Is Jaguar really a 64-bit System?

Since 1993 the question been asked, "Is the Atari Jaguar REALLY a 64-bit system when the games look 16-bit?" Let's dive into this question and try to come up with the answer!
Special thanks to Sam from Expedition Theme Park for narrating the John Mathieson quotes! Find him here: / expeditionthemepark
Here is the Atari Jaguar FAQ written by Robert Jung:
atariage.com/Jaguar/faq/index...
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I hope you enjoyed the video. Please check out the following links:
/ 1252321131587915
/ gregsgameroom
www.ataritimes.com
Okey Dokey Smokey by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (creativecommons.org/licenses/...)
Artist: audionautix.com/
#videogames #retrogaming #retrogames #classicgaming #classicgames #vintagegaming #vintagegames #arcadegames #atari #atari2600 #atari5200 #atari7800 #atarilynx #atarijaguar #nintendo #nintendones #nes #nintendosnes #supernintendo #nintendowii #sega #segagenesis #megadrive #segasaturn #segadreamcast #turbografx #pcengine #colecovision #intellivision #arcade1up #arcadegames

[@GregsGameRoom]

Thanks for watching! Here are some other interesting videos: Jaguar Game Drive Review: kzbin.info/www/bejne/eGKQZ6tvp7dpp9k Why I LOVE Atari! kzbin.info/www/bejne/j3aad5WCr7J0arM MUST-SEE Unreleased Jaguar Games! kzbin.info/www/bejne/o6TGY6iBi9Waf5o

[@XV250]

The Intellivision has a 16-bit architecture, yet no one asks why the games don't look like a SNES or Genesis. It is definitely a 16-bit system that "looks 8-bit". I think the difference is that Mattel never tried to use the 16-bit system aspect in their advertising; they merely showed screenshots side-by-side with a 2600 and let people come to their own conclusion. If Atari had put less effort into 64-bit marketing and more energy into creating and showing off games like Tempest 2000 or Alien vs Predator, people wouldn't mock the 64-bit claims. I'm not sure that would have made a difference in their long run success, though...

[@Sinn0100]

Hey, why don't Intellivision games look like Sega Genesis or Snes games? I'm sorry, I just had to do it. ;)

[@RetroGamerBB]

@@Sinn0100 isn't the Colecovision also technically 16 bit?

[@Sinn0100]

@@RetroGamerBB It is...my response was a joke.

[@Kazeira]

And the Master System is 8-bit with better looking games

[@juststatedtheobvious9633]

The Intellivision doesn't have a single 16-bit game. [Using a General Instruments CP1610 processor, Intellivision was the first 16-bit game console, the console is often referred to as a 10-bit system because the CPU's instruction set and game cartridges were 10 bits wide.] But bits are as misleading as the cpu clockspeed. Tell people that the ZX Spectrum, Colecovision, and Sega Master System all have the same Z80 processor running at the exact same speed, and watch their brains explode.

[@Sinn0100]

The Motorola 68K was not the only problem the Jaguar had. The software they used to make games for it was horribly bugged. Further, the Atari Falcon was what developers were forced to use when making games for the Jaguar. When all of this started the Falcon was so new it didn't have any developer tools either. Programmers had to make tools to make tools for the Jaguar...that's insane. If you want to see some real next level graphics on the Atari Jaguar...look up Skyhammer. It is a fully open 3d game that is completely texture mapped. It reminds me of a much better looking G-Police for the PlayStation. Check it out and be prepared to pick your jaw up off the floor.

[@GregsGameRoom]

I have Skyhammer. Awesome game, but the framerate is a bit low.

[@cessnaace]

Like all Atari platforms, there are still games being released for it. This is due to Hasbro's brief ownership of Atari in 1998. They publicly announced that they were officially opening up the architecture on all of Atari's home platforms (consoles and the like). So no lawsuits if people make games and peripherals. There is a company that even sells modified Atari Jaguar controllers that work with the Atari 5200.

[@curtdower1330]

208 bits!... I remember when rumours were going around that the PS2 was 256 bits here in the UK just around it’s launch, considering the Dreamcast was 128. 😲 Great review of this under appreciated gem! 💎🙂 Also, the Highlanders game for Atari Jaguar CD showed what it could do graphically, that looked like a clean non spooky version of Resident Evil. 😂 Not to mention Rayman.

[@rodrigogirao8344]

Considering the CPU, the PS2 was a 64-bit machine. The Dreamcast, the Gamecube, and the Xbox were all 32-bit systems. All current consoles are 64-bit.

[@worsethanhitlerpt.2539]

It really is 64 Bits except 50 of them are not hooked up to anything

[@danestegman155]

Good video! I learned a lot today about 64-bit for the Atari Jaguar system! I never did understand why Atari kept called the Jaguar a 64-bit machine! Now I know! Thanks!

[@MaxAbramson3]

64-bit graphics pipeline.

[@cyrollan]

Love the video! Just purchased my first Jag a few months ago and I am really digging it! Tempest 2000 with the rotary controller mod slays!

[@ShamrockParticle]

Nice overview!! 👍 I forgot about the advert at the end where the teacher does the remedial math bit. That reminded me of the old Atari 800XL advert with Alan Alda where the kid hypes up technical detail to him, but Alan in turn reminds him to hype up the whole system's benefits - not just the raw numbers! "256 colors!" versus "it can help you draw better" is more powerful in hindsight... then again, Jaguar was just a games system... And the Jaguar ads were not wrong. It is 64-bit. Nice analogy with the 68000 being a process/coordinating manager too. The system was complex, but the right coding would have done a lot more benefit next to the competition. Didn't know Intellivision was 16bit either - wow. Thanks!

[@GregsGameRoom]

Thank's for the great comment. Part of it was brought on by Atari themselves for hyping the 64-bit aspect. (You don't hear anything about that today!) Ultimately, a system is only as good as the programmers that make the games.

[@dr.charlesedwardflorendobr3952]

I think this particular advertisement is problematic. It insults the people who watch the ad by making them look or feel stupid. What's worse is that instead of showing people having fun, it shows frustration, anger and stupidity.

[@RISCGames]

Absolutely love the music in Battlemorph, great spot to play it on!

[@GregsGameRoom]

Glad you noticed. I always seem to have the volume too low.

[@FantasyVisuals]

Unreleased games like Apesh*t and Conan showed what the Jag was capable of. The system is superb , theoretically. Love how the op builds it's images - bit the system has too many design fault. It has two 64/64 processors and a GPU that processes internally at 64 bit. If they had used a Hitachi CPU like the Saturn instead of the 68000 , it would have really helped them . But the price would have gone up too. Using a 68020 instead of a 68000 would have increase the price by 30 dollars

[@XfromDarkHorse]

There was also an unreleased game like "Dactyl Joust" which showed what the Jaguar was capable of. While it doesn't count as an official game, an unreleased homebrew game called "Atari Owl" really showcased Jaguar's power. Dactyl Joust: kzbin.info/www/bejne/pqXLnWapbrCFmNk Atari Owl: kzbin.info/www/bejne/nWWuaHR4m9-Am6M

[@MaxAbramson3]

The 68EC020 was selling for $8 in volume if you bought the lower clock version. The entry level 68EC030 was less than $20 at that time.

