The Comprehensive Story of the Atari Jaguar: The 64-Bit System (not really) That Killed Atari

[@bryede]

Okay, you can't say the RAM is both 16 bits and 64 bits wide. The RAM was organized in 64-bit words and Tom's blitter can move 64 bits at a time, but none of the CPUs could operate on 64 bit data. So, it was partially a 64 bit system and partially a 32 bit system. I developed for it and the biggest problem was that it was very hard to predict which programming strategies would result in the fastest code. I remember writing a bunch of benchmark programs just to know how to organize my project.

[@mwk1]

As John Carmack used to say: "If the Jaguar had dumped the 68K and offered a dynamic cache on the risc processors and had a tiny bit of buffering on the blitter, it could have put up a reasonable fight against Sony".

[@A31Chris]

@@mwk1He also said the op and blitter wee chips with no theoretical upper limit because their performance was based upon and only limited by the 64bit bus and available memory.

[@agramarten]

@@mwk1 Issue with Jaguar were hardware bugs and if Panther was never pursued which in end never ever worked to begin with then probably all of those bugs could have been resolved with Tom(GPU) being buggiest, because of that in order to have Blitter working efficiently it had access and use internal SRAM cache of the GPU which itself due to bugs had to use own cache to store code because DRAM controller was bugged. Here is the thing, if 68K was dropped and Jaguar did not have odd motherboard that had cut down corners at front due to design of the shell which compromised real estate just as 68K compromised available DRAM bandwidth along Jerry DSP(CPU). If front corners of motherboard were not cut down and 68K was ditched for final design with Jerry not being compromised by it then even with hardware bugs Jaguar could have been twice as fast compared to what it is. By fact Tom and Jerry could have been clocked to 40 megahertz up from 26.59MHz while latter could have had own 64 bit wide data bus DRAM controller and motherboard would have had enough space to have four more 512 kilobytes 16 bit DRAM chips for total of 4 megabytes and 128bit data bus. Another issue was lets be honest nonsense intentional hardware limit for cartridges that at most could have 6 megabytes, maybe 12 megabytes if bank switching was used.

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

@@agramartenyields were low. How can that be ? Transistor count is lower than on server processors of the time. I suspect bad dev tools which did not simulate the timing. The ASIC is slapped together from “IP cores”. I say that 28 MHz was already hard. The idea of consumer hardware is to be cheaper than arcade hardware. I don’t know many games which need audio effects beyond Jerry caps to be playable. Maybe music is important for the moot just as much as textures? But why 32 voices? If audiophiles are so hard bent on music, straight from CD audio is more important than I thought. The blitter has a lot of 64 bit registers. The problem is that we cannot write a program to run on it. Atari in their wisdom included a “state machine” to control the blitter. So any faults in the design could not be corrected after production. Otherwise we could probably cook up a loop which does not repeatedly read the same texel, where z-buffer and shading are compilant, and where the blitter would collect 4px inside the destination register even in pixel mode. Ah, maybe the shifter/multiplexer is missing? But 2d blits can multi-register shift! Just make it available as instruction! If the GPU were 64 bit, it could have functioned as an efficient line buffer. Writing to external memory every odd cycle, while the CPU fetches 4 instructions on even cycles.

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

@@mwk1I don’t see how a dynamic cache helps. The N64 really struggles to utilize it, while Carmack had no problem to slice up the Doom Code into 12 overlays to load into the visible cache once per game loop.

[@kendalljenkins9938]

The Jaguar's biggest problem was Jack Tramiel. He was smart, but his shady business practices in the past meant that no retailers or game devs trusted him. No stores would stock the Jaguar without payment terms, and they certainly didn't push it.This is the reason they eventually had to sell through infomercials. The Jaguar was a great system, but unfortunately with Jack running the company, it was never going to succeed. You can only burn so many bridges before you realize that you can't go anywhere.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

Jack was way too tight, cutting corners everywhere he could to make a few bucks. 7800 and Lynx conversions from Arcades and other home systems, lacked content as Jack wouldn't allow use of larger cartridges. He had ATD cut content from Cybermorph to get it to fit on a smaller cartridge for later in-pack releases. The industry knew before it launched, the Jaguar was destined for failure under the Tramiel's. And how right they were.

[@agramarten]

@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 Also in contradiction to cost reduction was use of 68000 and at that 68HC000 that was most expensive 68000 model, initially Jaguar was to have 128 bit data bus and clock at 40MHz was the goal.

[@chadb9270]

My dad borrowed a coworkers jaguar with AVP when I was in high school. It was absolutely revolutionary for a very short time. What it could do graphically was spectacular at the time, for a very short time.

[@PricklyPear34]

Wow. Thank you. I remember my friend telling me he wasn’t getting anymore NES games because he was waiting for the Atari Jaguar and he went on to tell me how it was going to be far superior. I never heard about it again until watching this video; I had assumed my friend made the whole thing up.

[@jaroothedruid]

I never owned one, but I was around 23 or 24 when I started seeing the commercials and and product in stores. But I found this video very interesting. I like how you stay focused and the information you present is relevant. I know a lot of KZbinrs inject themselves into these informational kind of videos (like doing voices or skits to add their opinions) and I especially appreciate those that respect my time by staying focused on the information. I stayed to the end so I gave you a like and a subscribe.

[@crocomirehuntah3000]

My dude, those three games you mentioned in the beginning were not Atari at all. They had ports on the 2600 but Pac-Man was namco, Space Invaders was Taito, and Defender was Williams. Just saying if I were you I would’ve mentioned Pong, Asteroids, Missile Command, and maybe even Centipede.

[@troykelso]

Thank you - that was driving me nuts.

