Is Jaguar really a 64-bit System? 

Thanks for watching! Here are some other interesting videos: Jaguar Game Drive Review: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-B1-6x9rR6qw.html Why I LOVE Atari! ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-YE7FbLzMA4Q.html MUST-SEE Unreleased Jaguar Games! ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-msc2uKVpgI8.html

208 bits!... I remember when rumours were going around that the PS2 was 256 bits here in the UK just around it’s launch, considering the Dreamcast was 128. 😲 Great review of this under appreciated gem! 💎🙂 Also, the Highlanders game for Atari Jaguar CD showed what it could do graphically, that looked like a clean non spooky version of Resident Evil. 😂 Not to mention Rayman.

Good video! I learned a lot today about 64-bit for the Atari Jaguar system! I never did understand why Atari kept called the Jaguar a 64-bit machine! Now I know! Thanks!

The Intellivision has a 16-bit architecture, yet no one asks why the games don't look like a SNES or Genesis. It is definitely a 16-bit system that "looks 8-bit". I think the difference is that Mattel never tried to use the 16-bit system aspect in their advertising; they merely showed screenshots side-by-side with a 2600 and let people come to their own conclusion. If Atari had put less effort into 64-bit marketing and more energy into creating and showing off games like Tempest 2000 or Alien vs Predator, people wouldn't mock the 64-bit claims. I'm not sure that would have made a difference in their long run success, though...

The Motorola 68K was not the only problem the Jaguar had. The software they used to make games for it was horribly bugged. Further, the Atari Falcon was what developers were forced to use when making games for the Jaguar. When all of this started the Falcon was so new it didn't have any developer tools either. Programmers had to make tools to make tools for the Jaguar...that's insane. If you want to see some real next level graphics on the Atari Jaguar...look up Skyhammer. It is a fully open 3d game that is completely texture mapped. It reminds me of a much better looking G-Police for the PlayStation. Check it out and be prepared to pick your jaw up off the floor.

So if we're going by largest chunk of data possible to process by the CPU in one go, the 64-bit PC on your desk may actually be a *512-bit* machine, if it supports the new AVX-512 instruction set (recent AMDs and premium-priced Intels do). If we're going by data bus size, your PC is a whopping *1-bit* machine. The PCIe bus uses serial links and a packet-based protocol instead of traditional parallel buses, making your computer a sort of LAN in a box. Each "lane" in PCIe can transmit or receive one bit at a time, but each bit is communicated extremely fast; at very high speeds serial is actually more reliable than parallel because it's hard to keep all the parallel lines synced. Cards may use multiple lanes, so I guess your GeForce RTX 4070 Ti is sitting on a *16-bit* data bus? Really all the bit numbers are truly all about marketing. The Jaguar has a 16/32 bit CPU. It's also a fun machine to play on or program.

Like all Atari platforms, there are still games being released for it. This is due to Hasbro's brief ownership of Atari in 1998. They publicly announced that they were officially opening up the architecture on all of Atari's home platforms (consoles and the like). So no lawsuits if people make games and peripherals. There is a company that even sells modified Atari Jaguar controllers that work with the Atari 5200.

Absolutely love the music in Battlemorph, great spot to play it on!

The Jaguar has always been the system I wanted to collect for, but unfortunately, it was during an era when I was still heavily into the SNES & Genesis stuff. I wanted so badly to invest in another Atari console, but remember, this was a time when so many great things were happening game-wise, and sadly the Jaguar sort of fell the radar for me. I did manage to snag one about 15 years ago, but it was a short relationship, and it was also in pretty bad shape. This was a great video, so much in fact, it left me wondering if I made the right choice years ago to part ways with the one I had. Nowadays, the price for 'nostalgia' has skyrocketed, but I wouldn't mind giving the Jaguar another chance. Good stuff Greg!!