[@MelancoliaI]

@@XfromDarkHorse now that is fascinating.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

Regarding Bubsy, Coder Andrew Seed breaks it down nicely.. At the start of the Jaguar Atari promised a lot but were unable to deliver, the GPU and DSP were cut back to half speed. The reason was that the chips could not handle the heat and could overheat and stop working. ( As informed by an ex-Atari insider ), also you only had either 2K or 2K of instructions cache in the GPU - back to the days of the ZX81. Ok originally you were able to run programs from outside the GPU's memory ( and DSP) but production machines could not. This meant that you had to have code inside the GPU to load memory from main 68000 memory. This was a pain. Also the GPU and DSP could read 64bits from main memory but internally it was 32bits - this meant that 32bits of the lovely 64bit read went into a memory address. Other problems with the Jag was the more sprites on screen took more time away from the CPUs. Bubsy ( which I wrote - mainly in 68000 - based on the Genesis control code) did run at 60 frames a second ( PAL 50 frames - not my fault 8¬) ) The Ali Baba level had a lot of small sprites per character - to save memory but crucified the game since it placed a heavy burden on processor time. But due to having 3 full screen sprites ( background , and 2 for the map - Bubsy could run behind things) I lost about 30% of processor time. Another problem I had with Bubsy was that updating the visible tiles meant a loss of 40% processor time - this varied due to the amount of none blank blocks I had to blit onto the map sprites. This was at most 72 16*16 blocks ( 256 colour). Depending upon how you needed to use the blitter it could be very fast but in most circumstances it would be slow. Finally the sound was like the ST, would had create an interrupt and feed the sound chip the values. Unlike the STE and Falcon where you could just play a buffer OK you had to create the buffer but that was in a nice fast tight loop). The reason I think most of the first games were 16bit ports was that the public knew the "characters", were comfortable and could bring in easy money. It would introduce the Jaguar then new and original games would follow - such as Iron Soldier. . But games like Tempest 2000 and Defender 2000 were still ports of arcade versions which Jeff Minter had done on the 16 bits machines. Ok he tarted them up for the Jag ( did a good job there ). Also the Alien Vs Predator game was basically Wolfenstien ( which played a fair bit at Atari HQ while finishing Dinodudes ).

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

JRISC in the GPU SRAM is a great way to assemble the background from the tiles. JRISC in the DSP SRAM is a great way to read out audio samples from DRAM. SRAM runs at twice the clock as DRAM so you can memCopy at full speed ( little Endian I think ). I mean you could if the blitter would have dedicated ports for external and internal RAM. At least for fully opaque tiles they can be rendered one time using the OP. Then an interrupt object starts the DSP which starts the blitter which bakes the tile in the background. To minimise memory usage there could be a slight skewed border so that in every scanline one tile on the border is pulled “on the fly”. Ah jaguar strikes again. Can not do it on the left side. Like transparent tiles they need extra tiles which we overdraw. Also OP replaces 0 . So clean the buffer. I begin to think that page flip is the lesser evil.

[@MilanStojakov]

I remember reading an interview with John Carmack, doom guy, and he praised the Jaguar system a lot. If it wasn't for the fact that architecture was gimped in some areas to save the cost it would have been a much better system. Also I think Jaguar has better architecture than 3DO, as far as I remember 3do mostly have 2d and FMV games, while Jaguar has some 3d games.

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

Where do they save money? Maybe they should have used 16 ROMs with a mapper to save on pins and EMI filters. They saved development time because everything runs over the system bus and can be recorded. Why does Jerry have more than the cosine wavetable ROM? Why do we need extra instructions for saturation, which fail to be useful. Why extra hardware for lines, text rendering ? I like that color clock is independent from system clock like on a PC. Though on a PC the transfer from the ISA bus to video RAM is cheap while the Jaguar needs two linebuffers for this? 1440 bytes !!

[@MilanStojakov]

@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt I don't know. It is something I heard/read long time ago and it is not something I know a lot about,

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

​@@MilanStojakov Carmack's views soured somewhat after completing Doom though.. "The Jaguar was definitely significantly hampered by its technical flaws, which kept me from ever being too big of a Jaguar booster. I was proud of my work on Wolf and DOOM (more so than just about any of the other console work Id has been involved in until just recently), but in the end, the better consoles won the war."

[@Optimus6128]

It's a bit of a myth/joke that 3DO had mostly 2D and FMV games. Well, most Jaguar games are also 2D. And some of the 3D games are not better in speed or visuals than the 3DO ones. There are some good 3DO games with fully textured map 3D, like Need for Speed and Road Rash, Return Fire, Blade Force and others. Jaguar seemed that it has to do a hybrid solution (RISC processor + Blitter) to draw polygons, esp texture polygons were a pain. 3DO was closer to Saturn or PS1, in that you could have the CPU dictate the hardware to draw a complete texture map polygon (whether it was quad or triangle),. so the bulk of the per pixel processing was done, no need for software rendered or half-software rendered solutions. But all of these consoles, some of the work for 3d engine had to be done on CPU(s), like polygon sorting, some polygon clipping/subidvision, visibility algorithms, etc.

[@Optimus6128]

To add, Jaguar was more interesting from programmer's perspective, that's why Carmack praised it. You can use those RISC processors (which are really like extra more powerful general purpose processor, a solution that 32x or SuperFX kinda used (not really a 3D GPU as people mistake)) to write software renderers to do the work, or prepare data for the blitter, but half of the work to render a triangle has to be done on the RISC processor. There are many interesting pixel effects on Jaguar games, because they more commonly used those processor for pixel manipulation, than simply relying on fixed hardware to draw polygons (which was more effecient on Saturn, PS1 and 3DO as it was fully fixed in)

[@SinistarPro_Mike]

The Jaguar has always been the system I wanted to collect for, but unfortunately, it was during an era when I was still heavily into the SNES & Genesis stuff. I wanted so badly to invest in another Atari console, but remember, this was a time when so many great things were happening game-wise, and sadly the Jaguar sort of fell the radar for me. I did manage to snag one about 15 years ago, but it was a short relationship, and it was also in pretty bad shape. This was a great video, so much in fact, it left me wondering if I made the right choice years ago to part ways with the one I had. Nowadays, the price for 'nostalgia' has skyrocketed, but I wouldn't mind giving the Jaguar another chance. Good stuff Greg!!

[@GregsGameRoom]

I was all-in on the Jaguar from the very beginning! I really wished it could have been more successful and the return of Atari being back in the game. But I don’t think the Tramiel’s had the drive to make it a video game company again.

[@pcernuska]

Allegedly Tramiel hated the gaming.

[@eriks3260]

If and when someone really digs deep into the system. Then it will shine!!!!!!

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

Regarding Jaguar Sensi Soccer: The Jaguar version runs at full speed (60fps, no slow down) in 256 colour mode with 8 channel 16bit sound for the crowd. All the menus use 65535 colour mode. The controls are as in the Megadrive version (ie 3 button, shoot,

[@bryede]

Bits only meant something before consoles had various processors and subsystems of different speeds and bus sizes. Today, the best you could do is come up with what percentage of the hardware falls into each size category.