[@DuckAlertBeats]

Was going to say the same

[@A31Chris]

Its some kind of AI so info is all mostly wrong anyway

[@clarenceboddicker6679]

I still liked and subbed

[@nyjsackexchange]

Pac man was one of the mistakes

[@BurritoKingdom]

The 3do was actually developer and publisher friendly. It had the cheapest royalties at $3 per game. It's why every major 3rd party had games for the 3do. Other than the PS1 it was the easiest console to develop for of that generation.

[@akfreed6949]

Some of the developers of the AMIGA computer made the 3DO . By the time it got released it would be out of date once the PlayStation and N64 would come out .

[@raygleason4306]

The industry moved at light speed during this time period, I remember seeing a Kiosk with AVP and was blown away, myself and friends were still playing the Sega Genesis. The whoa moments came extremely fast though with all the other consoles coming out, remember prior to this the 8-bit / 16-bit were very much the normal.

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

But I don’t understand why the Jaguar is not even that good at 2d? The first chips came out in the 70s. No magic compression algorithm for the artwork of huge neo geo cartridges. No bullet hell. No translucency. And the superscaler can’t do the fields of Outrun. Sprite rotation with a pixel shader based on a Normal map for shot em ups !

[@bi30]

The Jaguar didn't fail due to any "hardware" related issue. It failed b/c the people running the company had NO CLUE how to run a video game (or computer) company built around appealing to young consumers. At the time of it's release, the youngest person on the Atari Board of Directors was (IIRC) 64 years old. Most were in their 70's and one was 85. Jack Tramiel himself was in his 70's. They never understood what made Atari great or how to market to young people. The ONLY advice they took from me was to slap a "Made in the USA" label on the Jaguar's box (with American flag.) Not something that young people cared about, but the elderly board totally went for. 🤷‍♂

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

Exactly, they didn't know what 64-bit gaming meant, promising titles like Black Ice, White Noise, Dactyl Joust were exactly what the Jaguar needed, never recieved. Who cared if IBM had been awarded the Assembly and Q. A testing of the Jaguar?

[@JB9000x]

It failed because it's an Atari

[@poindextertunes]

thats a great point.

[@zikifer]

I owned a Jaguar, although not for very long; I ended up returning it after a month or so. I worked at a mall video game store at that time and could check the release date of upcoming games, and not only were there very few games but the ones in our system were constantly being delayed. I grew up with the 2600 and really wanted the Jaguar to succeed. But sometimes I think us fans wanted it more than the company did.

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

The design looked to the past. The bug make it look like it was designed by amateurs (fans). I only know IBM PC and C64? There are no famous bugs on the PC. The C64 inherited the broken floppy drive.

[@Balkroth]

I've had one since the $99 prive drop, I still enjoy it from time to time, it was a fun system collecting for in the late 90's mid 2000's when you could go into game shops and pick up the more popular or rare games people traded in for like $10-20. Was able to pick up full boxed copies of Doom, Wolf3D, and AvP for cheap then.

[@nater86zx]

I still have mine too, but I get the Red Screen of Death on every game. I tried to clean the contacts and what not but to no avail.

[@RandyRydberg]

I sold Jaguars at the game store I worked at. Based on the forum on AOL at the time, all sorts of great things were on the way and I sold systems based on that info. I still feel bad that I was so wrong. I still have mine, and Aliens vs Predator was a fantastic game. It's too bad the guys in charge didn't understand that you need games for a games system. It is nice to know that new games are out now, I'm curious as to how good the general quality of them are.

[@aleksazunjic9672]

They should have betted heavily on early 3D games i.e. Doom clones and 3D "sims" like X-Wing. All of that could be ported from PC, and Jaguar was most powerful console for almost 2 years. No other console could realistically run those titles until late 1995 and PS1.

[@DaisyLynn-xm1pl]

Had a Jaguar and never was a fan of it. Honestly, I loved my Lynx.

[@mattm7798]

Haha the Lynx was awesome. Released the same year as the game boy and IIRC 2 years ahead of the game gear. I loved mine!

[@mikeramsey3828]

Extremely well done and interesting video! Thanks for all the work you put into it! Keep up the great content!

[@josephb4086]

Atari Jaguar is interesting. I had fun with it and really liked Doom, wolfenstein 3d, Tempest 2000, hoverstrike, and a few others. The controller is good, and the hardware is impressive. It's simply lacking third-party software support. Too bad the system didn't succeed as we would have had some of the best games ever made back in the day.

[@DjMikeWatt]

Imagine stocking up on $30 Jaguar consoles, waiting 30 years, then selling them for $550 a piece.

[@xenobob2773]

Storage costs...

[@artemusprine]

I still have my Jag and Jag CD boxed. Tempted to let them go.

[@305slick]

I got one of those $30 systems from KB toy store

[@TheLifesentence2278]

with inflation you'd still lose money.

[@gmo6854]

⁠@@TheLifesentence2278 you’d make slightly less money

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

The ST computer technology was not used in proposed consoles such as the Panther, which would of used a 16-Bit CPU and 32-Bit GPU, nor the Jaguar. Project Robin was Rob Zydbel's attempt to pitch the ST hardware inside an XEGS style case and launch it as a budget console, with budget priced games, aging ST conversions of old arcade games like Battlezone, Crystal Castles, Moon Patrol etc. A similar pitch was attempted years later, but using STE hardware.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

It was Atari President, Ted Hoff who was behind claims the VR Headset left people feeling sick. He said:"Right now we don't feel the technology is viable for the market. In fact, when I played it, it left me feeling woozy"

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

It should also be noted the Jaguar hardware needed another 2 revisions to iron out all the hardware bugs. Atari never intended the original Jaguar to take on the Playstation and Saturn, that would of been the role of the Jaguar MK II, Jaguar was intended to take on DSP enhanced Sega MD and SNES games, 3DO,CD32 and CDi

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

The problem with the revision is that other companies did not sleep. I feel like energy was wasted on unimportant features. Why not stick to 16 bit cartridges? Why invent and adjust an object format when you have a GPU to control the blitter or videoDMA? Why are there scalar instructions which only exist because branches are too slow. Saturate is only needed once per pixel on Jpeg decompression. Likewise Absolute is only used once in 3d maths. Non-power of two frame buffers / textures? 5 bit conditions for jumps, but no overflow detection. MAC overflow.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

​@@ArneChristianRosenfeldtThat was exactly the issue Atari faced with the Jaguar, they couldn't afford further delays, whilst hardware was further revised and bugs ironed out, as they knew Sega, Sony and Nintendo all had newer, far more powerful being worked on in their R+D labs. Leonard Tramiel refusing to accept the hardware had issues didn't help, nor putting pressure on developers like Imagitec Design etc to texture map 3D titles, to be seen as being able compete with the 3DO in this area.