Great video. Love the Jag. Atari's downfall with it was probably including the 68k. Probably could have made better Dev kits as well. As I wonder what it was truly capable of

Regarding Bubsy, Coder Andrew Seed breaks it down nicely.. At the start of the Jaguar Atari promised a lot but were unable to deliver, the GPU and DSP were cut back to half speed. The reason was that the chips could not handle the heat and could overheat and stop working. ( As informed by an ex-Atari insider ), also you only had either 2K or 2K of instructions cache in the GPU - back to the days of the ZX81. Ok originally you were able to run programs from outside the GPU's memory ( and DSP) but production machines could not. This meant that you had to have code inside the GPU to load memory from main 68000 memory. This was a pain. Also the GPU and DSP could read 64bits from main memory but internally it was 32bits - this meant that 32bits of the lovely 64bit read went into a memory address. Other problems with the Jag was the more sprites on screen took more time away from the CPUs. Bubsy ( which I wrote - mainly in 68000 - based on the Genesis control code) did run at 60 frames a second ( PAL 50 frames - not my fault 8¬) ) The Ali Baba level had a lot of small sprites per character - to save memory but crucified the game since it placed a heavy burden on processor time. But due to having 3 full screen sprites ( background , and 2 for the map - Bubsy could run behind things) I lost about 30% of processor time. Another problem I had with Bubsy was that updating the visible tiles meant a loss of 40% processor time - this varied due to the amount of none blank blocks I had to blit onto the map sprites. This was at most 72 16*16 blocks ( 256 colour). Depending upon how you needed to use the blitter it could be very fast but in most circumstances it would be slow. Finally the sound was like the ST, would had create an interrupt and feed the sound chip the values. Unlike the STE and Falcon where you could just play a buffer OK you had to create the buffer but that was in a nice fast tight loop). The reason I think most of the first games were 16bit ports was that the public knew the "characters", were comfortable and could bring in easy money. It would introduce the Jaguar then new and original games would follow - such as Iron Soldier. . But games like Tempest 2000 and Defender 2000 were still ports of arcade versions which Jeff Minter had done on the 16 bits machines. Ok he tarted them up for the Jag ( did a good job there ). Also the Alien Vs Predator game was basically Wolfenstien ( which played a fair bit at Atari HQ while finishing Dinodudes ).

Bits only meant something before consoles had various processors and subsystems of different speeds and bus sizes. Today, the best you could do is come up with what percentage of the hardware falls into each size category.

I really wish it would have got its due and sold at least a few million units so some real quality games came out and we got to see what it could do

Outstanding video and highlights that developers often determine how good the games will be. Quality third party developers are very important. People forget that Nintendo had a monopoly on them during the NES reign.

Unreleased games like Apesh*t and Conan showed what the Jag was capable of. The system is superb , theoretically. Love how the op builds it's images - bit the system has too many design fault. It has two 64/64 processors and a GPU that processes internally at 64 bit. If they had used a Hitachi CPU like the Saturn instead of the 68000 , it would have really helped them . But the price would have gone up too. Using a 68020 instead of a 68000 would have increase the price by 30 dollars

Love the video! Just purchased my first Jag a few months ago and I am really digging it! Tempest 2000 with the rotary controller mod slays!

Awesome video! I had one friend growing up who had a Jaguar and I wanted one ever since! Wished I would’ve got one when they were cheap. Although after years of waiting I finally found one at my local game store! I ran home to get a tub of all my common/doubles or stuff I had purchased over the years for just such an opportunity! I finally own one and have been excited to collect some games. I actually have some sealed jag games that I’ve been holding onto for a few years that I found at a thrift store! Recently purchased some on eBay for a decent price. I’m most excited for Raiden (huge shooter fan)! I’m definitely a Sega fanboy and don’t have much nostalgia for the older Atari consoles but have always loved the Jaguar!

