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

[@mattcintosh2]

Part of the problem was us rural kids. At the nearest kmart/walmart/shopko/prange way/woolworths, you could find sega and nintendo consoles and games and accessories. But jaguar, turbographix, etc, you didnt know anyone that had them, there wasnt a demo unit at your local store, you couldnt rent the games at your local video store, you couldnt borrow games from friends.

[@xxxYouTunesxxx]

Bingo. I grew up in a rural town and can attest to this.

[@VOAN]

Even at big cities you still couldn't find a 3DO or a Jaguar. Most 3DO could only be found near where the VCR or Multimedia Player are, same for the Jaguar. A lot of their games were not shown at retail shelves either cause most people don't buy them and then the store just throw em into the bargain bin a year later.

[@trevagraham1605]

​@@VOANi got my 3do from Best Buy back in 94 and the only other place that sold them around here were Media Play, Babbages, and Electronics Boutique. I think the last two stores were the only place around to get a Jaguar.

[@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.

[@skeezixcodejedi]

Great video and pretty accurate comment; but all that aside, the games delivered were underwhelming, making the system look pretty bad. When the next gen actually rolled in, their software was plentiful and leagues above. The reasons were as above, but to the consumner it just DOA at the time. It couldn't get past the monicer for the Jag CD as "the toilet seat" either :P

[@SpaceManRD]

He certainly didn't help, but I'm not sure how much of it is on him. The console market was getting to be oversaturated with cheaper systems of similar capabilities, and _someone_ had to come in last.

[@bobbyfagan7760]

I remember asking my dad for a jaguar & he got me a PlayStation instead. Probably the best decision he made

[@kevinmcdowell2679]

Bullet dodged.

[@bobbyfagan7760]

@ 🙏

[@kevinmcdowell2679]

@@bobbyfagan7760 honestly, just the IDEA of an aliens vs predator game, back in that era, was enough to convince 13 year old me that it was a worthwhile purchase. Again; bullet dodged. Of course it would take another 20 years to get a proper quality AvP game. Better late than never .

[@AdhamOhm]

My uncle was the first person I knew who owned a Playstation, which he bought around the end of 1995. At the time, I thought it was the 3DO all over again (which he also owned) and that it would be forgotten in a year or two. My expectations were subverted big time.

[@bobbyfagan7760]

@@AdhamOhm we have all made mistakes, I thought the jaguar & Saturn were going crush the PlayStation but my dad was like nah, this is the best one u can get

[@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.

[@Cruor34]

Any idea who came up with the idiotic giant 3 button controller? SOMEONE on the design team had to play video games.

[@generalzod7959]

​@@Cruor34well, the 5200 was a massive failure and i suspect none of it's developers actually played games either. The controllers were the absolute worst ever designed!

[@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.

[@WauwautosaTufGuy]

@@zikifer my uncle was just like you, he expected Jaguar to bring back the glory days of Atari. I thought the Atari was alright, I enjoyed AVP and tempest was decent. The port of doom was solid but compared to the ps1 it was totally out of its league

[@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.

[@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.

[@kybble]

Completely agree. That was the one game I bought an Atari Jaguar for. Only game ever that has scared me. Living in the hood with it connected to my 5.1 sound system. That first "Over Here" scared the living be Jesus out of me.

[@kristinarain9098]

AvP was so much fun when mine worked. I loved it because it was versatile and you could play all three sides.

[@kevinmcdowell2679]

@@kybble I agree, if I had a Jaguar and I lived in the hood, I'd be scared too, of gettin robbed.

[@kybble]

@@kevinmcdowell2679 I dont really live in the "HOOD". But when you live alone and know no one else is in house with you and you hear "over here" so clearly and directional as if someone is standing right behind you maybe a foot away. That is scary.

[@kevinmcdowell2679]

@kybble yeah, that would freak me out regardless of where I lived.

[@lephtovermeet]

My guy I've seen at least 4 retrospectives of the jaguar over the years and this is def the best one I've seen. I really appreciate it!

[@ljraj]

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

[@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.

[@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"

[@balaam_7087]

Surprised you didn’t mention that jaguar consoles (or at least the outer plastic shells) were eventually repurposed as dental equipment. Not kidding. I don’t know what it actually did in the context of a dentist office, but there are stills floating around that show what is authoritatively the exact same plastic housing that we know in the world of gaming as the Atari Jaguar.

