One huge problem Atari had after the failed 5200 is that none of the other consoles they released were developed in house. The 7800, Lynx and Jaguar were all developed by 3rd party companies. It's more difficult for Atari to provide the support software developers need in order to make games that properly utilize the hardware when Atari themselves don't know all the ins and outs since they didn't develop the hardware. Nintendo & Sega and later on Sony & Microsoft have all had very robust development tools and information for software devs because they created their own consoles. I think that's a huge reason why so many 3rd party developers abandoned the Jaguar very quickly. Bad marketing, poor dev tools and reports of non-payments for devs doing 1st party work make for a doomed console.
I think one of the major problems from a marketing perspective was that the Atari brand didn't really excite kids like me in 1993. The concept of retro-gaming didn't really exist yet, so older games and consoles were considered uncool and Atari hadn't mattered in ten years, which was a very long time in both video game years and kid years. It didn't really matter to me how many bits it had or didn't have because I was more interested in what Nintendo and Sega were planning to do next than whatever the Pong people were planning.
I think the programmers didn't know how to program for it was what pushed game designers away. It was complicated to program for. I believe it could've been better. So it lacked 3rd party support. And they should have had released the Atari Panther or had something on the market that could've competed with Nintendo instead of trying to milk the Atari 7800 & 2600 systems for so long.
I had a Jaguar when I was around 7 or 8. I wanted it simply for ALIEN Vs. Predator. One of the best games for the system, but the best is easily Tempest 2000. So good.
@@LuisGonzalez-bj4il I sold mine a few years ago. Kinda wish I still had it, but it was just taking up space. Hope whoever bought it is enjoying the hell out of it.
Also funny thing is that most of us in our late 30's have probably played something based on the jaguar. Area 51 arcade cabinet is essentially a Jaguar.
The number one failure was them not releasing a Koopa game, a theme you'll notice in every single failed console platform. Look it up, every one that failed had zero Koopas
Atari was never known for great decisions. Many developers never utilized the Jaguar as it was hard to develop for the T and J chips. Many just developed software that used the 68000 as the only processor. Also it was stupid that Atari could think it would dupe the world that it was 64bit. Again, Atari at the brink of greatness, throwing it away with bad decisions. Great coverage LD, keep it up. Brings back many memories as the 80s was a great era to grow up in.
What's sad is that they didn't even need to market it as a 64-bit console in 1993. In the era of the Genesis and Super Nintendo, a brand new 32-bit console from Atari would have been plenty exciting.
Love your comment dude and yes the 80's and the 90's was a phenomenal Era for everything especially for games. We only have HD now but the 80's and 90's we had music, better art style, fun games and storylines.
But it really has a 64 bit system bus. RAM is 64 bit, OP ( the DAC) is 64 bit, as is the blitter. A problem is that the components on the bus are not 64 bit internally. So when one component wants to pull data from another one, the address bus would have to transfer this address 4 cylces in advance so that the source component has like 4 cycles to latch all the 64 bit onto the databus. But bus protocol was a 1:1 copy from the 68k because the Jaguar team knew that they are not bright enough to invent a bus. A bus by its nature is a shared resource. The Jag is crippled by all the wait states on it.
Developers had to use the 68k in the Atari Jaguar as there were crippling bugs in Tom and Jerry. The chips weren't complete and the developers at Flare weren't experts in silicone design.
10:06 I can't believe that "17 buttons" was ever thought to be a point of advertising. Especially in that day and age where some people were still complaining about the SNES pad having 8 including select and start.
Can you imagine today people still complain about the complication of buttons, the Switch controller basically had 16 buttons: A, B, Y, X, L, R, ZL, ZR, SELECT (-), START (+), Right Stick Up, Right Stick Down, Right Stick Left, Right Stick Right, Right Stick Click, and Left Stick Click. If they had back buttons then that adds an additional 2 more buttons, add a touch screen with digital buttons and that counts as additional buttons.
It seems weird because you're not looking at the controller with one of the unique overlays it had for the twelve buttons in the middle. Those buttons were effectively button versions of F-keys on a computer keyboard, and the plastic overlays that came with games like Alien vs Predator let you know what the function was for each one. It was actually really cool to play Alien vs Predator with a unique overlay for each of the characters I could play as: Marine, Predator, and Alien. There's plenty about the Jaguar that I can knock (bad marketing, convoluted hardware, etc.), but the controller was my favorite thing about it.
@@InJeffable I had no idea they had overlays for the controller. That's super cool! I'll be honest and say I've only ever seen one Jaguar in the wild (no pun intended) and that was about 26 years ago. It wasn't hooked up to play so I never have actually interacted with one unfortunately.
@@InJeffable yes, people knock the controller, but it was actually very comfortable & easy to use that keypad. I remember Iron Soldier used it perfectly. They lined up with the robots head, shoulders, hips & waste (which were what needed controlled). Sounds complex but actually intuitive.
I think Sega and Atari had the best naming schemes. Sega used planetsl names. Even codenames like Black Belt, Dural, and Katana sounded cool. While Atari watched too much ThunderCats.
I remember totally buying into the ‘bits hype’ back then and reading about the Jaguar made me want one. However I got to actually play one in a department store, I believe it was the Alien vs. Predator game, and even 7 year old me was so unimpressed by it (plus the controller feeling odd) that I told my mom “nevermind” 😂
@@fightswithstairs6292 AvP is a great game! I totally get that now :) but at the time I was also playing Doom 2 on my dad's computer (if I'm remembering my timeline correctly) so using that clunky controller to play a game that felt worse wasn't super appealing at the time. But it's definitely one of the best games on the Jaguar!
@@shaggymcdaniel3216 I think I had the same experience with Nights at the games counter at Sears around then! I remember being impressed by that 3D controller but the game itself just didn't quite grab me like Mario 64 immediately did.
Actually AvsP was arguably the best FPS ever released for a home machine back in the days. It was THE game that made you feel that the Jaguar had some true potential.
@@shaggymcdaniel3216 I'm a gen z person so I'm not old enough to remember sega consoles but I remember my 1st impression of nights into dreams & I remember a video from the xbox UA-cam cchannel when they revealed the games for gold for a particular month & nights was one of those games. A lot of the people on the comments section might also be too young to remember sega consoles & my attitude as well as the attitude of a lot of those ppl was WTF is that ? 🤔 Nights is a weird looking game 🎮 🕹 & not necessarily in a good way regardless of how good the game might actually be. I wonder if that is a similar attitude to what ppl might have had back in 1996 & how if negatively affected the sales 🤷🏾♂️
The chips themselves unfortunately had bugs -- at launch. The list of them is actually quite long, but most importantly: you couldn't render a textured, z-buffered polygon (which would be the heart & soul of a 3D engine). You had to split this operation up into two separate passes of drawing. The average frame-rate of the Jaguar games was shockingly bad, even compared to the lackluster 3DO. It's a tragedy. Had the chips primary function not been broken, and had the marketing not been completely brain-dead, it really could have kicked the Saturn to the curb!
