The Comprehensive Story of the Atari Jaguar: The 64-Bit System (not really) That Killed Atari
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 ต.ค. 2024
- The Atari Jaguar was it: It was Atari’s last-ditch effort to recapture former glory. It was built on revolutionary graphics chips, had record-breaking graphics, and planned a robust software library that would return Atari to the top echelon of video game designers.
It didn’t work.
The Jaguar failed for many reasons: A poor software library, inadequate support, odd marketing, and competition that was leagues ahead. In today’s video, we’re going to tell you the comprehensive story of the Atari Jaguar and why this “64-bit” system failed so badly.
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#atari #atarijaguar #videogame #videogameconsole #retrogaming
The Jaguar's biggest problem was Jack Tramiel. He was smart, but his shady business practices in the past meant that no retailers or game devs trusted him. No stores would stock the Jaguar without payment terms, and they certainly didn't push it.This is the reason they eventually had to sell through infomercials. The Jaguar was a great system, but unfortunately with Jack running the company, it was never going to succeed. You can only burn so many bridges before you realize that you can't go anywhere.
Jack was way too tight, cutting corners everywhere he could to make a few bucks.
7800 and Lynx conversions from Arcades and other home systems, lacked content as Jack wouldn't allow use of larger cartridges.
He had ATD cut content from Cybermorph to get it to fit on a smaller cartridge for later in-pack releases.
The industry knew before it launched, the Jaguar was destined for failure under the Tramiel's.
And how right they were.
I remember being curious with the initial hype for the Jaguar but then nothing of any substance happened with it. I regarded it the same as the 3DO, they had no must-have games so I didn't care. The early 5th gen hardware entries were rough, it felt more like they were jumping the gun before it was really time to do so.
The 3do was awesome, I don't know what you're smoking 😂
3do was an awesome system. I had both. Jaguar games were terrible AF, with the exception of Alien and T2000.
@@joshuaupham5993If you liked Mech Games, Iron Soldier 1 and 2 were fantastic.
At least I've played a 3do. Need for speed was a great game for it. Also used it for party's to play music with cool visuals.
I never owned one, but I was around 23 or 24 when I started seeing the commercials and and product in stores. But I found this video very interesting. I like how you stay focused and the information you present is relevant. I know a lot of TH-camrs inject themselves into these informational kind of videos (like doing voices or skits to add their opinions) and I especially appreciate those that respect my time by staying focused on the information. I stayed to the end so I gave you a like and a subscribe.
I've had one since the $99 prive drop, I still enjoy it from time to time, it was a fun system collecting for in the late 90's mid 2000's when you could go into game shops and pick up the more popular or rare games people traded in for like $10-20. Was able to pick up full boxed copies of Doom, Wolf3D, and AvP for cheap then.
Regarding the 64 bit, yes the Risk processors were 32 bit, but not only was the data bus 64 bit, but the Blitter and Object Processor (GPU) were full 64 bit. Other things did not help the Jag and changed the spec of what Atari wanted to release.
I owned a Jaguar, although not for very long; I ended up returning it after a month or so. I worked at a mall video game store at that time and could check the release date of upcoming games, and not only were there very few games but the ones in our system were constantly being delayed.
I grew up with the 2600 and really wanted the Jaguar to succeed. But sometimes I think us fans wanted it more than the company did.
The design looked to the past. The bug make it look like it was designed by amateurs (fans). I only know IBM PC and C64? There are no famous bugs on the PC. The C64 inherited the broken floppy drive.
My dude, those three games you mentioned in the beginning were not Atari at all. They had ports on the 2600 but Pac-Man was namco, Space Invaders was Taito, and Defender was Williams. Just saying if I were you I would’ve mentioned Pong, Asteroids, Missile Command, and maybe even Centipede.
Thank you - that was driving me nuts.
Was going to say the same
The ST computer technology was not used in proposed consoles such as the Panther, which would of used a 16-Bit CPU and 32-Bit GPU, nor the Jaguar.
Project Robin was Rob Zydbel's attempt to pitch the ST hardware inside an XEGS style case and launch it as a budget console, with budget priced games, aging ST conversions of old arcade games like Battlezone, Crystal Castles, Moon Patrol etc.
A similar pitch was attempted years later, but using STE hardware.
IMO the PS1 is the perfect blueprint of hoq to enter the video game industry and launch a new console. They did everything right and it paid off.