[@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.

[@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.

[@Bluecedor]

The Jaguar’s very brief existence is what happens when you take 70s video game mentality into the mid-90s right before the industry is about to take a massive evolutionary leap.

[@_OCPGAMING]

Longer videos are great as long as you're doing in depth ones that haven't been repeated on KZbin for the last two decades. This video is great and this channel is great, and I welcome longer episodes because of the accuracy and seriousness given to the subject matter. There's no gimmicks, no cheap laugh attempts. It's in depth, accurate and useful knowledge of a subject millions of us love. Keep up the great work.

[@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!

[@adamsfusion]

The lynx had such a great set of developer documentation. It was half useful technical info and half the author waxing about life.

[@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.

[@Cruor34]

That was the craziest part to me. They had seen how popular SF2 and MK were and those require 6 and 4 buttons at the very least. 3 buttons even on the Genesis released in 1989 (USA) was very limiting. I wish I could get an answer from someone on what the hell they were thinking.

[@Puert0ricandream]

Its a math book!

[@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.

[@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 !

[@RobColbert]

This was a wonderfully accurate and thorough coverage of the history of the console and a good enough glimpse into the shenanigans going on at Atari in these days. I always enjoy modern takes on historic game industry news because of what hindsight brings to the discussion. You've done a great job applying that in this report.

[@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?

[@Breakbeats92.5]

It all comes down to two words: killer - app. The bit of software that sells the hardware. Atari thought the console was the selling point, when in fact, it was the games that drove console sales. They didn't have that marquee, signature game that made you want to invest in the hardware. Confusing as to why they didn't understand that dynamic.

[@kristinarain9098]

I still have my jaguar. It had some serious issues with bugs and certain games ran with a horrible ringing noise like playing AvP with all 3 chats suffering from crippling tinnitus

[@radwolf76]

How many other consoles had the molds for their plastic shells repurposed to make the base units for dental cameras? If nothing else of the Jaguar's legacy survives, it will always have that.

[@cblizz730]

I remember getting this game system in 1993. My first reaction after playing Trevor Mcfur was, this is definitely not 64 bits. I've never been so disappointed in a game. I really expected that system to have an arcade experience to it. Especially after playing stun runner and hard driving in the arcade. Atari should have ported the arcade games.

[@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

[@dustinferguson6996]

The only major issue I had with it was when buying used games. Putting the "menu" on the controller rather than the screen wasn't very smart because not only do you have to keep looking down to be sure you are pressing the correct buttons, but if you bought the game used, often the overlay was missing that explained what each button did for that game, making it almost impossible to play. Additionally, as the systems aged, they began to overheat. Mine did just that. But boy did I still love AvP on that system!

[@valley_robot]

atari didnt make pacman , namco did , taito created space invaders , the atari ST was a very successful computer in Europe , it was significant because it had midi in an out , it was the main computer in many recording studios .you could do with a bit more research mate

[@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.

[@Cooe.]

This is just you and Atari playing with semantics to mislead the average person. By almost every definition the "bitness" of a system in 80's & 90's contexts was based on the CPU, not the system bus or ASIC chips like graphics accelerators.

[@Conshnz]

I have a jaguar. I didn’t know anything about it being discontinued and bought it when the price dropped to $49.99. I was 18 at the time and that was affordable. Turned out to be barely any games available for it in stores. So I just played the 2 that I got when I bought it. It sat for years in my basement and I just pulled it out a couple of years ago and played it. Glad to see more games have been made for it since then.

[@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.

[@Thereis1]

The cadence of this history guy isn't bad at all

[@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!

[@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.

[@WeirdoError]

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

[@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!

[@PatrickWard4]

We had the Jaguar! I think we only had hoverstrike. I miss that thing. I loved how cool the insert card was that went over all those function buttons. I wonder if they make usb controllers for emulation?

[@Cruor34]

I was 13 when Jaguar came out. Even as a kid, the thing that blew my mind was that they SAW how popular SF2 and MK were, and they STILL released it with a 3 (functional) button controller. WHAT WERE THEY THINKING!? Should have been a 6 button controller with like 3 small buttons in the "dead" space that could have been used as start/pause and 2 other random buttons for any game that wanted to use them. Had it come out with a good controller and a few better games, it might have at least turned a profit for Atari. in 1993-1995 at $250 and offering "the best" version of SF2, Mortal Kombat, and then a few console exclusives to wow your friends like Alien vs Predator maybe it could have held up for a bit.

