you have two main processors that were 32 bit, so working together = 64 bit.
@JohnCrawford1979 that is not at all true. No consoles 'did the math' that way.
@@JohnCrawford1979 100% false.
@@InglebardGaming - The Jaguar did, with using dual 32-bit CPUs. And it is possible that loads of arcade games could be 24 bit. There was no exact math, and there are many technicalities in all the old consoles and arcades. After all, the Intellivision had a 16 bit CPU, even though most would consider it at best an early 8 bit console. So the math has always been a bit fuzzy and depending on what the companies wanted to focus on what the console's main capabilities were to highlight to the public.
Also would love to see someone take the Atari new VCS controller and just make an adapter to use it on the Atari Jaguar.
Why ?
Jaguar was a fantastic scam, I, like many poor victims, remember "Avoid to the ground" and "Were did you learn to fly" with horror.
My only sweet memory is Tempest, then I back to Saturn
It was better than the Saturn . Alien Vs Predator was awesome. And the Saturn couldn't compare to the Jaguar when playing audio CDs.
I bought a 32x because the Jag CD took forever to appear.
Sad . The Jaguar CD is awesome
@@BruceStephan Maybe but I was just tired of waiting at the time.
Is Doom on the Jaguar 3D? It doesnt appear to have the slight distortion of a 2.5 raycast engine. You can tell when you study the in game movement and look at corners and ceiling edges.
I notice the same difference when using Zdoom and switching from software to the 3D renderer.
Don't think so. 32x version was based on the Jaguar code IIRC.
@MarginalSC it is (32X is based on the Jag version). I covered that one in the video.
Edit: added the bit in parenthesis for clarity.
@@InglebardGaming Oh yeah. Just one of those things I've gotten used to reciting by rote. It's up there with how Jag Wolf 3d was ported in a weekend.
By the same rationale, because 99.99% of N64 games never fully utilized the console's 64 bit capabilities, and the ports sent to it were developed in 32 bit, then the N64 was not a 64 bit console because no one used its 64 bit capabilities. Heck, the Game Cube was developed with 32 bit tech because no one was using 64 bit tech because 32 bit was just good enough. As it is, 64-bit didn't get fully realized until the 2010's when multicore processors and computers needed more than 4 GB RAM to be able to keep up with growing demands of 3D modeling, animations, and graphics.
Also when talking about chips and chip sets, consider that it's ridiculous to compare an Pentium i5 9th generation to an i5 14th generation, and more so to say the Pentium II is just as good, or exactly the same as both i5 chips because they're all Pentium chips. Because that's what a lot these echo chambers on the retro gaming YT channel seen to be doing these days, regurgitating the same Wki talking points without even a thought about what went into decades of development on the chips that improved how they worked over time.
Agreed! It was basically just a video crapping on the system by regurgitating talking points that people who have never actually researched the system properly always spew. So boring.
Echo chamber? Not exactly. As a Jag owner from the start I know the system has its die hard defenders and what the community is like. I even talked about how interesting the aftermarket/homebrew scene is on the system and showed the in development MK port.
I didn't bring up the N64 at all because this video wasn't about the N64. If I ever end up doing a video on that system it'll be treated fairly and claims by Nintendo would be evaluated against the tech in the system and what they actually did with it.
I wasn't easy on Nintendo in my SNES video, so I'm really not sure what your point was here in bringing up the N64.
Yeah! The guy who made it didn't do any research at all! He definitely didn't provide links, or direct quotes or citations in the description! He definitely didn't show actual magazine articles during the video! And what, no brand new information on this system that was discontinued 30 years ago? Ridiculous! I mean, he couldn't have done any research at all!
Here are the things that are 64-bit on the Jaguar. The data bus, the blitter and the object processor (the latter two both incorporated in the Tom chip). The data bus doesn't correlate to the CPU's bitness. The original Pentium had a 64 bit data bus, most computers nowadays have a 128-bit data bus (assuming you have two or more RAM modules plugged in), and the Xbox Series X has a 320-bit data bus. As for the blitter and object processors, both of those are fixed function. Doom has already been mentioned as repurposing the CPU in the Jerry chip for collision detection instead of music. You can't do that with the blitter or object processor.