Damn, I didn't know that. That really is a shame. It came so close to potentially being a big hit which would have saved Atari. I know someone is eventually going to respond and say Atari is still around, but really they're not. Atari is just a name now, and it has been that way since 1998. It's an entirely different company now that has nothing to do with the Atari prior to that.
z-buffer plus texture map is one function which is actually not broken. But you cannot Gouraud shade it. AvP and Doom got away because you can still lighten and darken a line: vertical, horizontal, and even diagonally. Diagonally is really motivating me to maybe try to homebrew. I only find two register with dual-use: "The pattern data register also serves to hold the computed intensity integer parts and their associated colours." " The source data register also serves to hold the four sixteen bit fractional parts of intensity when computing Gouraud shaded intensity." . I think "alone in the dark" would run nicely on the Jag. Or is this about this: "If Z-buffer operation is enabled at the same time as the ADDDSEL or SRCSHADE bits are set, then the data is some-times corrupted." ? Or this: "If doing a DSTWRZ blit with SRCEN set, but not SRCENZ, and a set of Z values are written into the Z registers, then the Z values get shifted as if they were read source Z values." Ah, it maybe about doing the z-buffer in phrase mode. The real culprit is that the blitter does not collect its output pixel into a phrase before it accesses RAM. Now I still think that the access to the GPU RAM is quite cumbersome. z check happens on the same page as pixel write. It costs only 4 cycles. Now in 4 cycles the blitter can read 4px from GPU so that is nice. But writing those cost 4 cycles per pixel . Also this breaks down the moment you draw Doom walls .
I read in a pc magazine years ago that in the 90's THERE WAS NO DEFINITION OF WHAT MADE A SYSTEM X-BITS. Was it the sum of the system's parts, the bus width, or only the biggest processor inside it? With no standard definition, Atari was not lying about 64-bits. It was a grey area.
I had a Jaguar (which my brother now has) and followed it closely at the time. I liked how your coverage correctly cited the incomplete development of the Tom and Jerry processors as a major problem for developers. Another issue would be that developers were not used to programming on multiple processors simultaneously and often simply chose not to try. That was a bigger problem for the Sega Saturn which more often than not, had one of the two main processors not running game code. I liked how you showed most of the top titles that were on the system instead of just the ones commonly ridiculed for poor quality. The other issue with the Jaguar was that Phillips stabbed them in the back, but I would assume that bit goes with your coverage of the Jag CD addon.
i always had my doubts about the jaguar when i was younger and while it was on the market and your video only proved my suspicions of the console back then correct. keep up the great work lady decade, i enjoy your videos.
I don't know anybody that had a jaguar or any store that sold it. I never liked the Atari brand and the Jaguar didn't change my mind. N64 was a far better system
I remember being intrigued as a youth by the name of this system. It didn’t take long for me to see what it offered and quickly forget about it. But there’s still a part of me that wants to get one as a collector item.
Those early 32/64 bit systems did look impressive at the time especially when compared to the 16bit systems. If I had my own cash then, I've would have got one.
The Jaguar really didn't. It had potential, like with Rayman. But otherwise, all the games looked rough. Atari really shouldn't have tried to make it showcase 3D games and should've stuck with 2D games which essentially would've made it more like a 32-bit Genesis/SNES.
The graphics accelerators "Blitter (Programmable)" and "Object(None Programmable)" processors were 64-bit. Not like it matters, but they weren't really being dishonest either.
I remember reading or watching something saying the Jaguar COULD have been as powerful as Saturn and a little less powerful than PSX if it had its cache doubled.
Cache is for code and vertices. The PSX blitter draws complete triangles. In the Jag you need firmware in the GPU for this. The blitter is not even able to update its address registers at reasonable speed. The Jag would run 4 times as fast if the blitter would not read the same memory address twice and write twice to the same target address. You know, simple latches and comparison. The blitter spits out a line. I could just buffer the line of like 16px. But the designers originally wanted two banks of memory where you wont need this buffer. For everything but super hires true-color slideshows, two 32bit memory banks would have been faster. Put textures/sprite into one and frame and z-buffer in the other bank. The bank switch pins are there and used in CoJag. .. Yeah, but Gouraud shading was hype at that time. Still the blitter wants the GPU to calculate the first 4px for it !? In the end Gouraud is only fast with large triangles, although it only looks good on small ones.
Jaguar was badly designed. It was a register short , so stalled constantly. Its blotter ran in step by , had it ran in step by step it could have been used for texture mapping The non wait ram was too small to use and buggy . The Jag was far more powerful than you think - but couldn't run properly . It also only used AssemblyLanguage , so was a nightmare to program . It would have blown away the PSX had it not suffered from the design faults
@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 close but no , the GpU was a register short ( it had 32 with 64 internally so I don't know what they meant there - probably referring to a design fault with JUMP ). Funnily enough , if the blitter was designed step by step value , rather than step they could have used it for texture mapping ( protector programmer )
@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 What is a dynamic cache? There is a recent video about the cache on the MIPS on N64 (3 years later ). The video is about Mario64, but it shows how devs had problems because a 1 associative cache is not really transparent. Jaguar was at a time where games were just small enough for assembler. Also cache was so small that you cannot lose to padding . Manual says: "It may be viewed as a simple cache RAM, with software cache control - this technique is known as visible caching ". I like how the Jag can play all those 16 bit home computer games, but with more color. Could have had elite, but with texture ( like on PC ). So you don't need two devices.
About 7 years ago, I remember downloading a bunch of Jaguar videos on UA-cam. Even the corny infomercial. It's the worst system I've ever owned but I still love it for being an underdog like my LA Clippers.
I first saw the Jaguar with Rayman and though it looked good. But a few years later I finally upgraded my Genesis to a PlayStation for my birthday. =) They had it bundled on sale with the dual shock controller. And more importantly the older psx games were starting to go on discount! Was no reason to have any other console back then.
the PS1 was the game changer that ruled that gaming era. Nobody else could get in the market once Sony opened the floodgates with the third parties developing so many many games. The Atari Jaguar desperately needed this and the games could have been so much more instead of the so few that were good.
The emulator BIGPEMU runs Jaguar games even better than Jaguar. I've been playing Checkered Flag at a smooth framerate, clean laps at full speed. I can see how it was meant to be and if you watch my world records "lvlupscore" makes the game look enjoyable. I have 8 of 10 tracks mastered so far. Been especially enjoying Power Drive Rally, Defender 2000, Missile Command 3D, and Super Burnout.
I think its actually a pretty forward thinking idea to have 32 bits dedicated to sprite based video games. in some ways modern developers are just coming back around to this idea
I think Sega and Atari had the best naming schemes in the 90s. Sega used names of planets. Even codenames like Black Belt, Dural, and Katana sounded cool. While Atari watched too much ThunderCats.
The console was indeed a failure, and like you say at the end of the video, it was quite a gamble. However, I think at the time most of us knew that, aside from the most die-hard fanboys. The company knew it, and many consumers knew it. The controversy over whether or not it was truly 64-bit was definitely true. When it was released, it wasn't possible to compare it to the Saturn or the PS1 because they weren't out yet and wouldn't be out for about 18 months. You could compare it to the 3DO, the Genesis and the SNES. The 3DO was wildly expensive and suffered long loading times, like most CD-based consoles in the generation. Ultimately, the Jaguar failed because it was complicated to program for, there was inadequate documentation and tools for the developers, there were some pretty key bugs in the hardware, and it didn't have the RAM it needed. Those problems created a lack of third-party software and caused the reliance on the Motorola 68000 which resulted in games that were, in essence, 16 bit. Those were all big problems, but I'm not sure many of us were surprised when it did ultimately fail. Even if those problems were fixed, it is still unlikely it would have dominated the market. It was a long shot gamble that did not work, but without it, Atari would have just faded away anyways. The company was on the decline with or without the Jaguar.
Excuse me... the "Blitter Processor" is full on 64bit sitting on top of the Jags 64bit registers, which can be controlled by any of the other 32bit Processors.
