The Story of the Unreleased Atari Jaguar 2

[@Tolbat]

Wish that Atari got the Panther out in 1991 and shelved the Jaguar until the Jaguar 2 was ready. Also the Jaguar should have been 100% CD based imo - storage with Atari compression would have meant zero storage issues.

[@PeBoVision]

Jack Tramiel...a visionary at Commodore, seems to have become risk-adverse in Atari's later years. He made it clear that he placed little confidence in the game division of the company that he himself had split into smaller components. I believe Tramiel's goal was to either make Atari's computer division a monumental success with "Power Without the Price" or to shutter the company as his former arch-rival if he failed. Against all odds, and bearing no resemblence or relation to the Atari that came before it, Atari turns 50 with all the success its legacy can buy. Unfortunately one can only cash in on past successes for so long.

[@sluggomatthews8470]

I'm sure the 16 people who bought the Jaguar were devastated.

[@TheLairdsLair]

I know I was!

[@NullStaticVoid]

It's so depressing to hear the pitfalls and mistakes of companies like Atari and Sega. They dominated the video game market during our youth then made a timing mistake or budgeted badly and were gone. Atari seems to have made the mistake Apple did with the trashcan Mac Pro. They foisted a complicated architecture on developers, who didn't have the time or inclination to learn it. The CPU-less architecture was kind of visionary really. If it had caught on it might have influenced console and even personal computer arch to follow a different path.

[@activeaction8374]

I spoke with Atari management at that time and before Sam had his heart attack, they were going to continue to make games for their current platforms but also make games for competing platforms. But they were not going to continue to make hardware, just games.

[@TheLairdsLair]

Yep, the very short-lived Atari Interactive label. Jack soon gave up on that and just sold the company off.

[@dreamcaster4754]

It's such a shame that Atari threw the towel in when they were still developing such great hardware.

[@roboarcado5552]

It's simply striking how many forward-thinking Atari projects were undone by circumstance. Think of how many technological leaps they could have made for home computing if they had a little more nerve or communicated better.

[@KarlHamilton]

Wow. Never knee they actually made prototypes!

[@johneygd]

I think atari made the right decision to not release it as most people had already a ps1,sega saturn or N64,and since atari had already wasted 90 million on the whole atari jaguar project they couldn’t make such huge risk again,and btw no matter how much more powerful a game system will be,it’s eventually all about the games,this has been proven from time to time once again,but the story keeps repeating itself over and over again,when will companies lears that it is not about the bits but the hits.

[@albertabramson3157]

N64 wasn't out, and only a couple million Saturn and Playstations were in living rooms when ATARI made it official.

[@ryanbrennan3228]

I definitely wish so much that they had released the Jaguar 2 & the Jaguar Duo! To only dream what could have been!

[@sluggomatthews8470]

Crappy games galore?

[@buffalodebill1976]

The original Jaguar should have been given more time (so the development & testing could have been done properly - means, finished) and it could have been THE console of the 90's - quite close to this unreleased Jaguar II. Also, Atari should have put much more effort into making a good documentation on how to program the thing properly and distribute it for free to all SW houses. That did not happen, so developers often had to go the the trial-and-error method, often resorting to just using the familiar Motorola 68k processor for everything - basically doing it the same way as for the ST and Amiga computers. In a result, there were just not enough (superb & good) titles for the console for it to become and stay a reasonable purchase.

[@MaxAbramson3]

It was the limited use of the 64-bit graphics pipeline. The 68000 was more than potent enough for game code.