[@Offramp-z7p]

30 Years later and the Atari Jaguar still stirs many strong opinions when it's brought up. Amazing isn't it? @thefurthestmanfromhome1148 Yes, the Jaguar wasn't intended to take on the Playstation and Saturn. But doesn't the CoJag make you wonder if it *could have* if they would have, if they had gone with more aggressive hardware? Personally that question still drives me crazy, 30 years later.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

​@@Offramp-z7pEven if they had just taken some of the key features from the lower end CoJag hardware:Using a 25 MHz Motorola 68020... 4 megabytes of RAM, the system could of been really something. I was also very surprised they allowed the awful spaghetti A. I code Jane Whittaker ran on the 68000 for AVP, which literally crippled the games frame rate. An even larger cartridge for that game would of allowed for the planned full orchestral score. But no everything was done on the bloody cheap.

[@StrikingMachine]

I mostly played just the GameBoy Color, and the GBA during this era. I did not like the Nintendo 64 or PS1 during that time. But when the PS2 became affordable, I slowly returned to Console Gaming..

[@technodrone313]

tempest 2000 was a masterpiece

[@repomanzilla]

Love jaguar stuff and documentaries

[@AdmiralBison]

Have you tried BigPEmu. It's the best Jaguar emulalator and also supports Jaguar CD games. It's one of the best designed modern emulators

[@stream1entertainment]

I really enjoyed this historic retrospective video. Thank you for making it. It's a different take on the Jaguar that I didn't really get yet. Thanks bro.

[@calvinthurston1441]

Bad ass video dude! By no means have I watched a bunch of other Atari Jag docs but this was a solid piece! got a thumb smash for sho! Gonna hit the back catalogue too!

[@blank8327]

Great content. Subscribed. 😊

[@legacyoftheancientsC64c]

Alien vs Predator scared the cr@p out of me back in the day. No music, just the hum of the station, the screams of the aliens or the clicking of the predators. It was an incredibly atmospheric experience.

[@JayOwinFull]

Great format. Made it go the end. You showed video of a weird thin coloured block gane. Memories of that came back. Also feel like i might have played a little bit of avp. Do you have any videos about Sega Channel?

[@spladam3845]

Good job, I watched the whole thing, subbed, you should do more of this. You had some errors, you should get yourself a technical editor.

[@WeirdoError]

This is an excellent deep dive into the system. Well done.

[@DrixxMadison]

Excellent video. Love the format. 🤜🏼🤛🏼

[@ailaxl]

one could also argue it was this generation's PC Engine (a 16-bit CPU with two 32-bit gpus)

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

How would you organise memory with 32 bit banks with interleave? Then development becomes even more difficult. Put textures in one bank, frame buffer in the other, object list here, object data there? Just having one address and unified RAM is so much better than separate video RAM as on pcEngine.

[@A31Chris]

We'd like to thank you 'Almost Something' that after 30 years and countless sources for correction that you're still clueless enough to perpetuate the myth that Atari added the two 32 bit processors together to come up with 64bit.. Your integrity is almost something.

[@nater86zx]

Oof! Shots fired. lmao

[@EggShen905]

I liked the video! This is about the max length I'm interested in, though.

[@Riz2336]

I remember seeing a Jaguar playing Cybermorph in a store when it was new and I was utterly unimpressed with it, I was there with my dad and I didn't ask him to get it for me or even really care much about it

[@aleksazunjic9672]

Well, they did screw it with that. They should have gone with Doom or at least Wolfenstein 3D as their release games. X-Wing was also available but not ported to Jaguar.

[@spokehedz]

The Atari 50 Collection (not sponsored, just a fan) allows you to play 9 of the 'most popular' Jaguar games. And you can get that on most current consoles, if not all of them. This allows most people to play most of the 'good' games. If people want to dig deeper, there is always "BigPEmu" which plays them all.

[@martok2112]

I used to own a Super Nintendo, and Sega Master System, a Sega Genesis and 32X, an Atari Lynx, and a Nintendo Gameboy, with a decent library of games between them all. I was going to take all of those to the local Babbage's and trade them in for an Atari Jaguar. Main reason, Jaguar could run Doom linked with another Jaguar so that a friend (who did own a Jaguar) and I could deathmatch. The clerk at Babbages advised me to wait for the Sony PlayStation (which was only a couple of months from being released). He explained the features of the PlayStation vs the Jag, and I was sold. So, I traded them all in on credit for an incoming PlayStation. I was not disappointed when I got my PlayStation. Not a second thought given to the Jag.

[@dr.charlesedwardflorendobr3952]

This is an example of how retailers help sell the Playstation. Sony's policy towards retailers were advantageous to retailers. Sony gave them higher commissions compared to Sega or Nintendo, and most probably even Atari. I heard that Jack Tramel's policies were quite harsh to retailers while he was still head of Commodore, so I would expect similar policies when he took over Atari.

[@martok2112]

@@dr.charlesedwardflorendobr3952 Yeah....Atari leadership at that time was pretty horrendous, wasn't it?

[@WatchWiseUS]

I remember when Tempest 2000 was announced - being made by LLamamsoft and Jeff Minter (a household name in the UK for video games in the 80s), it created a lot of hype - I still think that it's the best game of the "official" launches and the only one that's instantly playable.