The thing is, its not about how powerful your system is, what matters is can you sit down and make a fun, creative and interesting game that runs on the system. Also its about IP brands too. Mario is an original creative IP. Same with Soinc. So its not just about making a game, its about character design and world design and then making something fun. It's really challenging to make original and fun content. Star Fox needed an enhancement chip to run on the SNES. Cybermorph didn't need any such chips as the base console was powerful enough. What separates the two games is Game Design and Focus. Start Fox was an on rail shooter and was fun. It had cool characters and good music and good controls. Cybermorph is a free roaming shooter, but it doesn't have the cool characters or cool music nor is it easy to get along with. So its not about how powerful the hardware is, but rather its the art of making a game in general that separates a good game from a bad one. Games are experiences, you tell stories, people can escape into the game world for a bit, its about imagination and wonder.
Got my hands on a couple Jaguar demo cabinets at an auction. Basically an arcade cab top on a simple pedestal base. I'd never heard of the Jaguar at that point and the consoles themselves were not included, so I promptly refitted the cabs to demo PS1 systems, and it was during testing the refit that I got to experience some of the best PS1 gaming I ever had. The Jaguar cabs had a phenomenal arcade cabinet sound system which also worked great with a Playstation. Great times. I still have one of the audio amps out of Jaguar cab.
Some friends of mine were developing a cool shoot em up game for the Jaguar; it's a shame that it was never released because although it was 2d graphics, it was fun as hell and the sprites and backgrounds were rendered CGI abd really made use of the extra colours. It actually looked like a next gen game.
Dude! Like legit, you should tell that story at AtariAge. Do you remember the name of that shoot 'em up project your friends were doing for the Jaguar? Cheers mate!
My family was still using an Atari 2600 in 1991, interesting to know it was technically still active at that point. I think that Atari console was the first thing I ever sold in a yard sale
there were several reasons the 5200 failed, the first was price, the second was lack of backward compatibility(they released the 2600 adapter too late) and awful controllers. the 7800 failed because it was released too late and Atari couldn't get enough 3rd parties interested in it.
I already loved this channel, and Tophat, but I didn't realize how much better your content is from the norm until I searched for a video on the Atari Jaguar. Everyone else tries too hard to be funny in a time consuming way. Your humor hits fast, so even if I didn't like it (which I do) it wouldn't make me feel like my life was passing me by. 😂🎉❤
Love your videos and documentary style! Keep up the great work, I remember begging my parents for a jaguar....so glad they did not get one and got my PlayStation a few years later instead
Got my Atari Jaguar at a pawn shop in Arizona while visiting my grandparents during summer vacation in 1995. It came with Aliens VS Predator and Cybermorph.. All my friends and I loved AvP but Cybermorph sucked. I never found another Jaguar game because all I had was a Local FuncoLand so I ended up selling it to someone for around 200$ The Jaguar was a cool system but the controllers sucked I never got a Lynx but always wanted one. Kinda wish I still had a Jaguar because I'm a collector but honestly there's not a lot of good games. I've never met anyone with a Jaguar and I definitely have never seen a Jaguar CD. Tha js for all your content. Please be well!
I had a Lynx which was good, better than people say. The games were impressive but like the Jaguar the quality of the titles were sub par due to lazy programming by the devs. Sadly my Lynx died in a beach accident in Spain a few years ago (don't game near choppy high tides! Lol)..but I always wanted the Jaguar! It was such an amazing system for the time.
I agree the jump from 3rd to 4th gen was enormous. I can't think of anything recently which has made such a large jump from one gen to another that wasn't a difference that PCs weren't already capable of.
I remember playing on this at a friend's house and was blown away by the graphics for the time and the console was actually well made. The initial cost of the unit and games plus the lack of support killed this one off quick. It could've been a Contender !
It was a contender but flop cause dev weren't ready for 64-Bit that soon. Nobody at that time knew what a 64-Bit game looks like and for some dev most thought that more bit means just more processing powers and better graphics but what they don't know is that 64-Bit also needs to be more innovations. No innovative games means nobody ain't gonna be interest in the console.
@@VOAN definitely. Devs did not know at the time how to utilise the power. It was an low powered N64 in a time when 32-bit gaming was about to breakthrough and 16-bit consoles ruled with hundreds of quickly released good quality titles.
The Jaguar gets a deservedly bad rap, but it had some great games. I have many fond memories of my Jaguar (and CD). Doom, Cannon Fodder, Iron Soldier, Battlemorph (CD), and Super Burnout were all tons of fun in their day. Let's not forget Rayman also got his start on the system. The system doesn't compare to the Playstation of course, but I still love the thing.
Oh man, I remember that Next Generation interview with Jack Tramiel. He even claimed that Saturn and Playstation games looked better than Jaguar because they were CD games!! Like the storage medium made all the difference, not the actual capabilities of the hardware!
I never owned one, or played any of its library. But I remember hearing stories about its funky controller, and library that was.. unique. I give Atari credit for trying, but they flew too close to the sun
I think it can be easy to forget amongst the general failure of the console that the Jaguar had a very innovative controller for the time. I owned a Jaguar, and I loved the overlays for what were essentially button versions of F-keys on a keyboard. It was especially impressive in Alien vs Predator. I had a unique overlay for each of the characters I could play as: Marine, Predator, and Alien.
I remember when I was in grade school, after those ads started playing... Although I more specifically remember the commercial where there were a bunch of kids in an elevator who all excitedly got off on the 64th floor. Being the imaginative man that I am, I started pretending that I could create my own game console that was even further beyond what the Jaguar was claiming to be. I imagined myself with a console that was "2000 bit." (I didn't quite pick up on the mathematical pattern at play here, but looking back if someone did make a 2048-bit console they might have simply called it 2000-bit because it was easier to remember, so maybe?) I don't think I had any idea what the games would look like or be like, I was just hopped up on ego and liked to pretend that I could come out of nowhere and make something that was a hundred times better than even the impressive claims of the Jaguar. All part of my little fantasy world I lived in while walking home from school. I never got to see what a Jaguar could do in person. I recall seeing a 3DO with a cool movie-based game, and later a Playstation that thoroughly frustrated me with its long load times after I immediately fell off a ledge playing Jumping Flash. I don't think it was until the Nintendo 64 came out that I was reminded of that "awesome 64 bit console" that I heard about back in the day, and began to wonder what happened to it. It seemed surprising to me; with all those bold claims they made, they somehow just got forgotten? How does that even happen? I had never heard of such things back then; that was back when everything was just as cool as the TV commercials made them look. ...Except for Sega, because they tried to say they were better than Nintendo so obviously they were lying.
I remember seeing an advertisement for the Atari Jaguar in a magazine back in the 90's. It was surprising to see Atari back in the fight. I never knew anyone that had one. Having an interest in Atari from growing up with the 2600, 800 and the ST this console does interest me to this day. I always felt like they were trying to be too far ahead of their time and fell short of what was coming. It did have some fascinating ideas. The multiple processors caught my attention.
The video suggests the system was underpowered to the point it was hardly any better than the 16-bit consoles, but then the video suggests that almost nothing took any real advantage of its hardware leading to its games looking like… the 16-bit competition. It kind of can’t be both. While it’s definitely nowhere near up to the N64/PS/Saturn’s level, it nonetheless likely had unrealized potential far in excess of the 16-bit consoles.
for a starter, I think it can do all 2d a 16-bit console can but in CRY or even true color, but 2MB total of memory and 5 MB cartridge only go so far. But did you really miss the colors on the 16 bit? People imitate the pixel art even today.