The very question “is it truly 64 bit?” comes from the false mindset of what bits even mean. The media pushed bits as always meaning how good graphics are. How good graphics are in a game has never had much to do with bits. It has to do with GPU and CPU power, how many colors it can push at once, and to an extent, has greatly to do with how talented the programmers are . We’ve seen talented programmers create 2600 games that look like NES games (almost)

The Jag is without question a 64 bit machine, but this does not mean that it has to be more powerful than the newer 32 bit systems, as these have much more hardware support for 3D graphics and specialized RAM areas for video and sound generation to speed up data throughput. Marc Rosocha Eclipse (Iron Soldier 1+2)

I worked at an electronics chain over on the east coast when Jaguar launched & we sold about 10 units. We sold many more 3DO units, like 30, and when the Playstation launched, it was game over. We were told by management to throw out the Jaguar display cabinet with the Jaguar and all. That's how I got my hands on a Jaguar. But I loathed the controller & only care for Tempest, Alien v Predator, Atari Karrs & Rayman, which actually looked and played better than PS1 or Saturn. Doom was OK, but the PS1 version was the way to play the game back them as far as ports went. And Jaguar NBA Jam TE was my favorite version, but that was basically the extent of my Jaguar library. Like I said, wasn't a fan of the controller, most games were ugly as sin, N64 was better out of the gate & Playstation had what I wanted, JRPGs & the Saturn had all the 2D fighting games.

That was really informative, the Jaguar seems ambitious for the time but convoluted as well as to its design. I wonder what the potential of the Jaguar could have really been at the time, or if truly it didn't worth the effort.

Jag was capable of a 1:1 starfox 64 port? Smokes alive, they screwed us over!

What I was told by an "Atari expert" is the rumor of the jaguar being a 32-bit machine came from SeanBaby out of spite when Atari refused to give him a jaguar for free. I've never heard anyone else say this however.

Many Jag games could easily pass for N64 games and nobody doubts N64 is 64 bit. Its the cart holding both systems back. games that could pass for N64 games are Tempest 2000 Iron Soldier AvP Rayman and more.

Nice overview!! 👍 I forgot about the advert at the end where the teacher does the remedial math bit. That reminded me of the old Atari 800XL advert with Alan Alda where the kid hypes up technical detail to him, but Alan in turn reminds him to hype up the whole system's benefits - not just the raw numbers! "256 colors!" versus "it can help you draw better" is more powerful in hindsight... then again, Jaguar was just a games system... And the Jaguar ads were not wrong. It is 64-bit. Nice analogy with the 68000 being a process/coordinating manager too. The system was complex, but the right coding would have done a lot more benefit next to the competition. Didn't know Intellivision was 16bit either - wow. Thanks!

I remember reading an interview with John Carmack, doom guy, and he praised the Jaguar system a lot. If it wasn't for the fact that architecture was gimped in some areas to save the cost it would have been a much better system. Also I think Jaguar has better architecture than 3DO, as far as I remember 3do mostly have 2d and FMV games, while Jaguar has some 3d games.

If and when someone really digs deep into the system. Then it will shine!!!!!!

Using a systems full capability is always a pipedream. Even today. Most modern PC games struggle to max out the current multi core processors of today. And trying to multitask totally different components to run parallel? Even worse. That's why the Jaguar in theory is capable of much, much more. But it didn't really happen.

I was writing to say hello and I hope you are doing well buddy. Have a great day

Last generation 16-bit systems would've hang thier heads down in shame⬇️😔, if the Atari🕹🐆Jaguar would have came out with Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition with an Atari Jaguar 6 button controllers 💯%‼ 🎛🔉🎵🕹🤩📺🕹🤯🎧🎚🔊🎶

I'm looking forward too the PS6 Super Slim Series Q console, that glows in the dark, is 24,000 Bit and makes you coffee in the morning.

It's 64-bit architecture and architecture that should of had at least another 2 revisions of the chipset, according Rob Nicholson of Handmade Software, more Memory according to Peter Molyneux of Bullfrog., needed another RISC processor with a dynamic cache as the CPU, not the 68000 according to John Carmack etc etc 😂 Add to that decent development tools... Marketing such flawed hardware as 64-bit,simply raised expectations way beyond what the system was capable of.

