How Powerful Was The Atari Jaguar 2?
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- Опубліковано 1 сер 2023
- In celebrating 30 years of the Atari Jaguar, let's look at Atari's effort to follow-up on it, which ultimately went unreleased due to the OG Jaguar's failure. The Jaguar 2 did make it far enough along however that the few existing boards do work in running Jaguar 1 software. But without development tools and existing games, the only way we can surmise what the games would have looked like is to look at the paper specs and compare those against some other platforms from the 1990s, including arcade hardware like the Sega Model 2 and the VM Labs NUON. #atari #consolegaming #videogames
- Ігри
The sad reality is that specifications can be out of this world; however, without good developers, the system will go nowhere.
And good development tools and libraries, something the Jaguar lacked.
@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 It seemed that developers were pretty much on their own. No kidding the 68000 was used almost exclusively by 3rd party.
Indeed and the competition was strong and better funded.
@@johnmc3862 Atari with the Tramiel's was a day to day struggle almost from day one. The ST was popular and profitable in the beginning, due to the price, but this was only a short lived situation. The quick pumping out of the XE Game System, 7800, etc literally watered down the Atari label and made them less relevant and more of a retro curiosity, but nothing serious compared to competitors. It's sad, but true.
@@ridiculous_gamingthe 7800 from a UK perspective, was an absolute joke, annouced to replace the aging 2600,this after a UK 5200 release had been annouced, then abandoned, it was shown at a London event, then quickly replaced by the XEGS thanks to Bob Gleadow convincing Atari, it was more suited to the UK market.
The 7800 then limps out after, putting Atari in situation where they have the 2600 Jr, XEGS and 7800, all competing for a share of the limited UK 8-bit cartridge bases, console market
The Jaguar, 3do, and 32X are all port of what I call the Lost Generation or misfits generation. All 3 systems give a glimpse of the future without really being part of that future. These 3 systems are not really powerful enough to be truly next gen, but they did have some really good games that give that glimpse of what is about to come. The biggest issue with these systems were they were too late to the market or cost way to much. The Jaguar was the best value from a price point, but only a handful of games gave that glimpse of next gen. (DOOM, AVP, Iron Shoulder, Temist, maybe a few others.. but that was it for me anyways).. 32x had Starwars, DOOM, V-Racing, TEMPO, V-Fighter, maybe a few others but can not remember really... 3DO had a bunch of good games LOTS EVEN and looked the most NEXT GEN from what the games showed off. Madden, Shockwave, some other space fighters, ROAD RASH, NEED FOR SPEED!!! The 3do was amazing, but for $700 bucks people just could not afford the price. MOM and dad will never pay $700 bucks for that thing NEVER! I had all 3 because i paid for them myself! I enjoyed the JAG the most because of DOOM, AVP, and IS...
You and Me are a rare breed of people who owned both the 3DO and Jaguar 64
Best top Games I enjoyed on both in no specific order
3DO
Madden
Solar Eclipse
Crash & Burn
Samurai Showdown
Need For Speed
Street Fighter 2 Turbo
Road Rash
Jurassic Park
Gex
Jaguar 64
Tempest 2000
AVP
Atari Karts
Rayman
Missile command
Ultra Vortex
Iron Soilder
Doom & land Party. 2 players Verses each other via 2 Jaguars and 2 TVs
They were interesting times - All 3 systems had things going for them; the 32X made sense as a lot of people had a megadrive, the Jag was a step up from the current 16 bit systems (but ultimately only that; a 2D console in a world that was moving to 3D) and the 3D0 was, er, expensive (but impressive, and the idea to licence the technology made sense).
Even when I bought my first Jag I was hoping it would succeed, rather than assume it would. But I loved it. I even got a 3D0 after the system failed - a great machine with some really good games (most that were also on the PSX were better on the 3D0) - had it come out at a slightly lower price there may have been an M2 released. who knows?
Back to the Jag 2 specs though, memory alone (aside from recouping the R&D costs) it would've been an expensive console to buy, but had the Jag done well it might've seen the light of day.
However Atari sort of lived on in a hardware sense insofar as the Falcon's later case became (in a somewhat convoluted way) the PS2's.. so.. er.. yeah..
The problem with the Jag was never really one of hardware specs, it's fatal flaw was a lack of compelling software. Console history has shown time and time again that developers will put up with difficult hardware provided that the user base is there to justify the effort.The only possible way a Jaguar 2 could have put up any kind of a fight would have been for Atari to have secured big games from major developers and they were simply not in the market or financial position to make that happen. Really fun to speculate about, though.
No, it was also the limited hardware.The Jaguar could do a lot, but not much concurrently because of the 68000 slowing down the bus. The error was not using the 68020 for the Jaguar and using very little cache on the different custom chips.
@@erikkarsies4851 I'm not saying the hardware didn't have issues, it certainly did, but the buggy hardware isn't what killed the machine on a commercial level, it was a massive lack of games that people actually wanted to play. The reason the Jaguar didn't get, say, a Street Fighter game isn't because of flawed hardware, it was because of Atari on a business level.
@@seanmckelvey6618 very true, Rob Nicholson of HMS said the hardware needed another 2 revisions to fix bugs in the chipset, but..
Even if they'd been fixed, dev support just wasn't there.
Domark didn't back the platform, Core Design said it'd only ever get enhanced ports from the Sega Mega CD, not original I. P, Bill Rehbock went to Japan to try and get likes of Capcom onboatd and got nowhere.
@@erikkarsies4851 I think it's ultimately both. Had the Jaguar come about in '91 then the hardware flaws really wouldn't have mattered as much but coming out before the more powerful and capable Saturn/PSX really hurt it. But it is apparent from developer statements that Atari was in a panic in '95 and demanding that devs do things that the hardware just couldn't do, as they had hung all of their chances on "64-BIT POWER" and that was unraveled by 32-bit consoles that could do better 3D that was fully texture mapped.
IMHO, and I'll do a video about this some time soon, is that Atari should have courted ST developers more, and sought to have some of the ST's biggest hits converted over to the Jag for the launch - particularly a few 3D games. I imagine that an Elite 2000, Dungeon Master 64, Civilization, Defender of the Crown, Robocop 3 as a part of the Jag's launch line-up would have moved perceptions in a more positive direction than just having Cybermorph and Trevor McFur. I'd also throw in some other ST 3D games like Interphase, Virus, Cybercon III, and Simulcra would have also helped moved the needle - but they would have been needed very early on, before Sega or Sony came along touting their better graphics.
@@iratanongrata5973You've only to look at how Atari treated ST developers during the Lynx era, to see how they treated them in the Jaguar era.
Jeff Minter approached them about bringing Defender 2 to the Lynx, Atari weren't interested.
Rob Nicholson of HMS talked of porting Elite to the Lynx :
One version that got to the prototype stage but never saw the light of day
was the Atari Lynx version of the game. I got as far as writing enough code
to display the start screen with a spinning Cobra in solid 3D. The Lynx
could handle it well and the frame rate was pretty impressive for it's time.
I'm not sure a cartridge was ever produced of the demo (we had to get Atari
to burn cartridges) so it probably only existed in Lynx image format.
We tried to sell the idea to Atari but they weren't interested. It was just
at the start of the sad but invertible decline of Atari :-(
The head of Audiogenic approached Atari to develop on Jaguar, only to be told Atari didn't want them..
I loved my Atari jaguar I got as a kid. I got it for like 30 bucks brand new with 3 games from a computer parts catalog that got mailed to my house. The alien vs predator game was pretty sweet. I thought the controller was pretty sweet. I want to say I got it fall if 96? Don’t remember exactly when except it was at the beginning of the school year in either 96 or 97.
I was also a late-comer to the Jag scene, buying mine in early 97. While that was too late to make a difference for Atari, I had fun with it and got to enjoy the Telegames and Songbird releases. :)
I never owned a Jaguar but I remember seeing a demo of it when it first came out and I was blown away by how good the games look and how smooth it ran.
@@abcmayaFor 1993 it was pretty sweet. It just would've had a better chance had it been able to come along in '92.
