Hi all! Sorry for the lack of uploads recently, but I was on holiday. Hope you enjoy this one. You can find a link to a site for ROMs in the description if you wanted to try any of these games. EDIT: The Jaguar aficionados tell me that the bit about the two 32-bit processors is complete bollocks, so... whoops! My bad.
It's confusing but the best explanation is that the Jaguar was 64-bit where it counted (64-bit bus, RAM and two of the graphics chips inside of the GPU (the Blitter & Object Processor) that were responsible for drawing the screen). The Turbographx as you used was a good comparison in that it used different components of different bit widths (8 & 16).
If I remember correctly the Atari Jaguar was so ahead of its time AMD took the design of the Jaguar CPU and used the design to make Jaguar based CPUs in current gen consoles including the Xbox One and PS4 in 2013, as well as mobile and desktop APUs for the PC market starting in 2011.
Object and blitter chips are 64 bit chips. The gpu is 64 bit internally. Like the atari st (sixteen thirty two ) a mc68000 is internally 32 bit. The jag is 64bit but poor quality as its early trch.
The Jaguar was a 64 bit system. The risc processors were 32 bit, the OPL and Blitter and data bus were a full 64 bits. The problem with the Jaguar was not it's bitness but it's horrible tools that were not able to take advantage of the power. The machine was ahead of it's time, like betamax... and you saw what happened there and unfortunately what usually happens when the hardware outclasses those who wished to develop on it. Atari is to blame the most for very bad handling. More effort on proper tools for development and easy porting of games would have made all the difference. Having a a system that programmers needed to code in assembler while all other systems were using C compilers was the biggest issue in my opinion. The other problem is no one knew how to run code out in the main RAM area.
An incredible disappointment the Jaguar was. While the console itself was fairly affordable, none of the retailers seemed to have but a handful of games for it. The controllers were quite odd as well. I wasn't sure if I was holding a telephone, or playing a game. Pitfall The Mayan Adventure was of the very few games worth playing on it.
Yes, I don't remember seeing more than a very small selection of Jaguar games in one shop back in the day. Haha great description of the controller, it is awful.
Deathwatch and Conan both look amazing. It looks like the system was capable of arcade-quality 2D, but the only game to take advantage of this was Rayman.
Steve Indeed! They’re the two that I like the look of most. Sadly 2D games in the West were pushed aside in favour of the in thing at the time (3D). A shame, as 2D games have aged so much better.
@@onaretrotip Yeah, that was a terrible era for graphics. I thought most 32 bit 3D looked rough even at the time. After all the refinements over the 16 bit days, suddenly graphics regressed back to a blocky distorted mess. History vindicated me, but at the time I was considered to be an out of touch dweeb for not being impressed by bad 3D.
I chatted to the Conan coder some time ago, Carlo Perconti, regarding what became of it: 'We got involved developing on the jaguar after we met some key people at one of the CES show in LasVegas (I do not recall who exactly). Lyes and I we were impressed by the concept of the GPU Jaguar, an unique list processor which could allow huge sprites to be drawn on screen and which broke the limitation of number of hardware sprites on 1 video line like We used to have back then on the SNES. So at first We decided to develop a new graphic engine based on multiple layer of sprites on PC, then through Arcade Zone We got access to one of the Jaguar Hardware and then We started to port the beginning of a “first possible” level of what We wanted to demonstrate based on a CONAN character (but really it was only to show up the engine, no license was signed yet at that time). For sure, back to that period, We got many inspiration from the Big Coin-Up Arcade titles like GoldenAxe and alike…….'
Atari made the '64-bit' claim because the Jaguar had a 64-bit bus, and well as various 64-bit processors, such as the object processor, and the blitter chip. It's still marketing speak, and clearly demonstrated the enormous flaw in the "bit" argument (I mean, the PS4 and Xbox use 64-bit hardware today... Ironically, it's called Jaguar!)
@@onaretrotip It's only relevant when it's a bottleneck on the performance. 8 bit and 16 bit were bottlenecks and that's why no console has been 16 bit since snes/megadrive. It was like clockspeeds on CPUs. Once they hit 3.0ghz clockspeeds became a poor guide to performance.