Regarding Jaguar Sensi Soccer: The Jaguar version runs at full speed (60fps, no slow down) in 256 colour mode with 8 channel 16bit sound for the crowd. All the menus use 65535 colour mode. The controls are as in the Megadrive version (ie 3 button, shoot,

The biggest issue was the unfinished dev kits. I don't think any game really took advantage of the hardware. The only one that may have came close was AVP. People also seen to forget that the Jaguar was also meant to compete with the Snes not the Saturn and PlayStation.

I owned a jaguar and kept waiting and waiting for the quality games. They just never came. Then the PS1, Saturn and Nintendo 64 arrived and it was clear the “64bit” Jaguar was a dud, often even outdone by the SNES.

In looking back, it's interesting how the Bit Wars ended when the 128-bit Dreamcast was released. After awhile, bits stopped mattering when so many DC and PS2 games looked alike.

So I had a 128-bit system in 1997 when I got the NVIDIA RIVA 128? I didn't know my system was so advance at the time, nice! All the experts were still referring to it as a 32-bit system as it had a 32-bit CPU and a 32-bit OS, but because my system had a 128-bit memory bandwidth somewhere in it, the entire system should have been classed as a 128-bit system. This means when I got my Vega 64 in 2017, I had a 2048-bit system, whoa! So I downgraded my bits when I upgraded my GPU last year. I should have got the 2015s AMD R9 FURY X and got myself a 4096-bit system.

Atari had a lot of rival disinformation used against by Trip Hawkins and even a Nintendo executive saying it wasn't 64 but.

a machine from 1993, with an affordable price, and can run doom, wolfestein, with link? i think it was an awesome machine. And got really cool games. I love the console, but now is expensive as hell, and most of the collectors they got the machine are haters. Some years ago, when was very cheap the scene was growing, with nice demos and libraries; but now the scene is quiet thanks to the inflated prices, speculators, and collectors of garbage. Man, if you really want money, a house, a dog, a pretty wife, a car and other things, study something and look for a job. Stock bargain consoles in a container or a hobo's hole makes you a weirdo.

In a nutshell to quote mephilis the dark from sonic, ”the answer to that is yes and no” The console is a 64 bit system judging by the processors made for the system, unfortunately almost none of the games on the Jaguar utilize the processors towards they’re advantage especially compared to the n64 and even the PlayStation which both systems pushed their graphics towards the limits in most games But I really can’t blame the developers for not pushing the Jaguar towards its limits as the Jaguar is a pretty complicated system to work with Overall the system is definitely 64 bit but since most games on the jag never pushed the system to its limits it is pretty understandable why some may question this The Jaguar is definitely a system that is worth collecting for the library and it’s history

You are right on homey. That Motorola CPU was there so people wouldn’t be scared by the tom and Jerry chips and nothing else.

Atari jaguar is 16bit With a 32bit graphic bus and 32bit audio bus So is less powerful than a 32bit machine

I bought a Jag with money I earned selling raffle tickets. It was 96 n I had no prior knowledge of the system. I thought it was new. I was so dissatisfied and disappointed. The jaguar sucked then and sucked now. If u say orherwise... U are wrong and a choad.

And yet the 32-bit 3D0 looked MILES better than the Jaguar. Overcomplicated systems like the Jaguar or Saturn shoot themselves in the foot.

Same reason neo Geo claim be 24bit in USA and Saturn 64bit in Japan advertising

The Jaguar becomes a 16 bit system when people code to the 68000.

Jason Rubin (Naughty Dog) talking about the Atari Jaguar hardware, when he was developing 3DO Way Of The Warrior: "It's a decent piece of Hardware. It's not as good as they're claiming in terms of numbers. One of the game's magazines has been pushing the reports that Atari puts out. 64-bits for example, is questionable. That's like saying I have 3 Ferrari's that all go at 150 MPH, so i can drive at 450 MPH. "