[@onslaughtizhere8485]

Great video. Love the Jag. Atari's downfall with it was probably including the 68k. Probably could have made better Dev kits as well. As I wonder what it was truly capable of

[@onlysublime]

Including the 68k was a mistake because it gave devs an easy out and let them just port their 16-bit games to the jag. But if Atari didn't release buggy hardware and had actual documentation for the system, programmers wouldn't have to resort to the 68k

[@TeeroyHammermill]

@onlysublime: not a mistake. They just didn't optimize the hardware and used too many subcontractors to make the games. The arcade board used a 68030 which is still 16 bit

[@onlysublime]

@@TeeroyHammermill the 68030 is a full 32 bit processor. But we're not talking the 68030 anyway. The biggest problem that wasn't fixed before the jag was released was the memory controller bugs.

[@MaxAbramson3]

Had ATARI just used a 68EC030 instead of the DSP, games would've been easy to port, the engineers' efforts could've gone into the gpu and memory, and we would've gotten a better machine with more games.

[@worsethanhitlerpt.2539]

Judging from the 3D games on Jaguar its about 1 quarter the power of the PS1

[@dreamcast3607]

I really wish it would have got its due and sold at least a few million units so some real quality games came out and we got to see what it could do

[@TheSocialGamer]

I really love the overview within this video. simple to understand and no bs. Thanks Greg I appreciate your Jag information.

[@GregsGameRoom]

Thanks, I always try to be concise. ;-)

[@Wintersoldier73]

I worked at an electronics chain over on the east coast when Jaguar launched & we sold about 10 units. We sold many more 3DO units, like 30, and when the Playstation launched, it was game over. We were told by management to throw out the Jaguar display cabinet with the Jaguar and all. That's how I got my hands on a Jaguar. But I loathed the controller & only care for Tempest, Alien v Predator, Atari Karrs & Rayman, which actually looked and played better than PS1 or Saturn. Doom was OK, but the PS1 version was the way to play the game back them as far as ports went. And Jaguar NBA Jam TE was my favorite version, but that was basically the extent of my Jaguar library. Like I said, wasn't a fan of the controller, most games were ugly as sin, N64 was better out of the gate & Playstation had what I wanted, JRPGs & the Saturn had all the 2D fighting games.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

it was always going to be hard for Saturn and PlayStation to effectively reproduce Tempest 2000,as it was coded specifically for the Jaguar architecture, Tempest X3 used the PlayStation hardware wisely. PlayStation Rayman has more parallax, smoke effects etc not found in Jaguar version, but controls aren't as tight. Going from Jag AVP, I hated PlayStation Alien Trilogy, wasn't until Alien Res on PS1, Jag AVP was bettered on console.

[@twh563]

Great review and information. Love the humor as well.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

The Z80 in the Sega Genesis was also used in some polygon games to help calculate the maths.

[@timbrooks6538]

Outstanding video and highlights that developers often determine how good the games will be. Quality third party developers are very important. People forget that Nintendo had a monopoly on them during the NES reign.

[@jamesborlan2850]

In a nutshell to quote mephilis the dark from sonic, ”the answer to that is yes and no” The console is a 64 bit system judging by the processors made for the system, unfortunately almost none of the games on the Jaguar utilize the processors towards they’re advantage especially compared to the n64 and even the PlayStation which both systems pushed their graphics towards the limits in most games But I really can’t blame the developers for not pushing the Jaguar towards its limits as the Jaguar is a pretty complicated system to work with Overall the system is definitely 64 bit but since most games on the jag never pushed the system to its limits it is pretty understandable why some may question this The Jaguar is definitely a system that is worth collecting for the library and it’s history

[@Sinn0100]

Well...no, the Jaguar had a 64-bit bus that was used by the blitter processor. It's main processors were called Tom/Jerry and they were 32-bit RISC processors that ran at 26.59MHz each. The Jaguar had quite a few games that took advantage of the hardware if you consider how small its library actually is. AVP, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, NBA Jams TE, Iron Soldier, Iron Soldier 2, The Highlander, Checkerd Flag, Atari Karts, Missle Command 3D, Tempest 2000, Defender 2000, Rayman, Super Burnout, Blue Lighting, Battlesphere, Breakout 2000, Battlemorph, Battle Vortech, Club Drive, Hover Strike, and Skyhammer were all games that couldn't be run by the Motorola 68K. If you want your mind blown check out Skyhammer right here on KZbin. That game could easily pass as a mid-generation PSX or Saturn game. Addendum- This is not an exhaustive list. Further, you may notice a couple of Jaguar CD games on the list. The Jaguar CD didn't add anything to the console minus storage and many of its games (I listed them) have been ported to cart. They can all be played on a stock Jaguar without a CD ROM attachment.

[@fossil-bit8439]

Awesome video! I had one friend growing up who had a Jaguar and I wanted one ever since! Wished I would’ve got one when they were cheap. Although after years of waiting I finally found one at my local game store! I ran home to get a tub of all my common/doubles or stuff I had purchased over the years for just such an opportunity! I finally own one and have been excited to collect some games. I actually have some sealed jag games that I’ve been holding onto for a few years that I found at a thrift store! Recently purchased some on eBay for a decent price. I’m most excited for Raiden (huge shooter fan)! I’m definitely a Sega fanboy and don’t have much nostalgia for the older Atari consoles but have always loved the Jaguar!

[@dogeymon83]

The very question “is it truly 64 bit?” comes from the false mindset of what bits even mean. The media pushed bits as always meaning how good graphics are. How good graphics are in a game has never had much to do with bits. It has to do with GPU and CPU power, how many colors it can push at once, and to an extent, has greatly to do with how talented the programmers are . We’ve seen talented programmers create 2600 games that look like NES games (almost)

[@quantumrobin4627]

I’m stuck on the part where you said the media misrepresented something, I’m just so shocked….🤣jk

[@dr.charlesedwardflorendobr3952]

IT was Electronics Gaming Monthly (EGM) that led the barrage against the Jaguar and spread the rumors on it being 32 bit + 32 bit. If we were to use their way of thinking, then the TG16 and the SNES should both be registered as 8-bit, not 16-bit.

[@bryede]

Both the Fairchild Channel F and NES are 8-bit, so it's not a terribly useful metric.

[@vogonp4287]

It's kind of like teraflops now. Comparing them don't matter outside of the same architecture.

[@ilkeryoldas]

Examples of 2600 games looking like NES?

[@AFourEyedGeek]

So I had a 128-bit system in 1997 when I got the NVIDIA RIVA 128? I didn't know my system was so advance at the time, nice! All the experts were still referring to it as a 32-bit system as it had a 32-bit CPU and a 32-bit OS, but because my system had a 128-bit memory bandwidth somewhere in it, the entire system should have been classed as a 128-bit system. This means when I got my Vega 64 in 2017, I had a 2048-bit system, whoa! So I downgraded my bits when I upgraded my GPU last year. I should have got the 2015s AMD R9 FURY X and got myself a 4096-bit system.

[@SalivatingSteve]

3:48 That voice is familiar… Didn’t realize Expedition Theme Park was a retro gaming fan!

[@GregsGameRoom]

Yeah we’ve been friends for several years now.