@@onaretrotip It's not largely irrelevant. It means the cpu can for instance fetch twice as much data at once. That can make the difference of 30fps and 60fps
Atari did claim specifically that the system's architecture was "64-bit" in this advertisement 4.bp.blogspot.com/-FohVu10XSsg/UkKuzU1lMJI/AAAAAAAACOs/4t1Div2mx-o/s1600/true0203.jpg And despite the jaguar having some 64-bit hardware, it's debatable if you can declare the system's architecture as 64-bits, I mean the only true cpu it has is like a faster version of the megadrive's cpu is.
It's not irrelevant from a tech point of view, but it's irrelevant from a games quality point of view. If we just limit ourselves to judging audio/visual quality, compare the Atari 2600 vs. NES. Both have 8-bit CPUs (almost the exact same CPUs actually) but the difference in AV quality between them is vast.
Probably because a lot of the released games were developers first time programing for the Jag, and the cancelled games were worked on by people who had at that point learned how to take advantage of the hardware better.
@@onaretrotip chatted to the Conan coder some time ago, Carlo Perconti, regarding what became of it: 'We got involved developing on the jaguar after we met some key people at one of the CES show in LasVegas (I do not recall who exactly). Lyes and I we were impressed by the concept of the GPU Jaguar, an unique list processor which could allow huge sprites to be drawn on screen and which broke the limitation of number of hardware sprites on 1 video line like We used to have back then on the SNES. So at first We decided to develop a new graphic engine based on multiple layer of sprites on PC, then through Arcade Zone We got access to one of the Jaguar Hardware and then We started to port the beginning of a “first possible” level of what We wanted to demonstrate based on a CONAN character (but really it was only to show up the engine, no license was signed yet at that time). For sure, back to that period, We got many inspiration from the Big Coin-Up Arcade titles like GoldenAxe and alike…….'
Starfox SNES 1993, didn't really expect more from 3D gaming than that. Jaguar's expectations were too high. I would have been more than satisfied with if these cancelled games were released, although gotta admit that Black Ice looks like it was edging on the 3D that some 1996-1998 3D PC games could do, not bad at all. Sadly the release library wasn't anything I wanted, but seeing these unreleased titles makes me feel like I definitely would have bought in.
chatted to the Conan coder some time ago, Carlo Perconti, regarding what became of it: 'We got involved developing on the jaguar after we met some key people at one of the CES show in LasVegas (I do not recall who exactly). Lyes and I we were impressed by the concept of the GPU Jaguar, an unique list processor which could allow huge sprites to be drawn on screen and which broke the limitation of number of hardware sprites on 1 video line like We used to have back then on the SNES. So at first We decided to develop a new graphic engine based on multiple layer of sprites on PC, then through Arcade Zone We got access to one of the Jaguar Hardware and then We started to port the beginning of a “first possible” level of what We wanted to demonstrate based on a CONAN character (but really it was only to show up the engine, no license was signed yet at that time). For sure, back to that period, We got many inspiration from the Big Coin-Up Arcade titles like GoldenAxe and alike…….'
Ironically the Jagar chipset was full of bugs, primarily in the pipelined instruction processing. This resulted in 3d calculations being approximately 13 times slower than they should have been. The blitter on the other hand was good. Thus really Atari should have pushed 2d games with huge sprites / graphics and downplayed 3d titles, they did the opposite... if only upper management had someone, anyone in their ranks who had the technical background to understand the console's strengths and weaknesses.