Similar to the Sega CD or 3DO, which saw a relatively small percentage of their libraries emphasize full motion live actors blown out of proportion. Also similarly to the Dreamcast, which saw a relatively small percentage of its library literally overnight ported from PS1, N64 or PC (thanks WinCE). The Jaguar got a reputation based on what few games the masses actually bothered to look at for the average 15 seconds their attention span lasts. If the Jaguar isn't a 64-bit system, then the TG16/PCE isn't a 16-bit system. Therefore the PS2 is just a PS1 with a DVD player tacked on and some useless extra chips that took eight years to glean any extra power from. That said, I consider the Jaguar the ultimate Motorola 68000 game hardware. That is saying a lot considering all of the Arcade boards that used the 68k. All of the Arcade boards and PCs that did better than the Genesis/MD with the 68K used extra processors with their own memory bus in one form or another. I am recommending the kiddos learn assembly in 68k first for the same reason that the Jaguar, Saturn, and multitudes of Arcade hardware used the 68k.

As someone who was alive as a teenager in the mid-90s it was a really odd space for gaming and there was no clear direction to anything because so much technology we take for granted today was still uncharted waters back then. A lot of people, including myself, held off waiting to see what would last because we were leery if this 3D phase would die out like the FMV craze. Ultimately we see Sony won out in the end but any one of these systems could have blown up. It's easy to poke fun now but let's keep it real...the Jaguar, the 32X, the 3DO, they were all wonderful systems in their own right. It's just that Sony just so happened to invest in the right medium, at the right time, with the right price, and with the right marketing. In a lot of ways today kinda parallels back then by comparison because it's like..what's going to be the next big thing? Not much has improved from this generation and last generation other than the Switch being the first handheld/console hybrid.

Yes, kind of, and but it deserved to be treated better.

If you can put a 64bit address into it and process it, then it's a 64 bit system. Whether it's on 2 chips, 3 chips, 5 chips, makes no difference.

am I the only one person to hear the very high pitched sound of the television he use to play his games ? it's in the same frequency range as a moskito flying sound , but more higher i think

The Jaguar and Lynx are the only Atari systems I never played. Well and the new VCS if we count that.. lol

Great video man

If Atari had not taken the time to put a 68000 in, and given us ONE more revision of the GPU and DSP that fixed the prefetch bug with external jump instructions.... just one more revision might have done it, things might have been a bit different.

Jaguar is a 16 bits system because the usage back then was to consider the cpu's number of bit. Was it a good way to compare system ? Not really. It was neither a rule, this is why Atari could pretend the Jaguar is a 64 bits system. The error of Atari was that they had too comunicate on this. They also could have pretend it was a 32 bits system whithout mention it on the box. Because 32 bits was simply the next step in people's mind, nothing more. They made a mistake puting emphasis too much on the number of bit the system had. For example my video card has a 2048 bits memory bus, it would never come to my mind to say my pc is 2048 bits. Sorry for my english, I'm not a native speaker.

3:48 That voice is familiar… Didn’t realize Expedition Theme Park was a retro gaming fan!

64bit or not but it sucks as a game system

I think the bottom line is that you cannot really get a specific sense of hardware power based on the "bit-ness" number advertised. It's similar to megapixels on a camera. Sometimes 50 megapixel cameras look worse than 12 megapixel cameras. The Jaguar had 64 bit elements in its hardware, but it's software rarely looked like 4 times the power of the Genesis / SNES. Interestingly, the Sega Master system (and/or Mark III) had a VDP with a 16-bit bus; similar to the PC Engine / TG-16; but most people consider it to be an 8-bit system and the TG-16 to be a 16-bit system. The Neo Geo had a GPU with a 24-bit bus attached to it... thus SNK advertising it as a 24 bit system... which I feel is a fair label due to the Neo Geo being AT LEAST 50% more powerful than the Genesis/SNES in terms of 2D graphical performance. Again, the bottom line is that there are many factors to consider when assessing the hardware power of a system; and just throwing around bit-ness in a school yard argument is over simplified. p.s. I was one of the original owners of the Jaguar when it was first released in New York and L.A.... I was sorely disappointed due to expecting graphics that were 4 times better than 16-bit.

I wish I could play Tempest 2000 right now!

