The Atari Jaguar's MANY hardware issues.

[@Kurriochi]

I've made a video to correct an error I made along with clarifying some things that were not in the video: kzbin.info/www/bejne/eZK6YqlopZeDg80

[@WalterdasTrevas]

Bad idea to use Sega Saturn images instead of Jaguar images during the video.

[@seanmckelvey6618]

The fundamental problem with the Atari Jaguar was Atari themselves. The issues with the hardware could have been ironed out with a bit more R&D time and money, but Atari didn't have that money. It's not that the hardware was even bad, but that Atari didn't have the capital to not release it as soon as possible. Fixed hardware doesn't fix a lack of good games & 3rd party support though, and both of those are, again, Atari issues, not hardware.

[@scottythegreat1]

Not quite. Atari just marketed the Jaguar. The Jaguar and Lynx weren't designed by them. In both cases, Atari took on the product because they had money, but no product to market. Atari's flaw was that everyone in the industry knew Jack and Sam Tramiel played hardball and had the reputation of going to court and winning lawsuits, causing parts manufacturers to go bankrupt.

[@seanmckelvey6618]

@@scottythegreat1 Again, Atari is the issue. the hardware bugs are one thing, but the system didn't sell because Atari was unable to get any major 3rd party games on the console. This is the case no matter how you slice it. The hardware issues were irrelevant to the general public. All they saw was a system claiming to be some super-powered monster that could barely play slightly-enhanced, but mediocre 16-bit games. The jaguar failed because no one in their right mind was going to pay for a system with maybe 2 games of note when the Saturn and PS1 were maybe a year or two away and the Mega Drive and SNES were doing just fine.

[@apollosungod2819]

Dude, Atari Corp, the company owned by Jack Tramiel had PLENTY of money... the problem with the Atari Jaguar was paying all the money they did to the marketing firm with their goals of mocking and comparing themselves directly to the competition while also calling the gamer stupid indirectly for owning a Sega or Nintendo... 3DO did the same thing and that style of marketing did not earn them hardcore buyers... same deal with Sega Genesis in the first two years... By 1991 the Sega Genesis had been around since 1989 in North America and since 1988 in Japan so software development was in full swing so the comparison commercials Sega of America staff chose to go for did not seem as bad as they actually were because they are misinformation... talk about your game library, your original games and more importantly look at Sega Japan's efforts to purchase licenses for third party arcade games to appear on your hardware... aka SF2, Mortal Kombat series, etc... instead Atari Corp and their president acted like they were entitled to get third party support without selling the required number of consoles that third party companies look for in order to not lose millions of dollars on a brilliant game on a system where it only sold barely two million units... that means only a percentage of users will actually buy that particular game... the higher the sales, the higher the chances... also hardware is largely irrelevant... Atari Corp just sucked, like sEga of America 90s staff.

[@MaxAbramson3]

Why attempt to build so much new hardware when there was cheap OTC hardware like the ARM and AT&T TMS3210? And why not include a standard CD-ROM in 1993 when you already have 2MB of RAM? ATARI would've had a PS1-like machine on the market two years before SONY.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

Rob Nicholson of Handmade Software, said the Jaguar chipsets needed another 2 revisions to fix the bugs

[@marklechman2225]

Right off the bat you say the Jag advertised that it had 128 bits. That’s so wrong can’t even finish this video.

[@crism8868]

When you do the math but do too much of it 😂

[@plaztik767]

64 was the big claim of the day..

[@seanmckelvey6618]

Bro, if you're that easily put off a video by a mistake about the details of a video game console you might need to take a serious look at your life.

[@TheMinchio]

128 bits? 😂😅

[@thegamingchef3304]

Didn't the Dreamcast have 128 bits lol.

[@fringeelements]