@@InglebardGaming - The N64 mention was a comparison in reasoning, in rationale, not about it being covered in the video. The point is that both were 64-bit systems, even if they had 32 bit capabilities, even if the majority of games at the time were already being developed in 32-bit even before being ported onto the consoles, so they never realized any of the 64-bit capabilities on the majority of the games because there was no point to, because 32 bit looked good enough. Heck, a lot of devs would still be running 32-bit XP on their computers even to this day because 32-bit tech had such a longstanding legacy reach of most of a decade. That was not the atmosphere in the 90's when the Jaguar came out, when a new computer you might of bought from Best Buy was already behind the curb of the rapidly growing tech at the time. Even with game consoles, We had the PC engine that was questionable if it was indeed 16-bit, and it could be argued that it wasn't a 'true' or 'fully' 16-bit console, to the Dreamcast that claimed to be 128 bit. Never mind that even today there is no such thing as a 128 bit operating system, unless it's somewhere still being worked on under some code project we have yet to hear about. The point is, even if the Jaguar was 'fully' or 'tuly' 64 bit, people were not programming for it, nor were there any dev kits capable of utilizing 64-bit.
What I like about the Jaguar that is not present in the Playstation 1 or Sega Saturn is that the Jaguar is a cartridge based 32 bit machine. This means that you can plug in a cartridge like the Game Drive, which has an FPGA on it and use this to increase the performance of the Jaguar.
So if you really want to see the Jaguar truly deliver 64 bits, you can do this by programming a custom CPU within the FPGA of the Game Drive flash cart and give the jaguar some extra power. No joke.
Cartridge slot is only 32 bit and never the full clock rate ( not even half like memory).
You develop using a TT030 workstation instead of a PC Based Development kit.
@@Mrshoujo before we had the emulator. Workstation? At least a TT had a reasonable price unlike the SGI based development system for N64. I like how the development kit basically just has the full memory (RAM) and cartridge space (ROM) before Tramiel cuts down on cost and reduces it for the consumer console.
Who the fuck owned a Jaguar from the start?
This guy. But like I said, I didn't buy it, it was a gift!
@@InglebardGaming😂 I did, seeing AVP preview sold it to me, it was the cheapest way at the time to play a great version of Doom also.
I think I read somewhere that the beta version of fight for life is the real one. Any info/thoughts on this?
Dont think so but video of the real version exists, it had more details, more colors, and better animation.
Atari statement at the time :
Ted Hoff from Atari being asked the questions.
AEO] Did you have anything to do with the decision to rework Fight
for Life?
[Ted] Not really. You did. My staff was telling me what the onliners
were saying based on early magazine reviews and I thought the gamers
spoke clearly on what they want.
[AEO] How many programmers were working on that title, given that its
Japanese counterparts usually have teams of programmers on such
projects? Also, what is to become of FFL now?
[Ted] Francois Bertrand is working with Bill Rehbock and his staff to
review their needs on that project. Enough work has to be done that
many parts of it will need to be reviewed anew. Since it clearly will
not be something ready this Holiday season, I’m demanding that no
hasty decisions to be made.
Ted Hoff A reworked prototype of FFL was sent to ECTS
for showing with the intentions… of getting feedback from the
developer community for comment. we are… encouraged by the
response and an update will be forthcoming.
Inglebard. You have to look at what a 64 bit number actually _is._ It goes up to 4 billion. That's pretty much it. Useful for big gigantic numbers. But that's just big numbers. Not that useful. Nintendo's first 64 bit console is the Switch! It's made by NiVidia so it's overengineered. The Jag _is_ 64 bit's where it counts. Which is the size of the bus. A bus bandwidth of 64bits is a real number that is used in the system alot and it goes to working ram. Do Tom and Jerry have 64bit instructions? Maybe not, I couldn't confirm it. But it's irrelevant as the only 64bit thing about the N64 is a couple of instructions and registers that made development more difficult and could arguably be considered a bug. Put there 100% for marketing purposes.
Meanwhile, the Jag has that bus so both chips and the cpu _can_ operate at full speed independently without a buffer through a very impressive full and true 64bit bus pipeline. The N64 had a 9bit system bus I think, how weird is that?
"the main cpu of the unit...thr 68K which, is regarded as a 16bit processor..." Because it has a 16bit external bus and ALU (bit's counted per cycle) but _does_ have 32bit instructions that take two cycles to process. Making it a hybrid, as the Z80 was an 8/16bit hybrid and the SNES is an 8/16 hybrid. Although the instructions in the SNES are purely for show because it has an 8bit external bus.
Let me break out my nerd card here. Um actually, the biggest 64-bit unsigned integer is 18,446,744,073,709,551,615, which is 18+ quintillion. The largest 32-bit unsigned integer is just over 4 billion. I teach IT, btw 😁
Just about every early console manufacturer engaged in bit shenanigans back in those days. Still, I don't think by any realistic measure that Jag can be considered a 64-bit system considering so many of its limitations.
I haven't looked enough into the N64 to talk confidently about its technical side at this time. Maybe sometime down the road!
@@InglebardGaming Let me find the recent video about the N64 I thought was very good.