[@andymouse]

Minter wrote Tempest for the jaguar ?

[@WatchWiseUS]

@@andymouse sure did.

[@andymouse]

@@WatchWiseUS Cool, he's a legend :)

[@lsdowdle]

The ST in Atari ST stood for Sixteen Thirty-two. The Jaguar was a TS, Thirty-two Sixty-four. Most of the games looked like 16-bit games because the development tools provided to developers by Atari was sub-par and very difficult to use to access the custom hardware... so most developers just used the Motorola 68000 which was very well known. In fact these days a number of Atari ST games have been ported to the Jaguar. The Jaguar might have done better if only their development tools were easier to use making using the advanced custom hardware a common thing. The games that sold the best were those that did take advantage of the custom hardware. Folks like Jeff Minter knew what they were doing but not a lot of other folks.

[@todesziege]

Most 3rd party releases were low effort, often barely upgraded ports of 16-bit games. Few developers would bet big on an unproven system with a small userbase, regardless of ease-of-use and documentation.

[@apr2499]

Great video! Please make more like this!

[@AdmiralBison]

Thank goodness for emulation. I'm enjoying some great 90's FMV 3DO games: - Blade Force - The Daedalus encounter - Demolition man - The original Need for Speed - Road Rash - Supreme Warrior - Wing Commander 3 If one is fascinated with FMV games and their campiness, the 3DO system was one the best systems for that kind of thing. Atari Jaguar seems really only notable for Alien vs Predator and Tempest 2000, Still the Jaguar/CD emulator BigPEmu by Rich Whitehouse is one of the best and most refined emulators there is, making jaguar/CD games easy to play.

[@juancarlosramirezparra8233]

Thanks for the video. I watched it because it's very likely next week I'll have my first Atari Jaguar 🐆🥳

[@michaelmorris4515]

A bits.. A marketer's dream since it's an ambiguous measurement and multiple aspects of a computer or even a CPU can be measured in bits and have the same measurement. Take the 6502 processor. 8-bit right? Well, the word length is 8-bit, but the address bus is 16-bit. It's damn near impossible to make an 8-bit address bus work - your processor would only be able to see 255 memory locations at a time. The Atari 2600 used a pared down 6502 called the 6507 which had a 13bit address bus limiting it to 8K (the limitations of the cartridge port further limited the 2600 to seeing ROMs in 4K pages). The address bus, to be honest, is even more meaningful to what a system, or an OS, can do. The move from 32-bit to 64-bit in the mid 00's was the difference between apps that could only ever use 3GB of RAM and. 16bit graphics? Well if you're truthful, the 2600 had no concept of a tiling system it had a 1 bit state on the drawing beam and you could change the color of the beam during draw, making the system insanely complex to program for with little upside for the pain. The NES and systems in its generation largely used tile based graphics and had 1 bit per pixel within a tile, and all the colors of the tile had a locked color - or you could do "low res" to get 2 pixels and thereby 4 colors in a tile. By the 16 bit era systems were up to 4 bits to the pixel. For full unrestricted color you need 3 bytes - 24 bits - per pixel (or 32 bits if you want to have an opacity channel and have the GPU mix colors off different layers). At the end of the day "bits" is really about how much memory you can see, and how much you can task to each element on the screen. As RAM allotments go up, so too do the screens. A 4K display screen needs approximately 198MB uncompressed for 24 bit true color. The Jaguar's chips could do up to 752x576, but at true color that's still 10.4 MB uncompressed. The Jaguar had 2MB ram, so these chips would never get a chance to really flex - the memory wasn't there. Most Jaguar games had a resolution of 320x200 for this reason as the 1.5MB requirement left some room for state tracking and the ROM didn't have to change. The thing that really killed the Jaguar in my opinion was the presence of the 68K processor. The Jaguar had the 32bit variant of the processor, but 16 bit software written for the 16bit variant of the processor (as seen in the Genesis and the Amiga computers) could be ported very easily. And the vast majority of Jaguar games did just that - eschewing the fiendishly complicated architecture intent of the system to just get something out there. And I'm sorry but a 16bit app is a 16bit app regardless of how powerful the processor is. When you make a new system you need to put out something the previous generation of hardware can't do. The NES arrived with Super Mario Bros - impossible on the 2600. The SNES arrived with Super Mario World - not entirely impossible on the NES, but the visual difference is overwhelming. Meanwhile Tempest 2000 can be done on 16 bit hardware. It doesn't push the Jaguar. Aliens v. Predator should have been the launch title for this reason - to show what the system can do. But Atari never learned - the packed in Super Breakout with the 5200 after all. Looking back on it I have to wonder if the company wasn't trying to fail.

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

SNES had F-zero early on. Atari-Kart needs its huge sky because the Atari is slower than the SNES here. The 6502 has an PLA which governs 110 control lines. Let’s round this up and we have a 128 bit processor. The blitter on the Jaguar is 64 bit, but so slow on Gouraud and especially texture mapping. In software some stuff is hard, but in hardware a stupid small cache can work: instead of fetching texels right away, store the phrase address in a list. SRAM cells in this list have a balanced output. PLAs are fed with a balanced signal. Very fast, low noise, low power NAND let’s check for duplicates as we insert the next phrase. Then when this list is full, the blitter could load all phrases at full burst speed. For a mesh with many small polygons it might be interesting to cache 16 pixel writes (maybe like two phrases per scanline). Then the next polygon may share some spans and fill up the unaligned phrases. UV mapping lets all polygons on a vehicle share the same texture. So maybe we don’t need LoD on vehicles .