The changes you're talking about a ~$500 console in 1993. 3DO 1993 - $700 launch (bloated with features, NEC-Turografx model where one company profits from hardware sales, completely inverting the razor and blades model of the games console market). Historical Jaguar 1993 - $250 Saturn 1994 - $400 (More components than PS1, less vertical integration than Sony) Playstation 1994 - $300 N64 1996 - $200 (Later launch, no CD drive, UMA) Sony was able to launch at the low price of $300 because Sony had more vertical integration than either Nintendo or Sega. Nintendo and Sega could sorta "fake" vertical integration by getting special deals (Nintendo and Sega weren't paying wholesale, let alone retail, prices for their components), and they could do final assembly, but Hitachi and SGI were still making a profit. Sony could manufacture more of their own components, and most importantly their own CD drives, they were the most vertically integrated, which was why the Playstation was able to launch at the cheap price of $300 in 1994. Frankly, the fact that Atari managed to get the price of that system to $250 in 1993 is a bit of a miracle. No CD drive helped, but in the long run the lack of a CD drive crippled the N64. Even though the N64 did better than the Saturn, the lack of a CD drive made it irrelevant and sorta ghettoized to Nintendo fanboys. And Nintendo has sorta been that way ever since, accepting hardware inferiority to microsoft and sony and sorta just riding their IPs, member-berries and supposedly great first-party games. In your changes to the Jaguar, you don't include a CD drive. How are you going to get games like Tomb Raider and JRPGs on the system? That's what crippled the N64, but Atari doesn't have iconic IPs and supposedly great first devs to carry them, their hardware has to be on-point and usable by 3rd parties to carry them (what Sony did). The Atari name is still known, so they still have a "foot in the door" (gaming mags initially gave the jaguar very favorable reviews), but they can't beat Sony or even Sega 1:1. They don't have the manufacturing to price-match hardware with Sega or especially Sony, and they don't have the 1st-party devs and IPs Sega has, or even the name recognition of either. I.e. their ONLY shot is being first to market, which is the shot they took. Now, Atari can delay to a mid-1994 launch in EU and NA, putting them a year ahead of Sony and Sega in those two regions, and just write off Japan as a lost cause. Then, take the changes you made that don't cost much money. You want to put in an SH-2 over the 68k? That's probably another $50 (Atari's getting big boy prices, so they're getting a discount, but you're changing the MB and glue logic to accommodate that beefier CPU). Okay, now you have to remove Tom or Jerry. And if you remove Tom or Jerry, the whole architecture is borked - which is to say, the Jaguar's architecture has to be something completely different now. Now you're looking at something like a modern CPU, custom GPU, custom SPU. And then you realize this looks a lot like the Genesis, SNES and Playstation design philosophies, along with how modern PCs basically work. CPU subsystem, Graphics subsystem, Sound sub-subsystem, glue logic of it all. Go figure! The only difference is modern RAM speeds and memory management make UMA viable for high-end gaming at reasonable cost. The weak, simple "conductor" CPU with monster graphics ASIC was common in arcade systems, and the Neo Geo (68k vs. Neo-Geo ASIC). And that's sorta what Atari seemed to be going for. The problem is that they botched the buses; if you're going with a CPU with more of a "conductor" role, you need big well-designed buses and DMA controllers. And those arcade boards aren't very flexible, which a home console expected to play a huge variety of games is a no-no, so home consoles need generally a higher CPU:GPU ratio in terms of design cost. And while you can sorta lean more toward ASIC/GPU vs. CPU in terms or where you "spend your points", putting a 68k in there was ludicrous as you rightly pointed out. The Neo Geo and System 16 could do that because it had a very narrow type of graphics it produced. And really, I sorta see the logic. Atari only had so many points, so they went with an "arcadey" style design philosophy because they needed a big splash. I think they wanted something like the Neo-Geo with more effects to sorta wow people, get early sales and hype, and now they're the first mover. So to save the Jaguar, you're basically making a completely different architecture, putting in a CD drive instead of carts, at which point - you're not really "saving the jaguar", you're going "this completely different system is what Atari should have done". Obviously different CPU, different GPU etc., so different timings and all the minutiae of glue logic (which you dive into in this video), but what it ultimately boils down to is "everyone should have made a type of Playstation, and use their first-party & IP advantage (in the case of Sega and Nintendo) or try for a first-mover advantage (in the case of Atari) to overcome Sony's vertical integration advantage". Why didn't Atari go with CDs? Well, I suspect for the same reason Arcades didn't. Arcade games are about eye-popping graphics fast, get people to see the attract mode and others playing and go "WOW!", and the space needed for the expected length of a home game isn't relevant for an arcade. There's also price - completely different market so you could have $500 ROMs for arcade boards. I think Atari was attempting that with a home console. CD makes the initial hardware price too expensive (even if CDs ultimately result in spending less overall after ~4 games, and larger games, people are stupid and respond to that initial price tag). So you can kinda divine Atari's strategy with the Jaguar based on the arcade-like architecture, their decision to use carts, their early launch, and "64-bit" hype. We know this failed since their early launch resulted with a system with weak dev guides and a ton of bugs and glue logic inefficiencies, but if they launched later their first-mover advantage would be weaker or non-existent. Since their first-mover bid was really all they had, they decided to just pull the trigger. Their whole strategy was about making a big "initial blast", wowing reviewers with advanced games, getting massive hype, and getting Jaguars in homes before the deficiencies of the system became apparent. Sega's strategy appeared to be the diametric opposite - it was the most "long-term" of the 5. Really complex architecture - BUT - over time devs would figure it out and ultimately the Saturn would have the best games right? (And I do believe that the Saturn is ultimately the most capable of the 5 5th-gen consoles, since the N64 is crippled by carts, given infinite dev time). Sony's strategy was the best, and Nintendo came late with carts (along with several architectural flaws you've gone over, but I think a 1994 CD-based Nintendo console, with "1994 scaled" capabilities, yet with all of the other historical architectural flaws, would have beaten Sony and Sega). 3DO was also a potential first-mover but outsourcing hardware (NO vertical integration, NO razors and blades business strategy) made it irrelevantly expensive. Given Atari's position, they HAD to go first, and they HAD to "spend their points" on the ASIC/GPU at the expense of CPU to ensure a big splash even if it made the console more limited in the long run, and with hindsight we know the end result. You know a lot more about the ins and outs of the Jaguar's glue logic, buses, memory access issues, and I'd be interested in how you'd design Atari's CD-based system for a launch in EU/NA in say, mid-1994 given Atari's position at the time at a price point of $300 (just assuming a CD drive increases the cost $50). Obviously I'm foisting restrictions on you based on my own ideas about the whole thing, but I think when you do so, you unavoidably find yourself designing a "kind of Playstation".