Sadly Atari's Marketing soon turned on 2D titles, wanting 3D instead, trying to have the Jaguar being seen as being able to compete with never systems like the PlayStation and Saturn. Absolute idiots 😭
Eric Falk on Tiny Toons. "The game was scrapped well into the project. The wiki page says it was due to poor quality (I actually resent that a bit), ...as I remember it funding was cancelled on the game due to poor sales of the Jaguar and the fact that the company did not want to continue to put money into this game as there were considerable production costs to get a physical game out. The company I worked for was a small animation studio that was contracted out to do the animated characters. I remember there was another company doing backgrounds and other aspects of the game. I am still in touch w/ about 3 of the other animators on the project (I think there were about 6 of us total). As far as I know everyone is still in the design business in some capacity. "
chatted to the Conan coder some time ago, Carlo Perconti, regarding what became of it: 'We got involved developing on the jaguar after we met some key people at one of the CES show in LasVegas (I do not recall who exactly). Lyes and I we were impressed by the concept of the GPU Jaguar, an unique list processor which could allow huge sprites to be drawn on screen and which broke the limitation of number of hardware sprites on 1 video line like We used to have back then on the SNES. So at first We decided to develop a new graphic engine based on multiple layer of sprites on PC, then through Arcade Zone We got access to one of the Jaguar Hardware and then We started to port the beginning of a “first possible” level of what We wanted to demonstrate based on a CONAN character (but really it was only to show up the engine, no license was signed yet at that time). For sure, back to that period, We got many inspiration from the Big Coin-Up Arcade titles like GoldenAxe and alike…….'
Conan is long one of the 'holy grails' of Jaguar collectors so it was a real shame that it never made it far; a few others that enjoy the same status is Phear (which became Tetrisphere on the N64); Zyzorryx II (made by the guys to created the excellent Super Burnout); Battlewheels 2025 (would have been a sequel to the Atari Lynx version); Legions Of The Undead (made by Rebellion with an enhanced AvP engine); AvP2; Mortal Kombat 3; Tomb Raider and AC/DC: Defenders Of Metal - among others :P
Nice video, despite the erroneous claim that Atari added (only) two of the five processors to get the number 64; the system does handle 64-bit calculations and “it is a true 64-bit system, since the data path from the DRAM to the CPU and Tom and Jerry chips is 64 bits wide.” (Next Generation No. 12. Dec 1995 pp 36-85.)
chatted to the Conan coder some time ago, Carlo Perconti, regarding what became of it: 'We got involved developing on the jaguar after we met some key people at one of the CES show in LasVegas (I do not recall who exactly). Lyes and I we were impressed by the concept of the GPU Jaguar, an unique list processor which could allow huge sprites to be drawn on screen and which broke the limitation of number of hardware sprites on 1 video line like We used to have back then on the SNES. So at first We decided to develop a new graphic engine based on multiple layer of sprites on PC, then through Arcade Zone We got access to one of the Jaguar Hardware and then We started to port the beginning of a “first possible” level of what We wanted to demonstrate based on a CONAN character (but really it was only to show up the engine, no license was signed yet at that time). For sure, back to that period, We got many inspiration from the Big Coin-Up Arcade titles like GoldenAxe and alike…….'
Another great cancelled games video Pete, wow Conan looks awesome a shame it never got finished. the one genre lacking on the jaguar a decent side scroll beat em up
DeathWatch , Conan , Dactyl Joust all would have been huge for the Jag. Oceans Apesh*t a two player game in 32000 colours was hugely promising. Atari hadn't got a clue , even now some of the most visually impressive PS4 games are 2D !!!
I know; sadly at the time the Western video game publishers were obsessed with 3D, which is why the Japanese libraries are better in hindsight and have aged well (the Saturn's 2D library for example).
Nice vid. I've only played Thea Realm Fighters ( ;) ) and I like it. The beta prototype, which was not featured in the vid, is quite playable but only features 4 characters. The alpha prototype (which is featured) is very hard to play but has more characters. Supposedly there is a prototype that is near complete but I have yet to see it. Perhaps one day it'll get released. If any of you do play the beta prototype, please play via an actual Jaguar. The software emulation makes the game play at a snails pace. Use either a repro cart or a skunk board to see how it really plays.
Thanks! And thanks for the footage, I linked to you in the description (which I guess you've already seen). Ah, thanks for the clarification with the prototypes. I always play prototypes on original hardware, I'm not really an emulation kind of guy when it comes to those things. Thanks for watching!
Great stuff Pete. I bought a Jaguar from Special Reserve back in the day and very quickly sold it to a guy in my year. What a shame it never got Conan, looks superb
That Conan game looks epic. I have a lot of love for the Jaguar. It's not nearly as bad as it was made out to be - the ports of 16 bit titles are usually of a very high standard. Ports like Doom and Wolfenstein are fantastic, and some of the original Jaguar titles, like Alien vs Predator, Tempest 2000 or Iron Soldier are absolutely brilliant. If you're a Jaguar owner, you NEED to get an RGB Scart cable, for the best picture. Retro Computer Shack on eBay makes professional quality cables, and the improvement is amazing. There's just two - well, three things I'd like to see on the Jaguar. New pro-controllers, a flashcart (CD drives are hard to get hold of and bloody expensive) and some way to run MAME.