Have a console that is comparable, specs wise, with the competition. Have an attractive price. Spend a ton of money on marketing (I hear Sony spent $200M on marketing the PS1, 10x more than Sega did with the Saturn) Buy or open studios to make 1st party software. And, most importantly IMO, woo a bunch of publishers with undeniable deals to release games onto your platform.
Atari didn't have the money to market their console as much as Sega or Nintendo, let alone Sony. The design of the system was weird so the games didn't look impressive. They didn't have the first party support to give the system a good start. And they couldn't secure 3rd party support. There was so much working against it.
Another thing to take into account was Atari's reputation. I was a kid when this launched and to me and other kids my age, Atari was associated with old people. A lot of us had old uncles or grandpas with a 2600 collecting dust in a drawer in their entertainment center. I even played my grandpa's 2600 and I wasn't impressed. It would have been a hard sell to convince 90s kids that Atari was cool.
People complain that the PlayStation GTE only does 16bit maths (like Jaguar). But in both cases a developer can bin the world around the camera into shells and use 32 bit maths SUB on the CPU to center, and the fast SHA instructions to select the significant bits.
I played with my cousin’s Jaguar every now and then when I was in high school, from late 1996 into 1997. I remember not really being all that impressed. Some of the games I played looked and sounded like they were on the 16 bit Sega Genesis. I thought Cybermorph really sucked.
The Jaguar would have been at least as powerful as the Playstation, if not for Jack Tramiel extreme cheapness and shortsightedness. They used the 16-bit 68000 clocked @12Mhz instead of the 32-bit 68020 clocked 26Mhz, which was (at least) FOUR TIMES MORE POWERFUL. The cost savings? $5 per unit.
The CoJag used the 68020.
$5 higher manufacturing cost would have meant roughly $15-$20 higher retail price. In today’s dollars that would be $30-$40 more.
@@Sashazur I understand what you are trying to say, most of the time you'd be right, but that isn't how it works in this case. You're quoting manufacturing cost. In this case they bought the finished processors from Motorola to be used in Jaguar. There's no higher cost to ship a 68020 to the plant or attach it to the board than the 68000. So the cost difference was actually only $5 per processor.
Fun fact: One prototype of the Jaguar used the Motorola 68030, which would have been even faster.
The Jaguar main board looks so ugly compare to pcEngine or N64. Most ugly are all the traces to the 68k. Now imagine even 16 more. I don’t understand how the cartridge was supposed to work. If EMI was a problem on the slot, why not employ some low voltage differential signaling and use fewer pins for less “antenna size”? JRISC should have been the main machine language. The basic idea is to have this heads-up instructions as in ITANIUM. So the CPU explicitly instructs the blitter to load the following code. So the compiler / developer decide that in a function a lot of branches will probably be covered. Everything else is outsourced as exception. Then the call would trigger the blitter to load the whole function into local memory. So there is no artificial alignment to cache lines (only phrases). JRISC has a short instruction queue so that it can continue while the blitter stores a phrase every other cycle. Same for structs: load them in one go, then pick the members. If local stack overflows ( or under ) flush half of it to external memory.
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt I understand the part about possible interference, the programming was over my head. Good to see someone who really understands hardware and programming. 🙂
I wish I could ask you a question about the 68000 and the BUS of the Jaguar I have always wondered about. I am a novice programmer though, the ignorance of my question might make your head hurt. But if you wouldn't mind answering my question though, let me know. Thank you.
@@Offramp-z7p Uh, I did not grew up with the 68k. But I read that on the Jaguar the 68k sits on the bus as a first class member. I read that the 68k needs two cycles for a memory access. But I did not find out if it could accept wait states. But as it is in the Jaguar, memory is can return a value even in case of a page miss. A weird thing is when the 68k want to read not the first word in a phrase. Then Tom latches the whole phrase, takes memory of the bus, and puts the desired word onto the low 16 bit. This is almost caching, but I guess to prevent bugs, everything is reset at the end of the cycle. If the 68k reads again at the same address, Tom will again ask the DRAM for contents.
It should also be noted the Jaguar hardware needed another 2 revisions to iron out all the hardware bugs.