@@iratanongrata5973 Or if the best titles it saw in its lifespan had all been launch titles.
People in the comments are really stuck on the software portion of the Jag, and maybe it's because it's what they know best? I'm not sure. The Jag had some wacky hardware quirks that killed it for normal use: Want to render some cool polygons? You could quickly swap out small GPU programs repeatedly each frame to really burst the performance, even though it's hell to optimize and debug, _or_ you can write most of that on the slow 68K. But one and done right? You optimize your pipeline, set your GPU object list, and now you can focus on logic!... errr not, since you have to refill the object list _every time the GPU reads it because GPU reads are _*_destructive_* so enjoy spending a large portion of your frame budget refilling it. Many platforms had hardware issues, sure, but none to my knowledge were as bad as the Jag. It's not even just a burden to develop on; it feels like it actively fights you.
Developing for the Jag is a pain for certain - but that's where I come away more impressed with good looking games on it, since it is a nightmare to manage. Supposedly though, the Jaguar 2 was going to resolve some of the more pressing issues that the GPU on the original had (such as the necessity to write things for the tiny 4K GPU cache)
@@iratanongrata5973also, the 68k made programming experience even worst.
This was a wonderful video about the video game history of the Atari Jaguar 🐆 line. And the possibility of having a Jaguar-2 would’ve been a nice thing.
Would love to see Perfect Dark run on Jaguar 64!
The beginning of the end for Atari can be pinpointed to that damn Swordquest contest that was never finished.
But seriously I remember pining over the Jaguar as a 12-year-old kid who grew up on the 2600, 7800, and Lynx, and was completely enamored with the 'more bits is better' nonsense of those glorious 90's.
It's an interesting relic from a gaming history aspect, but I'm kind of ok with never having had one.
I picked a Jaguar up in 2008, due to the appeal of the Alien killer app; boy was I disappointed. Space Hulk on the 3D0 was 10 times more impressive.
When that happened the Atari that made the Jaguar was still Commodore.
Yup.
@@artemusprine Yes, it was Tramiel and no longer Atari. Ironically Jay Miner led the creation of the 2600, Atari 8 bit and the Amiga chipsets, which I simply adore.
I love how consoles used to have their own unique architectures unlike nowadays.
nintendo still does....😁
@@ssppeeaarr In comparison.
But I bet every game on the Switch could be ported to any competing system and optimized in a matter of days.
Hardware differences mean nothing now aside from performance.
they show the Alien one but there was a interview with Rebellion back then for magazine called Die Hard Game Fan and Rebellion said flat out, they scaled back the texture quality a LOT due to having to stuff it in a cartridge
I once did see the proposal for AvP2 that Rebellion had cooked up - it was shared in a special section of the defunct Jaguar Sector 2 forums. I can't recall much about it but it was intended to run on the Jaguar CD where they would have been able to do much more. Of course, had the J2 really come to fruition, I wouldn't be surprised if they had instead ported it over to that platform.
Isn’t it great that you don’t need to redraw pixel art? Just let the computer scale down / jpeg compress to match the memory size exactly like we did for mpeg-2 DVD burns.
@@iratanongrata5973are you referring to the AVP SE wish list? I've shared that with Frank Gasking of GTW and AVP Galaxy, it basically was the early template for what Rebellion put in the 1999 PC AVP game.
The concepts Atari wanted, were too ambitious for the Jag CD, which just offered dumb storage.
My dad bought me a Jaguar from Radio Shack when I was little. it got discontinued like 3 months after I got it.
I know Atari had planned for a Jaguar 2 but did they actually get far enough along that any of the hardware exists but in other forms like how the Panasonic M2 has arcade boards of it? Interesting question to pose for a console that could have been and I look forward to your video here.
0:20 - The Jaguar was announced in August 1993? But it only came out three months later. Commodore did the same thing with the CD32; strangely short announcement-to-release time for these pricey bits of hardware.
4:17 - I could see that theory making sense, though I do wonder if the backwards compatibility situation might have held the Jagaur 2 back in a sense, as I assume it would have to include some of the architecture and complicated chip-set of the original Jaguar to perform said backwards compatibility.
5:27 - 4 controller ports would have been neat; surprising that Nintendo was the only one who thought of doing so around this time (though 3DO had a fun work around). Interesting that they stuck with a D-Pad, though I suppose control sticks only started to take off after the N64 released and Saturn's NiGHTS.
8:57 - So a lot of the Jaguar 2 development seems to be aiming to fix criticisms or bugs of the original Jaguar.
11:09 - The lack of texture is a charming style nowadays but I could certainly see the issue with lacking it back then. Funny how such a key 3D development happened in 1993, too late for many of the 5th Gen consoles to suddenly add-in or address before releasing their systems.
16:20 - I knew the Jaguar was tricky to develop for but I'm learning about a lot of bugs with it in this video.
22:38 - Now this I had been waiting for; examples of the games for comparable systems I feel is the best way to convey the "potential" of the system. As a DOA fan, it would certainly have been interesting for a Jaguar 2 to be capable of an arcade-perfect or near arcade perfect port of the original DOA.
26:18 - Speculating on the M2's potential is certainly a lot easier with that arcade board existing.
27:00 - So this explains your reply to me on the NUON video. I was curious about this Jaguar and NUON connection you ended up mentioning. What great timing to get the answer in one of your recent videos.
I don't believe that the full Jaguar 2 chipset was ever completed. only parts of it were.
Development was still in the very early stages, when the plug was pulled.
Best I can tell, the Puck (or Jerry II) wasn't completed yet but it's also likely that Oberon/Tom II was further along but also not 100%. It would be nice to interview John Mathieson and ask about it. I also have to admit, not sure where these specs came from, but it's the best we've got, aside from a few Jag2 boards floating around there in collections.
I've thought about watching it on the channel here but there was a big press conference in Aug. 1993 where the Jaguar was officially unveiled. The hardware spec was finalized the year prior in the summer of '92, then debugging, tool work, and manufacturing prep took up the next year or so. As it sounds, it could have used more debugging but had they waited longer it would have been a bigger disaster.
To your point of Jag criticisms, if you find that press conference video, Sam Tramiel starts it off by them doing the conference to address "the lies surrounding the Jaguar" - apparently 3D0's Trip Hawkins had already heard of the spec and was going around touting that it was "only two 32-bit processors running in parallel." But as mentioned, the problem was that by August of '93, they already had to have units being manufactured - there was no way as I understand it, that they could have added in things that would've helped. By what Jag devs have stated, the object processor needed a 2nd buffer as well as a cache (I noticed that the Texture Mapping Engine of the Jag2 has a nice cache); and the system should've used a 68020. But John Mathieson had stated that he didn't design the Jag to use caches like that, which ultimately hurt its 3D performance. Of course, the Jag 2 would have nailed all that, but I wonder if they might have made the mistake in touting it as a 128-bit system, when it was more of a 64/128 hybrid.
BC - AFAIK, the internals of the Jag2 all worked out the same as the OG Jag, so getting BC to work wasn't going to be that much more of an expense; The 68020 is BC with the 68000 "naturally" as I've been told from some Jag coders (when I asked about the possibility of porting Jag games over to CoJag arcade hardware).
Here's a really old write-up I did of my history with the NUON - I should turn this into a video at some point :P arcryphongames.wordpress.com/2015/02/22/a-fans-history-the-nuon/
@@iratanongrata5973 So we'll never know for sure, which is a shame but also the fun of such speculation.
An I assume developers were informed of the plans for Jaguar's 1993 release backing 1992 or even before, rather than having a Saturn or CD32 situation of early releasing.
Interesting, so the Jaguar 2 was effectively building on the original Jaguar but with enhancements and additions to both live up to it's original claims and enable to do additional development tasks that had become popular since then (1993 onwards rise of 3D gaming).
Having a video dedicated to the Jaguar and NUON connection would be awesome. You see a few channels cover Jaguar, the odd one even focused on it, but NUON is certainly a rarely talked about subject.