Yeah, Conan looks stunning! Oh, if you own any console retro you need to get RGB SCART, any other cable is not doing it justice! I usually get my consoles RGB modded if they don't support it natively. I saw there's a flashcart on the way, but progress seems slow as the guy is doing it in his spare time. New controllers would be good, the existing ones are awful.
Googled for new Atari Pro controllers last night. Seems to projects are on the go. One is a reproduction of the original Pro Controller (minus the Atari logo) and the other is by the guy who built the Jaguar/Jaguar CD combo machine (which does look amazing). It's a completely new design, which incorporates a spinner for Tempest 2000 as a ring AROUND the d-pad, and two analog sticks, along with the rest of the controls. How feasible that one is, I dunno.
Mame would be tough on the Jaguar. It could certainly run a lot of the late 70's up to a few of the early 80's games as an emulator mode but beyond that would be asking a bit much of the ol' black cat.
The Jaguar has a kick-ass library of homebrew titles that can be bought from AtariAge, including Escape 2048, Rebootroids, and a plethora of Atari ST ports approved by the original developers.
Awesome video! I really loved Black Ice/White Noise, wish I could play this. There are never too many Blade Runner-isque games IMO :) I'm hoping you'll do a follow-up with more canceled Jaguar/Jaguar CD games, would love to learn more. I always loved the Jaguar and finally bought one second-hand a few years ago, something I rarely do. Hover Striker and Iron Soldier 1 are the games I bought it for.
I never liked the Jaguar myself (the controller looked horrific) but some of these games I would loved to have played on some system (the Conan one specifically, love me some beat em up action!)
Phase Zero actually looks pretty cool! Is the ground voxel-rendered? It seems to load so smoothly for being 3D on Jaguar... looks like they've built a good engine despite the obvious pixelation
A lot of so called "voxel" games actually used heightmaps (Outcast, Comanche etc.) Phase Zero also has heightmaps. For a voxel game take a look at Blade Runner for PC
Cool. I've always wondered what the Jaguar could do when it was pushed and you can see some of that in here. It's obvious the downfall was probably more due to bad management decisions and PR as they could have come up with a library of updated 16 bit titles rather than taking on the 32bit machines. More good work on your part!
I'm not a big Jag defender, but the claim that the 64-bits comes from adding up chips is wrong. It comes from the fact that some parts of the Jag were truly 64-bit. The RAM bus is 64-bits wide. The GPU/Tom also has a 64-bit bus and can perform some 64-bit operations (namely those involving the blitter). So, it's 64-bit in a few places and most modern designs are hybrids of some sort. That doesn't mean it's fast. Remember that both the NES, and the Fairchild Channel F are 8-bit designs, yet the Channel F has only a fraction of the power. In other words, bits are only part of the story.
Is it just me or do many of the 3D games on Jag-WIRE (lol) look really dark & colourless? It's a shame a lot of 2D games were getting dismissed to focus on the 3D stuff but looking at it from a back then perspective, I guess that is what everyone was wanting, it was the future afterall lol. Conan & Death Watch look like they would have been great games. :)
The Jaguar is my main system, but the library is limited to a very few absolute classics, some solid 16-bit conversions (mostly from the Amiga), and a lot of absolute dog's dinners! Conan looked fantastic.
I have in my collection a repro of the incomplete prototype for the Jaguar "Arena Football '95." It was developed by V-Real Interactive. It's in a standard Jaguar cartridge w/color label. No manual or box.
It's cool, how you can contact people who were in these games, animes or live-action movies, whom you wouldn't have had a chance to contact at that time, thanks to the internet and the birth of social media. I actually added Sonya (MK II or III I think) at Twitter and she replied and liked, if I can remember:-) Truly everything is in God's perfect time- there's always hope but patience is a virtue (I guess between the tweet and MK's release, that's about more than 23+ years. God bless, Proverbs 31
I always wanted one of these systems when I was a kid. but looking back I probably made the right choice sticking to Nintendo products. better overall libraries of great games.