[@The2ndflood]

It truly amazes me how there are so many creative people out there that keep making games for these older systems. I wish I had those skills but it seriously impresses me the skills and dedication that so many people have for video games and their systems! I only played the Jaguar once at a local Sears. I had fun but I was a Sega fan boy. I should have purchased it though. Especially seeing as people keep creating games for it even in 2024! That will be one of my many regrets. Like how I should have purchased the brand new NES's that were being sold at Toys R Us for $20 a pop, after the SuperNES had come out.

[@alcampbell469]

The 1050 was the disc drive, not the computer, which was the Atari 600 and 800xl. The 7800 was not the last game system of the 1980s produced by Atari. That was the XGES. Yep, it was essentially the 800 xl repackaged, but it did have a light gun and Microsoft Flight Simulator. You should do more research when speaking of the Tramiel Atari. Also, the 7800 was originally released in 1984 then shelved until 1986. There was an Atari ST 1040, but it was the ST, not the 8 bit range. That said, a rather entertaining video.

[@losalfajoresok]

keep it up the good work, amazing video!

[@RightNowMan]

Great video!

[@djvoid1]

Seeing it in magazines at the time, you got a sense that the Jaguar just wasn't anywhere near as exciting as it was hyped to be. Clearly an 'also ran'. The 3D0 came earlier and seemed momentarily to be the next big thing, but things were moving so fast that only a year later, Tekken hit arcades and we all wanted a Playstation instead

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

The future of gaming clearly lay in texture-mapped 3D,the arcades were already demonstrating this, the Jaguar, a 2D powerhouse, with impressive plain polygon pushing capabilities, was always going to become obsolete before it had time to truly establish itself..

[@MrUltimatemaniac100]

Great video 👍

[@hammondeggsmusic]

14:32 I remember back in the mid 90's having a modem for my PC - a 33.6Kbaud modem that had a dedicated headset port for communicating voice while playing a 2 player game via a direct modem connection. It actually worked OK, and was a lot more fun than typing.

[@annareismith6843]

My best memories are that I never owned or played it and had the much better game consoles of the time. I did play a few on emulation later, only to prove myself right about not buying or playing the Atari Jaguar. I didn't know any friends that owned one. To me at the time, it seemed like a waste of money better spent else where. I did have as a child the Atari 2600 I mostly played Pitfall 2 on. About the only game worth playing on it at the time.

[@clarenceboddicker6679]

@annareismith6843 The best times of my life were never owning or playing an Atari Jaguar. All of my happiest memories are never going anywhere near an Atari Jaguar.

[@austinblack7991]

Thank god that the Atari 50 anniversary collection has jaguar games on it

[@mattkidroske]

I never knew much about the Jaguar. This was super interesting!

[@sotsubreivaj]

Atari Jaguar is one of those consoles that are also known for developers not having been able to reach its full potential. And I think that's some reason for enthusiasts for trying to seek how far it can get. Maybe these just do it for themselves, don't love the Jaguar neither ever had one but anyways the Jaguar has its redemption and that's a good thing, always. Liked and subscribed.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

Would you say Eclipse with Iron Soldier 2 and Rebellion with Skyhammer, reached the Jaguar's 3D potential?

[@troykelso]

18:45 Those systems aren't the original systems, they're the new "plus" systems. When you're referencing the modern systems and you say "2600" instead of "2600+," you're off by about 47 years.

[@DanielsGarage86]

The VCS is an original System I have one and it's awesome!

[@seanc.5310]

I remember walking past Kaybee toys in my local mall seeing Jaguars being sold for $19.99 and still thinking, not worth it.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

Missile Command 3D features support for the ProController and If a Jaguar VR headset is detected, it can be played with in both 3D and Virtual modes. So there's no question of it working with the VR Headset. AVP 2 never got beyond the concept stages, Beyond Games along with Alexandria Games had put game pitches to Atari, Beyond were in negotiations with Atari when they pulled the plug on the Jaguar.

[@dartdude4084]

As a 13 yr old when it hit market. We rented the system and it was worse than the 3DO.

[@Freddie1980]

It never stood a chance, the SNES was pumping out equally as good looking games with it's FX chip backed by it's 16 bit processor and Sega had its massive arcade library to call upon.

[@Mrshoujo]

I love my Jaguar with CD. What games I have, I enjoy immensely. Best to buy what you like rather than stuff you don't. And yes, it was 64 bit. Period. Raiden is pronounced Rye Den.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

It could be marketed as such as it had 64-bit architecture, it wasn't a true 64-bit console in the way the N64 was.

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

I wonder if the instruction fetch could be modified to really utilize the 64 bit. Software devs are supposed to load all 32 bit constants needed into registers. But here 64 bit could help to load 32 bit immediate values in a single max 2 cycles. MOVEI says that the value is loaded in cycle 3. A stream of 16bit words. Weird. Anyways, with 64 bit the target of a branch could be loaded speculatively because (mis) alignment will have made us load the forward path already for one or two instructions. Identify which instruction affects the flags and route a shortcut to select one of two instruction words just in front of the decoder circuit.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

Atari wanted a lot of complex, PC simulation games converted to the Jaguar (TFX, Falcon, Gunship 2000 etc) these required a lot of keyboard commands, hence the numeric keypad on the controller.

[@todesziege]

The numpad is great for games like Doom. First person shooters and other PC conversions were typically very clumsy to play on consoles of the time due to lack of buttons. It's not like it really takes up any space either, as it sits "below" the main pad surface.

[@jfwfreo]

One of the big problems is that the custom RISC processors could only execute code from internal buffers and those buffers were far too small. If the RISC chips had been able to execute code from main memory (or if the buffers had been bigger) it would have made the much hardware easier to work.

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

Source code is out in the internet. You may want to check out what old school coders were able to do in 4kB of code. For data there are 64 + 1 + flag registers (62 if you enable interrupt). Memory access is fast for GPU data. And every coder still filled the remaining bytes in internal RAM with some variables. Like the assembler checked for free memory and pulled in some from external memory. The blitter can load the next code section very fast. External code execution can fail due to some bus states when jumping. I read that some Zero jump code is in the SDK. It ends in a halt or so. I dunno is alignment using NOPs is really safe. A lot of bugs occur only in special cases. For example scaled sprites and GPU data access have an incompatibility.