@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 Ah, a shame to hear. So more of a Commodore Hombre situation than a 3DO company M2 situation. Thanks for the answer.
I enjoyed this video. Very interesting. Would you please consider doing a video on the canceled Panasonic M2 console?
Possibly. That would be a bit easier since there's that arcade hardware for it.
3:32 keep in mind, consoles at the time often had non-square pixel aspect ratios. So 1600x600 doesn't necessarily equate an ultra wide display. To me it sounds more like they were going for 800x600 with 2x supersampling (and realistically, such max resolutions never actually ends up used, the PS2 could technically output 1280x1024 but that was only actually used for the PS2 Linux kit)
Yeah, there was another comment mentioning that and it makes sense. I do imagine that it was just to say it could do that resolution which looks good in marketing materials but would never or rarely be used
@@iratanongrata5973Doesn't the Atari 7800 use some strange rectangular pixels system?
@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 It can, but it can also do regular pixels just the same. It's lower resolution mode tends to mimick the Commodore 64 but the way it builds the screen is entirely different, separating things into horizontal zones. But the architecture of the Lynx and the Jaguar (and the Jaguar 2) and how they drew the screen were entirely different.
@@iratanongrata5973that's the best explanation of the 7800 hardware I have yet been given, thanks
I had a beloved Atari STe back in the day. The "medium" resolution option on that doubled only the horizontal resolution, from 320x200 to 640x200. The fonts and icons would be tall and thin and it could manage only 4 colours on screen at once. As a kid I couldn't imagine what this mode was for, but I imagine if you used more serious software, music creation software for example, which was popular on the ST, it would give you more screen real estate. 🤔
Not particularly relevant to the conversation, it just reminded me of that. 😅
I would advise caution when using SegaRetro as a source for system capabilities. They're very... optimistic in a lot of ways, like counting the Saturn's VDP2 Mode 7-style planes as 1,000,000 polygons, conflating tilemapped graphics with texel fillrate, or using transform and lighting numbers for the Saturn that are completely unrealistic (If you pin both SH2s and the DSP, sure, you can do more T&L than the PS1, but you can't realistically do that because the CPUs will always have a bunch of other stuff to do.)
Looking at what this version of the Jaguar 2 is, the specs are too vague to get a really good idea of what this machine could do. I don't think it would be anywhere near what Model 2 could do.
Noted - that's where I also used System16 for some specs (where they are also a little more conservative on how the Model 2's capabilities).
Either way that's the best we have and since we don't know exactly where that came from, it could have been wrong or exaggerated. But do keep in mind that Atari was listening very strongly to the critics (both the media and developers) and wanted a platform powerful enough to resolve all that. 900k T-mapped polys would have been pretty solid for the time, and being able to pull off phong shading wasn't bad either. Too bad we'll probably never know for sure though
ATD apparently said Atari approached them and asked what they'd like to see in the Jaguar 2 hardware.
IMHO, Saturn numbers are more like demo rates, rather than game rates. The Saturn was still technically more powerful than the PS1, but so hard to program that few games came out better, and only marginally so.
I think the issue is that the machine sounds like it was chasing the competition, instead of pioneering. This would have kept it comparable with machines that, unless it launched alongside the N64, would have been outdated within two years when the Dreamcast came out, and without the brand power of Nintendo.
Interesting note is that according to some internal documents including the Jaguar developers manual Atari intended to also release a PC video card based on the Jaguar chipset. Presumably that would also have moved to the Jaguar 2 chipset.
Unfortunately Atari basically just ran out of money.
They needed one more revision of the Jag chipset to fix the JMP in main ram prefetch bug, but had to push the Jaguar out the door since they were running out of money.
Jaguar 2 is an interesting design and could have been good. However, with a company running out of time and money, fixing existing issues with a shipping design should have been the focus. The homebrew scene found a workaround for the jmp in main issue, but Atari only had it listed as no workaround. Best they had was copying chunks of ram into local ram to avoind the issue - that is what Doom did.
Rob Nicholson of HMS. said they needed another 2 revisions, but didn't specify which issues he had in mind.
Re:The Jaguar PC Card, do you mean..
Sigma Designs
- JAGUAR PC CARD. Computer peripheral. Sigma Designs was developing a
card for IBM PCs and compatables that runs Jaguar CD software and acts
as a ReelMagic MPEG card.
@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 I recall a programmer saying the Jag would've been way more capable if they just added ONE more register! I don't know if that's true or not but it stuck in my head all these years
Graphics card is a missed opportunity. Also, atari should've release jaguar pci board and jaguar 2 board or graphics card after its cancellation.
@@PlasticCogLiquid going off memory, that may well of been John Carmack.
@@PlasticCogLiquidthere are many places which would need optimization. John Carmack means that the address generators in px mode should detect if a carry happens so that the phrase changes. So on the read side, reuse the old phrase if the address is still the same. On the write side, don’t write out the phrase, while we are still filling it. Would also really help with the z buffer.
The registers to hold the phrases ( texels and pixels and z ) are already present.
Maybe he meant to have a write queue which waits for the read queue? Upscaling would get most speed up. Downscaling would still prevent a lot of page misses.
For short spans alignment costs a lot in Gouraud shading. There is already a double source register. Use it to let the address generator run ahead. Of course you would need to store the ticks also. Maybe this could even proceed over to the next line. Like when the source address generator is done, it signals JRISC. Then JRISC updates along the pipeline.
With such a wide resolution I wonder if this was intended to be "split" down the middle and used for the two screens required for the VR system Atari were working on?
That's a possibility - given that the VR headset was supposed to launch about 1996ish and they wanted full backward compatibility, it would've made sense as well for this system to take greater advantage of the headsets capabilities.
For everyone commenting on software being king - yes, it is and power doesn't mean you can't have great games on a platform :) Same goes for the 7800 power video. But power isn't meaningless - more power tends to = more things you can do with a game. SMB3 wouldn't have been possible in the exact way it was done if produced on the 2600; Oblivion or Skyrim wouldn't work on the N64; No company would be doing HD remasters; No one would care about how "perfect" an arcade port is/was; And developers wouldn't have jumped ship on the Jag to create content for more powerful platforms. That doesn't mean that power is king, but to say "it doesn't matter" is denying the reality of game development and history.
In regards to the Jag2, without any games (or even announcements of games for the Jag2 that I can find), it's easier to discuss what is known from the specs and from there could at least derive what types of games the platform could handle. The Jaguar not being a 3D powerhouse meant that it simply couldn't handle a lot of the big hits that hit the scene in '95/'96, like Quake and such. The Jaguar 2 sounds like Quake, Quake 2, Sega Rally, Dead or Alive, etc., all would have handled it and anything else that someone was working on in '97-'99 just fine (again, proof that power did matter - games the Jag couldn't handle meant it didn't get them). Of course, the big issue is that Atari was terrible at developer relations. Having someone in that role who was likable and competent would have been a bigger help to the OG Jag's chances, for sure.
I may do a video about Jag 2 potential software, if anyone cares, although with it being the OG Jag's birthday this year, I'd like to focus on some things that could/should have come to it :)
I'll adress specific points via seperate posts.
Re:Jag 2 games. Dev quote from the time..
Andrew Seed
I worked for Imagitec Design and knew the internal problems in Atari. We
were offered by Gremlin Interactive to convert either Actua Soccer, Loaded
and a racing game, they wanted to do at least one on the Jag 2 but we could
not get any details out of Atari about it - unless we forked out for a dev
kit . Then we saw Atari in its demise and decided not to get involved. Also
Bill Rehbok (hope thats the spelling) used to work at Atari before moving to
Sony. I too would have liked to have seen the Jag 2 since if it addressed
all the problems which dogged the Jaguar it could have been quite powerful
for its time. I am sure if the could have proved to developers that the Jag
2 was "impressive" then they might have survived.
Also I think that before the Jaguar retailers got burnt with Atari and so
were a bit sceptical to get behind the Jaguar. Whilst I was at Imagitec all
of the Jaguar games written were conversions (aprt from I-War) and doing
this might be good for the short term it does not do any good for the long
term. We had to wait a year for Tempest 2000. Ok it is not a 100% original
game but it was new to the teenagers who never experienced the original.