[@robbieburns3564]

I remember at the time - the Jag was the Joke of consoles. The disc attachment even made it look like a toilet! A friend of mine had a 3DO well before the Saturn and PS1 was around - and seeing the visuals on the PS1 was jaw dropping at the time - and then the Jag was advertised. My god - everyone knew this was failure so hard that it was going to leave an impact crater.

[@GregsGameRoom]

The problem is people compare the Jag to the PS1 and N64 when it was designed to compete against the Genesis and SNES.

[@ThexthSurvivor]

Exactly!

[@gipgap4]

I don’t think that’s true at all. It was clearly designed with the next generation in mind but Atari, like others, weren’t prepared or foresaw what Sony had in waiting which blew the Jaguar out of the water performance wise.

[@Mecha120]

Their marketing was literally about it being a "64-bit" console

[@ryansteele2111]

@@Mecha120 Doesn't mean the Jaguar wasn't meant to compete with the 16-bit juggernauts of the era... to which it failed. For another example... The TurboGrafx was a competitor to the SNES and Genesis, but it was only truly 8-bit with a 16-Bit GPU. There's layers to onions, you see...

[@robsmall6466]

​@@ryansteele2111Lived through that era. In the UK there is a well known magazine called Edge. The Jaguar is the same era as the 3D0, CDI, FM Towns Marty, Neo Geo CD and CD32. It really was billed as next gen. Worlds first 64bit console. Could add the Virtual Boy and the 32X on to that list. There were so many new formats popping up back then. A really interesting time. Playstation caught everyone out with going for 3D graphics, ease of development, low software cost and courting developers. Hence the redesign of the Saturn. CDI was about more than gaming ( multimedia ). Neo Geo CD suffered with too slow disc access. CD32 was seen as an A1200 in console form. 3DO too expensive. Virtual Boy headache inducing. 32X another stop gap. Jaguar lacked support and suffered with expense. As for the FM Towns Marty - I think most forgot it existed

[@moskic153]

Jaguar and Cd32 has the same issue - in initial phase they cannont supply enough units to the market but people often don;t remeber this fact

[@seanmckelvey6618]

It wouldn't have mattered. The moment the Saturn, PS1 & N64 released people would have dropped the Jaguar and CD32 in a second. The Jag was a bugged console that was pushed out too quickly, was hard to get good results out of & Atari was never able to secure any big 3rd party games that MIGHT have drawn people to the console. The CD32 was being pushed out by a company in similar financial states and neither of them had the cash to secure big games or sit on a floundering console. Both machines were let down by their manufacturers, not the public and their inability to purchase them, which people weren't really doing anyway.

[@MarquisDeSang]

You design the hardware based on what games need (arcade daytona usa and pc doom). Here Atari created hardware without even looking at what the 3D algorithm actually needed.

[@TheRaveCrocker]

but seriously now we need a new video "Fixing The Atari Jaguar's MANY hardware issues."

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

We need a video: Simplify the Jaguar. The sprite hardware and the blitter should be the same. Then the blitter would have its dedicated access to a second buffer. Why these weird Atari controllers with their even more weird protocol? Only power of two texture sizes. Weird frame buffer formats can only be written to in a linear fashion. No integrated Audio DAC because we need external to reduce noise. Not more than 720px per scanline. Only 8bit connectors to the cartridge. We need to compress all data to fit on the tiny cartridge. So the connector is not the bottleneck. What are all this logic functions in the blitter for? So you can run a very fast text editor on it?? Faster branch instruction (react on flag from previous instruction -- not the one before that) instead of these weird SAT32. 3 register instructions instead of MMULT . ResumeMAC instruction instead of this weird interrupt block.

[@donpalmera]

someone needed to make this. It's not like this has been covered by tens or even hundreds of people already.

[@SoulforSale]

this is the most in-depth breakdown of the chipset that I've seen on KZbin

[@LJW1912]

I've watched hundreds of videos on the Jaguar over the last decade or so, and this is the most in-depth technical breakdown I've ever seen

[@HouseOfFunQM]

How... did they manage to produce a multi-CPU system on which neither could directly write to memory. This is the most bizarre thing I've ever heard, like SURELY you'd catch this way before mass production and then fix the fucking thing.

[@KarlHamilton]

They had no money by the end.

[@archive3do769]

The engineers knew this was an issue but Atari refused to let them work any further and wanted to push it regardless. Almost like a purposeful sabotage after purposeful sabotage to sink the already sinking ship so the execs could make away with money from loopholes that come with bankruptcy and selling off the company.

[@duhdeedee]

What bugs me about these "Jaguar could've been more successful if--" discussions is how they never touch on the system using carts with a CD add-on. If Sega shot themselves in the foot with Sega CD and Nintendo pushed away third parties by making N64 cart-based, how was Atari not doomed out the gate? For those who bought both system and peripheral at their launches, the real barrier to entry was $400. Even then, touting the Jag's price drop to $149 was dumb when they're asking people to buy the CD drive for another $149. Without making CD the default media fixing the Jag's hardware is redundant.

[@seanmckelvey6618]

I would agree that if they'd developed the Jag with CD as the storage method in mind from the start things might have gone just a touch better, but given how flimsy & prone to failure the CD unit is it's probably for the best they didn't.