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

The emulator has no speed problems, but the original hardware suffered from a lack of memory bursts. So there is only one System bus? So let every access count. Always 64 bit, possibly a range of memory addresses. The bus is king. But the design is still more like on a PC where the bus should just serve, no matter how scattered and unaligned the access is. Also: Memory supports only half the access rate. Standard should be that there are always two channels running on the bus, one of it is blocked from the multiplexed address lines and the enable pins from memory. Still visible on the pcb for hardware debugging. Or not? Have a configuration bit? On die cache was still pretty small at the time. It was not possible to cache complete textures like on N64. Still the blitter could have collected like 4 phrase addresses and then read them in a burst. Without bilinear interpolation the forward render, quad mode could have given more power where texture is scaled up. Load 4x4 texels and draw their mini-quad. Full perspective correct corners. For scale down, subdivide screen into 4x4 px. Perspective correct texture coordinates on top left corner. Store 4x4 in one go. ( role of address generators switched ) Also should have stuck to Lynx way: no sprites.

[@shawn6306]

well i heard people say that the atari jaguar did not do well at all maybe that's why the atari jaguar 2 got cancelled but i will say that i think atari should if gave the atari jaguar 2 a chance and i heard people say that atari has been bought out by warner bros and hasbro at one point but now inforgrames own atari now with the atari name well for me it doesn't matter if this is not the same atari anymore because all companies are not the same companies as they ones was back then i'm ok with that i'm still excited that atari is making a comeback with this new atari i'm really looking forward getting atari vcs because i'm really interested in it

[@RetroDawn]

Yeah, the Jaguar was put out by the 3rd iteration of Atari, already. Yes, all companies change employees over time. I've thought similarly to you on this. As long as the new team tries to carry on the spirit of the older company, it can be a good thing. The new Atari VCS will hopefully succeed in the marketplace.

[@CameronMulder]

I always found Atari after the 2600 to be shockingly bad and so far behind Nintendo and Sega that they should have closed up shop way before releasing the Jaguar. The lynx was interesting and I wish a lynx 2 had happening, but their home consoles were just bad.

[@Herschelrules]

I enjoyed the video. As far as I know, the Jaguar II "Midsummer" was to be released with the M68000 for backwards compatibility instead of a 68020. I believe it was still supposed to only have 2MB DRAM and the CD-ROM unit would have been an add-on like the original and not standard. Its two custom ASICs were expanded greatly, but I'm not sure if it would have been more powerful than the PSX or Saturn, but it corrected a lot of the deficiencies of the Jaguar and made it more competitive and easier to program.

[@RetroDawn]

Interesting. What I've read was that it included a 68020 (I seem to recall it was specifically a 68EC020, with a 24-bit address bus, for 16MB of address space, like the 68000). I'm pretty sure it was to include extra RAM and the CD-ROM, as well. There's some pretty detailed specifications available.

[@Herschelrules]

@@RetroDawn Sorry for the late reply. Yeah, I just don't know. I've heard conflicting information on the specs. As of 1995, the specs as I listed would have been correct (I think), but I don't know if they made some adjustments afterward. I would assume not as they exited the gaming market at about this time. The prototype motherboard shown in this video has a 68000 and at 6:21 the image shows that it has 4MB of RAM, but if you look up the chips they are each 256kx16bits (or four 512k) for a total of 2MB like the original.

[@cessnaace]

How different things might have been had Atari released the Jaguar 2, or better still given the system developers an extra year and released the improved system as the original Jaguar.

[@johnmc3862]

They couldn't release it. They had owed so much money on the 1st one they couldn't afford it.

[@albertabramson3157]

@@johnmc3862 ATARI still had money in the bank and could've launched a backward compatible machine. Although the Jaguar's game library was modest, many developers would likely have finished their Jaguar I games just to take advantage of launch title status on the new machine.

[@maroon9273]

​​@@johnmc3862even release a pci board or pc card of the atari jaguar 2?

[@rustymixer2886]

Mpeg1 support, nice

[@ridiculous_gaming]

There are many power full systems that failed due to poorly available libraries and complex hardware including the Jaguar. I believe that even with promise, the Jaguar 2 would have done no better; especially with PS1's marketing dominance.

[@lracseroom8286]

you're kidding yourself mate. Atari would never have been a viable competitor to Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft.