[@bitwize]

So if we're going by largest chunk of data possible to process by the CPU in one go, the 64-bit PC on your desk may actually be a *512-bit* machine, if it supports the new AVX-512 instruction set (recent AMDs and premium-priced Intels do). If we're going by data bus size, your PC is a whopping *1-bit* machine. The PCIe bus uses serial links and a packet-based protocol instead of traditional parallel buses, making your computer a sort of LAN in a box. Each "lane" in PCIe can transmit or receive one bit at a time, but each bit is communicated extremely fast; at very high speeds serial is actually more reliable than parallel because it's hard to keep all the parallel lines synced. Cards may use multiple lanes, so I guess your GeForce RTX 4070 Ti is sitting on a *16-bit* data bus? Really all the bit numbers are truly all about marketing. The Jaguar has a 16/32 bit CPU. It's also a fun machine to play on or program.

[@Tarkus88]

That was really informative, the Jaguar seems ambitious for the time but convoluted as well as to its design. I wonder what the potential of the Jaguar could have really been at the time, or if truly it didn't worth the effort.

[@Halon1234]

From what I remember the lack of CPU cache killed a lot of the console’s potential, especially for textured 3D. John Carmack once said a decent cache probably would have improved the speed of those operations by a factor of 7. Beyond that the memory controller was also finicky and prone to crashing if you didn’t babysit it, it was cache-deficient elsewhere also, and the m68K was tasked with odd jobs like polling the controller and determining which buttons were pressed - which was quite CPU-intensive since there were so many buttons and so few pins. I rooted for it then and always had a soft spot for Aliens vs Predator and Tempest 2000, but the Jaguar itself needed another six months for design. With some changes it could have put up a good fight against the Saturn and PlayStation.

[@juststatedtheobvious9633]

@@Halon1234 At least the CRY colors looked great.

[@Halon1234]

@@juststatedtheobvious9633 Agreed. It wasn’t all bad.

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

@@Halon1234already the NES pushed all button states to the console. Why polling?

[@Halon1234]

@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt mostly because the Jaguar had such a large number of buttons, and relatively few signal pins, making the CPU work harder to determine what buttons were engaged.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

The Jag is without question a 64 bit machine, but this does not mean that it has to be more powerful than the newer 32 bit systems, as these have much more hardware support for 3D graphics and specialized RAM areas for video and sound generation to speed up data throughput. Marc Rosocha Eclipse (Iron Soldier 1+2)

[@monkbond5172]

Great video man

[@demonology2629]

Last generation 16-bit systems would've hang thier heads down in shame⬇️😔, if the Atari🕹🐆Jaguar would have came out with Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition with an Atari Jaguar 6 button controllers 💯%‼ 🎛🔉🎵🕹🤩📺🕹🤯🎧🎚🔊🎶

[@GregsGameRoom]

MK3 was supposedly in the works

[@demonology2629]

@@GregsGameRoom Really? That was a rumor I heard since 1996 🙏🏻☯️🧘‍♂️

[@Animated__Freak]

The Jaguar has some really interesting hardware quirks that are seldom talked about. I read a huge chunk of the technical reference manual and it seems like the designers intended for 3D games to use a mix of textured and flat polygons. The upside being that the textured polygons would be perspective correct and the flat polygons would have really smooth shading via the CRY color pallet. I think the best game to utilize these features is Battlemorph, the smooth shading on the polygons gives a appearance of a textured environment even if there isn't any and the once that are textured never warp like they would on Playstation. I especially like how when you go under water they use the smooth shading to give the environment a very dark mood. PlayStation had to rely on dithering to get such smooth shading in games like Silent Hill. So there definitely are some very distinctive hardware characteristics to the jaguar that are sadly overshadowed by the 64-bit claim.

[@Odolwa2]

Jag was capable of a 1:1 starfox 64 port? Smokes alive, they screwed us over!

[@kavya1638]

it was more than capable of a starfox64 port. the system remains untapped to this day, sadly.. like the guy said, everyone ported crap to the system. as for 3D games, no one really knew what they were doing at that time, it was just too early.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

Regarding some of the 16 bit ports, Coder Mike Diskett: Syndicate and theme park are both very simulation heavy games designed to run on a high end 486 (at the time) and even on PC suffer slow downs, without a major simplification of the game it was never going to run at a constant great framerate. With more time we could have made it run better, but I guess projected unit sales were so low it wasnt worth the business guys at Bullfrog have us spend more time and maybe make a loss on making the games.."

[@josephchaparro1037]

Cool video I appreciate the fun facts about the Jag.

[@konami1979]

In looking back, it's interesting how the Bit Wars ended when the 128-bit Dreamcast was released. After awhile, bits stopped mattering when so many DC and PS2 games looked alike.

[@dr.charlesedwardflorendobr3952]

The Flare 2 team originally designed the architecture to run on a Z80 as a manager instead of a 68000. It's a good thing they upgraded it or else the flak that the Jaguar as a 64bit system would have bit worse.

[@bitset3741]

If Atari had not taken the time to put a 68000 in, and given us ONE more revision of the GPU and DSP that fixed the prefetch bug with external jump instructions.... just one more revision might have done it, things might have been a bit different.

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

You don’t want any processor run directly from unified RAM in this system. 68k would already be less of a problem with 2 phrases of code cache ( 68k has a pin to signal code load ). Also I want a jump instruction with a 10 bit target address within the scratchpad and an implicit register which tells us where to pull the memory block from main memory. The GPU is a 64 bit bus master.

[@thearchive1973]

I was writing to say hello and I hope you are doing well buddy. Have a great day

[@GregsGameRoom]

Have a good one Matt!

[@legendsflashback]

Same reason neo Geo claim be 24bit in USA and Saturn 64bit in Japan advertising

[@jameskelvin6720]

I wish I could play Tempest 2000 right now!

[@GregsGameRoom]

It's the best game for sure!

[@FantasyVisuals]

Get a powkiddy x18S . I play Jag AVP on it regular

[@Larry]

What I was told by an "Atari expert" is the rumor of the jaguar being a 32-bit machine came from SeanBaby out of spite when Atari refused to give him a jaguar for free. I've never heard anyone else say this however.

[@GregsGameRoom]

Calling it 32-bit isn't much of an insult considering so many think it's 16-bit because of the 68000 and the multitude of Amiga ports. I'll go with the designers opinion over SeanBaby's!

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

That would of come from the Retro Laird.. odd you don't name him, when you reference a claim he's been making for years. You were happy to use him briefly as a script writer for your YT and guest writer in your book, so why not name him as your source here? 🤔 You should also quote in context, Sean Baby made the claim in EGM magazine... without reference to where the claim was made and when, it has no context.

[@NOLADEEJ]

The Jaguar and Lynx are the only Atari systems I never played. Well and the new VCS if we count that.. lol

[@GregsGameRoom]

You're missing out by not playing the Lynx! Pretty amazing little system there. Jaguar has some great hardware for the time, it's just so few programmers knew how to get the best out of it.

[@XV250]

Try emulation: there are now good emulators for both the Lynx and the Jaguar (BigPEmu).

[@richhutnik2477]

The Jaguar becomes a 16 bit system when people code to the 68000.

[@katieblackmore2004]

I'm looking forward too the PS6 Super Slim Series Q console, that glows in the dark, is 24,000 Bit and makes you coffee in the morning.

[@joesshows6793]

You are right on homey. That Motorola CPU was there so people wouldn’t be scared by the tom and Jerry chips and nothing else.

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

All the more impressive how Archimedes could be sold without the 6502 used for development.