[@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.

[@Watcher3223]

9:45 While Jack Tramiel had a reputation for cutthroat business practices, he wasn't involved with Atari at the time Activision was formed. At the time Activision began operating, Atari was still wholly owned by Warner, run by Ray Kassar and well after the moment that Nolan Bushnell was fired from his own company. Jack Tramiel entered the Atari picture only after the video game crash, and after Jack Tramiel was, himself, ousted from Commodore.

[@2012JRB]

I had a Jaguar and honestly I really liked it. AvP was awesome for the time and Tempest 2000 honestly was fun. I've had almost every system from the 90's at some point and the Jaguar held a special play in my heart.

[@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 .

[@TheMr02drop]

As a kid I had an Atari 7800 that I loved. It broke unfortunately. My parents got 6 year old me a NES in 1986 and that took over. But when the Jaguar came out in 1993 I was rooting for it so that I could go back to the company that got me into gaming. I also was rooting for it because I like Jaguars... but I was a kid and kids like things for stupid reasons. Now as an adult, and knowing that Atari was a shit "profits above all else" company I'm relieved that they failed. I wish more companies in the gaming industry would fail these days because of putting profits over the product they are producing. Whether it's buggy games, under developed games, hamfisting modern day social politics into the stories, and whatever else it really feels like a lot of the gaming industry has lost its way.

[@Akira625]

Jack Tramiel's last name is pronounced "Truh-MEL".

[@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.

[@vick3938]

I loved the Atari Jaguar. NBA Jam was amazing, Doom was awesome, it was revolutionary, it's just unfortunate it didn't get more game development behind it

[@Cruor34]

It wasn't revolutionary. We had Doom on the PC first and it was a much better version than the one on the Jaguar. We also had First Person Shooters and Death matches long before people played Golden Eye on the N64.

[@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.

[@mikeramsey3828]

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

[@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..

[@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.

[@Wallyworld30]

I recall when my grandmother passed away in 1994 i brought my Jaguar to my grandparents house and we had around 50 family members there. I recall my more tech savy uncles being blown away at the 3D graphics. It was an impressive piece of Tech in 1994.

[@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.

[@Jinzouningen36]

Had to watch this. i had a buddy who bought a jaguar when it came out. didnt take long to realize it was lack luster. on the other hand i was an early panasonic 3do owner back then too XD . anyway thank goodness for the PS1

[@cd5sircoupe]

I picked up a Jaguar and 3 games over 20 years ago, only ever played it a handful of times. I can recall two of those games, Iron Soldier & Kasumi Ninja. I don't view the system in high regards, considering most of it's best games are available elsewhere and run better. It's still neat that I have one though.

[@williambaldwin9346]

Only knew one person who owned one, ONE, in all these years. Always wanted to play AVP on it, but never owned or had access to a Jaguar. Another point is the mold of the Jaguar's case has been used in other industries, including medical. Some X-Ray or something machines you clearly can see the case holding the circuits fo the medical machine. Prob other things as well. Who knew what it could be if it was released a bit later with true 64-bit RISC CPU's and maybe some 10/100 Ethernet port/ USB ports...

[@Nightweaver1]

I was so excited for the Jaguar when I first saw previews of it in GamePro magazine back in '93, but those were quickly eclipsed by what I thought then was the much better system, the 3DO. My mother actually bought me a 3DO at the sticker price of $700 for Christmas that year (no idea how she afforded it). I was 14, a dumb kid and didn't really know any better, and certainly didn't have any foresight that both the Jag and the 3DO were destined for obscurity and the scrap heap of history. At that age the magazine ads sold me on the systems and games, as there really was no internet and that was my only source of gaming news.

[@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

[@apr2499]

Great video! Please make more like this!

[@losalfajoresok]

keep it up the good work, amazing video!

[@Pocketrocket-pj1us]

1:40 You forgot some of the other thing Flair created, Like RIC & Charlotte.

[@davidkoblentz]

great video... I always wondered what happened, I remember the "do the math" ads which seemed to be around for about 2 months but the ads were all over the place for a blink. I was a Nintendo loyalist back then, I think the absolute awful design of the Playstation controller initially turned me off... but then the games that they started to release... no way to ignore that!