[@eddieruminski4098]

Should have had more context regarding the controller button pad. They had done this with the Atari 5200, the colecovision, and the intellivision prior and was a fairly well received thing for legacy users (really it was only controversial with modern gamers understandably expecting something else), especially as with games quickly evolving past single button inputs the developers wanted the flexibility to increase inputs - this was a fairly elegant way to do that, especially once you see it in action using the appropriate overlay panels that game with each game (Doom was excellent for this with visually showing which weapon could be accessed with a specific button)

[@fattiger6957]

IMO the PS1 is the perfect blueprint of hoq to enter the video game industry and launch a new console. They did everything right and it paid off. Have a console that is comparable, specs wise, with the competition. Have an attractive price. Spend a ton of money on marketing (I hear Sony spent $200M on marketing the PS1, 10x more than Sega did with the Saturn) Buy or open studios to make 1st party software. And, most importantly IMO, woo a bunch of publishers with undeniable deals to release games onto your platform. Atari didn't have the money to market their console as much as Sega or Nintendo, let alone Sony. The design of the system was weird so the games didn't look impressive. They didn't have the first party support to give the system a good start. And they couldn't secure 3rd party support. There was so much working against it. Another thing to take into account was Atari's reputation. I was a kid when this launched and to me and other kids my age, Atari was associated with old people. A lot of us had old uncles or grandpas with a 2600 collecting dust in a drawer in their entertainment center. I even played my grandpa's 2600 and I wasn't impressed. It would have been a hard sell to convince 90s kids that Atari was cool.

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

People complain that the PlayStation GTE only does 16bit maths (like Jaguar). But in both cases a developer can bin the world around the camera into shells and use 32 bit maths SUB on the CPU to center, and the fast SHA instructions to select the significant bits.

[@mattm7798]

Honestly, Sony got so much right with the PS1 it is a minor miracle. You have Sega and Nintendo as eating up about 90-95% of the console gaming space, and Sony enters with not only some good games at launch, but good games during it's first year. I always assume Sony used it's connections to lure developers away from Sega and Nintendo. At the end of the day, Sony knew it needed great games to sell the console, and it had those early and often.

[@mattm7798]

@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt I've heard from devs that the PS1 was fairly easy to develop for, especially compared to the dual cpu Saturn, which devs were not at all prepared for.

[@fattiger6957]

@@mattm7798 I think due their experiences with Nintendo's draconian licensing agreements, many publishers were more than happy to get with Sony. Plus, n64 carts costed exponentially more money to manufacture than PS1 CDs (think it was something like $5-7 per cart, while CDs were pennies)

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

@@mattm7798 I don't see the dual SH2 as a problem. The real problem is that there is also a SegaDSP, which on paper looks good and lures in developers. Then there is VDP1 and VDP2 and no way to efficiently use both. And for the CPU: Sega and Hitachi should have released a compiler with forEach.AsParallel() . A cheap way to distribute the first halve of the iteration onto one core and the other on the other core. And then you see all those mediocre developers who fight async await even in 2024.

[@DaisyLynn-xm1pl]

The Jaguar 2 would have fixed all the problems that Jaguar had. Atari also should not have canceled the Lynx and their home computers.

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

The documents about this don’t have many details. One thing was that the GPU does write to external memory using a queue to prevent blocking. The Jaguar2 would have such a queue at the more important GPU -> Blitter Interface. A hallmark of the Jaguar was that it did embrace simple DRAM. How does this transfer to the much smarter SDRAM used in any console after? How do we get rid of the physical 68k (compatibility vs cost of the PCB area ).

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

Except software support, Imagitec Design have stated they were asked if they would be interested in porting old PlayStation games to the system.

[@carmelosgro6413]

If they had 10 or 15 games at launch I think they would have had more sales

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

They'd of needed far more development teams than they had, plus the budgets to fund proper next-generation titles, rather than 256 colour SNES ports that did nothing to showcase the potential of the hardware.

[@LilaHikes]

Had a friend who had more -money- credit card debt than sense. He made it a point to buy every new console upon release. So I got to play the Jaguar and it was horrible. Only thing worse than the games was the controller. Felt like a small book in your hands. Releasing a console in that day with only 3 main buttons was puzzling; especially after the SNES and the revised Sega Genesis controller.

[@techkev140]

Liked the video. I don't think the Jaguar brought down Atari on it's own. It was simply the last product of the original company. They were already on the ropes when the Jaguar went on sale. The ST line of computers was failing and the next gen upgrade the Falcon, had failed to revive their computer line. Also the Jaguar bundled launch title was allegedly developed for the cancelled Panther and did not show off the Jag's hardware. As with any company short of cash and trying to launch a new product. They can't afford the coverage to garner the attention (and development) they needed. Pointing out the capability of the hardware was probably all they could do. A pattern followed by Commodore with the Amiga CD32, only the Jaguar was probably more capable and expensive if you wanted the tiolet seat shaped CD add on. Nice to see a revival of Atari but the Jaguar was not as iconic as their earlier hardware.

[@scannaunderscore1]

I remember Rumbelows and the jaguar going for cheap in my local town in uk

[@israelmejia697]

Just got me a jaguar, and jaguar cd 💿 not working for 650 both on eBay. Already fixed the jaguar, i have parts on order for my cd add on now. Definitely one of the rarer items in my collection.

[@drtekrox]

"Focused on profit at the expense of creativity" Videogame crash soon?

[@mattm7798]

Haha maybe the AAA industry. Smaller devs are putting out some amazing games.

[@T0m0zuki]

I almost bought one solely to play AvP. But the price of it was almost 3x of the Sega Mega Drive II.