Regarding Jaguar Quake.
Initially, Shawn Green had made a comment saying John Carmack had told him, Quake would be heading to Jaguar, with compromises, then later issued this statement.
Regarding I.D bringing Quake to the Atari Jaguar :
In all likelyhood, there will be no port of Quake to the Jaguar.
-Shawn Green
Project Manager
id Software
6.10.96
John Romero and Dave Taylor from the company openly mocked the concept of Quake running on the Jaguar, Romero going so far to say the hardware could barely handle Doom.
@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 Thanks. It's a little confusing as it sounds like they are blending requests for games on both the OG Jag and the Jag 2 but obviously never even saw the Jag 2 hardware. If Atari had some sense, they'd have treated Imagitec like a 1st party dev and loaned them a Jag2 dev kit so they could start tinkering with it, instead of demanding they pay.
@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 Yeah, I'm not one of the crowd who thinks that Quake would've been possible and that's not what I'm claiming in the video - I'm talking specifically about the Jaguar 2. Quake only could've ran on the Jag1 in a tiny window and even then maybe if some textures were off.
The Jaguar 2 however, would have been more than capable of handling it Quake 2, if the specs are to be believed. That's part of the point of the video - seeing where it lands so we could make an educated guess as to what games the Jag 2 (not the OG Jag) could have handled.
Quote from WTR coder:
World Tour Racing - Jag 2 Info
1/29/97
I'm about to disappear as it's the end of my working day, but as there seems
to be quite a high level of interest I'll clarify what I said about the Jag 2
in my last message.
I don't have any physical Jag 2 papers, I don't think anyone does except the
ex-employees of Atari, as the project was confidential, but I did get to see
some of them.
Atari started releasing details to some developers around the middle of '95,
with the intention of holding a developers conference in the Autumn. The
conference never happened and the project died later that year.
Depending on how much I can remember (it was over a year ago) I'll try to
post some information up about the machine tomorrow. But I will say this, at
the time it didn't look that great compared to what was looming and Atari
must have been aware of that.
Very interresting. Thanks !
You should take some time with audio as well, the intro is ear-piercingly loud, the speech is too low, and the background music is of a kind that does interfere with speech.
Thanks for that advice and apologies on the bad quality there.
If Atari had enough money to last through early ‘97 I think things could have gone well for them, the Jaguar was seriously underutilized. Games like Rayman proved the Jaguar was capable, and even the unreleased later 3D titles looked great for the time. The problem was is that the Jag came out too early, and most developers would just make Sega quality games because that’s just was around at the time. PlayStation and N64 didn’t exist, so developers didn’t really have anything to go off of in terms of “advanced” games.
96/97 release would've been much better since final fantasy 7 was not released and n64 launch in 1996.
Love the research..GREAT JOB.i am one of probably 10 people in the US that had the jaguar 😅.i think the biggest failure was all the planned games that were ultimately cancelled.Atari came out swinging but unfortunately it wasnt enough to stop the nintendo,sega and sony juggernauts.
Thanks! The Jag was the first console I'd bought with my own money so I have a soft spot for it :P I may do a video about the many unreleased games the system has, which is both sad and fascinating at the same time.
I am one of the others. Not only did I have one I played it daily, for hours.
Iron Soldier, Syndicate, Tempest 2K and Power Drive Rally were among the best games of the era.
The NBA Jam rom is the best version of NBA Jam on a home console
Top of the line machines and unique consoles don't need the same massive infrastructure backing them. Someone making a game for the Wii or bringing out some arcade monster really couldn't go anywhere else. Even the $2,000 gaming PCs didn't exceed the N64 until 1996-97, and that was with a $300 Voodoo from 3dfx. If your game requires more than 500k polygons/sec, the PS1, N64, and Saturn versions will need too many cutbacks.
That's how the Genesis performed so well. Many Amiga and Atari ST games needed SEGA's System 16 arcade board, and they'd sold millions of them.
I read once that the dev Kits were never fully finished which further compounded the issues devs bad with this console. It was also difficult to code with multiple processors which meant most games hardly used the power of the Jaguar.
Do you mean the original Jaguar or the Jaguar 2? I've never heard of Jag2 dev kits but I do imagine that something must have existed in that regard, even in prototype form
@@iratanongrata5973 I don't think the Jag1 dev kits were fully finished...
Would have to assume that any Jag2 development was done on those Jag1 kits, if any was even ever done.
How about the Sabretooth with the teeth signifying 2? Also, IMHO, if the Jag would have embraced what it was good at and gear more games towards that, it could have been more successful. There are alot of 2.5D games and flat shaded games it could have done well with. Maybe we could have gotten I-Robot 2000 or a fighter like Tobal No. 1.
The Atari Sabretooth? I like that, it would have been clever!
I have been thinking about doing a video that gets into "How could the Jaguar have been successful" and it would cover things like simpler 3D games (there were some on the Atari ST that should've been converted) and some certain arcade ports - particularly at the launch. Atari needed to come out swinging in Nov. '93 to jumpstart interest before the PSX/Saturn could undermine the Jag's "most powerful console ever/64-bit" marketing.
I may also do one about "what games would the Jaguar 2 have seen?"
Great idea and great video
Sadly, Atari's inept marketing team had decided 2D was dead, 3D was way forward and so canned the promising looking Deathwatch for a start
@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 ua-cam.com/video/mmGkjsWhFSU/v-deo.html
Pretty cool to see a bit more in to Atari's history. I think it's for the better than it wasn't canceled. I don't think it would have had a chance for success, launching 2-3 years after the Saturn and PlayStation, as well as going up against Nintendo 64. Atari's strength had always been their arcade ports. By this point I don't think arcade games were in the minds of many home console gamers. Aside from a handful, of course.
I also can't imagine 50Hz interlaced modes would have looked or ran good at all. I guess they were targeting the PAL regions? 50Hz gaming can be pretty archaic compared to 60Hz (and higher).
Best guess is that it's either a typo (the guy who shared the specs forgot to include 60Hz - I notice in the document that they mentioned "Motorola 68000" when it should've been the 68020) or as a prototype being built in the UK, they we focusing on that first and would have added 60Hz in the final spec.
It would be nice to track down whoever has this board at present and have them check
The redesigned Jaguar 2 was intended to be a modular gaming console, allowing users to easily upgrade specific components such as the graphics processor, sound chip, and even the CPU. This groundbreaking concept would have allowed gamers to customize and enhance their console's performance over time, creating a highly personalized gaming experience.
It's not groundbreaking if Sega already did it and failed miserably with it.
@@VOANthe fuck are u talking about?
Do you realize why PCs were not popular to develop on before Steam existed?
When specs have that much variance, making any game requiring more than the lowest common denominator limits your potential audience.
There is a reason why you can count the amount of games that need the PC-Engine's Arcade Card Pro, or the Sega Saturn's or N64's 4M expansion packs on one hand.
This is literally the first time I recall hearing anyone make this claim. It also seems very improbable given the multiprocessor design. There is nothing about the known prototypes to indicate that they were actually planning to do this. It does however sound like something someone might have said in an interview.
@@cabbusses the Saturn hadn't an expansion pack. It had a RAM cartridge.
I did a little research on the MIPS/MOPS issue, and it sounds like for the Jag, MIPS and MOPS are equivalent, because of the RISC architecture. It would be a different story if most of the chips were CISC. So, yeah, about where the N64 was.
The number of bits a processor/data bus can process/communicate at once does indeed put a limit on the complexity and fidelity of the images it can generate in a reasonable amount of time.
Agreed - but I think it simplifies it way to much to claim "8-bit graphics" when you can have multiple bit-widths in a computer and graphic fidelity/complexity varies wildly even among "pure" bit systems. But, it is easier to say 8-bit or 64-bit when talking that sort of thing
@@iratanongrata5973 Yea I knew what you were trying to communicate to non-technical people, I just would have thrown the word "necessarily" (bits do not necessarily equal graphics) in there. Cheers.