I'm a HUGE Atari fan (Berzerk fan too.. but that doesn't matter here.) If it has the Atari name, I throw my money at it. This console is... well.. it.. umm.. has some good games for it. Granted most of those games are from the modern homebrew community. Some of the older games are okay too. But many of the games were just... so very very bad. You gave me PTSD flashbacks of playing Cybermorph at the 14:50 mark ;) The console looked sleek and modern, but the controller, inferior hardware under the hood, and nightmare it posed for game developers really did not help this system. Awesome documentary! You definitely covered all the key points on this system!!
Sam Tramell was right. John Carmack worked on the Doom port and he said that with some minimal changes in the hardware it was almost as powerful as the Playstation. Too bad for the engineers and for Atari. EDIT: you can find John Carmack talking about this on the internet, a magazine scan.
I played a friends Jaguar in the mid 90’s. I remember playing a fighting game on it and thought it was a pretty good jump from the Atari 2600. But, it could never replace my PlayStation and N64.
Was broke during my early years of college (early 2000s). Think i sold my jaguar, 2 controllers, and about 8 games for probably $75. Now i probably paid 10x that amount just to get it all back for my collection.
Bringing up the Atari 2600 brings me fond memories of my childhood playing Pac-Man, Dodge'Em, Haunted House, Joust, and a myriad of other games. Sadly, I did not play the new systems, like the Jaguar.
There was some major hardware flaw that could have been avoided apparently that was mentioned by the developers of Doom in an interview, basically they had to use the DSP chip for calculations instead of music since the Jaguar was missing the necessary components in order to do both, leaving the game "silent" (same w/ AvP I believe) but functional. This additional chip was supposed to be there and was in the original hardware design I heard somewhere but was dumbfoundingly taken out by the higher ups for cost cutting measures or something and completely ruined all the potential for actually making good games contributing to near total bail out from all third party devs. This might be related to the textured polygon issue someone else mentioned.
Oh the Jaguar! So many memories. I still have one in storage! Truly a necessity for gracious living. 64 bit. #DoTheMath Though with seriousness, from what I've read, the Jaguar had some crap chips and good chipset, but since the good chipset was so hard to program for the vendors used the underpowered chipsets to make their Jaguar games. I could be wrong though. Haven't read up on this stuff in a while.
I remember calling in to chat with a rep at Nintendo back in maybe '93 when the N64 was still on the drawing board. He talked to me for probably an hour telling me all about the then called "Ultra 64" and how it was going to be a TRUE 64 bit console. Then he explained how the Jaguar wasn't 64 bit at all and pretty much said the same things this video is saying. Crazy stuff.
The Jaguar had a 64-bit graphics memory bus, blitter chip, object processor, and GPU. Of course, SEGA and everyone else measured bits in terms of the data path with the CPU. Using ATARI's measurement, the Sega Master System had a 16-bit VDP and would've been a 16-bit game console. Still, had ATARI called it a 32-bit game console and advertised the games (instead of "do the math"), it likely would've sold far more units and may even have succeeded in the marketplace.
Problem was games... you can brag about your number of bits, but if at the end of the day, you do nothing looking better than Donkey Kong Country, Chrono Trigger or even Starfox, your bits mean nothing, people play games, not bits.
the jaguar had some power to it & was a very capable system but some developers did say that they did make it a bit difficult to develop for their are after market home brews that show this. they should of kept it simple & went with the panther & released that with the jaguars pro controller minus the keypad
Atari lynx and jaguar were so weird too see during my youth considering it was around the SNES days. I had family that had them and they were interesting to try out when got the chance.
I never owned a jaguar but I do have a problem with comparing cybermorph to starfox. Yes cybermorph did have a bad draw distance, but it definitely looked better than starfox. Cybermorph was a full 3d free roaming environment, starfox was an on rails shooter and it needed a special chip just to do that. Full 3d free roaming environments in games were very uncommon at the time except for high end pc games. I knew many kids who wanted a jaguar, but like the 3do it was just too expensive. If the full capabilities of the system were utilized it definitely would have competed with the saturn, ps1, and even the n64. I think the n64 was what atari meant for the jaguar to be.
Ooh yes can we please have a video on the Panther! I remember seeing Jaguar in my local computer store and it never appealed to me. I did get a CD32 and 3DO though!
It wasn't a total disaster. There was that dental equipment company that bought the molds for the case and started making oral cameras out of them.
😂
Why is this making me laugh more than ot should?🤣
One huge problem Atari had after the failed 5200 is that none of the other consoles they released were developed in house. The 7800, Lynx and Jaguar were all developed by 3rd party companies. It's more difficult for Atari to provide the support software developers need in order to make games that properly utilize the hardware when Atari themselves don't know all the ins and outs since they didn't develop the hardware. Nintendo & Sega and later on Sony & Microsoft have all had very robust development tools and information for software devs because they created their own consoles. I think that's a huge reason why so many 3rd party developers abandoned the Jaguar very quickly.
Bad marketing, poor dev tools and reports of non-payments for devs doing 1st party work make for a doomed console.
It didn't help that Jack T fired the developers of 7800 before it was even released 😅 ... at least they had 9 or so games made before they left lol
I think one of the major problems from a marketing perspective was that the Atari brand didn't really excite kids like me in 1993. The concept of retro-gaming didn't really exist yet, so older games and consoles were considered uncool and Atari hadn't mattered in ten years, which was a very long time in both video game years and kid years. It didn't really matter to me how many bits it had or didn't have because I was more interested in what Nintendo and Sega were planning to do next than whatever the Pong people were planning.
True but Alien vs Predator won many over.
I think the programmers didn't know how to program for it was what pushed game designers away. It was complicated to program for. I believe it could've been better. So it lacked 3rd party support. And they should have had released the Atari Panther or had something on the market that could've competed with Nintendo instead of trying to milk the Atari 7800 & 2600 systems for so long.
True. Kind of hard to market yourself as cutting edge when everybody sees you as gaming company your parents grew up with.
"Pong people" is crazy to say 😭
I had a Jaguar when I was around 7 or 8. I wanted it simply for ALIEN Vs. Predator. One of the best games for the system, but the best is easily Tempest 2000. So good.
I wanted the Jag for AVP too. However I would say Wolfenstein 3d was the best Jag game.
i never in my life seen one
@@LuisGonzalez-bj4il I sold mine a few years ago. Kinda wish I still had it, but it was just taking up space. Hope whoever bought it is enjoying the hell out of it.
Wolfenstein 3d was a great port for the Jaguar tbf
Same here. I still have both my Jaguar and Jaguar CD. Yeah, Alien vs Predator was the sole reason I got a Jaguar. And Rayman. 👍
She actually said the words: "get them out and play" just as I was checking her out... What an absolute goddess ;)
Also funny thing is that most of us in our late 30's have probably played something based on the jaguar. Area 51 arcade cabinet is essentially a Jaguar.
The number one failure was them not releasing a Koopa game, a theme you'll notice in every single failed console platform. Look it up, every one that failed had zero Koopas
But only Sega has the rights to Koopa.
@@Lightblue2222 no, otherwise the Saturn wouldn't have soiled the bed that the Dreamcast woke up in.
Zero. Koopas.
@@greenkoopa oh yes, I see now that you are correct!
Wait, I thought the Koopas belonged to Nintendo
@@floydjohnson7888 these facts are only obstructions
The Jaguar is part of the reason the 32x was rushed out because Sega management was terrified around a 64bit console
"A simpler, stupider time". Line of the day for me! Thanks Lady D.
