This Company was DISHONEST About Their Console
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- Опубликовано: 11 июн 2024
- When Nintendo joined the home console market, Atari would never be able to beat them. The Atari 7800 lost to the NES. Their handheld console, the Lynx, would lose to the Game Boy. But Atari would try one more time against 16-Bit and 32-Bit consoles.
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History of the Jaguar:
www.atariage.com/Jaguar/histo...
More on the Atari Panther:
web.archive.org/web/200411210...
Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:49 Atari 5200
1:48 Atari 7800 & Lynx
3:06 Development of Jaguar
3:53 Release
4:35 Hardware
5:39 Cybermorph
6:21 Trevor McFur & Bubsy
7:24 Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure
8:21 Checkered Flag
9:23 Atari Karts and more
10:30 Hardware Issues
11:23 Third Party Support
12:16 Saturn and Playstation
12:56 Decline
14:06 Conclusion
14:28 Outtro
Special thanks to the following users from pexels.com for the stock footage:
84LENS, 霍天赐, A frame in motion, Ahmet Akpolat, Andrew Hanson, Anna Hinckel, Anvar Tushakov, Artem Podrez, Caleb Oquendo, Cottonbro, Cristian Dina, Curtis Adams, DAV Grup 1, David McBee, Distill, Drones Scot, Edward Jenner, EKATERINA BOLOVTSOVA, Ekrulila, Evgenia Kirpichnikova, Free Videos, George Morina, Glen McBride, Hirsh Philippe, Jack Sparrow, Joseph Redfield, Kampus Production, Kamrul Chowdhury, Karolina Grabowska, Kelly, Kindel Media, Ksenia Chernaya, MART PRODUCTION, Mikhail Nilov, Miguel Á. Padriñán, Mike B, Monstera, Nazim Zafri, Nicole Michalou, Pavel Danilyuk, Pete Wales, pickarick, Pixabay, Polina Tankilevitch, Pressmaster, RDNE Stock project, Ricky Esquivel, RODNAE Productions, Ron Lach, Ruvim Miksanskiy, Sora Shimazaki, Steve B, Thirdman,Tiger Lily, Tima Miroshnichenko, Tom Fisk, Tony Schnagl, Vlada Karpovich, Yan Krukov, Yaroslav Shuraev
Special thanks to streambeats.com for the music used in this video.
#atari #atarijaguar #retrogaming 
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Most of your information on the jag seems to be wrong, the jaguar have 2 megs of ram not rom like you say. Carts can be 1/2 or 4 megs of rom. Next you mention that tom and jerry are 32 bit and this add up to 64. That is wrong also, maybe before doing a video you could take 5 minutes to read on wikipedia and don't look like a fool later.
Yes and it’s not the first time. I have mentioned that in almost all his last videos it has been plenty facts errors that as you say could easily be checked
@@litjellyfishI wrote elsewhere I’ve never made it through a pojr video without finding errors. He’s a poseur not a true enthusiast/expert. It’s why I won’t subscribe or support him.
@@datacipher seems so. And I understand you.
Also consistently pronouncing Jaguar as "Jagwire"
Try to make 64 bits by chaining together 8 NES's !!!!
They didn't call it 64-bit because the Tom & Jerry chips added up to 64 (32+32).
They called it 64-bit for 2 reasons:
1) the memory bus was 64-bit
2) The Tom chip while containing a 32-bit RISC architecture contained a 64-bit object processor/video processor, a 64-bit blitter, and had the controller for the 64-bit memory bus
This is sort of, but not completely, similar to how the Turbografx-16 technically was an 8-bit cpu with a 16-bit video processing capabilities, and so they called it 16-bit.
Through out the 80s and 90s this sort of wishy-washy nature of bits was common. Chips consisting having mis-mashes of bits from the bus to the register size and everywhere. The Motorola 68K through out its various versions would have 32-bit instruction set, but 16 bit data bus and sometimes 24-bit address bus. Motorola even dubbed it a 16/32-bit processor. Later versions would of course expand it upto the full 32-bit, but it mish-mashed around over the years before then.
Case in point the N64 used a variant of the MIPS R4200 called the R4300i which trimmed the bus down to 32-bit to make it more affordable to produce. And most games on the N64 actually performed all of their math in 32-bit rather than 64-bit since it was faster than doing it in 64-bit (the bus was only 32-bit afterall, so it required 2 reads to get a full 64-bit value).
Though I will stand by the idea that the N64 has more right to call itself 64-bit since it's a 64-bit processor with its bus trimmed down (it was 64 first and foremost). Where as the Tom chip is a 32-bit RISC architecture with some 64-bit features added on.
But in the end... its marketing. It's not like Blast Processing on the Genny meant anything really. Yes, the marketing term was drawn from a comment made by Marty Franz in regards to the faster DMA controller... but really... it meant nothing.