Announcing the Jag 2 as ready for release two years after the Jags release helped kill off the Jaguar, console lifespans were 7+ years, here was Atari telling customers and devs that their machine was redundant in 2 years.
Just a thought, but the resolution could have been for the purpose of supporting jag vr which was an intent of Atari at the time. Utilizing an output of two 800x600 images rather than one 1600x600. But who knows
That is possible...makes sense given that the VR headset was a thing at the same time the J2 was being created.
what is the game around 10:15 - I don't think its name was mentioned
Ah you're right, I thought I'd mentioned what it was. It's called Battle of the Solar System but Microprose and Jaelco. It's an arcade game released in 1992; AFAIK it's rather rare and was never ported to anything.
@@iratanongrata5973 a crying shame it never got a home release.
I hate how I feel so insanely jealous any time I hear of a person owning something like this... why can't I just be happy for them? Idk but I can't help it....
I know how you feel my friend, People Slagg the JAGUAR off. But i had some AMAZING Times
On my JAG. I had Aliens With the 3DFX Card It was Brilliant mate And Jaguar XJ220, They were
AWSOME games. I Miss my Jag, I shouldn't have sold it. They were the best times in my life, The
JAG and the 3DO my friend.
Same.
@@cpu64 Thanx for the reply mate, Mabe you could get yourself one pall.
I might just save up and try to get myself another one. You could try retro
shops, There arn't many left But there are a few Dotted around If you know
where to look. There's one In Brierly Hill Near Merry Hill, And he has Got
Some Great stuff, And a lot of it is mint in the box mate.
I used to have one from way back when they were being showcased in dixons. I saw aliens vs predator and bought it on the spot... For the day if was ok, not great but adequate. I even enjoyed Tempest 2000 💝
The Jaguar 2 was meant to be around 150 MIPS (not MOPS) which would have made it a little less powerful than the N64 on paper.
900k polygons is a lot more than the N64's 180,000. I s wish that ATARI had released the Jag 2 than the Jag 1.
I remember being dental X-rayed with an Atari Jaguar.
I think the resolution of 1600 x 600 is to accommodate dual monitors of 800 x 600 for some insane reason that I can not fathom.
local multiplayer probably. Same concept as Playstation and the bridge cable or whatever it was that let you connect two units and TVs each user gets a full screen.
@@Blink_____ But what would even be the point without Armored Core?
Wish whoever owned the working prototype would make of video of it playing a Jaguar game. I can’t imagine owning such a rare thing and not a documenting for the world. 1 picture doesn’t cut it for me😅.
Unfortunately I'm not sure who owns the working board now...it had been under Curt Vendel's ownership but after his untimely death, I think some of the collection might have been sold off (or put in storage)?
@@iratanongrata5973 this sucks. The guy who owns the final prototype working prototype of the 3do m2 by matsushita with dolphin demo also went off the grid years ago too. Oh well
@@TheBic4 Yeah, it does. There was talk a few years ago of someone making the Jag2 in FPGA but that seems to have gone no where. :/
Me n my friends just knew the jaguar was too expensive for us to get, but thought it would be cool, n moved on. Obviously we never saw any specific great games on it, not that it would've mattered, our parents were not spending that kind of money. So that was that.
There are soooo many details that are impossible to include in a concise presentation. For example, the reason that 3DO DIDN'T use the DVD standard was that they had backing from Philips and Matsushita (Panasonic), Sony's two main rivals, and it was Sony who was pushing DVD. Together they could have challenged Sony with M2, but neither wanted to work with the other enough to pull it off.
And if they hadn't been bitter rivals unable to focus on a bigger picture it would have been interesting if Commodore and Atari could have worked together. Apple backed the PPC partially to end the CPU upgrade routes for both the Amiga and ST. Motorola's ColdFire succeeded the 680X0 line but wasn't going to keep either machine competitive.
But had either read the writing on the wall and known how short their time was it would have been interesting to see the Jaguar II chipset co-developed by Atari and Commodore and then used in a wedge-style desktop to succeed the Amiga 1200 and Falcon. Commodore were pretty close to a high end Amiga using AT&T's DSP (probably for audio but would have boosted floating point maths used in 3D) but were dividing resources between the AAA and Hombre chipsets, neither of which were ever completed. The Jaguar II chips would have been comparable enough to Commodore's Hombre spec. Putting them in a computer would not only have helped them recover their investment sooner it would have given them an affordable development platform. Jaguar II games could have been developed on an Amiga if only the two companies could have buried their ugly history.
How involved is it to make one of these videos?
It depends - I do try to research as best I can in advance, come up with a script and try to follow that but once that's done and you edit in all the little clips, it can take several hours, depending.
rgw nuon uses ALUS similar to cores but its more like the cell but vastly less complicated
It's not about how powerful a system is anymore. It's about how powerful a game is for that system that proves it! 🎵🎮🤘🤩🎧📺🎶
The problem with the Jag was its software library was a lot of _(Atari 1980s arcade game) 2000_ titles, after having done that once, already. Atari, now, is actually getting that a fresh coat of paint isn’t the only thing you need to do to “modernize” an IP... Sometimes it works, but not for so many games about which nobody cared, in 1994. Millennials and Zoomers are more into those games, now, than Gen X’ers were, then. Nobody was on a retro tip for the Atari 2600, in 1994. The gaming landscape was still evolving, even in terms of many genres that exist today but didn’t, then - which make up over 3/4 of the landscape that was being built in the mid-‘90s. Hardware has _never_ been Atari’s problem. Even after losing the Amiga-the successor to the Atari 8-bits more than anything-to Commodore, but then generating a MIDI machine still in _professional_ use, today, coveted among many musicians...
To be fair, there weren't that many remakes in the Jag library - It only had Tempest 2000 for the first year, Missile Command 3D and Defender 2000 didn't come until '95...although sure, it did need some more modern experiences if it had any hope of getting anywhere. Cybermorph was a good attempt at that for '93 but it certainly wasn't enough.
@@iratanongrata5973There weren't many that appeared.
Battlezone 2000 morphed into Hoverstrike, Space War 2000 was canned, Major Havoc 2000 never got off the ground.
Underrated system and they should have put out an Atari Jaguar 2
Games sell consoles & console sales get you devs who make games…
What is really telling about the jaguar is what the homebrew scene has been able to do in the 30 years since.
Had devs been performing at that level from day one I’m still not sure the jaguar would have thrived.
A little more time in the oven could have made a huge difference though.
Seems like Atari was ahead of their time when attempting to increase word sizes back in the day.
GC Loader will solve your game price challenge
What game is at 10:14?
It's an arcade game by Microprose called Battle Of The Solar System (B.O.T.S.S.). As an arcade business operator and collector myself, I've never seen one and would guess it's pretty rare - but would've made a great Jag 1 game.
Saturn had a 4MB cartridge from Capcom
Whoa...the Jaguar 2 was said to produce how many MIPS in 1995? 127.902MIPS? Holy good God man that's stupid fast for 1995. The Playstation clocks in at 33.868 MIPS and the Saturn at 37.227 for each processor. I don't know if one can add them together or if it's still considered as one number but even together it doesn't come close. I am having trouble finding how many MIPS the N64 can produce but I'm willing to bet it's going to be slower than 127 MIPS. The Sega Dreamcast absolutely smokes it at 300 MIPS...
Addendum- I know MIPS is not a great way to judge a consoles power but it's pretty wild just the same. I'm actually interested in what its GPU can do as compared to the other 5th generation machines.
Those claims are worthless and irrelevant because Atari SUCKS! and can't do anything right. They would have never pulled it off, guaranteed. This is why there was NO ATARI JAGUAR 2. Just a bunch of empty hopes and claims.
@@CEEPMDEE
First and foremost, "Atari's" isn't a console and my "claims" I'm afraid, are 100% accurate. Atari is the name of a company that produced many consoles. Which of course shows how little you know about the subject at all. Without them the industry would be a mere shadow of what they are today but I digress...