[@KryptonianAI]

I still have my jaguar and jaguar cd. Memory track and all that. My controllers are the things that barely work anymore. 😢

[@lokimischievous1698]

I owned a Jaguar and a jaguar cd. Remember the first time playing AVP, and I think the jag might have been the first time I played Doom and Wolfenstein. Maybe the first time I played Doom was on 32x. I loved I Iron Soldier

[@PhilipMurphy8]

Only back in the day, there wasn't much gaming industry standards because it's was still fairly new

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

You mean for 3d? There were stuff like Unity3d for C64 and Amiga. Also check AmigaOS comfort functions for sprites!

[@ryanbullock2971]

I had a Jaguar in 1994. It glitched and no longer displayed in color. I got it replaced by a sneaky game store owner after the warranty was already over. Thank you to that dude at the Cottonwood Mall. Rayman, Tempest 2000, Iron Soldier 1 and 2, Raiden, NBA Jam, and Doom were really good games. I also picked up two copies of Battlesphere and only got to play head-to-head once. I had some other games, but I'm having trouble remembering if any of them were fun. People could make cool looking games that were fun to play, but I remember months of no games being released, and when they were, they were overpriced! I remember some games being $60 and $70. Back in the mid 90s, that was a hell of a lot of money for a game.

[@megabigdump]

A buddy of mine had one and it blew me away how cool it was haha. I loved AVP, wolfenstein and some giant mech game I can't remember the title of. I begged my dad to let me save up and buy one myself but he hated video games and said Nah.Turns out to have been a blessing is disguise I guess haha

[@enemyzer092]

I had a Jaguar and loved it . Some great games especially Tempest 2000 which I have the soundtrack too on cd .

[@aliensoup2420]

I bought a Jaguar for the sole purpose of playing DOOM, which it did quite adequately. At the time I was a Mac user and Mac Doom2 had not yet been released, so the only other way to play DOOM was on a dedicated console. I had a SNES, but that version of DOOM was kinda sucky.

[@hundgirridchannel]

Classic example of good hardware not supported by good software, reputation and marketing which were odd, wrong and disorganized back in the 90s. Cheers.

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

But is it good hardware? My personal journey was that I first read that the Atari Falcon had problems with fast page mode . Intel always used instruction queues which naturally create bursts of reads which are fast on at memory architecture: going from 8bit all the way up to today. Fast page mode is old but esoteric? At least someone at Atari knew about this because Tom has a configuration register to set a lot of wait states for a page miss. And parts of Jaguar can burst. But stuff inherited from Panther does not. Jaguar only has 2MB. Games are small. Devs can write low level code. So just give us an object list which sits in a continuous array. A jump instruction which tells use to read the whole subroutine. A loop which tells us the same. Audio samples copied from a queue in DRAM to a queue in local RAM. To save pins: memory interleave, but I think this costs a cycle.

[@mr.y.mysterious.video1]

There's no w in jaguar. Still enjoyed the video however

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

It should also be noted Atari had originally planned a simultaneous launch for the Panther and Lynx, but Atari lacked the resources to support 2 flagship consoles at once, so Panther was put on the back burner.

[@robintst]

I remember being curious with the initial hype for the Jaguar but then nothing of any substance happened with it. I regarded it the same as the 3DO, they had no must-have games so I didn't care. The early 5th gen hardware entries were rough, it felt more like they were jumping the gun before it was really time to do so.

[@ChristIsKing8888]

The 3do was awesome, I don't know what you're smoking 😂

[@joshuaupham5993]

3do was an awesome system. I had both. Jaguar games were terrible AF, with the exception of Alien and T2000.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

​@@joshuaupham5993If you liked Mech Games, Iron Soldier 1 and 2 were fantastic.

[@carlwillows]

At least I've played a 3do. Need for speed was a great game for it. Also used it for party's to play music with cool visuals.

[@ninji5226]

It's crazy to look back on all of these systems I would drool over in magazines as a kid just because of the marketing only to find out as an adult that they were just expensive turds. Thats not to say they didn't have potential but the final product, however it got there, could hardly be considered systems at all.

[@reesejabs1895]

Flop - O -Rama! Too complex, too late to the market. Too expensive.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

And hardware was too bugged, development tools terrible, third party support minimal.

[@mchenrynick]

It's obvious now that the "64-bit" processing of the Jaguar was using the farthest "stretch of the law" to claim that. The Playstation 2 was truly 64-bit.

[@venturefanatic9262]

My Ex gave me one for my BD, I was a SEGA guy so I smiled as nicely as I could thanking her. But in my mind I was screaming WTF!

[@Sashazur]

Is that why she’s your ex?

[@SomeOrangeCat]

4:25 From a coding perspective it is not a 32-bit system. The "bits" a system is depends solely on the maximum instruction width it's CPU handles. This has two 32-bit CPUs. That does not equal 64-bit instruction width.

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

Instruction opcodes are 16 bit. I would be nice if instruction fetch would detect copy instruction which we insert to not overwrite the target register. So: fetch 32 bit at once. Would also be cool if 32x32->64 bit would be as fast as on 386sx. Some instructions have immediates and are 48bits .

[@kylemartin9215]

I had a jaguar, I liked it I found the controllers surprisingly comfortable and it had some great games, tempest, alien vs predator, the best ports of doom and wolfenstein, and cannon fodder were some gems on the system

[@GregsGameRoom]

Atari did not "add up chips to get to 64-bits." That's an unproven fallacy perpetuated by uninformed videos like this. The Jaguar has a 64-bit data bus as were the blitter and object processor. There's NEVER been a concrete definition of what constitutes the "bitness" of a system so there's no reason why Atari can't legitimately call the Jaguar 64-bit.

[@j.makison1547]

Yeah, these kind of videos are extremely frustrating. That was just nonsense pushed by Trip Hawkins and magazines like EGM. Hell, EGM was all about the Jag until Atari wouldn’t send them free units. After that, they did a 180 and bashed the system every chance they got. This is truly one of the most misunderstood and misreported on systems of all time.