All our classic perspective that more bits means a leap in graphics is faulty and it was marketing. It happened that for a short period, jumping from 8bit era to 16bit to 32bit, there were also vast leaps in graphics hardware. If 64bit meaned anything, then N64 should be playing Elden Ring right now. Our modern PCs are x64.

Cool video I appreciate the fun facts about the Jag.

6 months later the PS1 came out at a whopping 32 bits and people didn't care what was written in the spec sheet, they just cared about what was on the screen. Game OVER!

Sega were just as bad with marketing in Japan, claiming the Saturn was 64-bits some within Sega even liked to refer to it as a 128-bit system.

The Z80 in the Sega Genesis was also used in some polygon games to help calculate the maths.

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."

So basically, it’s technically “64-bit” with all the hardware, but the real issue is how most developers aren’t taking full advantage of the hardware into either using its full capability or pushing past its limit versus Saturn, N64, and Playstation. No wonder 90% of their library lacked the charm and value.

My iphone plays old Genesis games so it's probably only a 16bit phone

"Is that Atari Jaguar 64-bit?" "Well, yes, but actually no."

Regarding some of the 16 bit ports, Coder Mike Diskett: Syndicate and theme park are both very simulation heavy games designed to run on a high end 486 (at the time) and even on PC suffer slow downs, without a major simplification of the game it was never going to run at a constant great framerate. With more time we could have made it run better, but I guess projected unit sales were so low it wasnt worth the business guys at Bullfrog have us spend more time and maybe make a loss on making the games.."

good insight I have to admit, I thought they just added the two 32 bit Tom and Jerry processors together to false call it a 64 bit system. (I can't remember if I've heard someone else say claim that was the reasoning)

Good video but the 68000 part was so cringy lol

It may be truly 64-bit but it's more on par with PS1 and Saturn. N64 just blew it away.

Do the TurboGrafx-16 next.

The only way to ever prove us that the jaguar is 64bits is to see a homebrew port of mario 64 and donkeykong 64,only then we can shove away those aging discussions whether the atari jaguar is truelly 64bit or not.

Atari Jaguar: Hahaha I'm 64 bit Nintendo 64: I believe we never met

Atari jag ads said to "Do the Math". They might as well said that it had All the Bits. The games didn't really reflect what 64 bit gaming would become. Couple of gems though. Skyhammer for one. I really liked the look of Checkered Flag but the gameplay stank.

Its a shame that the system was never full untilised.

Honestly, the engineering behind the Jaguar is awesome no doubt but it was horribly conceived. This type of stuff would plague future consoles and made porting harder and the systems harder to develop for. A big reason some of Segas flagships systems had failed from was poor developer support b/c other consoles were easier to develop on (say SNES) As far as I've ever known, most people have specified between OS or hardware when saying 'bits' when speaking hardware in gaming I look to the bus width as a 64-bit video chip today is minimalist at best and most better performing cards are going to be 256-bit etc. Only when it came down to OS, whether the CPU was 32-bit or 64 bit, et al... I think this confusion is because consumers were thinking in resolution 8-bit / 16-bit vs 32-bit (SNES in between 24-bit) so all of this together is understandably confusing for the lay.

Great stuff love me some Jaguar. Alien Vs predator is always a fav.

The Flare 2 team originally designed the architecture to run on a Z80 as a manager instead of a 68000. It's a good thing they upgraded it or else the flak that the Jaguar as a 64bit system would have bit worse.

I wonder if some neogeo games could be faithfully ported to the jaguar? Metal slug as example.

Can you explain the turbo grafx 16 and snk neo geo

I really love the overview within this video. simple to understand and no bs. Thanks Greg I appreciate your Jag information.

Great review and information. Love the humor as well.

So if I understand correctly the CPU is not 64 bit rather it's 32 bit And furthermore developers never took Advantage of the Jaguar capabilities to create great looking games. So people ended up with games that looked 16 Bit At best

Atari jaguar is still use 16 bit cpu but graphics are 32 bit + sound processor is also 32 bit. Then they marketed it as 64 bit console. That is like you have PC with rtx 2080 Ti but the cpu is Intel atom. So, Atari jaguar is 16bit+ console and the Specs is bottleneck for 3D gaming.