I always get confused by that... what was that 32 bit bus? Was it an internal one? Between the CPU and RCP? Both? The memory bus was much narrower IIRC, but it also operated in a very high frequency. Developing the memory controller on that must have been a real pain.
@@gcolombelliRamBus was a separate company without a fab, but with the claim: “We know how to make better memory (including the controller)”. No one was forced to develop this memory controller. Simple SDRAM was used by Sony and Sega. AtariJaguar used even simpler DRAM Lila Atari 8bit .
This is also true of the 65c816 in the SNES. It supports 16 bit registers inside the CPU but only has an 8 bit data bus
You nailed it. It’s all marketing. Bigger number is better. At least in the minds of marketers trying to sell to the moms, dads and grandparents.
Same applys to pcc always 32bit until x64 but many areas of the pc and gpu and cpu were multitudes of 32 and even 128 256 and 512 bit but the pc was always referred to as 32bit. Today all computers consoles phones etc have parts varying from 16 to 512 bit
Love your channel but this video has so many issues. For one the 64 bit on the Jaguar comes from not 32 + 32 bit equals 64 bit as you say, but from the 64 bit data bus, 64 bit object processor that displays all data to the screen, and 64 bit Blitter processor. The Jaguar is massively more powerful than the SNES and Genesis, as shown in a recent demo of Quake. The Jaguar could have been much more powerful with some hardware tweaks, but the issue with games was many developers just used the 68K CPU for simple 16 bit ports and never pushed the system. Fact is the Jaguar is more 64 bit than the SNES is 16 bit.
Yeah I was gonna say, the SNES processor is weak and it’s more akin to the PCE is it not in that the graphics are 16-bit but it has other factors going against it.
End of the day, they all used the “bit” thing as a big marketing campaign even though most people didn’t understand it at all. Modern consoles are 64-bit but that hasn’t stopped claims that older consoles were “128 bit” or whatever.
We're all saying the same thing lol. I just said that in my comment. The Jaguar is kind of more powerful than the PSX as the PSX has a 32Mhz cpu and the Jaguar is 26Mhz with similar MIPS performance. Just less advanced 3D acceleration. Definitely a console that I would have loved to see do well, in retrospect it had so much potential but it was released with annoying hardware bugs.
A lot of data buses in modern hardware are wider than even 128 bits. The PlayStation 5 has a 256 bit data bus for its GDDR6 memory for example. The RTX 4090 has a 384 bit wide data bus.
PC engine and genesis processors destroys the Snes processor. Snes had the slowest processor at the time
I remember from another video that Jaguar had a serious hardware bug, and the programmers mostly stuck with what the 68000 could do instead of pushing Tom and Jerry. Not only because it was hard to program for, but mostly because even if you jumped over that hurdle, the system still wouldn't deliver.
"I feel like I'm driving in Upstate New York" LOL.
Really? Well, I'm from Utica and I've never heard anyone use the phrase 'steamed hams'.
@@Rouxenator Love the Simpsons reference. You want your axels rearranged tour ithica.
Oh, not in Utica, it's an Albany expression.
Haha love it.
The main issue with the jag was it was too hard to program for...so most devs just used the moto 68000 to program their games...thats why they all look 16bit cuz the 68000 was the same cpu as the genesis.
It was not difficult to code, they simply did not finish the SDK and documentation in time.
The 68k is also in many ways 32-bit CPU.
The bit-wars mean very little in reality.
The Intellivision has a 16-bit CPU yet came out in 1979, for example.
From what I remember the Atari Jaguar had SDK based around an Atari TT. Not sure if later SDK was PC based.
The Jaguar also had serious hardware bugs that prevented developers from taking full advantage of the Tom and Jerry chips, crippled their performance and made them way harder to use reliably than it would have been without the bugs. The lack of a decent SDK also didn't do it any favors. Rushing the design and validation phases of new hardware can result in major, crippling bugs like this. Atari was already in terrible financial shape before this, they took huge risks, cut too many corners trying to save time and money, and it backfired big time.
@@mattl_ Yeah, and new PCs of the time were running 32-bit 386 or 486 CPUs, yet you don't see that much difference between a VGA side-scroller and one on the consoles of the era.
Jag wire? Jag-WAR. :)
Yeah wasn't totally sure the right way to pronounce it, so I just went with the way I usually say it lol.
Jag? YOU are!
That's just how we say it here in the States, get over it lol
US or UK pronunciation would be fine. But wire? Jags had nothing to do with electricity. This is like nails on a chalkboard. Jaguar is hardly an uncommon word, and a simple Google search can give you pronunciation of any word.
@@pojr scientists have recently determined no two people on earth have ever said "Atari Jaguar" the same way.