Atari never intended the original Jaguar to take on the Playstation and Saturn, that would of been the role of the Jaguar MK II, Jaguar was intended to take on DSP enhanced Sega MD and SNES games, 3DO,CD32 and CDi
The problem with the revision is that other companies did not sleep. I feel like energy was wasted on unimportant features. Why not stick to 16 bit cartridges? Why invent and adjust an object format when you have a GPU to control the blitter or videoDMA? Why are there scalar instructions which only exist because branches are too slow. Saturate is only needed once per pixel on Jpeg decompression. Likewise Absolute is only used once in 3d maths. Non-power of two frame buffers / textures? 5 bit conditions for jumps, but no overflow detection. MAC overflow.
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldtThat was exactly the issue Atari faced with the Jaguar, they couldn't afford further delays, whilst hardware was further revised and bugs ironed out, as they knew Sega, Sony and Nintendo all had newer, far more powerful being worked on in their R+D labs.
Leonard Tramiel refusing to accept the hardware had issues didn't help, nor putting pressure on developers like Imagitec Design etc to texture map 3D titles, to be seen as being able compete with the 3DO in this area.
30 Years later and the Atari Jaguar still stirs many strong opinions when it's brought up. Amazing isn't it?
@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 Yes, the Jaguar wasn't intended to take on the Playstation and Saturn. But doesn't the CoJag make you wonder if it *could have* if they would have, if they had gone with more aggressive hardware? Personally that question still drives me crazy, 30 years later.
@@Offramp-z7pEven if they had just taken some of the key features from the lower end CoJag hardware:Using a 25 MHz Motorola 68020...
4 megabytes of RAM, the system could of been really something.
I was also very surprised they allowed the awful spaghetti A. I code Jane Whittaker ran on the 68000 for AVP, which literally crippled the games frame rate.
An even larger cartridge for that game would of allowed for the planned full orchestral score.
But no everything was done on the bloody cheap.
I picked up a Jaguar at a flea market in the 90s when it was off the market and a few games with it. It was an unimpressive, clunky and an embarrassing experience with a bad controller (SNES/Genesis had refined what a controller should be) and I really felt bad for gamers who bought this at retail at the time. The games were just flat out terrible, even for the mid-90s. Tempest 2000 was amazing and a killer app, but that couldn't sustain it beyond 6-12 months. Many games were just 16-bit ports because the 68000 CPU was available so the system wasn't even being used properly. There were a small handful of other games that were very good but nowhere near enough to float the platform. When news of the PS1 and the N64 came along, it was over.
So it was a Jaguar
18:45 Those systems aren't the original systems, they're the new "plus" systems. When you're referencing the modern systems and you say "2600" instead of "2600+," you're off by about 47 years.
The VCS is an original System I have one and it's awesome!
Atari did not "add up chips to get to 64-bits." That's an unproven fallacy perpetuated by uninformed videos like this. The Jaguar has a 64-bit data bus as were the blitter and object processor. There's NEVER been a concrete definition of what constitutes the "bitness" of a system so there's no reason why Atari can't legitimately call the Jaguar 64-bit.
Only back in the day, there wasn't much gaming industry standards because it's was still fairly new
You mean for 3d? There were stuff like Unity3d for C64 and Amiga. Also check AmigaOS comfort functions for sprites!
It should also be noted Atari had originally planned a simultaneous launch for the Panther and Lynx, but Atari lacked the resources to support 2 flagship consoles at once, so Panther was put on the back burner.
I was working for the UK games press at the time of the Jaguar launch and even went to their UK release/press event.
I remember, even then, my fellow journalists saying this would be the end of Atari. My publisher tried to make a magazine around the console, but (IIRC) it only lasted a few issues before it, and the console, died a very, very quick death.
What was the magazine?
The UK press were initally quite positive regarding the actual hardware, but rightfully extremely skeptical of Atari's ability to market and support it properly.
@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 I was working for Paragon Publishing at the time. I don't recall the name, but I do remember the editor was Stuart Wynn.
@@WatchWiseUSI fondly remember X-Gen Magazine by Paragon, laying into Jaguar games like Super Burnout and Ultra Vortex, titles Jaguar fans get very defensive over.
I do remember magazines like:Edge, C+VG, Gamesmaster, which initally started out fond of the Jaguar, soon turned on it and the 3DO once the Saturn arrived, then turned on the Saturn once the Playstation arrived.
Cut throat time for the industry and consumer.
@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 I absolutely loved the 3DO
Love jaguar stuff and documentaries
Have you tried BigPEmu.
It's the best Jaguar emulalator and also supports Jaguar CD games.
It's one of the best designed modern emulators
Extremely well done and interesting video! Thanks for all the work you put into it! Keep up the great content!