As much I don't know much everything about the Jaguar and game I only know games that was cancelled are Mortal Kombat 3, Batman Forever Arcade game, Demolition Man. Those the games I only know about all I heard and remember that people staying Jaguar was commercial failure and pretty sure it has like 15 or 20 great games on there. So that's it! That's the only thing I heard about from it
The Jaguar with the CD add-on and Pro 6 button controller was actually pretty decent, and should of launched like that (without the retarded phone keypad).
@@onaretrotipthe concept was sound enough, Atari wanted more complex simulation titles converted from the PC to Jaguar.. TFX, Falcon, Gunship 2000 etc and these required a lot of keyboard commands. A numeric keyboard would make things far easier.
The world is missing something without Dactyl joust. I wonder If that could have been a take off on the old Joust games where you pilot a flying ostrich?
@@onaretrotip slight correction, Scott Stilphen had the documents from PROBE software where they talk of assigning a coder, who did PC MK, game would be converted from PS MK III Code. Curt Vendel etc have docs showing payments.. Faran T has talked of some screens being done for milestone payments etc
Am glad they were cancled as they wouldn’t had make much sense,most of them were just 16bit games anyway,whereas the focus was on 3D games,because in the mid-90’s everybody wanted to have their favorite game translated into 3D. And the jaguar’s 2 32bit cpu chips can run in paralell together as a 64bit,and 3D can be done trough software if those gpu chips can’t do that, so there was a way to get 3D on the jaguar if they wanted it,but all the fear of losing money for making games for it hampered it,ouch.
HMS said they had considered doing a Jag CD version of Kasumi Ninja, but it would of only offered longer loading times, more characters and backgrounds
AFAIK, the "24-Bit" NEO-GEO system was the only system marketed by adding the "bits" of two chips together (16-bit 68000+8-bit Z80). The PC Engine was not marketed as a 16-bit system until given the TurboGrafx-16 name for Western release, and this was not because it had two 8-bit chips but because it had a 16-bit graphics processor (superior to the one in the "true" 16-bit Megadrive/Genesis) in addition to an 8-bit CPU. If Atari had added the bits of the Jaguar's 16-bit 68000 and two 32-bit RISC chips, the Jaguar would have been called an 80-bit system. The 64-bit designation instead comes from the main system bus being 64-bits wide.
I think the Jaguar would have worked if Sega had sold the system, and were able to make it backwards compatible with the Genesis/MegaDrive. It would have been cool if they made a 3d version of Golden Axe Warrior.
@@onaretrotip it was originally designed by a small British outfit called Flare Technologies, but I was referring to the archetecture of the system itself.
Several years after the dust settled, I came to the conclusion that the Jaguar's main problem wasn't hardware (although there were issues) but that it was sold by a company that didn't have adequate to launch a system. First of all, the system was delayed a few times, which could probably be traced back to Atari's financial situation. Some of the games showed that the Jag could run games that would absolutely smoke the 16 bit systems, and at least not be totally embarrassed when compared to PS and Saturn. But while other consoles were getting big budget games, the Jaguar titles were mostly from no-name developers with only a handful of people working on each one. If the same hardware had been marketed by a company with an actually budget and recognizable IP (another of Atari's major weaknesses), I think it could have been a success.
Never actually played on a Jaguar, but some of it's games look very decent. Same as that Conan game. Shamed it got canned as it did looked very promising.
@@onaretrotip it looked superb, sound was the problem as they used the DSP to unpack all the compressed graphics data into the Jaguar RAM I believe I'm no tech head 😂
That Conan game sure has some chunky sprites. never played a Jaguar. Should probably just pinch my mate's one when he's not looking. or ask him if I can borrow it maybe. He has Kasumi Ninja which I'm pretty sure is terrible... so I need to play it.