It’s amazing how few it sold. People may have been Nintendo and sega obsessed by then, but you’d still think the Atari name and marketing campaign would’ve gotten it over a million sales or so
Pojr, you have to do the MATH !
Indeed lol
Yeah, 32+32=64. It's really simple.
@@UltimatePerfectionActually this is a wrong misinformation. Atari Jaguar does have some parts of the hardware 64 bit. And has a 64 bit data bus.
If Atari had simply added 32 bit+32 bit processor together to get 64 bits. That still leaves out the 68000 16 bit processor. The two 32 bit Tom and Jerry, plus 16 bit 68000 would together be 80 bit. Was the Atari Jaguar fully 64 bit no it was not, but did it feature some 64 bit technology yes it most definitely did. It also had some bugs in the hardware, that reduced its potential performance. Atari Jaguar was mainly a 2D powerhouse that could do some 3D.
@@peterpereira3653 🤓
@@peterpereira3653 Moreso size of the bus is what matters most when talking about bit count.
The Jaguar actually has two 32-bit CPU's, one 64-bit Object Processor, one 64-bit Blitter, and one 16-bit 68000, so if Atari wanted to "add up the processors to get 64-bits" wouldn't they have added them all together to get 32 + 32 + 64 + 64 + 16 = 208 bits? Why would they only add 2/5 of the CPUs in that marketing? Face facts, the console had 64-bit wide RAM which could be accessed 64-bits at a time with The GPU, the Blitter, and the Object Processor. Can we put this "32+32=64" thing to rest after all these years?
I think I'm going to stop watching Pojr. There are too many times where he puts out inaccurate or missing info in videos.
If a 64- bit graphics pipeline driven by two 32-bit RISC processors isn't 64 bits then how wide is it? Developers at the time and after the failure of the console have described it as being 64-bit.
You explained this much better than i could! Just scrolled down to check if anyone called him out on this. The console was actually a brilliant piece of engineering
So my PC is 4096 bit system because the GPU has a 4096-bit wide bus? Cool. I mean Microsoft, Apple, Intel, AMD, and more professional companies consider modern day systems to be 64-bit based on a different set of criteria to you, but I imagine @USWaterRockets your expertise on this matter are superior to theirs.
Oh and the guy (Rich Whitehouse) who wrote the emulator for the Atari 50th Anniversary (BugPEMu) stated he doesn't believe it is a 64-bit system, someone with a bit more expertise on the subject than you.
Atari desperately needed to move away from sequels to arcade/2600 games that had little depth to them. What original titles they did come up with just had no appeal compared to what Sega/Nintendo were putting out at the time. Hindsight is 20/20 but it should have been obvious to them that the games they were putting out just did not have the same staying power as games from other consoles. Trevor McFur for example was just a bad game and should not have been one of the first impressions people had of the system, especially with Gradius 3 on the SNES as a direct comparison.
While the Jaguar only had 63 games (that's counting the 13 Jaguar CD games as well), there were 15 good games the system did received between those bunch, those are Tempest 2000, Defender 2000, Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, Rayman, Raiden, Atari Kart, Super Burnout, Dragon's Lair, Primal Rage, Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure, NBA Jam Tournament Edition, Syndicate, Flashback, and AVP. At one point the Jaguar was also plan to receive more ports of hit games (license and non-license) including Mortal Kombat 3, Revolution X, Batman Forever (a port of the boring Sega Genesis and Super NES game, not the more exciting Arcade, Sega Saturn, and PS1 version), Cool Spot, Out of this World, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (a Jaguar CD port of the Sega CD FMV game), and a Madden NFL game but all of those were canned once Atari stopped supporting the console and its CD add-on. I also heard that Sega was gonna port some of their games to the Jaguar, they waited for Atari's approval but Atari never approved of anything so nothing was ever done and no Sega games were ever brought to the Jaguar.
Yeah true. I didn't consider the CD games. And there's quite a few games I wish I talked about.
That Sega thing was a weird legal case between Atari and Sega where Atari ended up winning the license to publish a handful of titles. I think it was 80s arcade titles like outrun, altered beast or something. Atari would have had to develop themselves kinda like the Sega games on pc engine. They just ran out of money to make them after paying the lawyers or something. Don’t know the exact happenings, but Sega didn’t want to publish on that console. There are videos about it
@@sloppynyuszi I don't think Atari would've been able to do that. There was NO WAY that was gonna happen.
@@sloppynyuszi I can't blame them. There's no way a Japanese developer was going to risk caught dead developing (or even allowing) games in a console like the Jaguar.