[@crazedlunatic43]

There was technically more to the story on why third parties left Nintendo during the N64 era. The choice of format for the N64 didn’t drive third parties out, but rather due to Sony’s entrance and how they were able to appeal to third parties by offering them better deals that they wouldn’t have gotten from Nintendo. Remember that many third party companies at the time were fed up with Nintendo’s strict policy during the NES and SNES era, and Sony’s entrance was a breath of fresh air for many as it meant no censorship like how Nintendo used to enforce, and Sony offered a more programmer friendly system aided by streamlined tools for developers take advantage of. Even if Nintendo stuck with CDs, it wouldn’t have helped them all that much other than significantly increase the price of the base system to a steeper price, and considering hardware complexity was an issue for N64 (and Saturn), the system would’ve still received less games compared to PlayStation.

[@agramarten]

Problem with your suggestions to fix it that for majority it would increase cost to point of not being that much cheaper than PlayStation. Also changes to the Tom and Jerry are not possible due to them then being larger than what could be produced.

[@josephb4086]

The atari jaguar was capable of great games with good sound and graphics comparable to playstation 1, the saturn and at max possibly something similar to an n64 game as the system was capable of smooth surfaces with lighting effects and shading, not to mention textures.

[@mattbeck3933]

I remember playing the Jaguar demo of Aliens at a Future Shop. Sweet game but the controller was a mess.

[@MarquisDeSang]

I loved the game controller, if 8bitDo makes one, I will buy it.

[@PoutingTrevor]

I like supporting smaller gaming channels, and you obviously put a lot of work into this, but I really didn't enjoy this video essay. You clearly set out to make a technical assessment of the Atari Jaguar system, yet immediately made a ridiculous factual error by claiming that the 64-bit Jaguar was 'advertised as 128-bits', a claim that you would continue to make several times throughout the video. Did you not notice that every reference material you were putting on screen clearly said '64-bit system'? Even the infamous Do the Math campaign has '64' written on the blackboard, and you even included a snippet of that very commercial, and still managed to get it wrong multiple times! You also made very little effort to provide any context around the discussion. You could have covered Atari's history and legacy; the shape of the company in the early 90s; what games released for the system; the competition of the time, i.e. the aging SNES, Turbo-Graphx 16, Genesis/Mega Drive, and the similarly maligned but more successful 3DO; the significance of the Motorola 68k microprocessor (which could be a video in itself) which developers fell back on as it was familiar architecture (hence the 16-bit looking graphics in most games); and any number of interesting areas of discussion that would have fleshed out the video and acted as a welcome counter to the barrage of dull technobabble that made up the majority of the runtime. And what an odd choice to use predominantly SEGA Saturn footage while discussing the Jaguar. Seriously, what was the thought process there? Was there a Panzer Dragoon game on Jaguar that I am unaware of?! And while a bit nitpicky, there's no such expression as 'failing downwards'. That's just failing. You're thinking of failing up, when a person or company makes poor decisions yet manages to come out on top. The inverse is failing and the downward trajectory is implied. Your conclusion meanwhile - i.e. what could have been had the system been released later - was probably the most interesting aspect of the discussion, but this almost felt like an afterthought. Again, provide some context around the fifth gen console race and what Atari could have done differently to secure those 18,000,000 sales you projected. In summation, it's incredibly difficult to take a video essay which aims to discuss the technical aspects of the Atari Jaguar seriously when the most basic facts are incorrect. You provided almost no context to the discussion, and what you actually focused on was incredibly boring. The gaming space is extremely competitive right now and many small creators are marking out a niche for themselves by making longer form video essays with a strong focus on research. This fails to compete on that basis.

[@Kurriochi]

I made an addendum video that mentions the errors and clarifies some stuff, sorry.

[@seanmckelvey6618]

Just out of curiosity, where exactly are your videos proving your point? It would be one thing if you were another creator offering constructive criticism, but you aren't. You're just some guy who typed out a fucking novel about how you know how to make a better video? Shut up dude. Unless you can do better fuck off.

[@Izhen_UwU]

The Jaguar could've been a CD-based console from the start, it would greatly benefit from the larger space and higher quality audio tracks

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

And it would of cost far more, The Tramiel's deliberately wanted the Jaguar to be the cheapest system of it's era on the market.

[@AmazedStoner]

I was only a kid when this console released and I never seen one in a store ever back then. It was as if it had stopped existing after its release. Learning how rare the Sega nomad was back then and having actually owned one back then as well I’m surprised one never made its way into a store or the pawn shop I used to frequently visit back then.

[@lucoot]

As an elementary school kid at the time I don't remember any buzz for this thing - no one wanted one, no one talked about it. The only time I ever saw one was in 1996 when KB toys was trying to get rid of them cheap and a friend's mom got him one instead of an N64.

[@Berserkr01]

Why would an american company use the japanese - and also too fresh for the time - Hitachi CPU? The Motorola 68EC030 was the ideal for this context! Proper 32-bit processing (slighty better than the 020 with 32-bit MMU), recognizable ISA (even for japanese devs who already had experience with the Mega-Drive or the budget PCs of the late 80's)! The "35mhz clock speed" statement is limited by the manufacturers options.