Just want to add as a fact and you can research this Atari was not in any financial problems as described by yourself in the black ice white noise section in fact Atari was good at one thing and that was suing people they made millions of Sega if you look into this you will see Atari was not at all in trouble moneywise
@@onaretrotip The few million Atari had in reserve were peanuts compared to what Sega had spent marketing the Saturn and a speck of dust compared to what Sony had spent on advertising the PlayStation
@@onaretrotip Just to bring things into perspective, Trip Hawkins of 3DO said to be a competitor in the games industry at the time, you needed at least $500 Million in capital. A pie in the sky figure for Atari Sega spent $ 10 million on advertising for the 32X alone. When developing the N64, Nintendo had $3.2 Billion in the bank
@@onaretrotipSam Tramiel publicly stated they only had $50 million in the bank when they were handling the Jaguar, that's pityful and nowhere near enough to sustain a console launch.
I did enjoy playing a few Jaguar games like Zool 2 and i could've played Atari Karts(i couldn't play it because of emulation issues)but the game that i would've liked to play the most is Conan. also gotta love that Raiden music in the background.
I liked the original Zool on the Amiga, but not played Zool 2 on Jaguar. Me too, Conan looks fantastic, and right up my street. Yeah, got to love Raiden's music!
The Amiga version of Zool 2 actually has a music track that is absent from the Atari Jaguar Version, but that aside the Jaguar Zool 2 is better, just make sure to play it with the 99 lives code because that game can be VERY unfair difficulty wise and it has NO continues. i guess Conan would've been another french gaming gem since french devs are usually great at making games, especially in the 90's. i always liked the fact that the Jaguar version of Raiden had some exclusive tracks.
Hey onaretrotip, you want to know one of the craziest bizarre about a cancelled Jaguar game(s) that was considered for it? Believe it or not(no joke) a Jaguar version of Phantasy Star II. I shall tell you right here: In October 1993, Atari Corporation filed a lawsuit against Sega for an alleged infringement of a patent originally created by Atari Corp. in the 1980s, with the former seeking a preliminary injunction to stop manufacturing, usage and sales of hardware and software for both Sega Genesis(Mega-Drive in the rest of the world's case) and Game Gear. On September 28, 1994, both parties reached a settlement in which it involved a cross-licensing agreement to publish up to five titles each year across their systems until 2001. Phantasy Star II was one of the first five titles approved from the deal by Sega in order to be converted for the Atari Jaguar, but it was never released due to Atari discontinuing it after it failed in the market!
Another great video. Death Watch and Conan looknbrilliant. The MK clone is also interesting, looks almost like its using the same engine and movesets as MK2.
Thanks, Samuel! Yeah, I'd agree that Deathwatch and Conan look the best. What a shame that they wanted to focus on 3D, when those 2D games look so beautiful. Yes, Thea Realm Fighters looks so similar to MK2, in several aspects.
NEC didn't "combine" two 8-bit chips and call it 16-bit. They referred to the 16-bit graphics chip as their qualifier. You're comparing apples to oranges.
These games look Mondo, if the Jaguar had a bunch of games like this it and released properly in the UK it would have been a mega hit. Had one in the late 90s, Atari karts alien and tempest were my favourite games I had!! Conan and dactyl joust look amazing and way better than most of the cruddy unimpressive games like brutal sports and all the other shite 16 bit ports
Atari cancelling games for the jaguar? It sounds like by the time of the jaguar atari was taken over by people who hatted it and deliberately wanted the company and its system to fail.
@@onaretrotip I was given concept documents years which I passed onto Atarimania. There's nothing to show actual game wise as it never progressed far enough.
I got a Jaguar in 1994 for three reasons- Doom, AVP, and Tempest. I had a Sega Genesis/Sega CD, SNES, and 3DO at the time. I was disappointed with Doom for both the 3DO and Jaguar (the Snes... no). My parents listened to me one last time and bought me a 32X in late 1994...and that version of Doom was less than as well. Finally, I built a 486DX2 and was able to play the original Doom in all of its glory. I wanted Doom on a big TV...ot did not happen until I bought with my own money the PSX and Saturn. The question I have- Why did they release a CD Rom attachment for the Jaguar?
Glad you got to play the DOS version of Doom in the end, as that's by far the best. Luckily that was the one I played as a kid. God knows why the made a CD add-on for the Jaguar. A lot of companies made some very poor hardware choices in the 90s.