I think the fact the N64 bus is 9bit says it all. The Jaguar architecture was hampered primarily by not having many eyes on it and actual bugs from the Trameil school of product design.
But remember the bus is really important because every time you add a bit you add the possibility of more data per cycle to move.
The fact the N64 has such a small bus bit is because the bandwidth is compensated by a fast clock rate.
So you see that the two risc cpu's and the 68kcpu are working together genuinely. So by that fact alone, the bit rate of the system if 64bit and it's pretty clear really.
Adding an instruction like in the SNES does not matter because the data is going to need two cycles to move the data through the external bus eventually and the clock speed/bit width is the speed of the bus.
@@InglebardGaming th-cam.com/video/3We_ZGOwmik/w-d-xo.html this man is trying to make a new N64 game.
Man, IBM is a Kitty
Ken Kutaragi
Its really kicks the llamas ass lol 😂
IBM never distributed the Jaguar. IBM manufactured the Jaguar only. Atari did the distributing.
Every contemporary newspaper article I've read from the time said distribution was part of the deal.
One example: www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-06-29-fi-8269-story.html
IBM did part of the construction of the console .
@InglebardGaming Distributing implies that retailers contacted IBM to order products. I am 99% sure that never happened. Retailers ordered product through Atari.
@@InglebardGamingThe official statement at the time:
IBM, working with a 30-month contract worth $500 million, will
be responsible for component sourcing, quality testing, console
assembly, packaging and distribution, and will build the system at its
Charlotte, N.C., facility. The motherboard will come from an
IBM-approved manufacturer, said Herbert Watkins, director of
application solutions manufacturing at IBM Charlotte.
Jaguar is definitely 64-bit: th-cam.com/video/rNi6HkBG_7E/w-d-xo.html
If only the jahduo was released, and if atari did came up with atari classics with many of their 8bit games on it including nintendo & sega games on it as well, i definitely would,ve loved the atari jaguar, what a misopertunity from atari to NOT releasing the atari jaduo because that 2 in 1 combo atari jaguar system could,ve compeated waaay better against the playstation,sega saturn and the N64,
But also because the atari jagduo looks waaay more cooler then the atari jaguar,
And yes that’s right, as a atari fan i dare to say that the atari jaguar just looks ugly, it’s just as ugly looking as the nec super grafix 16 system,yug.
When the Panther is so buggy, why did the Jaguar end up with its object processor? Whoever thought it would be great idea for videoDMA to have write permission to DRAM???
@@TheLairdsLair Sprite is like C64 , where the sprite patterns for the line are loaded 1:1 into shift registers. Then the C64 can expand them in x direction on the fly without hogging memory. Lynx only has a blitter. It loads patterns from RAM and stores them in RAM. This is shared RAM, so it does not care if it is written to or read from. Nothing is idle. SRAM has no fast page mode.
So what of these do you mean?
Jaguar has a linebuffer like the SEGA Genesis. Just the genesis draws to the buffer in horizontal retrace, while Jaguar has a double buffer for a better duty cycle.
@@TheLairdsLair According to Jeff Minter, the Panther's sprite hardware was very similar to the object processor in the Jaguar, to the point where both had the same limitations. Putting too many sprites on a single scan-line, for instance, would require too much time to draw the line and caused a "tearing" effect in the affected row.
Ah, I always wondered when exactly the buffers swap. Now I just need to find out if the earliest the buffers swap is when the last pixel has just been drawn. How did Atari manage the async event? Pixel clock is not system clock, but better should exactly be in sync on both borders.
@@TheLairdsLair so like Jaguar and Neo Geo ( and some C64 demos ).
@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 research? I only research first hand for money it seems, and not about games . To relax I depend on stuff discussed in forums. There is no clear explanation why Atari had Jaguar vs that other console. How difficult is a hybrid design or to merge designs? So there may have been alternative designs as in small details. Jaguar has JRISC. For me it looks like they cut out the middle man for sound. It is not a fundamental change. It explains the low quality integration.
@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 why do we care? It was along the lines. Just ask the laird.
club drive has better physics than the first 5 grand turismo.
My dude, don't start off by telling me you owned a Jaguar back in 93; that does not lend credibility to your opinion so much as it tells me you make bad purchasing decisions.
It was a Christmas present, I didn't buy it.
@@InglebardGaming fair enough.
Dope
Depends on when you bought it. I still kick myself for not getting one, and a Jag CD back when you could get the packaged bundles with a choice of games for nearly half the price of the main console on its own when it was new.
Great video I didn't know a lot about Jaguar consoles, they were never sold in my country, and I am 1 of those people that mocks anyone that owns an Atari game console 😂
You get mocked for NOT buying Atari.