@4:40 you kinda crashed out my guy... the # of bits has nothing to do w/ RAM when people were discussing consoles. You should try caring about what you post.
This video needed a lot more research to be considered quality.
yeah it's almost something
@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 : I agree. Bout the 4:25 he hit around that 32+32 nonsense that no one at Atari or anyone else in the industry suggested that's what made the Jaguar 64-bit. Using his logic, the Jaguar is 80-bit.
@@TeeroyHammermillI was very dissapointed in 2024 to hear someone say Atari just added 2 32-bit chips to get the number.
I remember when Tempest 2000 was announced - being made by LLamamsoft and Jeff Minter (a household name in the UK for video games in the 80s), it created a lot of hype - I still think that it's the best game of the "official" launches and the only one that's instantly playable.
Atari Jaguar had no support what so ever from Japanese developers.
Even every 128 bit console would had been total failure without developers from country of rising sun.
-Do the math?
56 -games? -Not enough!
Bill Rehbock did make a couple of visits to Japan to try and get Japanese support from the likes of Capcom, fact he has never spoken about said trips, speaks volumes as to how unsuccessful they were.
Seeing it in magazines at the time, you got a sense that the Jaguar just wasn't anywhere near as exciting as it was hyped to be. Clearly an 'also ran'. The 3D0 came earlier and seemed momentarily to be the next big thing, but things were moving so fast that only a year later, Tekken hit arcades and we all wanted a Playstation instead
The future of gaming clearly lay in texture-mapped 3D,the arcades were already demonstrating this, the Jaguar, a 2D powerhouse, with impressive plain polygon pushing capabilities, was always going to become obsolete before it had time to truly establish itself..
I really enjoyed this historic retrospective video. Thank you for making it. It's a different take on the Jaguar that I didn't really get yet. Thanks bro.
Regarding the Jaguar VR headset..
The 1st VR headset, a Red unit, used low resolution optics and Atari officials were not satisfied with this ...
Virtuality went back and revised the optics to meet Atari's demand.
These are found in the Blue headset which fixed other minor problems as well as the voice communication and extra IPD adjustments.
Atari severed ties with Virtuality and the company didn't receive a single penny for any of the work they did for Atari..
Atari appeared to want the highest grade optics in the headset but wanted the headset to be manufactured at a consumer friendly price, it just couldn't be done with the technology of the time, nor produced in high enough numbers, as the Jaguar user base was so miniscule.
My Ex gave me one for my BD, I was a SEGA guy so I smiled as nicely as I could thanking her. But in my mind I was screaming WTF!
Is that why she’s your ex?
The Atari 50 Collection (not sponsored, just a fan) allows you to play 9 of the 'most popular' Jaguar games. And you can get that on most current consoles, if not all of them. This allows most people to play most of the 'good' games. If people want to dig deeper, there is always "BigPEmu" which plays them all.
Atari wanted a lot of complex, PC simulation games converted to the Jaguar (TFX, Falcon, Gunship 2000 etc) these required a lot of keyboard commands, hence the numeric keypad on the controller.
Marketing around bits was so stupid. So many companies did it in the 90s even though gamers really had no idea what it meant.
By the time I really got into video games and got my PS1 in 97, Sony didn't even mention bits in their marketing. They were already beating the N64 in sales, so they realized that more bits really didn't matter. I bought my PS1 because of the games I saw it had, I couldn't care less if it had half the bits of the N64 or (allegedly) the Jaguar.
Yeah.
Not like the 'Terra flops' we have today. 😋
@@AdmiralBison Yep. Modern gamers understand what teraflops are about as much as gamers in the 90s understood what bits were
Missile Command 3D features support for the ProController and If a Jaguar VR headset is detected, it can be played with in both 3D and Virtual modes.
So there's no question of it working with the VR Headset.
AVP 2 never got beyond the concept stages, Beyond Games along with Alexandria Games had put game pitches to Atari, Beyond were in negotiations with Atari when they pulled the plug on the Jaguar.
Great video! Please make more like this!
Thank goodness for emulation.
I'm enjoying some great 90's FMV 3DO games:
- Blade Force
- The Daedalus encounter
- Demolition man
- The original Need for Speed
- Road Rash
- Supreme Warrior
- Wing Commander 3
If one is fascinated with FMV games and their campiness, the 3DO system was one the best systems for that kind of thing.