Wrong. The Turbo Graphx had a real 16 bit graphics chip with an 8 bit cpu. The Jaguar had two 32 bit chips and a 64 bit blitter but that did not make it 64 bit. But the Turbo graphx did really have a 16 bit graphics chip and ran on an 8 bit cpu.
The Blitter and the OPL are full blown 64 bit monsters. The CPU is not where the 64 bits were needed. The Data Bus is a full 64 bits. No claim was ever made by Atari that CPU's were 64 bits. It is a 64 bit interactive multimedia SYSTEM..... the key word is SYSTEM. The power is in the Blitter and the OPL and the data bus, all of which are 64 bits wide and particularly underused in most Jaguar games. The Jaguar was rightfully called a 64 bit SYSTEM.
@@onaretrotip A more polite answer would be that John M.(hardware designer), Jez San, Rob Nicholson and others from the industry had explained Jaguar was 64 bit architecture and 64 bit where 'needed '. This allowed Atari to market the Jaguar as a 64 bit system. Sega got away with marketing the Dreamcast as a 128 bit system on similar grounds Sam Tramiel called it 64 bit architecture, saying Trip Hawkins tried to screw them, there were no 2 ways about it,whilst Jaguar had 16 and 32 bit architecture, it was a 64-bit system, no doubt about it
@@onaretrotipThat Jez San quote in full.. Jez San, Argonaut, who were working on the cancelled Jag CD version of Creature Shock: "A true 64 bit chip would have a 64 bit ALU and 64 bit registers. The Jaguar does not. Simply having two 32 bit chips does not constitute a 64 bit cpu. Having a 64 bit databus does technically allow you to call it a 64 bit system if you must, but 64 bit cpus? no way."
Filip Martinez It seems that’s not strictly true, as the Jaguar did have some 64-bit stuff going on inside, but at the end of the day it’s all bollocks anyway isn’t it!
To resume: The Atari Jaguar gaming console from the second half of the 1990's, is actually a well-designed, pretty decent hardware piece of domestic entertainment technology. Meaning that the Atari console R&D engineers; were prob the only ones, that were doing their supposed tasked job; back the 1990's. The problem then, was that the Atari company had already lost some of its best game developers, probably because its department of gaming software R&D was being treated amateurishly, by the Atari's commercial department. Which meant that, most released gamed for the AtJag, lacked a lot of gameplay testing and its debugging. The AtJag wasn't that hard to program good stuff for it. But, it required a professional approach, in order to make it work, for the final consumer and therefore, for the gaming retailers as well. When I was about 15 years old; I saw two brand new AtJag, inside a domestic tech stuff local store. And after that, I only once saw, a shelf with around 20 different way too expensive, gaming cartridge boxes, for the AtJag. Meaning that it was just a bad deal for the costumer, to have to pay a minimum of $75, for a chosen game, that would feel quite unsorted, specially regarding its gameplay. And those were the 1990's for you there; with sometimes a total laziness from those who could and should have done a difference for better. Ameanwhile: most of the rest who were wise, would embark on an anti-struggling enterprise, just to be able to get by, without missing too much of what was decent to get, during those days.
This information didn't age well, as we all know now that the Jaguar did indeed process information and data via it's 64-Bit data bus. So regardless of the chips which it had two 64-bit and two 32-bit and one 16-bit chip(s) it would still indeed run information at 64-Bits. So in technical terms it was run programs and data at 64-bits. only other consoles bragged about the bits of the chips and not the data bus or processing information capabilities. For instance a good example is the Intellivision which had 8-bit chips but also had a 16-bit data bus which it used to produce largely better visuals than the other 8-bit consoles prior to the NES.
Not this silly “the Jaguar is just two 32 bit processors running in parallel” bit again. Do any of you guys do research? While you can debate how powerful it is or isn’t, the Jaguar had five processors, not two ...
DracIsBack most youtubers take other mis-informed youtubers opinion as facts. The worst part is when they only have 5-6 of the worst games and do a system review.
Todd Jameson The power of a console is largely irrelevant, it’s the games and someone’s personal enjoyment of it that counts. In the retro community we love and respect anyone’s passion for gaming, whatever the system. Arguing over the power of consoles is playground behaviour.