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

About the MHz: parts of the chip have this deep pipeline where register file access happens in one cycle and ALU operation in the next. But then then if a bus master wants to read over the system bus, address goes to over it, everyone checks if they are the target, memory controller converts between 16 and whatever bits, checks for a page flip and then someone sends back the data. There is no pipeline here. The whole bus is blocked until the master ( or how is it called today? I use the word from the manual) has sensed the data back from the bus. The bus design is the original one for the 68k from the 70s. 16 bit MUL in one cycle or the 32 bit division step in one cycle probably also limit the clock. The arm in the gba sticks to 8bit MUL per cycle. You can see what parts have been optimized and where Atari pulled in dated macros from a Motorola library. The Object Processor reads from the display list and then has to process this information before it can access the pixel data. But there is no pipeline. So memory is idle and has to wait a bit for each object. So typical NES 8px wide sprites are horribly inefficient.

[@chaoticsystem2211]

did you also use an atari 800 to rip the ad footage? :D

[@wagnerpaivafernandes]

Is not hilarious at all. It could happen to any product

[@LockFarm]

The early Jaguar dev kits were monster machines - the thing to remember is that it was designed when people were still unsure what would come after the 16 bit, largely 2D console generation. PCs were being hyped up as interactive video players, there was absolutely no agreement on "how to do 3D" and no-one really knew which CPUs to bet on. The reason why it was so bad at texture mapping? Because outside of Doom (which used some very specific tricks), texture mapped games were not seen as practical on a low cost games machine - so Jaguar was only expected to need Gouraud shading to be "next generation". The PS1 was a complete shock to the entire industry. Yes, Atari rushed it to market, handled the launch badly and never got third party support. Yes, it was a complex architecture with some weird legacy 'features' - but it's completely understandable given the environment of the time that a company could make the wrong bet for all the right reasons (and others did, including Commodore, 3DO, Nuon and a bunch of other smaller players). So it's wrong to suggest that it was a "dumb move" that could easily have been avoided. The industry was a complete mess at the time.

[@artemusprine]

If they'd merely added up the bits it would have been advertised as an 80-bit system, at the least. Why does everyone get this wrong? It had a 16-bit 68000 CPU, and two 32-bit RISC processors communicating over a 64-bit wide system buss. Atari felt that made it arguably a 64-bit system. Neo-Geo was advertised as a 24-bit system and in that case SNK absolutely did add up its 8-bit Z-80 and 68000 to come up with that number.

[@robpaul1583]

Awesome review here. This is what I think is so unbelievable about this console, how many things it struggled with that were already made easy in the 16-bit generation. I remember when the system and games came out and how many were missing music. This was something standardized back in the NES 8-bit days and you did a great job showing just how awful the architecture here was and why so many developers were not able to put music in. In the end, the technical issues with the system were a huge problem, but even if this system had many of the hardware improvements mentioned here and in the addendum video, the main issue was that no one wanted to develop for it. Japanese studios had no reason to develop for American hardware (I love the huge MADE IN USA sticker on the box of the Jaguar) and American studios were already making numerous games for the 16-bit systems that had a massive install base. The 5th Gen cluster of horrible game systems (3dO, Cd-i, Virtual boy, etc.) made game developers have to really want to commit to making a game on a system that could likely fail. Sony obviously saw many of the flaws here and in other earlier 5th gen consoles and made sure that 3-D polygon games would work properly and would do so on a CD. Good video, love this in-depth technical stuff.

[@Sinn0100]

Alright so I understand everything correctly...the Jaguar was an incredible console. It was so far ahead of it's time that nothing came close to it's greatness. ;)

[@005AGIMA]

Fantastic video saying it how it is. I say this as someone who brought a Jaguar shortly after release, and have a boxed example in my connection now. But the fact is, in the context of the time, it was shit. When you have a 90s system who's best game is from 1981 (Tempest) you know you're in trouble. I'll say it again, the Jaguar was and is shit.

[@300BaudStudios]

As an owner of not one but two jaguars, I enjoyed your video. Tom & Jerry were both 32 bit processors that communicated over a 64 bit bus, hince the 64 bits. I think a lot of the features you mentioned were left out to keep costs down. The Agnus chip of the Amige had direct access to Fasr RAM. Not having the ability to talk directly to RAM would seriously impact preformanc.

[@MurderMostFowl]

I don’t really understand what the point of suggesting replacing the monitoring CPU etc. is in this video. It’s clear that the machine would’ve been massively more powerful had there not been the crippling hardware defects. Wouldn’t it be better to just fix those problems rather than re-architect the whole thing around a different CPU? The Atari jaguar was rushed to market and could not recover from a fatal hardware flaw. In my opinion, they should have fixed the hardware issues in a new revision and issued a recall. I think in their hubris, they thought they could figure out a workaround, but then more and more issues popped up and it was doomed.

[@Offramp-z7p]

Forget words I can sum up why it failed in a single number, 68000. As in the Motorola 68000. It failed because they poured so much money into an anti-piracy system, instead of hardware. The price to use a 32-bit, 25Mhz 68020 instead of a 16-bit 12 Mhz 68000? $5 per unit!!! To quote a member of the team that created 'Fight for Life' the Jaguar was about "half as powerful as the Playstation". Piracy is no issue when nobody wants your games. But after years of bad moves, Atari deserved to fail anyways.

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

Atari should have used 8bit cartridges and feed all data through an off-the shelf decryption chip. Game would load serial “sectors” like from a disk. Can’t be too expensive. So modding would be too easy?