[@smakfu1375]

As a low-level software and systems engineer, the “bitness” of a system is defined by two primary values: ISA word length and internal execution unit “width”. External interconnects are secondary values. On this basis the MC68k is a 32/16 CPU with 24bit memory addressing (32bit ISA, including registers, but 16bit ALU, internal data paths, etc.). An i386SX, despite being wired to a 16bit external (modified 286) data bus, was internally fully 32bit (including ALU, MMU, despite only having 24bit addressing) and is considered a fully 32bit CPU, functionally speaking. Modern AMD64 processor cores, in much the same way, are considered 64bit due to, again, having a 64bit ISA and logical addressing, even though they implement 128bit wide (or wider) internal and external data buses, and have only a subset of 64bit physical memory addressing implemented (initially 40bit, now 48bit, with a current page table format limit of 52 bits). So, in simple terms, a processor and, by extension, a system is a particularly bit width, based on ISA and execution unit width. MC68k was, functionally a 32bit CPU ISA implemented in 16bits. Thus it’s considered, practically, a 16bit CPU, much like the 80286 (which had a 16bit ISA, 16bit execution, 24bit addressing). So by this basis, we can say that the Genesis is correctly labeled a 16bit system. The PlayStation and Saturn were 32bit systems, and the Nintendo 64’s MIPS III ISA based R4300i is legitimately a 64bit processor, even if that made very little difference to overall performance (as many later systems, like the Dreamcast and XBox were far more powerful despite using nominally 32bit architectures). So what about the Jaguar? It was an MC68k powered machine and not, in any way, a 64bit system. It was an advanced 16bit machine, with a secondary (state machine) 32bit coprocessor, and fixed-function “64bit” accelerator, connected by a mix of 16, 32 and 64bit wide data paths (point to point, as it didn’t have a true 64bit common bus). From a systems architecture standpoint, this does not make it a 64bit machine, anymore than a circa 1994 Pentium PC could claim 64 bitness (despite having a 64bit data bus and fancy “128bit” fixed function 2D PCI graphics accelerator). TL;DR: Jaguar was absolutely not a 64bit machine, it was an advanced 16bit machine.

[@gelzamangitzaman1482]

nice video :D

[@alejandromoreno5056]

I never knew this existed until now, and I’m a 90’s kid

[@jcaseyjones2829]

10:47 to say "it had a 64 bit bus and the blitter was capable of moving 64 bits." Good lord.

[@GregsGameRoom]

…and I’m not even a wordy KZbinr trying to stretch out the video!

[@ronch550]

It may be truly 64-bit but it's more on par with PS1 and Saturn. N64 just blew it away.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

It's 64-bit architecture, not a true 64-bit system like the N64

[@ronch550]

@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 I'd like to think that it's a true 64-bit machine but it depends on how you look at it, I guess. But the fact alone that people have questioned whether it's truly 64-bit or not says it all.

[@juggalo4life247mfrs]

I remember being so proud to buy the jaguar day 1.i really liked the system,but it did seem a little under powerd.ecspecially if you compare it to the Nintendo 64.thats when you realized the bit wars were alot more confusing than compared to today.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

Sega were just as bad with marketing in Japan, claiming the Saturn was 64-bits some within Sega even liked to refer to it as a 128-bit system.

[@GregsGameRoom]

Interesting. I thought I heard the Dreamcast was 128-bit, but that was probably the magazines hyping things up and getting it wrong.

[@GregsGameRoom]

Interesting. I thought I heard the Dreamcast was 128-bit, but that was probably the magazines hyping things up and getting it wrong.

[@IntoTheVerticalBlank]

Yes, kind of, and but it deserved to be treated better.

[@GregsGameRoom]

Yeah, it was a good system, it just needed more good games.

[@StriderVM]

Using a systems full capability is always a pipedream. Even today. Most modern PC games struggle to max out the current multi core processors of today. And trying to multitask totally different components to run parallel? Even worse. That's why the Jaguar in theory is capable of much, much more. But it didn't really happen.

[@thedrunkmonkshow]

As someone who was alive as a teenager in the mid-90s it was a really odd space for gaming and there was no clear direction to anything because so much technology we take for granted today was still uncharted waters back then. A lot of people, including myself, held off waiting to see what would last because we were leery if this 3D phase would die out like the FMV craze. Ultimately we see Sony won out in the end but any one of these systems could have blown up. It's easy to poke fun now but let's keep it real...the Jaguar, the 32X, the 3DO, they were all wonderful systems in their own right. It's just that Sony just so happened to invest in the right medium, at the right time, with the right price, and with the right marketing. In a lot of ways today kinda parallels back then by comparison because it's like..what's going to be the next big thing? Not much has improved from this generation and last generation other than the Switch being the first handheld/console hybrid.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

It's 64-bit architecture and architecture that should of had at least another 2 revisions of the chipset, according Rob Nicholson of Handmade Software, more Memory according to Peter Molyneux of Bullfrog., needed another RISC processor with a dynamic cache as the CPU, not the 68000 according to John Carmack etc etc 😂 Add to that decent development tools... Marketing such flawed hardware as 64-bit,simply raised expectations way beyond what the system was capable of.

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

Did you just describe the PlayStation? The Jaguar could just have been simpler. Jerry is already minimalistic. N64 can draw a single px per cycle. Jaguar should have done the same. One pixel pipeline. Simple coding. Use the silicon for dedicated cache instead. No interrupts ( only a watchdog timer ). Two sets of registers for the blitter so that it can just switch over at the end of the span. The GPU will be blocked from write if both banks still need to be used. The GPU by the way has two banks.

[@justanobody0]

good insight I have to admit, I thought they just added the two 32 bit Tom and Jerry processors together to false call it a 64 bit system. (I can't remember if I've heard someone else say claim that was the reasoning)

[@lordterra1377]

The biggest issue was the unfinished dev kits. I don't think any game really took advantage of the hardware. The only one that may have came close was AVP. People also seen to forget that the Jaguar was also meant to compete with the Snes not the Saturn and PlayStation.

[@GregsGameRoom]

Good points. Atari was targeting the Genesis and SNES when looking to create a new system and simultaneously developed the Panther & Jaguar. If they were targeting PSX then the Panther wouldn’t have even been started.

[@A31Chris]

AvP didn't come close

[@lordterra1377]

@@A31Chris I think it used some of the extra CPUs for the texture compression. A long time ago I read a Dev blog about the game including how they created textures by hand and then protographed them before digitizing them into the game. Even if it didn't fully utilize the hardware but for it's time it has an impressive look. No way the SNES or Genesis could have pulled off anything remotely close.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

​@@lordterra1377 AVP was crippled by Jane Whittaker's awful spaghetti 68000 A. I code. Skyhammer is the most impressive game by Rebellion on the system and pushes it hard. Other titles like Iron Soldier II, Battlesphere, Hoverstrike CD, Battlemorph, WTR probably push the system in certain areas more than AVP. Rebellion themselves were optimising the AVP engine for their planned, multiplatform title, Legions Of The Undead.

[@lordterra1377]

@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 Considering the Jaguar was not really meant to be a 3-D focused system, games like Skyhammer are really impressive even with the low frame rate in certain spots. Yet low frame rates were pretty common on a lot of games back then.