You see, Atari was the only company that had the balls to stand up to Nintendo's highly illegal and predatory licensing policies in the 1980's. Without Atari, Nintendo would have remained unchecked allowing them to continue to kill off all innovation as they went. So what was it that you were running your mouth about again? I bet you weren't even around when all of this happened. No run along, I think it's past your bedtime junior and don't forget your blankey on the way out.
@@Sinn0100I can't remember the specs quoted at the time, but Jaguar 2 was indeed intended to take on both the PlayStation and N64, so you'd of been looking at theoretical sub DC performance.
A pinch of salt is always needed with Atari soap on a rope, tech claims.
Here's Bill Rehbock talking of original Jag 3D Performance
:
Can you clear up some ambiguity regarding the audio/visual powers of the Jaguar? How many polygons and sound channels can the Jaguar manipulate simultaneously?
BR:
Well, if anybody quotes numbers about those capabilities, they'd be lying; they're dependent upon what else you're doing in the system. From strictly specifications standpoint, the maximum number of rendered polygons it can produce is over half a million, but to throw around that number is ludicrous, because the software must do other things.
Audio capability is all software too. Depending on what kind of audio you're doing (FM synthesis, eight-bit samples, 16-bit samples), you can run the range from one voice to well in excess of 25 voices on the Jaguar. But at 25 voices, you'll trade off sampled stuff with FM stuff, and it's going to depend on your music score and sound effects."
@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148
Excellent post! Now, the Jaguar 2 was definitely sub Dreamcast based on the "peak" hardware specs vs. performance they claimed. We know peak performance always meant ideal situations that are not something you would ever see in the real world.
The N64 CPU itself has 125MIPS. The RCP had 100MIPS. If you combine it like the jag did it's 225.
The PS1 itself if you combined the CPU, GTE and the MDEC was 176MIPS. This does not include the GPU or SPU.
From reading about the Oberon (Tom2) it was 4 processors in 1 and the combined was 128MIPS. The main limitation of the Jag 2 was its weak CPU, just like the original Jag it was going to use a Motorola 68000 variant at 28MHz. The Saturn itself used the same CPU just for sound control. Not to produce sounds, just to control the SCSP and decompress samples.
So no the Jag 2 would not have been a powerhouse, its weak CPU would have held everything back just like it did with the original Jag.
Please equalize the audio volume of your videos. The 2600 Pacman dying sound effect is much, much louder than your narration audio track.
Yes, I'm aware of that and have edited the video to remove the intro, but it will take some time for the change to be reflected.
HEY, Did you know that the 3DO was Suppose to have a DVD drive, But it got Cancelled due to Cost.
That's mind blowing, To think DVD TECK has been around that long, And the 3DO would have been the
first console ever to use that Teck. WAW is all i can say my friend.
I hadn't heard that and I wonder if that's even true as Toshiba didn't launch DVDs until 1996. The M2 might have been able to do DVDs but I highly doubt that the original 3DO would have. But overall, there are some fascinating things that happened in the past and I like discussing them.
@@iratanongrata5973 YEH Mabe my friend, But Don't forget before Teck is released
It's in development for years, So the Teck could have been there already, I Did hear
this on you tube to be fair, So It could be fake, But i think i Believe it. I wish i could
get my hands on an old retro computer mag from the day with the 3DO specs in it.
this is Bugging me now cause Im'e from that era and ihad a 3DO back in the day, And
i use to buy all the computer mags back then. Well i do have a 3DO again now, Now i
have to find out more about this 3DO And DVD Thing my friend.
System manufactures tend to exagerate the capability of new machines. I think the Jag 2 would have been maybe around n64 levels of performance. The n64 had a few pretty big flaws though, cartridge sizes and tiny texture cache to name a few, so maybe the Jag 2 would have been a bit better. It's a shame they never released it though.
They do sure, but as far as we know, the specs posted through Curt don't come from Atari themselves looking to impress people. Ultimately, the only way to know is for someone to actually make some software for one of the few J2 prototypes out there or for that J2 FPGA project to happen and homebrew devs start taking a crack at it.
If I ever get the lottery, I'll make reproducing the Jag2 my vanity project, haha.
@@iratanongrata5973 if I win a billion I'll gladly fund that project lol
Plus, it will use cd media as well. Has a edge over the n64.
Wasn't programming for it really hard especially due to the tom and jerry situation?
It really doesn't matter how supposedly powerful Jaguar II was on paper, sources from Imagitec Design have stated Gremlin contacted them, as Atari had been looking at converting a handful of PlayStation titles over to it.
Atari clearly had learnt nothing from The shovelware SNES and ND ports to the original Jaguar.
New hardware needs killer apps that fully exploit the new hardware, not more colourful ports.
That had always been Atari's way of doing things since their early consoles. How many times do they expect people to buy the same games from generation to generation? All of Atari's games from the 2600 to the 7800 and again putting them on the Lynx. Tempest and Defender 2000 were exceptions as they had something new to offer, but the others were just graphical upgrades from previous generations.
lol but its good to have ps1 ports since they went on to dominate!! but ya atari sadly didnt build good relations with third parties.
especially with the jap ones. also they had no standout IP of their own... like nintendo and sega. but even so i would have liked to
see what jag 2 could have been.
Great, sound a bit low.
Sorry about that, I did do some adjustments but in going back to it, should have gone a little louder. Will keep in mind for next time
Interesting.
The Jaguar needed the Tramiels to have another 500 million in the bank and to use that money to provide proper tools, documentation, and memory.
Just one more revision of the chipset would have ironed out a performance sapping DMA bug. But their developer support was terrible too and in the end most devs just did everything on the 68000 with minimal use of the custom hardware.
Maybe it's Motorola to blame also who didn't want to invest much in the 68020 or 68030. Both went on to be big sellers in the embedded world afterwards. I don't think the problem was the extra cost, but more Motorola not wanted to guarantee Tramiel that those would available enough for a long time. And it's not only the better speed but also a better MMU would mean much better development software possible.
O btw I would want a seperate bus from the memory to the object processor. That would have helped a lot!
@@6581punk Yup. I was at the launch event and had great excitement for the Jaguar. I have most of the collection and even the home brews so it's a console I love. I visited Atari many times back in those days. Their E3 booth was actually pretty awesome.
Atari lacked 3rd party support since the 7800 which was largely in part due to cost cutting (imo), an issue that would have also plagued the Jag 2 in some form or another.
Imagine trying to play N64 games with a Jag controller! Terrifying!
they prob would have copied joysticks eventually like sony did into their controls. lol.
they would have called it the cheetah
I'd have been fine with that
Reading the specs and concept, I think, they were basically aiming for a RISC based PC, so working with the AT form factor, creating a nice case around it and using RISC OS would have been a possible solution :)
And I think "Atari Anubis" would have been nice cause the similarity to the "Acorn Archimedes" :)
Powerpc would've been a great choice for a risc based pc.
Atari Jaguar needed arcade games and not games looking like Super Nintendo games. Games that look like the Neo Geo games. Do the math 64 bit not 16 bit.
Neo Geo is 16 bit
@@legendsflashback The Neo Geo was market as the first 24 bit system. Even if the Neo Geo has a 16/32 bit cpu 68000 and 8-bit Z80 coprocessor the games are awesome arcade quality.If the Atari Jaguar had arcade quality games it might been more popular.
@@orlandoturbo6431 Saturn was marketed as 64bit in Japan, tg16 was marketed as 16 bit in USA, I saw the neo Geo 24 bit pitbull ads, it's b.s. it's a 16 bit machine.
@@orlandoturbo6431 same main cpu and graphics chips in neo Geo are in Genesis , just clocked higher and with more colors and more and better sound chips 💡
Not just modern arcade games (titles annouced like Cisco Heat were far too long in the tooth by time the Jaguar arrived) but system exclusives like Black Ice White Noise, Conan, Dactyl Joust, Deathwatch.
It needed strong western third party support, to generate hardware sales to encourage Japanese developers to back it.