[@yetidynamics]

what are you talking about? the Atari Jaguar was the first console that could do dedicated 3d graphics, and the first that had a true color display. yes it failed, but it was a pioneer.. hindsight is always 20/20 , sure the changes would have been "great" but also expensive, add into the fact that Atari was going into this blind, they didn't know what their competitors were upto, they didn't know when other products were going to be released., the Jag when it was released was competing with the SNES, the and the SEGA, . not the N64 or Sony, both of which were kept pretty secret.

[@archive3do769]

Atari was hardly pioneers by 1993. They stuck to the same script they always did. Half baked and being cheap. No early adaption of cdrom, no vram, an outdated cpu, untextured launch title, no active development from Atari on truly next gen tech (jaguar 2 abilities were smoked by already existing competitor systems), and the hardware was not adapted in any other applications outside of Atari's use cases. What did the Atari executives do with all that money from the 2600? Was it all truly dwindled away on developing under performing systems from 1st to 5th gen? C'mon man. I respect your love for the system, but we cannot pretend like it was breaking any barriers 3do alone had not already breached.

[@saurondp]

@@archive3do769 "Half baked and being cheap" = um, no. Atari was a small company by the time the Jag was in development. They simply didn't have the resources to throw at the Jag's development that their competitors had. Considering this, it's amazing they came out with a pretty powerful console on such a slim budget. Your comment reeks of someone who has no idea what they're talking about.

[@apollosungod2819]

To the guy who made this video.. hey guy... the Super Hitachi CPU was CUSTOM developed for SEGA Enterprises LTD Japan because Hitachi and SEGA formed a partnership to develop the SH CPU, thus they developed the SH1 and then chose to improve on it and made the much more powerful SH2 CPU which itself was revised and made more powerful before being placed inside the Sega Saturn with the added benefit of using two of them. Thus it was impossible for Atari Corp to purchase the SH2 but more importantly, the staff and management at Atari Corp would never have used the Hitachi CPU anyway because of the way they saw things. The Atari Jaguar was the best piece of hardware Atari Corp could have developed for themselves given that they developed the Atari Lynx and later the Atari Panther project which itself was reformatted into the Atari Jaguar (hint the Jaguar was more powerful than whatever the Atari Panther was) That said as soon as Atari Corp launched their Jaguar and started throwing insults at gamers while comparing and claiming they were better than Sega and Nintendo and if you was a late teen back then with half a sense and no fanboyism, even you would feel insulted by a company that expected YOU to buy their machine to find out if it was better than a Sega or Nintendo. Meanwhile 3DO did the same type of marketing... lmao.

[@Anthonyelmio2]

I knew no one who had a Jaguar, i seen the Commercials but never saw in person, everyone had a Ps1 or N64

[@ConsoleCombat]

I would like to see the reasons why the engineers chose this architecture layout on top of just saying it’s bad.

[@thomascharnock]

Interesting and refreshing to see a video more focussed on the technical failings of the Jag, as opposed to yet another 'why did the Jag fail?' video that's basically just Wikipedia copy and paste with no actual experience of the Jaguar when it was contemporary.

[@fadercreek]

if atari changes the controller model even right now people would instantly buy it

[@BruceStephan]

By the time the Jaguar AND the 3DO came out they were outdated .

[@seanmckelvey6618]

both came out in 1993, no? They weren't outdated at launch, technology was just moving really fast at the time. 3DO was arguably more advanced than the Jaguar anyway, at least it certainly gave off that impression.

[@ThexthSurvivor]

That's not entirely accurate. The 3DO was the most powerful home console at the time of its launch.

[@The_Prizessin_der_Verurteilung]

@@ThexthSurvivor Yes and no. It WAS the most powerful at the time, but compare to the fifth generation hardware it was supposed to compete with, it was far behind. The 3DO was more in line with the Jaguar and 32X than the Saturn, PlayStation and N64 and that was the real problem.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

​@@The_Prizessin_der_Verurteilungand it was weaker at 2D than the SNES..

[@archive3do769]

​@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148​that's a bold face lie and you absolutely know it. 3do Hombrew currently has 1:1 arcade graphical assets for mk2 running at 60fps, not something snes could have handled at all. Infact, no home port in the 90's did.

[@MrSnapy1]

Most games only used the 68000 chip skipping all the other chips so most of its games was 16 bit.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

Most Games? AVP started out 68000 heavy, but ended up with only the A. I routines running on 68000,Tempest 2000, Hoverstrike and Rayman were 68000 heavy, Hoverstrike CD saw code moved to the GPU, but only saw a 3-5 fps increase in frame rate. Skyhammer, Iron Soldier 1 and 2 WTR, Battlesphere, Battlemorph are great examples of the hardware used wisely . Defender 2000 used the GPU, but is a far weaker game than Tempest 2000. Power Drive Rally used the GPU.. Syndicate and Theme Park are 68000 heavy, Worms ported from the PC.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

Even early games like Tempest 2000 used more than just the 68000. Jeff Minter stated how he used the hardware for it.. JERRY is doing all the audio. TOM gets to draw all the calculated starfields by himself; he gets in league with the blitter to do polygon drawing, transforming and rendering game objects, and pixelshatter (where things break into a zillion pixels like the '2000' bonus). Melt-O-Vision is almost entirely a Blitter operation. The 68K runs all the game logic and orchestrates the other co-pros and builds the (very simple) Object List. The OLP isn't really doing much at all, it's sitting there twiddling its electronic thumbs and just displaying the main screen and an overlaid sprite for the score and ships info.