[@mathesar]

I owned one for awhile and ended up selling a couple years later, Tempest 2000 was my favorite game and Doom was a decent port but lacked any music which really removed a big part of the experience, I just remember the buyer texting me later down the road and said they couldn't beat my high score in Tempest 2000 lol.

[@MarkLambertMusic]

1990s video game advertising was obnoxious.

[@blank8327]

Great content. Subscribed. 😊

[@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.

[@hamsandwichson]

I worked at a KayBee toys when this was released. I never sold one. Or a Lynx. 😂 Never knew a person who owned one.

[@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.

[@TeeDohJackson]

@9:52 I wanna know more about "Huggy, the wireless puppet" 😂😂😂

[@PassportBrosBusinessClass]

So anxious for a JAGUAR CLASSIC MINI console with the best Jaguar/CD games.

[@ScrapKing73]

EGM was wrong. The Jaguar's two 32-bit chips could execute simultaneously over the 64-bit data bus. The Saturn did not have a 112-bit data bus so the Saturn couldn't be described that way. Since bus width had long been how a system's "bits" were defined, the Jaguar was indeed a 64-bit system, just not an especially powerful one compared to those that came later.

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

No, the 32-bit chips needed to take turns. After all there is only one address bus . What you describe is the PS1 with GSRAM and SDRAM each 32 bit.

[@AlienFrequency]

To me, the most interesting thing about the Jaguar is that it’s housing is also used in some dental equipment, according to AVGN.

[@witness1013]

@4:40 you kinda crashed out my guy... the # of bits has nothing to do w/ RAM when people were discussing consoles. You should try caring about what you post.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

This video needed a lot more research to be considered quality.

[@piratesephiroth]

yeah it's almost something

[@TeeroyHammermill]

@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 : I agree. Bout the 4:25 he hit around that 32+32 nonsense that no one at Atari or anyone else in the industry suggested that's what made the Jaguar 64-bit. Using his logic, the Jaguar is 80-bit.

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

​@@TeeroyHammermillI was very dissapointed in 2024 to hear someone say Atari just added 2 32-bit chips to get the number.

[@dr.charlesedwardflorendobr3952]

@@TeeroyHammermill I recall that it was the editors of Electronic Gaming Monthly (which happened to be my favorite video game magazine at that time), who kept suggesting this 32+32 bit thing. EGM was very influential at that time.

[@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.

[@ice_fox]

I got the Jag for my bday, mainly for the AvP game I read about in a magazine. It was the only game I ever had for the system, but I did play the heck out of it 😅 I also had a T16 with tons of games, still my favorite system. Just something so clean and fun about 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.

[@BitsofJoshua]

Great video! First of yours I've seen. I subscribed

[@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 :)

[@mimavox-swe]

My main takeaway here is that I really want that gaming chair from the commercial

[@thaneros]

I still want one. I love the design.

[@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 .

[@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 .

[@elephantphysics9722]

I always wanted a Jaguar. But by the time I was ready to buy, it was gone. Too bad, seemed cool.

[@BuckFunky]

Your ending questions yield: When I was a kid, I had an NES. I had the Virtual Boy on my Christmas List. I had it there because I was told Santa couldnt afford a Jaguar. I got a SNES. I didnt like it. I eventually sold that and got a pennysaver delivery route to get an N64. This was fun to watch though, because between not liking the SNES, not suffering through the Virtual Boy, I always wondered about the Jaguar, and it seems that would have been FAR more painful than an SNES, and a bike route, leading to an N64.

[@DQSpider]

it's important to note that the 3DO *debuted* at $700. It was very quickly discounted close to the Jaguar's price when no one bought any

[@VOAN]

Not only that, it only launch with one game for the first whole month. Many people who bought the 3DO at launch felt like they just got ripoff by that. $700 console and the only game you get is Crash 'n Burn, heck it wasn't even a bundle game either. It almost felt like Trip Hawkins is laughing at them. Those who bought NES, Game Boy, Game Gear, Super NES, Sega Genesis, and Turbo Grafx-16 got games like Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt, Super Mario World, Street Fighter II: The World Warrior, Sonic the Hedgehog, Altered Beast, Tetris, Super Column, Super Mario Land, Pokemon Yellow, Donkey Kong Country, Super Mario Kart, Super Mario All-Stars, or Bonk which came bundle with the console but for 3DO you got nothing with that console.