Atari was never known for great decisions. Many developers never utilized the Jaguar as it was hard to develop for the T and J chips. Many just developed software that used the 68000 as the only processor. Also it was stupid that Atari could think it would dupe the world that it was 64bit. Again, Atari at the brink of greatness, throwing it away with bad decisions. Great coverage LD, keep it up. Brings back many memories as the 80s was a great era to grow up in.
What's sad is that they didn't even need to market it as a 64-bit console in 1993. In the era of the Genesis and Super Nintendo, a brand new 32-bit console from Atari would have been plenty exciting.
Love your comment dude and yes the 80's and the 90's was a phenomenal Era for everything especially for games. We only have HD now but the 80's and 90's we had music, better art style, fun games and storylines.
But it really has a 64 bit system bus. RAM is 64 bit, OP ( the DAC) is 64 bit, as is the blitter. A problem is that the components on the bus are not 64 bit internally. So when one component wants to pull data from another one, the address bus would have to transfer this address 4 cylces in advance so that the source component has like 4 cycles to latch all the 64 bit onto the databus. But bus protocol was a 1:1 copy from the 68k because the Jaguar team knew that they are not bright enough to invent a bus. A bus by its nature is a shared resource. The Jag is crippled by all the wait states on it.
Developers had to use the 68k in the Atari Jaguar as there were crippling bugs in Tom and Jerry. The chips weren't complete and the developers at Flare weren't experts in silicone design.
10:06 I can't believe that "17 buttons" was ever thought to be a point of advertising. Especially in that day and age where some people were still complaining about the SNES pad having 8 including select and start.
Can you imagine today people still complain about the complication of buttons, the Switch controller basically had 16 buttons: A, B, Y, X, L, R, ZL, ZR, SELECT (-), START (+), Right Stick Up, Right Stick Down, Right Stick Left, Right Stick Right, Right Stick Click, and Left Stick Click. If they had back buttons then that adds an additional 2 more buttons, add a touch screen with digital buttons and that counts as additional buttons.
It seems weird because you're not looking at the controller with one of the unique overlays it had for the twelve buttons in the middle. Those buttons were effectively button versions of F-keys on a computer keyboard, and the plastic overlays that came with games like Alien vs Predator let you know what the function was for each one. It was actually really cool to play Alien vs Predator with a unique overlay for each of the characters I could play as: Marine, Predator, and Alien. There's plenty about the Jaguar that I can knock (bad marketing, convoluted hardware, etc.), but the controller was my favorite thing about it.
@@InJeffable I had no idea they had overlays for the controller. That's super cool! I'll be honest and say I've only ever seen one Jaguar in the wild (no pun intended) and that was about 26 years ago. It wasn't hooked up to play so I never have actually interacted with one unfortunately.
@@InJeffable yes, people knock the controller, but it was actually very comfortable & easy to use that keypad.
I remember Iron Soldier used it perfectly. They lined up with the robots head, shoulders, hips & waste (which were what needed controlled). Sounds complex but actually intuitive.
Why does the Jaguar story sound like another symptom of Atari being badly mismanaged after Bushnell was out?
I think Sega and Atari had the best naming schemes. Sega used planetsl names. Even codenames like Black Belt, Dural, and Katana sounded cool. While Atari watched too much ThunderCats.
Awesome episode! Thank you Lady Decade! Bravo! 👏🏼 👍🏻
I remember totally buying into the ‘bits hype’ back then and reading about the Jaguar made me want one. However I got to actually play one in a department store, I believe it was the Alien vs. Predator game, and even 7 year old me was so unimpressed by it (plus the controller feeling odd) that I told my mom “nevermind” 😂
@@fightswithstairs6292 AvP is a great game! I totally get that now :) but at the time I was also playing Doom 2 on my dad's computer (if I'm remembering my timeline correctly) so using that clunky controller to play a game that felt worse wasn't super appealing at the time. But it's definitely one of the best games on the Jaguar!
@@shaggymcdaniel3216 I think I had the same experience with Nights at the games counter at Sears around then! I remember being impressed by that 3D controller but the game itself just didn't quite grab me like Mario 64 immediately did.
@@Pendarr
I bought a Jaguar at launch, bad buy as it was pretty crap, my other bad buy was the Amiga CD32.
Actually AvsP was arguably the best FPS ever released for a home machine back in the days.
It was THE game that made you feel that the Jaguar had some true potential.
@@shaggymcdaniel3216 I'm a gen z person so I'm not old enough to remember sega consoles but I remember my 1st impression of nights into dreams & I remember a video from the xbox UA-cam cchannel when they revealed the games for gold for a particular month & nights was one of those games. A lot of the people on the comments section might also be too young to remember sega consoles & my attitude as well as the attitude of a lot of those ppl was WTF is that ? 🤔 Nights is a weird looking game 🎮 🕹 & not necessarily in a good way regardless of how good the game might actually be. I wonder if that is a similar attitude to what ppl might have had back in 1996 & how if negatively affected the sales 🤷🏾♂️
The "Where did you learn to fly?" Is awesome!
I LOVED the Lynx! I bought one used in the mid 90's for like $40 and could not get enough of it!
And it couldn't get over sucking dry those batteries
THAT was pretty good.The Jaguar was garbage
The chips themselves unfortunately had bugs -- at launch. The list of them is actually quite long, but most importantly: you couldn't render a textured, z-buffered polygon (which would be the heart & soul of a 3D engine). You had to split this operation up into two separate passes of drawing. The average frame-rate of the Jaguar games was shockingly bad, even compared to the lackluster 3DO. It's a tragedy. Had the chips primary function not been broken, and had the marketing not been completely brain-dead, it really could have kicked the Saturn to the curb!
Damn, I didn't know that. That really is a shame. It came so close to potentially being a big hit which would have saved Atari.
I know someone is eventually going to respond and say Atari is still around, but really they're not. Atari is just a name now, and it has been that way since 1998. It's an entirely different company now that has nothing to do with the Atari prior to that.
z-buffer plus texture map is one function which is actually not broken. But you cannot Gouraud shade it. AvP and Doom got away because you can still lighten and darken a line: vertical, horizontal, and even diagonally. Diagonally is really motivating me to maybe try to homebrew. I only find two register with dual-use: "The pattern data register also serves to hold the computed intensity integer parts and their associated colours." " The source data register also serves to
hold the four sixteen bit fractional parts of intensity when computing Gouraud shaded intensity." . I think "alone in the dark" would run nicely on the Jag.
Or is this about this: "If Z-buffer operation is enabled at the same time as the ADDDSEL or SRCSHADE bits are
set, then the data is some-times corrupted." ? Or this: "If doing a DSTWRZ blit with SRCEN set, but not SRCENZ, and a set of Z values are written
into the Z registers, then the Z values get shifted as if they were read source Z values."
Ah, it maybe about doing the z-buffer in phrase mode. The real culprit is that the blitter does not collect its output pixel into a phrase before it accesses RAM. Now I still think that the access to the GPU RAM is quite cumbersome. z check happens on the same page as pixel write. It costs only 4 cycles. Now in 4 cycles the blitter can read 4px from GPU so that is nice. But writing those cost 4 cycles per pixel . Also this breaks down the moment you draw Doom walls .
I read in a pc magazine years ago that in the 90's THERE WAS NO DEFINITION OF WHAT MADE A SYSTEM X-BITS. Was it the sum of the system's parts, the bus width, or only the biggest processor inside it? With no standard definition, Atari was not lying about 64-bits. It was a grey area.
I loved the jaguar, I really enjoyed the alien vs Predator game on it.
As always...great video, Lady D! Very well researched and love your presentation style. What's the techno tune playing at 11:40?