[@JoeLewis14]

Very good video. I hope you do more document style content like this that I can enjoy.

[@fattiger6957]

I don't think you can really say that, only if the Jaguar had better hardware, Atari would have sold millions and millions of units. Their problems extended far beyond just the hardware. Publishers had no interest in making games for it. Atari's 1st party output was pathetic at best. The marketing was absolutely horrible. And, as someone who was in the target age demographic at the time, Atari wasn't cool. Kids and teens in the 90s thought of Atari old people's video games. My grandpa had an 2600. I played it a couple times and it was far from cool to someone who grew up with an NES and SNES. It would have been a hard sell for Atari to capture the hearts and minds of the youth who already had Sega and Nintendo (and soon Sony) making consoles with modern games.

[@opaljk4835]

I wonder why they built it like this. Sega at least had some very good reasons for putting the Saturn together the way it was, even though it had plenty of its own issues. But what was the Jaguar built for? When you look at the the games, it doesn’t come across as having any kind of main style of game design in mind

[@Kurriochi]

The system was rushed before it was actually finished because atari's higherups had a terminal case of being tone-deaf to market changes and they were going bankrupt. That's why the Saturn's issues are "They didn't give private memory to the SCU-DSP", "they used forward texture mapping on VDP-1" and "they didn't use ADPCM compresison on the sound chip" vs the Atari Jaguar's "the RISC chips could not read from the main RAM and had to move data to their 8KB cache" and "the bus was so slow you had to pick between music and a 5 FPS experience over a 15 FPS experience in pure silence".

[@MrSamPhoenix]

How would these improvements would’ve cost back then?

[@Alexlfm]

Way too much to be realistic. Ram prices alone were something like $50 for a 1Mb SIMM in the early 1990s, and that’s for a relatively inexpensive, low density memory. The SH-2 was also significantly more expensive than the 68K which had become fairly inexpensive by 1990, let alone 93. These changes would have easily doubled the cost of the machine.

[@The_Prizessin_der_Verurteilung]

They wouldn't have cost an entire hardware division, that's for sure.

[@ThexthSurvivor]

The jaguar failed due to a lack of a good amount of software. The original gameboy sold very well because it had tons of great software despite being a much inferior piece of hardware compared to everything else at the time. The Jaguar would have had the same success if it had tons of great games, despite the systems shortcomings.

[@blakegriplingph]

>The Jaguar didn't have a texture cache *2600 flashbacks intensifies* And that boss fight at 8:22 reminds me of those popping pimples from their face 💀

[@opaljk4835]

Haha, there are some incredibly gross bosses in PDS

[@plaztik767]

Wolfenstien, Tempest 2000, And AVP, are the only stand outs ..👍🏻

[@Blas4ublasphemy]

The answer is very simple, lack of Japanese support ensured the quick death of the Jaguar. Had there been "64 bit" versions of Castlevania, Final Fantasy, Mega Man, Street Fighter etc. it could have competed and possibly thrived.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

Plus the 2 Iron Soldier games

[@aipaloovik]

I found a sealed Jaguar on the cheap at a swap meet with Kasumi Ninja and some other game. I'll have to dig it out of storage. I also have a Saturn. Somewhere.

[@TheInfamousLegend27]

at least the Saturn has good games AND a good controller (2nd version, 1st one was a bit crap haha)

[@The_Prizessin_der_Verurteilung]

@@TheInfamousLegend27 I think all the first controllers of the 5th gen were odd. The Saturn had a great pad, but not for 3D until the 3D Pad came out, and PlayStation had no sticks AND a crummy D-pad until 1997 too. I won't even mention the Goliath, Nintendo were on some real hard stuff to greenlight that lmao.

[@opaljk4835]

@@The_Prizessin_der_Verurteilungthe Saturn 3D pad might be my favorite controller of all time. It’s just so dang comfy and works great

[@plaztik767]

Poor software ..!! I still have mine and, I like the console. But it was never programmed for properly. And many publishers ignored it entirely through its life cycle..

[@ajlynch91]

I can hardly hear your voice over the music. Would be a much better video with sound issues ironed out.

[@stfuomgdude]

Same. Mixing isn’t that hard, shame it’s so difficult to hear him.

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

For arcade action you want a game loop. Control input, game logic, physics, graphics and sound effects. Each step loads its code into the scratchpads and utilizes the bus. Atari already created this buggy fragment shader. Surely, they did not want to hardwire the rasteriser. I almost wish that the fragment shader would also accept JRISC. I imagine that the address generator would shift through a phrase and only ( branch instruction ) load a new one on demand. So you could either load code for sparse sampling / scale down which loads fresh from memory every time, or code for zoom which can’t skip a phrase. Instructions to add the delta to either z or Gouraud. Instruction to add Gouraud to texture. Compare instruction for z buffer. Sounds slow to me. Better keep address generator and shader separated. So a pixel mode unit for address and gradient. The load unit would not be programmable, but just takes a list of addresses from the previous unit and fills in the values. A phrase mode unit to apply shading and do z-buffer.

[@TheRealJPhillips]

I'm just gonna say it....THERE WERE TOO MANY low tier European Development Companies ruining the presentation of a potentially decent System. This system couldn't even hold a candle to the SNES let alone the PS1. But wut do I know? 🤷🏾‍♂️

[@dilbertfish]

64-bits were too powerful, too complicated, too soon. It was like a supercomputer.