[@Term271]

I accidentally bought a boxed Atari 7800 game but I thought it was for Atari 2600

[@artemusprine]

I really did look forward to the Jaguar 2, and I think it would have been highly competitive. It would also have helped had Atari thought more like a Japanese developer. When the Saturn was struggling Sega developed and shared a software library internally and with its third parties. It's easy to see that many of the games which came out after that benefited from it.

[@TheLairdsLair]

Atari did actually offer something like that, but it came much too late. They licensed the motion capture techniques used in Highlander, the engine used in Doom and created a special texture mapping engine (as seen in Hover Strike) and offered them to third party publishers to use themselves. The development tools for the Jaguar were just so woefully inadequate though that most third party publishers gave up on the console before they really got started.

[@artemusprine]

@@TheLairdsLair Now that you mention it... They did try to do something in terms of dev support, too little and too late. But from what you posted they were coming around. The was the last days of "hitting the metal", writing to the hardware. The tipping point from when one person could understand the machine to when a group of people were needed. I still have my Jag and Jag CD, both in their boxes. Really wanted Atari or Amiga to produce a contender, I think it's safe to say that Sony buried them both. Thank Ken Kutaragi anyone still buys consoles!

[@ElectronStarCollapse]

It sounds like on the hardware end, Atari has learned from their mistakes of the first Jaguar. Given that the system was meant to rival the Playstation and Saturn, while maintaining backwards compatability, there is a great chance that the gaming ecosystem would be different today, should they have chosen to release it. However, I believe price would have been the ultimate deciding factor for determining the Jaguar 2's success. The system might have suffered from some lazy 32 bit ports, similar to the Dreamcast (Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver comes to mild), but decent marketing with programmer friendly hardware could have made the system attractive to developers and consumers alike. If some decent exclusive titles would have been available at launch, it could have given the needed traction for the company to continue forward. The backwards compatibility with the original Jaguar also could have extended the lifespan of the original system, but the prospect might not have been very attractive, given the lack of publishers by the Jaguar's end. There was also the solid competition they would have to face against the Playstation and Nintendo 64. Atari might have abandoned the project simply because of seeing what was happening to the Sega Saturn, and feared their system might not have been able to overcome the stigma created from their previous generations. Atari might also have been concerned over price competition, trying to keep the system profitable yet desirable as a superior alternative to the Playstation. I really wish to have seen the system launch, and wonder if we would have seen a competitive Jaguar 3 during the PS2 era.

[@ressljs]

Unless some much larger company took over, or at least acted as senior partner, I really don't see how Atari could have made any real comeback (and trust me, back then I was hoping they would). Nintendo had much loved IP's. Sega had some too, plus their large arcade catalog. And Sony just threw money at all the developers to bring their games to the Playstation. Atari's recognizable IP was all ancient, so it would have been a difficult task to catch consumers' attention no matter how good the hardware was.

[@alexandernorman5337]

I don't think the project could have succeeded in restoring the company. The specs given were about 2X what the Playstation or N64 could do. But they are well below the Dreamcast. The console would have had a year (maybe a year and a half) to promote itself as the most powerful (but with a very limited game library) before becoming the second most powerful - likely with a still limited game library.

[@rpgspree]

I agree, power isn't everything. Price and games are bigger factors overall. Hardware costs for the specs could have been a hard pill to swallow, either pricing itself out of the market (like the Saturn), high license fees that would scare off devs, or selling at a loss till enough devs sign on to beat the manufacturing costs. Given the absolute incompetence of their licensing and distribution, the later would have been impossible without first sacking these department heads.

[@MaxAbramson3]

​@@ressljsThey could've taken the Neo Geo route and focused on dominating one or two genres.

[@mutalix]

In the end the tramels just didn't have enough money for a new console. I mean shit, Sony used all of $2 billion on the PlayStation 1, console gaming is multi-facted in terms of its goal of being successful, having a good supportive warchest of funds goes a very long way in addition to smart marketing and developer retention, relationships and smart manufacturing. Atari just couldn't keep up.