[@Sabodable]

My dad bought me an Atari Jaguar console with 2 controllers, multi tap, and TEN games in a bundle for $60 from some overstock catalog when I was a kid in 1996-1997.

[@juancarlosramirezparra8233]

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

[@EggShen905]

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

[@acertainshape]

Good video, but I think it would have been cool if you had explained at the beginning the difference between the Atari arcade games company and the computer and condole company. A lot of people don't understand this.

[@IanPeon]

The Jaguar version of Doom (which could do deathmatch between 2 systems locally) was pretty good, I loved Tempest 2000, Iron Soldier was a lot of fun, and that's why I bought a Jaguar. There were a lot of other simpler games I played that barely pushed the hardware, but were still a decent amount of fun. Otherwise, the system was about a year late and the games were too, even though the CD player brought a couple of cool features with it, which I used to play music at home for years to come.

[@Sinn0100]

I got a Jaguar in 1994 with most of its best games. For a time it was the defacto place for hardcore FPS games on console. AVP was the stuff of legends especially in 1994. Nothing looked or played like it anywhere else in the console world. It still has the very best versions of Wolfenstein 3D and NBA Jams ever.

[@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.

[@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.

[@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)

[@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.

[@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.

[@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.

[@ericwessner228]

good video, loved it.

[@Offramp-z7p]

The Jaguar would have been at least as powerful as the Playstation, if not for Jack Tramiel extreme cheapness and shortsightedness. They used the 16-bit 68000 clocked @12Mhz instead of the 32-bit 68020 clocked 26Mhz, which was (at least) FOUR TIMES MORE POWERFUL. The cost savings? $5 per unit. The CoJag used the 68020.

[@Sashazur]

$5 higher manufacturing cost would have meant roughly $15-$20 higher retail price. In today’s dollars that would be $30-$40 more.

[@Offramp-z7p]

​@@Sashazur I understand what you are trying to say, most of the time you'd be right, but that isn't how it works in this case. You're quoting manufacturing cost. In this case they bought the finished processors from Motorola to be used in Jaguar. There's no higher cost to ship a 68020 to the plant or attach it to the board than the 68000. So the cost difference was actually only $5 per processor. Fun fact: One prototype of the Jaguar used the Motorola 68030, which would have been even faster.

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

The Jaguar main board looks so ugly compare to pcEngine or N64. Most ugly are all the traces to the 68k. Now imagine even 16 more. I don’t understand how the cartridge was supposed to work. If EMI was a problem on the slot, why not employ some low voltage differential signaling and use fewer pins for less “antenna size”? JRISC should have been the main machine language. The basic idea is to have this heads-up instructions as in ITANIUM. So the CPU explicitly instructs the blitter to load the following code. So the compiler / developer decide that in a function a lot of branches will probably be covered. Everything else is outsourced as exception. Then the call would trigger the blitter to load the whole function into local memory. So there is no artificial alignment to cache lines (only phrases). JRISC has a short instruction queue so that it can continue while the blitter stores a phrase every other cycle. Same for structs: load them in one go, then pick the members. If local stack overflows ( or under ) flush half of it to external memory.

[@Offramp-z7p]

@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt I understand the part about possible interference, the programming was over my head. Good to see someone who really understands hardware and programming. 🙂 I wish I could ask you a question about the 68000 and the BUS of the Jaguar I have always wondered about. I am a novice programmer though, the ignorance of my question might make your head hurt. But if you wouldn't mind answering my question though, let me know. Thank you.

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

@@Offramp-z7p Uh, I did not grew up with the 68k. But I read that on the Jaguar the 68k sits on the bus as a first class member. I read that the 68k needs two cycles for a memory access. But I did not find out if it could accept wait states. But as it is in the Jaguar, memory is can return a value even in case of a page miss. A weird thing is when the 68k want to read not the first word in a phrase. Then Tom latches the whole phrase, takes memory of the bus, and puts the desired word onto the low 16 bit. This is almost caching, but I guess to prevent bugs, everything is reset at the end of the cycle. If the 68k reads again at the same address, Tom will again ask the DRAM for contents.