Atari Jaguar seems really only notable for Alien vs Predator and Tempest 2000,
Still the Jaguar/CD emulator BigPEmu by Rich Whitehouse is one of the best and most refined emulators there is, making jaguar/CD games easy to play.
Flop - O -Rama!
Too complex, too late to the market. Too expensive.
And hardware was too bugged, development tools terrible, third party support minimal.
keep it up the good work, amazing video!
This is an excellent deep dive into the system. Well done.
It truly amazes me how there are so many creative people out there that keep making games for these older systems. I wish I had those skills but it seriously impresses me the skills and dedication that so many people have for video games and their systems! I only played the Jaguar once at a local Sears. I had fun but I was a Sega fan boy. I should have purchased it though. Especially seeing as people keep creating games for it even in 2024! That will be one of my many regrets. Like how I should have purchased the brand new NES's that were being sold at Toys R Us for $20 a pop, after the SuperNES had come out.
I love my Jaguar with CD. What games I have, I enjoy immensely. Best to buy what you like rather than stuff you don't.
And yes, it was 64 bit. Period.
Raiden is pronounced Rye Den.
It could be marketed as such as it had 64-bit architecture, it wasn't a true 64-bit console in the way the N64 was.
The last few days have seen me play all the Jaguar games, at least the ones that can be emulated, so no CD games. This has been one of the most depressing gaming episodes of my life; I could only find one game that was exciting to play - the buggy alpha of Total Carnage. And it uses the number keys on the sad Jag gamepad so it would have been horrendous on the original console. Being able to remap those buttons made Total Carnage into a fun twin stick shooter. That restarts randomly after a minute or two.
And 64 bit is horseshit. Does it have a 64 bit data bus? It does not.
I believe that was Handmade Software converting the PC code to Jaguar.
The 64-bit marketing nonsense related to the system having 64-bit architecture.
Well, decision to let Flare Technology designed a Jaguar (company that actually did not produce anything), bit Atari on the behind. Jaguar was way ahead of its time, with dedicated graphics processor (sort of like dedicated GPU today) and dedicated DSP . Main processor was weak (Motorola 68000) but it supposed to be only manager and used for I/O operations, while other two processor did most of the work. Unfortunately, developers at that time didn't know how to use Tom & Jerry (aforementioned GPU & DSP) to their advantage. Thus, with some exceptions, most games actually looked worse then on SNES or Mega Drive. Exceptions were amazing for the time (Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Alien vs Predator ...) but these were far and between . Whole situation was not helped with Atari actually withholding documentation from most developers (id Software was obvious exception) , and the fact that during design Flare Technology made several hardware bugs that had to be circumvented during programming. Overall, lot of potential for early and mid 90s, but at the time Jaguar was figured out new consoles were coming to the market.
Cybermorph didn't take advantage of the system hardware?
You couldn't be more mistaken.
It used the hardware Z-Buffering for a start..
Gouraud shading was used as light source for the polygon models
It was completely free-roaming, unlike the on rails Starfox.
ATD didn't have the resources of Argonaut, never mind Nintendo and they were originally tasked with just doing a flying carpet style tech demo for Atari to showcase the Jaguar, Atari liked what they saw, asked ATD to turn it into a fully fledged game.
Very Informative thx bro👊 I think what killed Jag was the Cd add on, The Games (a few were Kool), the appearance, the price, there was always something wrong with it &, so much more... but to me it was the controller that's it. They had something but they let go. Maybe just a few touches it might've work. They Should've stuck with first person shooters, strategy games, RpG's, make the contorller useful. What might've been...?
"Blast Processing" was a $5 word for DMA move from the cartridge to audio or DAC without having to involve the powerful 68000 CPU. The Genesis did actually offer twice the bandwidth of the SNES, so technically true.
The Jaguar did have a 64-bit memory bus feeding a 64-bit graphics pipeline. The two two 32-bit RISC processors being "64-bit" was a take on NEC's TurboGrafx 16, which had two 8-bit CPUs. Had ATARI brought out a proper set of development tools early on, we would've seen games the equivalent of the PS1's launch titles.
NEC has a single 8bit CPU with some weird additional instructions. This is the design which the Jaguar should have inherited: on the slow side cartridge and dated CPU. Then a bridge chip to the 16/64 bit side with VRAM. 68k could run on ROM directly and or access VRAM through a small cache on the bridge.
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt Are you suggesting just expanding the old ATARI game console with some extra chips?