[@TheLairdsLair]

Yep, that's pretty much what it comes down to. Sony didn't turn profit on the PlayStation until near the end of its lifecycle and then they blew even more money on PS2.

[@RetroDawn]

The Jaguar 2 couldn't have done worse than JTS, and the world would currently have another console and games for it to play. Even if it failed soon out of the gate, and only was as successful as the Nuon, it would have been the better decision. It's one of the consoles that never got released that I lament the greatest, along with the color Vectex, and Intellivision III and IV, along with a 1984 release of the 7800, with the Warner Atari supporting it. The latter 4 would have revived the video game market, rather than letting Nintendo, Sega, and NEC take it over.

[@davidr1620]

Where did you learn to fly?

[@JJbm4233]

I think it’s pretty definitive to say that they were correct to cancel the Jaguar too. The simple fact is the reason it’s only 132 bit generation was because he spent $500 million buying that generation in marketing. There was no way to Tori could compete.

[@atarijaguarsgarage8873]

Nuon did not "went up against the Sony Playstation 2". It was not a console and never designed as such, but a multimedia chip licensed to DVD manufacturers to expand the capabilities of DVD players. For a gaming system, the hardware was already outdated.

[@TheLairdsLair]

It wasn't intended to go up against the PS2 but it did due to Sony including DVD playback, and that is what ultimately killed the NUON as the PS2 could do the same things only better (as you just admitted!). I thought I explained that pretty well in the video personally.

[@atarijaguarsgarage8873]

@@TheLairdsLair So I stand correct. I "admitted" nothing, I just told you the simple facts. Comparing the PS2 with a NUON player is really totally out of hand, for several simple reasons, like different target consumers. Even without the PS2, the idea of NUON never took off, the games were mostly meh and not better than N64, and most crucially, there was no reasonable software support. The demand for a DVD player that also could play games was just not there. The PS2, on the other hand, is a cutting edge console that also could play DVDs, but it was not it's primary focus.

[@RetroDawn]

@@atarijaguarsgarage8873 The Nuon had a lot of potential, with an entire DVD's worth of storage, and a very capable chip, that only got 2x as fast in time for the PAL machines, but too late to change the fate. They had faster versions in the works, too.

[@bozobo3822]

I'd love to have seen what it could have done, but all history is full of what ifs and maybes... and this is just another.

[@terran0797]

When you said “multi processor architecture“ and said the ps3 would have that later. Didn’t many systems do this before the Jaguar and before the ps3? For instance the sega genesis which came beforehad more than one processor and the sega Saturn and 32x both came after the Jaguar. Weren’t they multi processor in this sense?

[@TheLairdsLair]

Saturn definitely, but the Sega Mega Drive isn't as it has a defined CPU that is in charge of the whole console.

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

@@TheLairdsLairthe Z80 is in charge of the music.

[@dragokills6990]

No, Atari were wrong to cancel it. It would not have beat PS1 or N64 but I think they could have succeeded in 3rd position like they had before.

[@mrt.7146]

04:33 - DATASTORM 🤩🤩🤩

[@TheLairdsLair]

Well, it's Protector: SE - but most of the same programming team apparently.

[@mrt.7146]

@@TheLairdsLair (let's try again and see if this reply doesn't get deleted): ahh, how interesting - seems the Jaguar version was based on, but heavily reworked, a Genesis port, that was ported, by the original Amiga coder Søren Grønbeck, from Datastorm 🤩

[@TheLairdsLair]

Yep, if you watch my Atari Jaguar Exclusives video you can see a bit more of it: kzbin.info/www/bejne/mZCliGx8fKqhqsU&ab_channel=TheLaird%27sLair

[@johnmogavero8156]

I would have bought Jaguar 2 if it came oout

[@baroncalamityplus]

It wouldn't have mattered. Atari's problem was the family running it. The market they knew how to sell for, early 1980s computers, no longer existed. I would have loved to seen the Jaguar II but I doubt it would have made a dent. It probably would have ended up the same fate as the NEC SuperGrafx. Only have a hand full of titles that took advantage of the hardware and not sell. It would have been a great rarity to play with though.