[@aether3395]

am I the only one person to hear the very high pitched sound of the television he use to play his games ? it's in the same frequency range as a moskito flying sound , but more higher i think

[@atomiswave1971]

6 months later the PS1 came out at a whopping 32 bits and people didn't care what was written in the spec sheet, they just cared about what was on the screen. Game OVER!

[@humansrants1694]

What I read about he PS1 before getting one was Sony made it for the devs not the gamers only the games were aimed at the gamers and Sony sold it at a loss to get as much performance and design to the devs. The res just assumed what gamers are devs wanted while Sony started from scratch doing research first and meeting the devs.

[@atomiswave1971]

@@humansrants1694 yeah the risc cpu had the polygon generator integrated. Effects like transparencies were simply turn on turn off. Compared to saturn it was easy to work with, cheaper to make and had a gigantic marketing campaign. I imported a Japanese model at launch. Around 10 people used mine and said they were buying it when it comes out in the west. 1 person bought a jaguar based on the 64bit cpu and immediately regretted it.

[@crazyjimheath]

cool video

[@twentysixhundred7813]

Great rundown of what the system really is. Trying to explain this to people hell-bent on hating the system no matter what is impossible. They always say "but the playstation is only 32bit and looks better'. Most the time i just give up and let them carry on with their own rant. Personally i have always looked at the Jag as the middle child. Was far more capable then most systems at the time but a little too early for the next gen that heavily focused on 3d architecture. Very slept on system that was never fully tapped into

[@itsesye]

i mean, what's wrong with that? if you're advertising this supposedly powerful console, then show how the games benefit from it

[@twentysixhundred7813]

@itsesye Was two years before the playstation and its only real completion was the 16bit systems and 3DO and CDi ect. On release it was fairly powerful. Probl3m was the software and not many could use its full potential. It was a 2d powerhouse though and in the right hands the home-brew scene has shown what it can do

[@johneygd]

The only way to ever prove us that the jaguar is 64bits is to see a homebrew port of mario 64 and donkeykong 64,only then we can shove away those aging discussions whether the atari jaguar is truelly 64bit or not.

[@GregsGameRoom]

The 2600 is 8-bit as is the NES. The IntelliVision is 16-bit as is the Genesis. Bits don’t mean better graphics.

[@johneygd]

@@GregsGameRoom true that,but you know what,for a long long time i always tout that the atari 2600 had 4bit cpu and that there was no way to expand the system at all,BUT once i discovered that the atari 2600 cpu was 8bit and that it was possible to expand it’s capabilities as well as it’s ram and it’s rom chip trough the use of bankswitching,i really became impressed with that system,especially once i saw the atari 2600 jr and also find out that nintendo and sega games did also came out on that system,it became a no brainer for me to pick up a atari 2600 jr along with a harmony cart for it😁

[@justanobody0]

there is a 3 year difference in time between the launches of each system also, how many bits are modern computers and modern consoles? isn't it still 64 bits? by that logic, one could say, we expect the n64 to be able to produce the same graphics as xbox27 or ps17 also it would be interesting to see how well the jaguar could perform at running mario 64 in times past when games pushed the limits of the cpu, it usually meant the framerate became low. so maybe a Jaguar version of mario 64 runs at a lower framerate than the n64 version Like the SNES with Star fox, stunt racing fx, doom, like I've heard some games could hit as low as 2 frames per second!! (maybe that was a non-fx chip game, but still even fx chip games were considered relatively low frame rate games) also some games they reduced the window size (area that the polygons had to be drawn) so the cpu didn't have to work as hard. SNES Doom is windowed, I think stunt racing fx is windowed gregsgameroom showed all the atari jaguar games, and a racing dirt bike game for example had a horrible framerate, but gregsgameroom noted that other games performed with better framerates, and it seems the jaguar should be able to play a game of that caliber with a better framerate

[@johneygd]

@@justanobody0 if you ask me, i absolutely do not believe that modern systems are only just 64bit,sure there’re other factors wich determine the utelization of the cpu cpu such as memory bandwide,transfaring speed,gpu and audio chip etc,,, But nobody can convince me that even the ps5 only has a 64bit cpu just like the N64,am mean if the N64 already couldn’t do 480p, then how can a ps5 could do 4K or maybe also 8K???? What i do believe however is that todays fat format is 64bit,meaning that the memory and ram could be devided into smaller sections sothat more bandwide will be left to increase transfering speed and save on memory space, Sets say fat16 devides a block of ram into sections of 4KB sothat even if you only put 1KB of data into it,that 4KB is then fully wasted,now if fat32 devides memory into sections of 2KB then that means that if you only put 1KB of data into it,that that 2KB memory is then fully wasted,NOW if fat64 format will devide the memory into sections of 1KB,then it means that if you put 1KB of data into it,you will still have more memory left because that other 3KB isn’t wasted,so you will have more space left on a rom chip and there will be more space availible in ram to allow faster transfering speed, I remember a while ago that 64bit was referred to that sorth of thing and nothing else.

[@justanobody0]

@@johneygd "if you ask me, i absolutely do not believe that modern systems are only just 64bit," What do you consider them? you bring up a modern system can do 4k when I search n64 screen resolution, it says most games did 240p 240p is 77000 pixels that need to be shown when I search 4k, it says its 3840 by 2160, which is 8.3 million pixels So by the ratio of the screen resolution, since 1996, the screen resolution is 108 times bigger so maybe, modern systems should be called 6400 bit

[@JoseSanchez-tk5zh]

Atari Jaguar: Hahaha I'm 64 bit Nintendo 64: I believe we never met

[@CharlesHepburn2]

I think the bottom line is that you cannot really get a specific sense of hardware power based on the "bit-ness" number advertised. It's similar to megapixels on a camera. Sometimes 50 megapixel cameras look worse than 12 megapixel cameras. The Jaguar had 64 bit elements in its hardware, but it's software rarely looked like 4 times the power of the Genesis / SNES. Interestingly, the Sega Master system (and/or Mark III) had a VDP with a 16-bit bus; similar to the PC Engine / TG-16; but most people consider it to be an 8-bit system and the TG-16 to be a 16-bit system. The Neo Geo had a GPU with a 24-bit bus attached to it... thus SNK advertising it as a 24 bit system... which I feel is a fair label due to the Neo Geo being AT LEAST 50% more powerful than the Genesis/SNES in terms of 2D graphical performance. Again, the bottom line is that there are many factors to consider when assessing the hardware power of a system; and just throwing around bit-ness in a school yard argument is over simplified. p.s. I was one of the original owners of the Jaguar when it was first released in New York and L.A.... I was sorely disappointed due to expecting graphics that were 4 times better than 16-bit.

[@GregsGameRoom]

The Jaguar was positioned in a really weird time. 2D games were being supplanted by 3D games. The Jag (and even the Saturn) didn’t have the proper hardware for 3D. Had gaming kept on with 2D games, the Jag would have dominated and no one would be questioning it’s “bitness” because clearly the hardware is far beyond that of the Genesis or SNES.

[@CharlesHepburn2]

@@GregsGameRoom I would say that the Atari Panther (cancelled 32-bit console) was focused on 2D games and the Jag was Atari's 64-bit 3D focused console. The Jag had specific hardware to make 3D gaming plausible on the system; however, due to the hardware design and testing being rushed (Jag was supposed to save the company), and also the development documentation and software tools being lackluster/under-baked, most games had a tough time doing 3D gaming. In fact, if the Jag had a few more hardware registers and a bit more memory, it could have put up 3D visuals on par with PlayStation 1 or the Saturn. Interestingly, the Jaguar uses the controllers that were designed for the Panther originally. Trevor McFur and the Cresant Galaxy and CyberMorph were also originally developed for the Panther hardware.