I had a Jaguar (which my brother now has) and followed it closely at the time. I liked how your coverage correctly cited the incomplete development of the Tom and Jerry processors as a major problem for developers. Another issue would be that developers were not used to programming on multiple processors simultaneously and often simply chose not to try. That was a bigger problem for the Sega Saturn which more often than not, had one of the two main processors not running game code. I liked how you showed most of the top titles that were on the system instead of just the ones commonly ridiculed for poor quality. The other issue with the Jaguar was that Phillips stabbed them in the back, but I would assume that bit goes with your coverage of the Jag CD addon.
i always had my doubts about the jaguar when i was younger and while it was on the market and your video only proved my suspicions of the console back then correct. keep up the great work lady decade, i enjoy your videos.
I don't know anybody that had a jaguar or any store that sold it. I never liked the Atari brand and the Jaguar didn't change my mind. N64 was a far better system
I remember being intrigued as a youth by the name of this system.
It didn’t take long for me to see what it offered and quickly forget about it.
But there’s still a part of me that wants to get one as a collector item.
Those early 32/64 bit systems did look impressive at the time especially when compared to the 16bit systems. If I had my own cash then, I've would have got one.
Agree. I wanted my mom to buy me a Turbo Duo so badly. Way too expensive.
The Jaguar really didn't. It had potential, like with Rayman. But otherwise, all the games looked rough. Atari really shouldn't have tried to make it showcase 3D games and should've stuck with 2D games which essentially would've made it more like a 32-bit Genesis/SNES.
@@jtlbb2 For me it wasn't until what was shown what the PS1 and Saturn can do that the Jag started to look bad.
That "Where did you learned to fly?" part. 😂
I never remember seeing Jaguars in any stores during the system's lifetime. The first time I actually saw one was at a used games store around 2004.
The graphics accelerators "Blitter (Programmable)" and "Object(None Programmable)" processors were 64-bit. Not like it matters, but they weren't really being dishonest either.
I remember reading or watching something saying the Jaguar COULD have been as powerful as Saturn and a little less powerful than PSX if it had its cache doubled.
Cache is for code and vertices. The PSX blitter draws complete triangles. In the Jag you need firmware in the GPU for this. The blitter is not even able to update its address registers at reasonable speed. The Jag would run 4 times as fast if the blitter would not read the same memory address twice and write twice to the same target address. You know, simple latches and comparison. The blitter spits out a line. I could just buffer the line of like 16px. But the designers originally wanted two banks of memory where you wont need this buffer. For everything but super hires true-color slideshows, two 32bit memory banks would have been faster. Put textures/sprite into one and frame and z-buffer in the other bank. The bank switch pins are there and used in CoJag. .. Yeah, but Gouraud shading was hype at that time. Still the blitter wants the GPU to calculate the first 4px for it !? In the end Gouraud is only fast with large triangles, although it only looks good on small ones.
Jaguar was badly designed. It was a register short , so stalled constantly. Its blotter ran in step by , had it ran in step by step it could have been used for texture mapping
The non wait ram was too small to use and buggy . The Jag was far more powerful than you think - but couldn't run properly . It also only used AssemblyLanguage , so was a nightmare to program
. It would have blown away the PSX had it not suffered from the design faults
@@FantasyVisuals Blown away the PSX?
Press X for Doubt.
@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 close but no , the GpU was a register short ( it had 32 with 64 internally so I don't know what they meant there - probably referring to a design fault with JUMP ). Funnily enough , if the blitter was designed step by step value , rather than step they could have used it for texture mapping ( protector programmer )
@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 What is a dynamic cache? There is a recent video about the cache on the MIPS on N64 (3 years later ). The video is about Mario64, but it shows how devs had problems because a 1 associative cache is not really transparent. Jaguar was at a time where games were just small enough for assembler. Also cache was so small that you cannot lose to padding . Manual says: "It may be viewed as a simple cache RAM, with software cache control - this technique is known as visible caching ". I like how the Jag can play all those 16 bit home computer games, but with more color. Could have had elite, but with texture ( like on PC ). So you don't need two devices.
The whole advertising campaign basically calling and portraying their customers (gamers) like idiots didn’t help.
It was true though they thought 32bit + 32bit = 64bits.
Thanks!
Thank you so much, I'm so sorry that it's taken me such a long time to find this, I had zero idea I was even receiving these!
About 7 years ago, I remember downloading a bunch of Jaguar videos on UA-cam. Even the corny infomercial. It's the worst system I've ever owned but I still love it for being an underdog like my LA Clippers.
At least the jaguar shell was turned into dental equipment 😂
I first saw the Jaguar with Rayman and though it looked good. But a few years later I finally upgraded my Genesis to a PlayStation for my birthday. =) They had it bundled on sale with the dual shock controller. And more importantly the older psx games were starting to go on discount! Was no reason to have any other console back then.
Agreed on the PSone. I remember when i bought mine at ToysRUs and immediately forgot about any other consoles.
the PS1 was the game changer that ruled that gaming era. Nobody else could get in the market once Sony opened the floodgates with the third parties developing so many many games. The Atari Jaguar desperately needed this and the games could have been so much more instead of the so few that were good.
Well I dont' know... quite a few titles on the N64
The emulator BIGPEMU runs Jaguar games even better than Jaguar. I've been playing Checkered Flag at a smooth framerate, clean laps at full speed. I can see how it was meant to be and if you watch my world records "lvlupscore" makes the game look enjoyable. I have 8 of 10 tracks mastered so far.
Been especially enjoying Power Drive Rally, Defender 2000, Missile Command 3D, and Super Burnout.
I think its actually a pretty forward thinking idea to have 32 bits dedicated to sprite based video games. in some ways modern developers are just coming back around to this idea
I think Sega and Atari had the best naming schemes in the 90s. Sega used names of planets. Even codenames like Black Belt, Dural, and Katana sounded cool. While Atari watched too much ThunderCats.
Watch the thundercats shaming ya commie. Flagging for hate speach 😭
Both also worked with the U.S. government and developed games for D.I.A. recruitment. Atari from 1981-1983. Sega of America from 1989 - present. 😉
You can NEVER watch too much Thundercats! lol
The console was indeed a failure, and like you say at the end of the video, it was quite a gamble. However, I think at the time most of us knew that, aside from the most die-hard fanboys. The company knew it, and many consumers knew it. The controversy over whether or not it was truly 64-bit was definitely true. When it was released, it wasn't possible to compare it to the Saturn or the PS1 because they weren't out yet and wouldn't be out for about 18 months. You could compare it to the 3DO, the Genesis and the SNES. The 3DO was wildly expensive and suffered long loading times, like most CD-based consoles in the generation. Ultimately, the Jaguar failed because it was complicated to program for, there was inadequate documentation and tools for the developers, there were some pretty key bugs in the hardware, and it didn't have the RAM it needed. Those problems created a lack of third-party software and caused the reliance on the Motorola 68000 which resulted in games that were, in essence, 16 bit. Those were all big problems, but I'm not sure many of us were surprised when it did ultimately fail. Even if those problems were fixed, it is still unlikely it would have dominated the market. It was a long shot gamble that did not work, but without it, Atari would have just faded away anyways. The company was on the decline with or without the Jaguar.
Excuse me... the "Blitter Processor" is full on 64bit sitting on top of the Jags 64bit registers, which can be controlled by any of the other 32bit Processors.
Too bad those bits didn't actually do anything hahah
The thing is, its not about how powerful your system is, what matters is can you sit down and make a fun, creative and interesting game that runs on the system. Also its about IP brands too. Mario is an original creative IP. Same with Soinc. So its not just about making a game, its about character design and world design and then making something fun. It's really challenging to make original and fun content.