[@SomePeopleCallMeWulfman]

I doubt that Atari would have had the muscle to lift the necessary marketing. They were up against some heavyweights such as Sony and Nintendo, with Microsoft already lurking in the bushes. Even Sega had to throw in the towel.

[@JesusChrist-is-not-MrNice]

The guy in the middle displayed like a hotshot, but big fail.

[@dejongejohan]

Atari were right to cancel it because whatever system they would've put out, they would've f-ed up the marketing. Says a release day Atari Lynx II owner.

[@ressljs]

He mentioned $90 from a lawsuit with Sega. But in relative terms of marketing a console launch, that is NOTHING! Even if they somehow turned into marketing geniuses, they simply didn't have the resources to compete. I think you could say the same about the launch of the original Jaguar.

[@jasonkoestner4630]

Great channel I have a Vader 2600 a recapped av modded 5200 4 port with scramble battle zone zaxxon 32k the last star fighter sinister pac man the arcade game likes just like the arcade sound dimensions real sports baseball tempest 2000 donkey Kong that was ported from the 800 all the levels are there it’s better than the nes version got 7800 and jaguar with Ava doom wolf Einstein 3d tempest 2000 rayman cannon fodder brutal sports football pinball fantasy’sand just got zero 5 that game really showed what it could do they should of launched with that and maybe things would have been different

[@datassetteuser356]

I think Atari did good not releasing the Jaguar 2. They would not have had the muscle to back it up anyway moving forward. The Sega money does appear in the annual report for 1994 and is the sole reason the company did not loose money that year on the balance. The other 40 million or so they received out of the Sega deal would have burned easily within a year or less, if they meant business on the Jaguar 2. Also, who would have wanted to develop for the console if the Jaguar already could not attract devs, considering this time, any new machine was competing against Sony, Sega and Nintendo and their budgets? Not to forget that they were already understaffed in 93 and cut staff with every year. In the end, the Jaguar 2 looks great on paper, but then again, so did the Jaguar. They should have saved their money on the Jag CD as well and fully commit to cartridge games. Maybe then they've had cash left to buy strong titles like MK.

[@albertabramson3157]

I remember looking around for another console at that time (having been screwed by SEGA's 32X-CD-Saturn-Jupiter-Neptune debacle) and taking a good look at the Jaguar, a bargain at that point. I never understood why every other console maker was dropping their price, but ATARI left the Jag at $249. By the time I returned to the discount mall, Jaguar was already less than $100, and the salesman was like, "They're on death watch, at this point."

[@williamoverton7775]

if the money was wasted in liquidation then this would have been better

[@themadmoderator8465]

i think like sega when it came dreamcast they had burned all their bridges add in the crazy money sony threw at playstation brand doomed to fail. never mind when xbox arrived. Nintendo were only saved by there handhels the wii mircale. Then finally coming up with the amazing switch.

[@robertomoi2044]

I'll do the Math(s). 64 bit my arse.

[@TheLairdsLair]

You need to go back to school!

[@WWammyy]

Na they probably did it right. Their games just didn't have mass market appeal just the small passionate base. When it comes gaming consoles. Either you are Nintendo that has well established IPs that have endured over decades now. Or you like Sony and Microsoft that has a lot of third party support. Atari had neither

[@1-eye-willy]

they would have called it something else, atari never had namming conventions liike tthat, you silly mman

[@TheLairdsLair]

Rubbish. They already had the Lynx 2 and this was a backwards compatible upgrade on the original hardware, they also announced it as the Jaguar 2 and Atari never changed a name after officially announcing a system.