[@katseazzz]

@@GregsGameRoom still i cant believe that jag can beat a neo geo in 2d

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

​@@CharlesHepburn2 Panther was a 16-bit system, with a 32-bit GPU. ATD and Atari Corp sources, confirmed NO Jaguar titles started life as Panther games. Cybermorph and Crescent Galaxy are sadly associated with the Panther due to misinformation. Panther was to get titles like.. Shadow Of The Beast The Crypt Strider 2 (Tiertex) A Star Raiders esq title from Jeff Minter.

[@CharlesHepburn2]

@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 I don’t believe that is correct. I believe a few titles were first intended for Panther. This has been the story since around the time of the hardware itself coming out. If you can provide a link to a better source I’ll keep an open mind. I’m one of the original owners of the Jag in the USA. I got it during the test launch in NYC. I was super excited about it and thought Atari was going to take the gaming industry back at that time. Instead, I got questioning from a green faced chick asking me where I learned to fly. Anyways, if you are right then I stand corrected…. But you are the only person/source I’ve ever heard to declare what you said. Please site your source.

[@thefifthdoctor6780]

Great stuff love me some Jaguar. Alien Vs predator is always a fav.

[@argedismun2]

Can you explain the turbo grafx 16 and snk neo geo

[@orderofmagnitude-TPATP]

I wonder if some neogeo games could be faithfully ported to the jaguar? Metal slug as example.

[@FantasyVisuals]

Would be difficult to port NeoGeo games to the Jaguar as there is only 2MB of Ram , and chronic problems moving Data

[@orderofmagnitude-TPATP]

@@FantasyVisuals it has Ram; aka with cartridge or are you referring to the jag cd? But yeah I can imagine with its complicated architecture moving stuff around isn't going to be easy.

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

ROM appears in the usual address space. OP can only use RAM, but the blitter can use ROM. ROM is max 5 MB. Usually, you would compress artwork. I think arcades don’t compress much. OP is slow for narrow objects. OP also wastes one cycle per 2 px.

[@RetroGamerBB]

Atari jag ads said to "Do the Math". They might as well said that it had All the Bits. The games didn't really reflect what 64 bit gaming would become. Couple of gems though. Skyhammer for one. I really liked the look of Checkered Flag but the gameplay stank.

[@GregsGameRoom]

The Jaguar was in that transitional time between 2D and 3D games. It had some power to do 3D, but that wasn't designed for it. As a 2D machine, it's pretty unmatched.

[@vidjenko8349]

Bummer you had zero5 and didn't really demonstrate it. That's also a pretty impressive game for the console

[@GregsGameRoom]

Maybe I’ll do a “Rare Jaguar games” video. But then again they’re all pretty rare.

[@wateriestfire]

If you can put a 64bit address into it and process it, then it's a 64 bit system. Whether it's on 2 chips, 3 chips, 5 chips, makes no difference.

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

Address range is 24 bits I think. 4 MB RAM in the CoJag and max 5 MB cartridge and then some internal

[@goldenheartOh]

The whole debate exists because THERE IS NO SPECIFIC DEFINITION OF WHAT MAKES A SYSTEM X NUMBER OF BITS. I read that in a PC magazine back in the day. Makes sense.Otherwise we wouldn't have all these discussions about it.

[@sonicexereaper6814]

So basically, it’s technically “64-bit” with all the hardware, but the real issue is how most developers aren’t taking full advantage of the hardware into either using its full capability or pushing past its limit versus Saturn, N64, and Playstation. No wonder 90% of their library lacked the charm and value.

[@baigos]

a machine from 1993, with an affordable price, and can run doom, wolfestein, with link? i think it was an awesome machine. And got really cool games. I love the console, but now is expensive as hell, and most of the collectors they got the machine are haters. Some years ago, when was very cheap the scene was growing, with nice demos and libraries; but now the scene is quiet thanks to the inflated prices, speculators, and collectors of garbage. Man, if you really want money, a house, a dog, a pretty wife, a car and other things, study something and look for a job. Stock bargain consoles in a container or a hobo's hole makes you a weirdo.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

Jez San, Argonaut, who were working on the cancelled Jag CD version of Creature Shock: "A true 64 bit chip would have a 64 bit ALU and 64 bit registers. The Jaguar does not. Simply having two 32 bit chips does not constitute a 64 bit cpu. Having a 64 bit databus does technically allow you to call it a 64 bit system if you must, but 64 bit cpus? no way."

[@humansrants1694]

It was marketed as 64bit because it had some chips that were 64bit and a 64bit Bus but one I think might of been TOM which had the main CPU could not use all the bus lanes.

[@maboroshi1986]

Hey man I’m really sorry but i couldn’t make it through the video. The CRT whine throughout your narration was deafening. You might want to check your audio to see if you can filter that out.

[@GregsGameRoom]

No worries. I'm usually very sensitive to CRT noise myself and I didn't notice it.

[@lordterra1377]

@@GregsGameRoom As you get older you lose the ability to hear it lol. Some brands are worse than others, none of my Trinitrons whine yet...

[@bruceleggett568]

We’ll never know what the Jags could do. We never got one AAA title that used the system to its fullest.

[@hw5091]

I think the homebrew scene will eventually try and port an N64 game etc. I think it could do some lesser ones, albeit cut back some.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

How would you describe the likes of Skyhammer, Iron Soldier 2,Battlesphere? They utilised the hardware extremely well.

[@bruceleggett568]

If the Legend of Zelda is a AAA, say the bar. Jaguar efforts form a design and quality angle were B titles. The quality Doom port was likely the best example of a top title ported to Jag.

[@Optimus6128]

All our classic perspective that more bits means a leap in graphics is faulty and it was marketing. It happened that for a short period, jumping from 8bit era to 16bit to 32bit, there were also vast leaps in graphics hardware. If 64bit meaned anything, then N64 should be playing Elden Ring right now. Our modern PCs are x64.

[@pizzamon795]

Where did you learn to fly

[@GregsGameRoom]

From Skylar!

[@scroopynoopers4662]

I like this video. I can see your page getting a lot bigger in the future. Just keep going at it and perfect your video process. I’m not one to talk myself cause I know nothing of having a channel. But I feel yours could be great with a little bit of production value. Idk. It’s hard to explain what’s missing. It’s nothing huge or anything. It’s like the cherry on a ice cream sunday. It’s a small part but it’s brings the whole thing together. I just wish I could tell you cherry your missing. Still great though

[@rxz4140]

Let's make a new Jaguar game.

[@kavya1638]

That would be a great idea. I would love to see the system utilized correctly and how it was expected to be used. Of course, there is OpenLaura, which Odolwa commented earlier (hasn't been ported to Jaguar yet), but it's expected that 3DO, 32x and Jaguar are all capable of mad 3D graphics with little performance loss with know-how.