Star Fox needed an enhancement chip to run on the SNES. Cybermorph didn't need any such chips as the base console was powerful enough. What separates the two games is Game Design and Focus.
Start Fox was an on rail shooter and was fun. It had cool characters and good music and good controls.
Cybermorph is a free roaming shooter, but it doesn't have the cool characters or cool music nor is it easy to get along with.
So its not about how powerful the hardware is, but rather its the art of making a game in general that separates a good game from a bad one. Games are experiences, you tell stories, people can escape into the game world for a bit, its about imagination and wonder.
Got my hands on a couple Jaguar demo cabinets at an auction. Basically an arcade cab top on a simple pedestal base. I'd never heard of the Jaguar at that point and the consoles themselves were not included, so I promptly refitted the cabs to demo PS1 systems, and it was during testing the refit that I got to experience some of the best PS1 gaming I ever had. The Jaguar cabs had a phenomenal arcade cabinet sound system which also worked great with a Playstation. Great times. I still have one of the audio amps out of Jaguar cab.
Some friends of mine were developing a cool shoot em up game for the Jaguar; it's a shame that it was never released because although it was 2d graphics, it was fun as hell and the sprites and backgrounds were rendered CGI abd really made use of the extra colours. It actually looked like a next gen game.
Dude! Like legit, you should tell that story at AtariAge. Do you remember the name of that shoot 'em up project your friends were doing for the Jaguar? Cheers mate!
@@KGRAMR This is it here "Livewire"
ua-cam.com/video/pXuGaaruW-8/v-deo.html
Here's another video with some sketchy footage
@@colinwatt9387 Ummm pal, where's the link to the videos? XD
@@KGRAMR
ua-cam.com/video/pXuGaaruW-8/v-deo.html
ua-cam.com/video/Si1CUaw158E/v-deo.html
"That stupid green trollope" "Unfortunately the customers had eyes, which they used for looking" "New Yoik" There's some quote gold in this video.
Also extremely difficult to appreciate such early 3D compared to the beautiful 2D we were all used to.
My family was still using an Atari 2600 in 1991, interesting to know it was technically still active at that point. I think that Atari console was the first thing I ever sold in a yard sale
there were several reasons the 5200 failed, the first was price, the second was lack of backward compatibility(they released the 2600 adapter too late) and awful controllers. the 7800 failed because it was released too late and Atari couldn't get enough 3rd parties interested in it.
I already loved this channel, and Tophat, but I didn't realize how much better your content is from the norm until I searched for a video on the Atari Jaguar.
Everyone else tries too hard to be funny in a time consuming way. Your humor hits fast, so even if I didn't like it (which I do) it wouldn't make me feel like my life was passing me by. 😂🎉❤
Love your videos and documentary style! Keep up the great work, I remember begging my parents for a jaguar....so glad they did not get one and got my PlayStation a few years later instead
I love your enthusiasm. Good video 👍
Got my Atari Jaguar at a pawn shop in Arizona while visiting my grandparents during summer vacation in 1995.
It came with Aliens VS Predator and Cybermorph..
All my friends and I loved AvP but Cybermorph sucked. I never found another Jaguar game because all I had was a Local FuncoLand so I ended up selling it to someone for around 200$
The Jaguar was a cool system but the controllers sucked
I never got a Lynx but always wanted one.
Kinda wish I still had a Jaguar because I'm a collector but honestly there's not a lot of good games.
I've never met anyone with a Jaguar and I definitely have never seen a Jaguar CD.
Tha js for all your content. Please be well!
$200*
I had a Lynx which was good, better than people say. The games were impressive but like the Jaguar the quality of the titles were sub par due to lazy programming by the devs. Sadly my Lynx died in a beach accident in Spain a few years ago (don't game near choppy high tides! Lol)..but I always wanted the Jaguar! It was such an amazing system for the time.
the atari ste was my first step into music production but the jaguar was a propper fail
Keep up the good work lass and, as always, stay safe.
I agree the jump from 3rd to 4th gen was enormous. I can't think of anything recently which has made such a large jump from one gen to another that wasn't a difference that PCs weren't already capable of.
I remember playing on this at a friend's house and was blown away by the graphics for the time and the console was actually well made. The initial cost of the unit and games plus the lack of support killed this one off quick. It could've been a Contender !
It was a contender but flop cause dev weren't ready for 64-Bit that soon. Nobody at that time knew what a 64-Bit game looks like and for some dev most thought that more bit means just more processing powers and better graphics but what they don't know is that 64-Bit also needs to be more innovations. No innovative games means nobody ain't gonna be interest in the console.
@@VOAN
Atari rushed their games. Cybermorph could have looked like Battlemorph if the developer was given enough time by Atari.
@@VOAN definitely. Devs did not know at the time how to utilise the power. It was an low powered N64 in a time when 32-bit gaming was about to breakthrough and 16-bit consoles ruled with hundreds of quickly released good quality titles.
Had one back in the day and loved it for what it was: a Tempest 2000 and Alien vs. Predator machine... but mainly Tempest 2000.
after a decent time failing with guitar pedal projects. its time to relax and drink some tea and enjoy some videos lady decade.
A colleague bought a Lynx, and we all thought it was great fun.
The Jaguar gets a deservedly bad rap, but it had some great games. I have many fond memories of my Jaguar (and CD). Doom, Cannon Fodder, Iron Soldier, Battlemorph (CD), and Super Burnout were all tons of fun in their day. Let's not forget Rayman also got his start on the system. The system doesn't compare to the Playstation of course, but I still love the thing.
Oh man, I remember that Next Generation interview with Jack Tramiel. He even claimed that Saturn and Playstation games looked better than Jaguar because they were CD games!! Like the storage medium made all the difference, not the actual capabilities of the hardware!
Yeah, and then a year later N64 was cartridge based and also demolished the Jaguar.
April 4, 2023 5:48 am
I never owned one, or played any of its library. But I remember hearing stories about its funky controller, and library that was.. unique. I give Atari credit for trying, but they flew too close to the sun
Rayman and Aliens vs. Predator were Jaguar games I always wanted to play
Can’t wait for the jaguar cd video !
Really enjoyed this video!
Amazing video!
I think it can be easy to forget amongst the general failure of the console that the Jaguar had a very innovative controller for the time. I owned a Jaguar, and I loved the overlays for what were essentially button versions of F-keys on a keyboard. It was especially impressive in Alien vs Predator. I had a unique overlay for each of the characters I could play as: Marine, Predator, and Alien.
I had one without any overlays. So we just thought it was weird that they put numbers there. We called it the phone controller.
I love the deep dive would love to hear more from you You're wonderful
I watched videos about all of these stories like a million times, but I still watch yours LOL.
I remember when I was in grade school, after those ads started playing... Although I more specifically remember the commercial where there were a bunch of kids in an elevator who all excitedly got off on the 64th floor.
Being the imaginative man that I am, I started pretending that I could create my own game console that was even further beyond what the Jaguar was claiming to be. I imagined myself with a console that was "2000 bit." (I didn't quite pick up on the mathematical pattern at play here, but looking back if someone did make a 2048-bit console they might have simply called it 2000-bit because it was easier to remember, so maybe?)
I don't think I had any idea what the games would look like or be like, I was just hopped up on ego and liked to pretend that I could come out of nowhere and make something that was a hundred times better than even the impressive claims of the Jaguar. All part of my little fantasy world I lived in while walking home from school.