@@MaxAbramson3 No I suggest to use two busses in the system. Like with Amiga: chipmem vs fastmem. Or MSX: VRAM vs main RAM. Or IBM PC: main RAM vs VRAM. Only the Atari ST had a single bus. And C64
Bought a Jag and cd CIB for 199. Thought is was expensive in 1999. I paid $40 for the Saturn with 40+ games, net link, ect, $20 for the Sega CD cib, $5 for 32x, $25 for Virtual Boy and "all 10 games available" and $50 for the 3do + 20games cib
The Jag is in no way as powerful or as good as the 3do. In terms of 3d processing the 3do was substantially better. Nothing says this like the software. There was no it could of dobe nonsense. The 3do had a dedicated gpu and the other glued two twin cpus+ a 6800 on the same board and claimed victory.
Ask yourself if I stuck 10 16bit 6800s on a board vs Pentium I and a Voodoo gpu would the 6800s 1600bit mean better games.
I really wanted one of these as a young adult. Couldn't afford it.
I got a used 32x instead.
There's no w in jaguar. Still enjoyed the video however
I played the jaguar a few times at Nobody beats the Wiz of all places. The controller turned me off though 😅. I was 10 when it came out
"Do The Math" had nothing to do with adding up CPUs nor did any Jaguar ads suggest this.
The Math refers to the bits. More bits = more power.
I never knew much about the Jaguar. This was super interesting!
I will never understand the love for that system. I owned one for a short time and couldn't dispose of it fast enough.
BigPEmu a jaguar/CD emulator is pretty damn good though.
One could easily play Aliens vs Predator and Tempest 2000 with it.
I hope they rerelease this machine like they have with the other two
The horrid controller was a deal breaker for me.
I regret not getting a jaguar back then, i was way too obsessed withe the playstation. Which is ironic, becuase today, i couldnt care less about the playstation brand, i haven't played, or purchased a playstation since the PS2. Nowadays I prefer to buy homebrew games for the systems i wish i had given a chance, like the Lynx, and Jaguar.
Got mine in November of 1993. It was awful… Cybermorph was terrible. I regretted my purchase. I also owned a 3DO. Also bad… but not as much as Jaguar. I should have saved my money and bought more 5 star SNES and Genesis games.
I got mine Dec 94. Still enjoying it today.
@@TeeroyHammermill what are you enjoying about it? Doom and Tempest were pretty good, but not too much else I can think of was that good. Maybe AVP… but that’s being generous honestly.
@@CharlesHepburn2AVP was good, for it's time, very atmospheric and I found it a better experience than PlayStation Alien Trilogy, but, Alien Resurrection on PlayStation, if you played with the mouse, blew it away and Rebellion took unused concepts from it and delivered the definitive AVP title on PC a few years later.
The Xeno A. I in that was amazing.
@@CharlesHepburn2 : This year I've played through Asteroite, Protector SE, Hyperforce, Power Drive Rally, Towers 2 Enhanced, HoverStrike CD. There's still fun to be had with your Jaguar in 2024. I still play SNES regularly as well.
Let's apply industry standards to the Jaguar's 64-bit question.
How the industry defines the overall "bits" of a system is the CPU (and its instruction set), the Address bus width, the Data Bus width, and the width of its registers. You do not strictly require all of these values to be 64-bits wide, as there is some room for interpretation. Room for interpretation that the Jaguar desperately attempts to take full advantage of but fails.
When it comes to the Jaguar, the only thing that can be labeled as "64-bit" is the data bus width. That's it. The data bus for the Nintendo 64 is 500Mhz which is five times the speed of its own CPU, but Nintendo never tried to capitalize on that because that would be ridiculous. It would be tantamount to taking the transmission from a million-dollar NASCAR racecar and putting it in the beater you had in your teen years and expecting it to perform as well as the car it came from.
While the 68k is defined as the main CPU, the fact of the matter is the developer can bypass the 68k and work directly with Tom and Jerry, the two 32-bit RISC CPUs, so we can toss the arguments related to the 68k and its status as the CPU. Even with that charitable consideration, the Jaguar cannot be defined as a 64-bit system.
Now let's consider an opposite situation.
Windows NT 4.0 and any concurrent Linux distro are both fully 32-bit operating systems.
You can install Windows NT 4.0 and/or any concurrent Linux distro on any 386SX PC provided it has enough RAM and disk space.
Anyone will tell you that, even as slow as this system is, it's still a 32-bit operating system on a 32-bit architecture and therefore a 32-bit computing system.