The name of the new console would definitely have been _Snow Leopard_ - also the best and last cat name for MacOSX... Puma woulda been the way to go, though, ‘cause they were into fast attack cats, and “Bobcat” is too generic/often used by sports teams/universities... Why aren’t any schools called “Pumas?” Pitt has the Panthers...
Actually, OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) was last. Snow Leopard was 10.6.
Judging by the time it would've come out, I'd imagine it would've been called the "Atari Liger"
It's too bad we never got a Lynx 2, which they could've called the Atari Ocelot or Bobcat :P
True comment about the bits.. My PC is 64 bit now, but in the early 2000s, it was 32 bit, My 32 bit PC would easily have outperformed the Jaguar or N64, despite the fact they are 64 bit. Well, the N64 is. The Jag is debatable.
I'm not knocking either console. Both had good tech for the 90s.
I grew up playing a Texas Instruments 99/4A. I didn't know at the time that it was the first 16-bit computer. But if you look at the games, they're like high resolution 2600 games - no where close to the SNES, Genesis or even other 16-bit computers like the Amiga or Atari ST.
Another question I like to ask for anyone still thinking bits = power is: How many "bits" is your PS5 or Switch? Ever wonder why companies stopped touting that as a power feature? ;)
@@iratanongrata5973 the Switch has 4 64-bit cores, with Atari logic that makes it a 256 bit system. Fun fact: despite being a true 64-bit console, most of the time N64 games used 32 bit operations as the additional precision wasn't necessary and the resulting code ran faster
Also, regarding the TI 99/4A, its performance was further held back by TI's decision that code should be written in their GPL language as opposed to the CPU's native code.
@@Phredreeke 32-bit math is more efficient for 3D calculations, 64-bit tends to be overkill; Bits aren't as important as Atari or Sega or Nintendo made them out to be. There's no such thing as "8-bit or 16-bit or 64-bit graphics."
It was Atari critics like Trip Hawkins who claimed that Atari was saying that two 32-bit processors made 64-bit, but it wasn't. No, the Jaguar was not "pure" 64-bit in every respect but it did have:
-A 64-bit bus
-64-bit DRAM
-Two 64-bit processors (The Blitter & Object processor)
Having two additional 32-bit processors (which could access all 64-bits of the bus, making them 32/64 hybrids, like the 68k a 16/32 hybrid) makes it a little bit of a Frankenstein, like the TurboGrafx-16, but it did have several important components operating at 64-bits.
@@iratanongrata5973 if we're counting DRAM databus widths then the PS2 has a 4096 bit GPU ;)
@@Phredreeke Sigh - why do I bother. Read up on how bits and computer components work since you're not wanting to read what I wrote.
It seems odd that an American company would shoot for 50 Hz/ interlaced video when US electrical system has 60Hz. 50Hz/60Hz? Yeah, but not 50Hz
The designers were Brits so it's possible that they were just making this early spec to work for PAL, then would have got the NTSC working later (just a guess though, but same thing crossed my mind).
For the Jaguar in general, I think it was a mistake of Atari to launch the 1st Jag just in SF and NYC at first and not include London and Berlin, given how strong the Atari brand was in Europe then.
Flare Technology were the designers of the chipset and were based in Cambridge UK.
Without partners, for thethe J2: no way... the power is with Good and creativy softhouses
I believe the rumored name for the Jaguar 2 was going to be the Panther.
IIRC Panther was the 16 bit console that got canned in favor of moving forward with the Jaguar
The opening sound effect of your video is hard on the ears. That's all.
It wouldn’t have had make any sense if atari had released the ‘jaguar 2” because it would,ve became more expensive to produce and if it would,ve been released in whether early 1996 or late 1997,it still wouldn’t have sold well simply because people already bought a ps1 or a saturn by that point,the second problem would,ve be it’s high price and lack off games,and thus because of this,it would,ve costed atari more money thenthat they could,ve fetch back and soi guess atari’s ship would sinked more deeper inside the ocean then it already did with their jaguar,
Thing is with knowledge i do have i do have these days, i can assume this would,ve probably happened,
If this story would,ve been told 20 years ago,then i would,ve believed that it would,ve sold like crazy & thrown everything behind it out of the water including the N64 and even the ps1,because back then i believed that people didn’t care about the costs or the games aslong they had the most powerful system ,
BUT as it turns out,that’s NOT the case,it’s that those companies make want to make you believe such nonsense thing,but the fact is most people don’t care about that,the only thing they care is (good) games,a good properly functioning system and a low price, now if companies will learn about this and play in on those people’s mindset rather then trying to change their mindset,they will make in alot of cash.
I can't remember the exact figure, but didn't Atari only have something like $30 million in the bank, when the Jaguar 2 was in R+D?
That's a pityful amount to bring a product to out of R and D and into production, signing up big third party titles as exclusives, paying in-house staff, booking marketing.
It just couldn't be done on that budget.
They were originally intending to launch the Panther simultaneously with the Lynx, but lacked the resources to support 2 flagship products at once.
It was all dependent on how things were working on the market at the time. Had Atari not lost something like $40m in 1995, then they likely would have pushed on with the Jag 2. They also did get a huge settlement from Sega around '94/'95, something around $90m but ultimately the failure of the Jag, Lynx and Falcon on the markets, coupled with Sam's heart attack in Dec. '95 led Jack to come in and cut his losses.
@@iratanongrata5973 ouch that’s a sad dramatic story🥲
Nuon had a very odd low resolution.
IIRC, devs claimed it was 640x480 or 720x480 but in practice it often looked rather blurry.
@@iratanongrata5973 I find it hard to believe the games other than video or menus run in that mode. Looks like 320 X 240 to me. Back in it launch I thought media coverage said it was 320 X 240 for in game? I'll have to double check. I have most of the games maybe space invaders, and the other puzzle games can run higher res vs 3d titles.
@@acem7749 it's been 20+ years so memory is fuzzy but I want to say that Jeff Minter had said on the old NUON forums that games ran at the same resolution as dvds. Probably should reach out to him again to verify
It's a shame atari gave up. Nintendo had Wii u which flopped but they didn't give up and switch did great. I guess it was down to money lost but if they had great follow up atari could still be player in gaming now.
It was really a matter of money. From the numbers I've seen, the company was on a slow decline from 1989 on...their computer division was an expensive failure up through the Falcon, the XEGS was a flop, the 7800 and Lynx didn't sell as well as they needed to. The Jaguar sold so badly for Christmas '95, up against the PSX and Saturn, that when he saw the numbers, caused Sam Tramiel to have a heart attack(which he survived, fortunately) - word is that situation infuriated Jack Tramiel (as he didn't want to lose his son)to step in and say to cut their losses.
I do think that they could have avoided that bad of a situation had they hired better marketing people who wouldn't push the "64-bit is power" nonsense...but they also needed better game designers. Jeff Minter was great but not enough. Had the Jaguar not fared so poorly against the PSX, then we would have seen them hold on for the Jag2, but it was unfortunately "baked into the cake" at that point, so to speak.
Jagwire?
Of all the things Jaguar needed "2" was not it.
Thanks God we never had Jaguar 2.
wack! i would love to have another 64bit console to vs nintendo back then. learned from its og jag mistakes and made a comback. lol.
that last vid showing jag 2 potential was sick!! atari way more deserving of the spot then microsoft for american game console. oh well...
Jaguar had only ports and most Atari ips arent that great. Also lacking in 3d capabilities in a time where 3d was the new thing.
Atari hyped it up way to much. Almost everyone who owned or played a Jaguar felt like it had potential but it was more like a high end 2d machine.
There were some original, exclusive game on the Jaguar - CyberMorph/BattleMorph, Trevor McFur, Tempest 2000, Iron Soldier, Missile Command 3D, Super Burnout, Atari Karts, Defender 2000, I-War, Highlander, Flip Out, Kasumi Ninja, Ultra Vortek, Val d'Isere Skiing...but sure, it could have used more.
As discussed in a video I did about Atari's IP, characters and mascot potential - potential always seems to be the key word. A lot could have been done with Adventure, Yars Revenge, Crystal Castles, Major Havoc, Star Raiders...but they just forgot about them and squandered what they had. It's all too bad.