[@iordaniskaravasilis]

So at the end of the day rely on companies that get the most out of their systems

[@Pathos312]

Honestly, the engineering behind the Jaguar is awesome no doubt but it was horribly conceived. This type of stuff would plague future consoles and made porting harder and the systems harder to develop for. A big reason some of Segas flagships systems had failed from was poor developer support b/c other consoles were easier to develop on (say SNES) As far as I've ever known, most people have specified between OS or hardware when saying 'bits' when speaking hardware in gaming I look to the bus width as a 64-bit video chip today is minimalist at best and most better performing cards are going to be 256-bit etc. Only when it came down to OS, whether the CPU was 32-bit or 64 bit, et al... I think this confusion is because consumers were thinking in resolution 8-bit / 16-bit vs 32-bit (SNES in between 24-bit) so all of this together is understandably confusing for the lay.

[@dr.charlesedwardflorendobr3952]

I never had the chance to play with the Jaguar but avidly kept reading about it since its development days. I think the Motorola 68k is both a curse and a blessing. Although we blame the programmers' use of the 68k for that 16-bit look, it was also the use of the 68k that allowed the Jaguar to have more games. If it wasn't for the the 68k processor, the Jaguar would have had much fewer games. I think the problem wasn't in the use of the 68k but rather it was in the art department, and the cartridge sizes restrictions that Atari had placed due to their penny pinching schemes. The Jaguar was capable of 16 Million colors, much like the Playstation, and later consoles. I think it was the first console to be able to display 16 Million colors. However, when developers ported their games from other 16-bit systems, they did not update the art styles to take advantage of those 16 Million colors. Another thing is that using the 16 Million colors would end up making cartridge sizes much bigger and would not fit into the 6MB cartridge that Atari often used. This is what happened to Trevor Mcfur and the Crescent Galaxy. Designers of Trevor Mcfur took advantage of the 16 Million colors capability but their background file sizes would become so big they would not fit into the 6MB cartridge. So what they did was to make the backgrounds smaller and then just kept repeating them like a Hannah Barbera cartoon. Remember that this was the age before jpeg compression.

[@JustMe99999]

Technically, JPG came out in 1992 and the Jaguar in 1993.

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

@@JustMe99999and the SDK comes with jpg. Just the hardware is a bit strange. JPEG uses DFT which ends up being a lot of adds, movs, and shifts. Ideal for JRISC. Instead they invested time in their MatrixMultiply Monster

[@MicklowFilms]

Can't believe this is still a debate lol. What are your thoughts on the Atari VCS and the new Atari? Atari in the 90s wasn't even the same Atari then. The Atari name has been run by so many different entities over the years it's crazy.

[@GregsGameRoom]

New "Atari" is little more than a licensing company at this point. For me Atari closed up shop when the Tramiel's sold it to JTS.

[@Shannon-ul5re]

Its a shame that the system was never full untilised.

[@tosgem]

My iphone plays old Genesis games so it's probably only a 16bit phone

[@joesshows6793]

Is the snes a 8bit system?

[@timberwolves100]

Determining Bits has always been sketchy. But Graphics and Sound wise it was more like 16Bit. Processor wise more like 8BIT. Core CPU was not much faster than NES. Alot of clever programming, carts with built in FX chips and Mode7 helped with the slow speeds.

[@iordaniskaravasilis]

So if I understand correctly the CPU is not 64 bit rather it's 32 bit And furthermore developers never took Advantage of the Jaguar capabilities to create great looking games. So people ended up with games that looked 16 Bit At best

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

The better developers took advantage. The 32 bit CPU runs at twice the clock of the memory to compensate. The problem is all that 16 Bit stuff in the blitter. For 2d it uses on list of sprites back to front. It reads through it every scanline. But it lacks a proper pipeline. Read descriptor -> load bitmap -> palette, scale, shadow

[@VOAN]

But then when you compare Jaguar's Doom to N64's Doom 64, then disappointment about the Jaguar continues. N64's Doom 64 make Jaguar's Doom look like 16-Bit in comparison.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

Totally different titles. John Carmack did a best fit PC to Jaguar conversion of PC Doom to the Atari console and admits if he'd written it from scratch, it would of run faster, in a higher resolution etc. N64 Doom is a spin off game, written specifically for the N64 hardware.

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

3 years later. And pace was fast. Unfortunately, N64 RSP even more than SegaDSP is beyond human comprehension.

[@BenHeckHacks]

And yet the 32-bit 3D0 looked MILES better than the Jaguar. Overcomplicated systems like the Jaguar or Saturn shoot themselves in the foot.

[@GregsGameRoom]

3DO benefitted greatly by the included CD drive and Trip Hawkins to court experienced developers. Also looks aren’t everything. I’d rather play Space Invaders on the 2600 than anything the 3DO offered.

[@AFourEyedGeek]

@@GregsGameRoom Atari 2600s Space Invaders is better than 3DO's Super Street Fight 2 Turbo, Flashback, Wolfenstein 3D, Syndicate, Wing Commander 3, Lemmings, The Horde, Cannon Fodder, Theme Park, and Star Control 2? Poor opinion.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

​@@GregsGameRoom you'd be missing out then. Starfighter 3000,SSF2,Road Rash, FIFA, The Horde, Space Hulk, all had me envious as a Jaguar owner at the time. NFS, FIFA, Madden, whilst not my thing, looked way better than games in the same genre on Jaguar. Things like Soviet Strike, Blood Omen etc started life on the 3DO.

[@RyzenZegend]

I had Jaguar 64 with the CD add on and blue lightning was worse than any game made on NES. Primal Rage , Aliens Vs Predator, Doom, and NBA Jams showcase what the system was compatible of. However was it it 64 bits? No........the most it ran was 32bits. One thing Atari Jaguar 64 had that was completely impressive was it had Land Play. 2 Jaguars can be played simultaneously on Doom. Player VS Player!

[@Lightblue2222]

The answer to me is.. YES

[@mandadog2449]

Atari jaguar is 16bit With a 32bit graphic bus and 32bit audio bus So is less powerful than a 32bit machine

[@dtester]

Personally I'd call it a 32/64 but whatever, it's close enough. ^_^

[@nandinho86]

It is a 64-bit system but nowhere near the Nintendo 64

[@bubbythebear6891]

Good explanation, but my ears are ringing.

[@GregsGameRoom]

Your the second person who has commented that, but I couldn’t hear it. And I’m normally very sensitive to CRT buzz.

[@Kevin_40]

Many Jag games could easily pass for N64 games and nobody doubts N64 is 64 bit. Its the cart holding both systems back. games that could pass for N64 games are Tempest 2000 Iron Soldier AvP Rayman and more.

[@FantasyVisuals]

Iron Soldier couldn't even pass for a Sega Saturn or 32X game

[@Kevin_40]

@@FantasyVisuals Wrong Iron Soldier has massive environments and massive 3d polygon structures. It runs smoothly. Great sound effects and music. Complex enemy AI. Good controls. If it were an N64 game it would be considered one of the better N64 games.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

​@@Kevin_40 I had I. S and Metal Head, Metal Head looked better, lots of texture mapping, but didn't have the essential feel of a Mech Game, I. S had.

[@RyzenZegend]

So you're telling me Jaguar can run Mario 64? Not in a million years!

[@Kevin_40]

@@RyzenZegend a less detailed version easily. maybe not quite as many levels either. but jaguar can do big worlds with huge polygons look at iron soldier. huge worlds runs smooth