The problem here is the "SX" appended to the processor. "SX" means, in order to cut costs, the fully 32-bit 386SX operates upon a 16-bit data data bus. The complete opposite of our Jaguar setup, in other words.
This deficiency enacts a terrific hit to performance, but at the end of the day, no matter how slow it crawls compared to, say, a 486DX; it's still a 32-bit OS operating from a 32-bit CPU. If you compile a program on your deficient 386SX workstation, you can expect it to run on the latest and greatest 486 or 5x86 or Pentium architectures that were fully 32-bit.
The Jaguar cannot manage this. It has no 64-bit instructions, it has no 64-bit anything aside from how wide its data bus is.
The data bus is the only reason they claimed it was 64-bit. As far as the graphical ability, the object processor and blitter were both 64-bit but no one cares at this point. This argument was squashed 30 years ago.
Doom runs a lot code on the 68k and runs fine. Only one company stopped the 68k completely, but without performance review. JRISC can be made to run out of external memory, but Atari fears that on some special cases (bus contention) even aligned instructions will be loaded from the wrong address??
I read that Intel produced a 64 bit processor in 1989 for professional graphics. Later this design would end up as MMX in Pentium. Why did MMX fail both times? Atari should have cooperated with Intel instead of Motorola. Or (patents?) come up with their own instructions? Like load store full 64 bit. 32x32->64 to mimic 386 maths. 32:32 -> 32+32 accumulator += delta . DIV -> quotient:reminder . FFT building blocks as in MMX.
I only had money for the Jaguar or the 3DO at the time. The 3DO was mighty expensive but it had way more games that I liked, so I ended up buying the 3DO and was amazed by how good it was. Years later I bought the Playstation, the best videogame system I've ever owned.
And a number of PlayStation games began life on the 3DO,before being moved to the Playstation.
I truly believe kids saw the controller and said no thanks
I had zero problems using it. The slow software releases and almost zero Japanese software support is what really killed it.
Yup, and few games.
@GetLostGames1: You've clearly never used that controller. It works well and is most practical for games that took advantage of it, particularly FPS games.
@@TeeroyHammermill Subject was "most kids," not "I."
Tramiel is pronounced “trah mel” not “trah meal”.
If they had 10 or 15 games at launch I think they would have had more sales
They'd of needed far more development teams than they had, plus the budgets to fund proper next-generation titles, rather than 256 colour SNES ports that did nothing to showcase the potential of the hardware.
I had one with the cd attachment and I played fever pitch and the doom is actually one of the best out there
I saw an ad for MK2 on Jag, in a magazine back then, and if they had produced that, I likley would of gone for a jag, MK2 was my favourite game for years,
Would love to code something on the Jag too, but I find the way its done annoyingly difficult to get my head around, ah well
Probe Software had started converting PC MK3 but it didn't get very far, MK 2 was never headed to the Jaguar.
I had a sega mega drive in 1993🤔 only cost £150🤔 and the 32x plug in means i could play doom👍i don't remember the jaguar so much 🤔 the price was probably the problem
At £229,whilst more expensive than Atari had wanted it to launch at, it was still considerably cheaper than say the CDi and 3DO and cheaper than the CD32.
Top stuff
Haha the 2600 and the VCS *THE EXACT SAME SYSTEM^
Always loved playing the jaguar showing people nowadays what that system could do by putting in a.v.p and they Greek when they saw when. It came out or doom rayman tempest 2000 or sky hammer the system had the power they just had lazy programmers who wouldn’t use Tom and Jerry just that stupid Motorola 68000 just killed it
Yeah even today noob N64 devs are so proud when they clip polygons to the frustum on the CPU…
Why do Yankees pronounce hundred as “ hun dret”
First!
great vid. atari is terrible now i signed a deal with them they do not reply for baout 9 months,.
Third!
Not as much of a tragedy as Sega destroying its credibility through corporate in-fighting in my eyes.
Still, Atari's macrodecisions are baffling. My favorite misstep are these ridiculous keypad gamepads. Who need that??
Great video 2 minutes in, I'm locked in. Thanks
@@taigawoods6526and why did the game pad not have a shift register inside? Atari should have acknowledged that their old design was inferior to NES. With a shift register you only need 4 wires. Power up to let the register read out the buttons. Then apply clock to read out the other bits. Just need a design which does not need a separate reset line, but comes up in read-buttons state reliably. Then switches to hold before the shift.