That said, I think when the Jag was released, Atari should have worked to get a more solid launch line-up than two games. If they had hit with some decent 2D stuff and a couple of 3D game conversions from the ST (optimized of course), it could have helped them gain some momentum at the start. Had it done well enough, then the Jag would have had a solid 1996 line-up, from the many unreleased games we know about.
@@iratanongrata5973Jaguar likely excels better with 2D sprites over 3D polygons. Similar to the Saturn, it was a machine that could manipulate sprites more efficiently than the SNES and Sega Genesis, but when it came to 3D, the Jaguar was unable to compete with the PlayStation in that category when it first launched. Nonetheless, Games like Rayman run comparably well compared to the PlayStation version.
@@crazedlunatic43on the downside coloring choice for rayman was not as vibrant as the ps1, saturn, and dos version.
Jaguar was such a turd of a system. Not even 10-minute load time CDs could help it. I did play the crap out of AvsP, though. Probably out of buyer's remorse for having paid $70 for it. Raiden and Iron Soldier were the only other titles worth playing.
It had the best console port of Doom, until the PlayStation version arrived.
Rayman was great, but not exclusive, Tempest 2000,Skyhammer, I. S 1 and 2, AVP (frame rate issues aside), but yep, Atari just didn't have the resources to generate the killer Apps the system badly needed.
@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 How can you call a Doom version without any ingame music (because the DSP was busy with translations ) the best console version?
@@erikkarsies4851 I see a lot of people making a stink about JagDoom because no music, but in defense of that:
1) The atmosphere for it becomes a bit more creepy without it
2) It could have worked, as shown by a recentish fan effort that got the in-game music working
3) Visually JagDoom was running better than other ports until the PSX version; The lighting effects in particular were better than the PC original, thanks to the higher color depth
The only game that has 1-min load times is Primal Rage on the Jag CD - everything else loads pretty fast :) AvP on cart had maybe 10~15 second load times but it wasn't *that* bad.
Raiden and Iron Soldier were great but I'd also suggest Tempest 2000, Super Burnout, Rayman, Wolf 3D, Missile Command 3D, BattleMorph, Doom, BattleSphere, Zero 5, and Worms were worthy as well :)
@@erikkarsies4851because I was never a fan of the PC MIDI music, where as the PlayStation soundtrack was awesome. Jag Doom was full screen, unlike the rushed 32X version, had more content, it had more graphical detail than the SFX 2 powered SNES version, wasn't an absolute rush job, like the 3DO version or a PlayStation port when coder wanted to write to hardware directly, a la Rage's Pal Saturn port.
It's source code used for other versions.
Atari jaguars.
Too much talk. >8bit ATARI hardware was always overhyped. Even when it had some extraordinary properties, always nothing useful came out of it for general public. There always was some fuckup. As you see Jaguar and Jaguar 2 was complex architecture. I imagine it would be horror to program it. ATARI provided at most little support to developers.
What actually is complex? I think that the Object Processor should be replaced completely by the blitter . The blitter would inherit the palette lookup and scaling mode.
Also the blitter should run a program similar to JRISC on GPU and DSP. Apparently, at least Jaguar1 did not have enough transistors for a (fixed) pipeline. There is only a single ALU. Complex shaders take longer, but simple 2d games like Rayman run at 60fps. You would only need to learn one or two commands. Like: compare z => flags . Store values using write enable bytes from flags. Don’t support framebuffer with less than 8bpp.
How would you implement FMV ?
It's such a shame it failed, Cause i use to own a Jaguar, And i played Aliens with the Add on 3DFX
Card, And the Graphics were just stunning for the time, Way better then the Blocky PS1. And i really
Enjoyed Jaguar XJ220 I think that's how you spell it, Anyway. If more Big gaming Companies had of
took Atari A bit more Serious. It Very well may have been a Different Story. I think it was the same for
The 3DO To be Honest. Not Enough People Got Behind it Because of the Stupid Blocky PS1, YEH
Flipping SONY. People only Paid for the Badge on that one my friend.
PS1 had countless of games worth playing on compared to the Jaguar. What Atari needed was better software support while being able to supply better dev kits that weren’t unfinished and buggy.
I got a jaguar after the cd32 died. no dont laugh its true
i flippin loved both for the record
@@christopher11morris Nothing wrong with loving underdog game consoles ;)
@@iratanongrata5973 had to get a cd32 i loved the amiga so much and the mass storage of cd got me. Had to get a jaguar for alien vs predator . But gaming was changing and the old companies where dying out.i was there too for sega with saturn and dreamcast but watched them fade early too. Great consoles all of them
The Faguar. Worst Atari console ever with only 2 good games.
Software - atari sucked at it.
Nowadays there is a Jaguar 2 : People cheating on youtube by altering the setting of the emulation of the Jaguar so much that it looks much more powerfull. That's not showing what the flawed real Atari Jaguar could do. Pathetic.
There are plenty who are using real OG hardware - just look back to Jag videos posted in the past, such as ViMaster. I'll be posting a video showing the Jag's graphics effects, solely from OG hardware.
@@iratanongrata5973 I don't say there aren't people like that also. But pretending that is OG hardware when it's not because it's emulating a better system is pathetic anyway. And graphic's effects is not a game with multiple tasks. The idea is that the OG hardware was limited by one bus handling everything. By for instance using a 68020 (32 bit , up to 33 MHz) instead of a 68000 (16 bit , on the Jaguar 13.3 mhz) it could have been drastically improved. Remember even the videochip had to get the image out of memory through that bus) the bus traffic could go a lot smoother. Also some more buffer on the DSP instead of 8K could have helped the handling of sound a lot.
@@erikkarsies4851 Sure, we agree on that but it'd be more effective for you to assume that people like myself are operating from an OG perspective and are doing these things in good faith than to assume the worst that it's all fakery, like you were doing with the recent Doom mods.
If you check out my bigger channel Arcade Heroes, you'll see that I rarely use emulation - I either capture from the hardware or point a camera at an arcade machine. I'll only use emulation if there's no other choice but then I leave it at defaults and don't tamper with the settings. Most arcade YTubers don't do that though so I can understand the assumption.
I'm not at all claiming nor implying that the Jaguar was more powerful than the PSX - I know there are those who try and make such a case - but it's also not a slightly more powerful Genesis either.
When I do the gfx video, while I will use a couple of tech demos just for kicks, I'll mainly focus on in-game graphics as I believe that's what you really want to know - what could a system do for the games, not a store demo.
@@iratanongrata5973 Well the footage of emulated stuff without proper descriptions can confuse people anyway :)
Big thumbs down for the deafening intro sound.
That's been edited out of the video, apologies for raping your ears
It's pronounced "jag you are". 😖
like i486dx2/66+ with fast VLB gfx card.
It would have been good if thr chipset was completed but it wasn't hence the bugs the system has.
Well, for 1993 it was great, but that wasn't a great time to release a game console. Had it come out a year prior, then you'd probably be discussing games of the Jaguar 2 and so on.
Of course as mentioned in the comments - had a company like Konami or Capcom made something for the Jag, then they could have made something great - really anything that was good on the Genesis or SNES could have been done better, in the hands of the right coders. I'm sure that Super CastleVania IV on the Jag could've been amazing.
Rayman is a good example of that - plays great on the Jag, Saturn and PSX. But the Jag needed some exclusive titles of that caliber to move the needle.
@iratanongrata5973
But like I said the chipset was rushed and had numerous bugs. If Traimel wasn't in a hurry to rush it out the door and they fixed those bugs I think it would have done better.
@@LUCKO2022It appears ATD, who were tasked with debugging the hardware, asked for implementing detail shading on objects (as you moved closer to them and further away from them), easier on the hardware and Atari made it happen.
Apparently AVP uses this hardware feature to good effect?
Which suggests Atari were willing to implement changes to prototype hardware, but only those that wouldn't delay the release for too long a period.
Atari knew they had an extremely limited window before Sega and Nintendo came out with next generation machines and wanted Jaguar out to get a head start on them.
The Jag sucked