[@dr.charlesedwardflorendobr3952]

One reason for the poor sales of the Jaguar was IBM's difficulty to manufacture the console. There was a big time period where there were no stocks available.

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

Did the chips not hit the 28 MHz or why was yield low? Were the best fabs reserved for server chips?

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

IBM just assembled and Q. A tested the Jaguar. Component shortages came from external suppliers. The custom chip fabrication plants in particular had extremely low yields on initial runs.

[@dr.charlesedwardflorendobr3952]

@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 Yes, from what I read, it was IBM's subcontractors that had to provide the other components. So the shortages was still within IBMs responsibility.

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 yeah, what plants? The chips did not stretch any technology envelope. So I read that Atari contracted a lot of fabs prior. I did not know that there was a standard “order form” to source ASICs . What about a different process? 6502 for example assumes a single metal layer.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

​From the information that was doing the rounds at the time: Herbert L. Watkins, director of Applications Solutions manufacturing at IBM Charlotte. "Everyone expect IBM to manufacture complex information technology products, and with this, we'll show that we can competitively build a sophisticated consumer product." In addition to assembling the Jaguar, IBM will be responsible for the component sourcing, quality testing, packaging, and distribution." I am lead to believe Toshiba and Motorola were the only manufacturers capable of fabricating the custom Jaguar chips at the time, due their extremely small die clearances and cutting edge design. Out of the 2, Toshiba could tool up faster for mass production, Atari went with them for the initial run of 50,000 (?) chips, but Motorola had been suggested as been the preferred producer of choice for Atari and Atari went onto place a much bigger order with them to try and ensure supply met demand.

[@saturnrvg8171]

I love the Jaguar. Have one of, if not THE largest collections on Earth. I've ported over or made from scratch over 300 Doom maps and enjoy them on one of my Game Drives along with nearly every other game or homebrew for the system. Whether it's 32 or 64 bits, I don't care, just love the console :)

[@10p6]

Regarding the 64 bit, yes the Risk processors were 32 bit, but not only was the data bus 64 bit, but the Blitter and Object Processor (GPU) were full 64 bit. Other things did not help the Jag and changed the spec of what Atari wanted to release.

[@channex8179]

Mad Professor Mariarti Is a port of an almost 40 year old game. It's sad that this is all the Jaguar could achieve, it was equivalent to a souped up snes or on par with the Amiga CD32. A 2D powerhouse but weak with 3D.

[@nater86zx]

I still have my Jaguar, but I can't play it because I get the Red Screen of Death! :( It was fun in the 90's playing Alien v Predator and many others.

[@adamwendt8972]

By the time the Jaguar had a decent library and price point, the hype train for the Saturn and PlayStation was so intense that no one wanted to waste their money on what was clearly last generation tech.

[@user-zx8de8op9l]

I bought the Playstation, in 1996 after buying a Genesis in 1993. I also had a NES as well as a Saturn that I bought of a co-worker to flip. I ended up giving it to my youngest cousins, who were under 10.

[@SongbirdPro]

Great video for a still-great system! 😄

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

Crescent Galaxy was built on an evolving hardware platform that was hard to program, featured early development features, and put together by a highly inexperienced game development organization at the time. Maybe if you had taken time to read comments by BJ West, Darran Thompson etc, you'd understand it simply had to be ready for launch. Or.. Lx Rudis: "I can't speak for everyone, but Leonard was pretty old-skool regarding Crescent Galaxy. At one point I remember complaining to him that we needed more game design for the levels. His reply was that side scrollers were too dynamic to justify lengthy design, that the best way to do it was to toss a bunch of NPC scripts at the game engine, then test hell out of the results until the team and testers deemed the result 'fun'..." Why you never looked into any of the aspects you talk about in this video, with any real depth, when there is such a wealth of information available, is just beyond me.

[@carlbyronthompson]

I saw the Jag on sale for $50 usd. Back in the day. The lack of software made me pass.

[@MarkMifsud]

What killed the Jaguar was the fact that... due to pressure from the Tramiels on the engineers, the hardware was rushed so it was bugged and those bugs were undocumented. The 68000 and DSPs couldn't exchange 32-bit data because by design they read the RAM in different orders. That is why the arcade version of the Jaguar (named Cojag) replaced the 68000 with fully 32-bit cpus. Making things worse the 64-bit data bus was there for speed of communication, but that was 100% useless when the DSPs were prone to data hazards due to out-of-order execution, while unable to share data with the 68K without first formatting it appropriately. While every machine has some shortcoming that software needs to design around, the Jaguar had too many outright flaws that were communicated too late. It was great when the code didn't run into the problems, but one could barely squeeze the promised power from even 2 of the 3 concurrent processors. Were those problems inexistent, who knows what the game library might have looked like!?

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

DSP and GPU have configuration to change Endianness. The chips were developed using a 68k - at least there is so much 16bit stuff in there. All the tiny registers. The arcade CoJag has an FPGA on Board to translate to MIPS. MIPS is also big Endian. Atari should have designed the system as 64 bit throughout. Force multiple reads from the cardridge to assemble 64Bit before the go into the system bus. A pixel and samples are 16 bit. So Endianness is back again! So Jerry shifts left through the phrase.

[@stephens4175]

had this system when it launched, had AVP, Doom and Wolfenstein 3D, the best on the system and the CD unit that wouldn't ever work, but got rid of them in the early 2000's and wish I never did.

[@TheRealKaiProton]

I saw an ad for MK2 on Jag, in a magazine back then, and if they had produced that, I likley would of gone for a jag, MK2 was my favourite game for years, Would love to code something on the Jag too, but I find the way its done annoyingly difficult to get my head around, ah well

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

Probe Software had started converting PC MK3 but it didn't get very far, MK 2 was never headed to the Jaguar.