It is a 64-bit system but nowhere near the Nintendo 64

So at the end of the day rely on companies that get the most out of their systems

I never knew this existed until now, and I’m a 90’s kid

The Jaguar has some really interesting hardware quirks that are seldom talked about. I read a huge chunk of the technical reference manual and it seems like the designers intended for 3D games to use a mix of textured and flat polygons. The upside being that the textured polygons would be perspective correct and the flat polygons would have really smooth shading via the CRY color pallet. I think the best game to utilize these features is Battlemorph, the smooth shading on the polygons gives a appearance of a textured environment even if there isn't any and the once that are textured never warp like they would on Playstation. I especially like how when you go under water they use the smooth shading to give the environment a very dark mood. PlayStation had to rely on dithering to get such smooth shading in games like Silent Hill. So there definitely are some very distinctive hardware characteristics to the jaguar that are sadly overshadowed by the 64-bit claim.

Is the snes a 8bit system?

But then when you compare Jaguar's Doom to N64's Doom 64, then disappointment about the Jaguar continues. N64's Doom 64 make Jaguar's Doom look like 16-Bit in comparison.

Bummer you had zero5 and didn't really demonstrate it. That's also a pretty impressive game for the console

Personally I'd call it a 32/64 but whatever, it's close enough. ^_^

The answer to me is.. YES

10:47 to say "it had a 64 bit bus and the blitter was capable of moving 64 bits." Good lord.

As a low-level software and systems engineer, the “bitness” of a system is defined by two primary values: ISA word length and internal execution unit “width”. External interconnects are secondary values. On this basis the MC68k is a 32/16 CPU with 24bit memory addressing (32bit ISA, including registers, but 16bit ALU, internal data paths, etc.). An i386SX, despite being wired to a 16bit external (modified 286) data bus, was internally fully 32bit (including ALU, MMU, despite only having 24bit addressing) and is considered a fully 32bit CPU, functionally speaking. Modern AMD64 processor cores, in much the same way, are considered 64bit due to, again, having a 64bit ISA and logical addressing, even though they implement 128bit wide (or wider) internal and external data buses, and have only a subset of 64bit physical memory addressing implemented (initially 40bit, now 48bit, with a current page table format limit of 52 bits). So, in simple terms, a processor and, by extension, a system is a particularly bit width, based on ISA and execution unit width. MC68k was, functionally a 32bit CPU ISA implemented in 16bits. Thus it’s considered, practically, a 16bit CPU, much like the 80286 (which had a 16bit ISA, 16bit execution, 24bit addressing). So by this basis, we can say that the Genesis is correctly labeled a 16bit system. The PlayStation and Saturn were 32bit systems, and the Nintendo 64’s MIPS III ISA based R4300i is legitimately a 64bit processor, even if that made very little difference to overall performance (as many later systems, like the Dreamcast and XBox were far more powerful despite using nominally 32bit architectures). So what about the Jaguar? It was an MC68k powered machine and not, in any way, a 64bit system. It was an advanced 16bit machine, with a secondary (state machine) 32bit coprocessor, and fixed-function “64bit” accelerator, connected by a mix of 16, 32 and 64bit wide data paths (point to point, as it didn’t have a true 64bit common bus). From a systems architecture standpoint, this does not make it a 64bit machine, anymore than a circa 1994 Pentium PC could claim 64 bitness (despite having a 64bit data bus and fancy “128bit” fixed function 2D PCI graphics accelerator). TL;DR: Jaguar was absolutely not a 64bit machine, it was an advanced 16bit machine.

The whole debate exists because THERE IS NO SPECIFIC DEFINITION OF WHAT MAKES A SYSTEM X NUMBER OF BITS. I read that in a PC magazine back in the day. Makes sense.Otherwise we wouldn't have all these discussions about it.

Where did you learn to fly