I never got to see what a Jaguar could do in person. I recall seeing a 3DO with a cool movie-based game, and later a Playstation that thoroughly frustrated me with its long load times after I immediately fell off a ledge playing Jumping Flash. I don't think it was until the Nintendo 64 came out that I was reminded of that "awesome 64 bit console" that I heard about back in the day, and began to wonder what happened to it. It seemed surprising to me; with all those bold claims they made, they somehow just got forgotten? How does that even happen? I had never heard of such things back then; that was back when everything was just as cool as the TV commercials made them look.
...Except for Sega, because they tried to say they were better than Nintendo so obviously they were lying.
I remember seeing an advertisement for
the Atari Jaguar in a magazine back in the 90's. It was surprising to see Atari back in the fight. I never knew anyone that had one. Having an interest in Atari from growing up with the 2600, 800 and the ST this console does interest me to this day. I always felt like they were trying to be too far ahead of their time and fell short of what was coming. It did have some fascinating ideas. The multiple processors caught my attention.
I bought a Japanese import ps1. A week later my friend bought a jaguar. He cried when he saw my system.
The video suggests the system was underpowered to the point it was hardly any better than the 16-bit consoles, but then the video suggests that almost nothing took any real advantage of its hardware leading to its games looking like… the 16-bit competition. It kind of can’t be both.
While it’s definitely nowhere near up to the N64/PS/Saturn’s level, it nonetheless likely had unrealized potential far in excess of the 16-bit consoles.
for a starter, I think it can do all 2d a 16-bit console can but in CRY or even true color, but 2MB total of memory and 5 MB cartridge only go so far. But did you really miss the colors on the 16 bit? People imitate the pixel art even today.
I'm a HUGE Atari fan (Berzerk fan too.. but that doesn't matter here.) If it has the Atari name, I throw my money at it. This console is... well.. it.. umm.. has some good games for it. Granted most of those games are from the modern homebrew community. Some of the older games are okay too. But many of the games were just... so very very bad. You gave me PTSD flashbacks of playing Cybermorph at the 14:50 mark ;) The console looked sleek and modern, but the controller, inferior hardware under the hood, and nightmare it posed for game developers really did not help this system.
Awesome documentary! You definitely covered all the key points on this system!!
Sam Tramell was right. John Carmack worked on the Doom port and he said that with some minimal changes in the hardware it was almost as powerful as the Playstation. Too bad for the engineers and for Atari. EDIT: you can find John Carmack talking about this on the internet, a magazine scan.
cybermorph definitely had a learning curve but once you know the control its actually a great fun game
Lady Decade videos, a necessity for gracious living!
I remember wanting a Jaguar so I could play Aliens vs Predator, I guess I dodged a bullet because we ended up getting a PS1 : )
Great video, lady (Decade). Underrated and amazing console, this.
I still have mine! It was the best console for first person shooters until the PS and N64 came out.
I played a friends Jaguar in the mid 90’s. I remember playing a fighting game on it and thought it was a pretty good jump from the Atari 2600. But, it could never replace my PlayStation and N64.
I just love hearing you say "Jag-you-wah!"
I had one. Overpriced and not enough games or devs still it was awesome ,it purred and gave me avp which was terrifying at night as a kid.
Atari Jaguars could hardly be given away when I was a kid, now they're hundreds of dollars on ebay. Crazy how a little time changes things
Was broke during my early years of college (early 2000s). Think i sold my jaguar, 2 controllers, and about 8 games for probably $75. Now i probably paid 10x that amount just to get it all back for my collection.
The 3DO cost $750 at launch I bought the smaller console for $75 games $5 each years later
Bringing up the Atari 2600 brings me fond memories of my childhood playing Pac-Man, Dodge'Em, Haunted House, Joust, and a myriad of other games. Sadly, I did not play the new systems, like the Jaguar.
Excellent except the 2600 version of Pac-Man. I hated it
Yep. Haunted house, pitfall, pacman, missile command, space invaders...
When you do get around to playing Terranigma, you'll be sorry you waited so long! It's fairly difficult, but the ending blew me away
Would love to see a Jaguar CD episode
Why? This video is just the same stuff that's been repeated about the Jag for 20 years. The Jag CD video would be no different.
There was some major hardware flaw that could have been avoided apparently that was mentioned by the developers of Doom in an interview, basically they had to use the DSP chip for calculations instead of music since the Jaguar was missing the necessary components in order to do both, leaving the game "silent" (same w/ AvP I believe) but functional. This additional chip was supposed to be there and was in the original hardware design I heard somewhere but was dumbfoundingly taken out by the higher ups for cost cutting measures or something and completely ruined all the potential for actually making good games contributing to near total bail out from all third party devs. This might be related to the textured polygon issue someone else mentioned.
Atari, very old school. Great video. I always wanted one.
Oh the Jaguar! So many memories. I still have one in storage! Truly a necessity for gracious living. 64 bit. #DoTheMath
Though with seriousness, from what I've read, the Jaguar had some crap chips and good chipset, but since the good chipset was so hard to program for the vendors used the underpowered chipsets to make their Jaguar games. I could be wrong though. Haven't read up on this stuff in a while.
I remember calling in to chat with a rep at Nintendo back in maybe '93 when the N64 was still on the drawing board. He talked to me for probably an hour telling me all about the then called "Ultra 64" and how it was going to be a TRUE 64 bit console. Then he explained how the Jaguar wasn't 64 bit at all and pretty much said the same things this video is saying. Crazy stuff.
AWESOME VIDEO MA'AM thank you for making this ^-^
Great channel. Love your way of presenting the video. I'm subscribing 😁👍
I’m proud to own this necessity for gracious living since new. Tempest 2000 is still fun to play.
The Jaguar had a 64-bit graphics memory bus, blitter chip, object processor, and GPU.
Of course, SEGA and everyone else measured bits in terms of the data path with the CPU. Using ATARI's measurement, the Sega Master System had a 16-bit VDP and would've been a 16-bit game console. Still, had ATARI called it a 32-bit game console and advertised the games (instead of "do the math"), it likely would've sold far more units and may even have succeeded in the marketplace.
it has no games compared to genesis and snes. It also gets beaten by the 3do.
Problem was games... you can brag about your number of bits, but if at the end of the day, you do nothing looking better than Donkey Kong Country, Chrono Trigger or even Starfox, your bits mean nothing, people play games, not bits.
The Megadrive was more 32 bit than the Jaguar was 64 bit
The Atari Jaguar was never 64 bit more like 32
Great video.
the jaguar had some power to it & was a very capable system but some developers did say that they did make it a bit difficult to develop for their are after market home brews that show this. they should of kept it simple & went with the panther & released that with the jaguars pro controller minus the keypad
They need to port all the popular franchises and keep it moving
Atari lynx and jaguar were so weird too see during my youth considering it was around the SNES days. I had family that had them and they were interesting to try out when got the chance.
I never owned a jaguar but I do have a problem with comparing cybermorph to starfox. Yes cybermorph did have a bad draw distance, but it definitely looked better than starfox. Cybermorph was a full 3d free roaming environment, starfox was an on rails shooter and it needed a special chip just to do that. Full 3d free roaming environments in games were very uncommon at the time except for high end pc games. I knew many kids who wanted a jaguar, but like the 3do it was just too expensive. If the full capabilities of the system were utilized it definitely would have competed with the saturn, ps1, and even the n64. I think the n64 was what atari meant for the jaguar to be.
Ooh yes can we please have a video on the Panther!
I remember seeing Jaguar in my local computer store and it never appealed to me. I did get a CD32 and 3DO though!