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

64 bit is needed if you want competitive speed on shared memory. Other consoles had two banks of memory with 32 bit each. The bank approach is very suited to texture mapping: Texture in one bank, frame buffer in the other. On the other hand, 64 bit unified could be used to draw a lot of colorful sprites per scanline for the ultimate 2d system. Then any not full scanlines some memory bandwidth is left for other parts of the system. Actually, it is a shame that Jerry does not have 64 bit. JRISC on both processors should have a load instruction to load multiple registers in a burst, for example a vertex with all attributes. If the instruction queue would be two phrases long, execution of code from main memory might be fast. Branches are still slow. So a compiler would identify stretches of code without branches and replace them with a GoTo .

[@unlimitedgaming7872]

I read in a gaming book it has a 16-bit bus and 2 32bit main processors unlike the n64

[@SianaGearz]

OK any sort of simple looking statement regarding Jaguar is going to be horribly wrong because it's a mess. Tom has a 64-bit memory bus. Jerry has a 16-bit memory bus. This is so painfully dumb because imagine sequential bytes in memory from the point of view of Tom, well Jerry can only access every fourth of them, making it bad to use it to prepare data for Tom and bad utilisation. 68K processor has a 16-bit memory bus, same as Jerry. Effective memory space for these two is 512K out of 2MB, while every area occupied by them is difficult to use by TOM at all. Cartridge ROM has a 32-bit bus. These are all interleaved. It needed to have two separate memory buses and each should have picked a width and actually just stuck with it, perhaps with a bridge between them that can actually convert bus widths. If a higher end 68k was an option, then keeping the whole bus 32-bit across whole device would have done fine. Maybe TOM's bus could have been bifurcated into two 32+32-bit, then no extra bridge needed. Jerry supports 32-bit bus but half of it is just cut off. Arguably 68k should have just not been there at all.

[@entertainmentwizard2703]

Great video!

[@williamoverton7775]

the jaguar failed because they screwed England. sending the first shipments to the United states denying the big crowd of Brit enthusiasts wanting to program for it.

[@PixelsNcreatureS]

I got the jaguar and jagcd around the end of it's life pretty cheap and kept it around. I've dusted it more than played it. I use to play music cds thru it but found out they break easy so I quit touching it 😂

[@kevinstrade2752]

The Jaguar started as the Panther and meant to compete with the SNES and Genesis. So it kinda started late 80's very early 90's and advanced from there. Making a powerful console meant one of two ways, Frankenstein a bunch of current processors or wait until more advanced processing came. Well, we know Wich route Atari took. The Panther looked promising but progress on the Jaguar was farther along, well initially. Had the Jaguar came out full in 93' it may have had a better chance but delays hindered it's success almost out of the gate when it finally did release full market. The Jaguar was my show horse for a year until I got my Saturn. Some games were fantastic on it at the time. Going from 16 bit to this was a leap.

[@SianaGearz]

It clearly needed one more respin of the custom processors to iron out the horrendous crippling errata, rather than releasing earlier and even more rushed. And this is also why every sane hardware designer released systems based on off-the-shelf processor logic, be it say MIPS or SuperH or even ARM, and doing bare minimum custom logic. Because you can throw down something fancy and it's sort of a hot task everyone wants to do, you feel like a star, but getting it RIGHT and spinning up a good dev toolchain, that's just fraught with unforeseen difficulties.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

The Panther wasn't anywhere near the powerhouse Atari claimed, just ask Jeff Minter, it was severely lacking in Ram, they were unlikely to use the Powerful soundchip, it was a colossal waste of resources.

[@ArythurDaley]

It failed because it was crap lets face it. And it was in the era of the playstation

[@ThexthSurvivor]

That can't be because the PS1 came out two years later. The Jaguar's competition at the time of its launch was the Super NES abd Genesis. It's even in their commercials.

[@The_Prizessin_der_Verurteilung]

@@ThexthSurvivor To be fair, the SNES and Mega Drive were tough competition. If it had come out when interest in them was waning it could've been different if they'd played their cards right. Jaguar is about as strong as the 32X mistake I mean add-on, so if they'd waited until that flopped, and used the time to make a noteable IP other than Tetris they could have done better. They still wouldn't have won, but maybe wouldn't have lost so spectacularly either.

[@tubebandits4439]

The video is nice, but your mic quality is sooo bad

[@sam_bibly]

one word: too many buttons!

[@jsr734]

But the 68000 has Blast Processing, it sure could have handled all the polygons and textures by itself, and probably calculated the size of the universe in the process.

[@Kurriochi]

in a few hours, probably.

[@zhuqiusong6698]

The 68000 cpu was a great cpu but it belongs to another generation.

[@jcaseyjones2829]

FOURTEEN SECONDS.

[@lowstaar]

The Jank-uar

[@nintendive]

Failed because it was shite. Simples.

[@GCJACK83]

For what it's worth, the Jaguar could have been a good machine. It was heavily hampered by a bad company trying to make it, lack of R&D time, lack of funding, and lack of third party support. In short, it's Ron Jeremy only being able to last two seconds.

[@brunoramos9747]

This system will always be and still is trash I feel bad for anyone that has grew up with this trash system that is no good😊 And have manipulated people into buying it😊

[@TheRaveCrocker]

first!