Correction: GCC made the Atari 7800 during the Warner Era (just before the split). Jack Tramiel did however have a dispute with Warner over who should pay GCC for their work on the 7800 with Jack reimbursing them (GCC) at the end of the day
You're right, my bad. I sort of glossed over the 7800 without elaborating or anything.
I've also heard Tramiel get blamed for cheaping out with the 7800's sound. But, apparently GCC just designed it that way for 2600 compatibility, and the idea was that games could just get extra chips as necessary. In fairness that's what happened with the Famicom/NES. But... they still should have put the pokey in the console.
Atari did not "lie" about the Jaguar being "64-bit". If they had said "The Atari Jaguar's CPU is 64-Bit", well then that would be a lie. They never "added 32+32" to get to their advertising conclusion. That is not how it was advertised. It was simply advertised as "64-Bit". And that was true based on the fact that certain aspects such as the data but and object processor were 64-bit. The same concept goes for the Turbografx 16. That console has a 16-bit graphics processor, although the CPU was 8-bit. Again we see what was done here. Some areas are 64-bit with the Jaguar and some 16-bit with the Turbografx. That allowed them to advertise these highlights. Advertising is no different today. It's not like companies are going to focus on the worst parts of their products. They focus on the best parts and advertise them. The areas that were 64-Bit on the Jaguar were what were advertised. And again I will reiterate they never said that the CPU was 64-bit.
As for the Jaguar, it was released to compete at the time with the Genesis, SNES and 3DO. It had vastly more power than these consoles but unfortunately we did not see it very much (although I will say I am still amazed to this day with Zero 5 and some other titles) because developers chose to take the easy route of creating games only utilizing the 68000 CPU that was onboard and meant to be used for simpler processes.
And the Lynx hardware by the way was far superior to any handheld on the market for years. I think the problem was the poor battery life that really held it back, and of course the stranglehold Nintendo had on the market at the time.
SNES : F-zero , and all the parallax backgrounds of donkey Kong country were not matched by Jaguar. Show me need for speed on Jaguar.
@ArneChristianRosenfeldt Really? "This game didn't come out for that system, so it must be incapable of running it!" The Jag, when properly coded for, can definitely outdo anything the SNES could. The problem was all the great devs were not working with Atari. Atari, and this was an historical issue with them always, could put out awesome hardware, but were always stingy with their documentation. As if they wanted the first party games to be superior to third party games. And this, ultimately, ruined their chances, time and time again. Outside of their computer ranges, which had massive 3rd party support, and the 2600, which literally caused the video game crash, they have had terrible a 3rd party library. They were not big enough in the mid 90s to be able to fund the entire line of games for the Jaguar, and that is what lead to the demise of the Tramiel era. The hardware itself was quite fine for that little era inbetween 2d and 3d gaming.
Gameboys were less than $100. Thats why they dominated. Within the budget for most children and their parents.
@@ngantnier Price is always a factor, sure. But, at the same time, people will spend more for better hardware in general. The Wii was tons of fun, but there were many people who had purchased a PS3 for so much more. Why? Well, it was way more powerful. The Lynx was way more powerful. But, it was a portable with a five hour life on six AA batteries. Not good versus a Gameboy with a few weeks life on two AA batteries.
I know as a parent that buying batteries for your kids toys is a costly PITA. Imagine having to buy six AA batteries potentially daily. You'd pay the cost of Lynx a month if not more.
Thankfully nowadays with modern screens you can get way more life out of the batteries. Me personally however, I just pay it plugged into AC at home :)
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt Just because the Jaguar went unrealized does not mean that it did not have superior horsepower to the SNES. Some games (although few as again it went unrealized) show that. Show me a game on the SNES with a soundtrack like Tempest 2000. Show me a SNES game that runs so fluidly with polygons as Zero 5 (and please don't say Star Fox...its great no doubt, but not on the same level). We didn't see much unfortunately when it came to the Jaguar as the game developers took the quick route using the hardware (using the 68000 only) so we ended up with a lot of games that of course looked like 16-bit titles. But, the horsepower is there no question and is visible and audible from a few games that actually used the hardware as intended.
We need a USB Jaguar controller for the emulation scene!!!!!
I've had this same idea, I thought maybe an Xbox 360 controller with the text pad but that doesn't work on Windows...
There have been adapters for ages to use the Jag Controllers on USB. And they are currenly selling Jaguar Pro controller clones.
9:03 "the graphics are very grey and depressing. I feel like I'm driving in upstate New York". Spoken like someone who's never driven in upstate NY! I lived there for 40 years. They have some of the most scenic roads in the country. In fact, Rt. 97 was extolled "the most beautiful highway in the east". You should really check out some videos on it. The mountains, lakes, rivers, and farm land looks very nice. This is especially true when the leaves are starting to turn, in the fall. You won't find more gorgeous colors of foliage in the entire country.
Cybermorph was really special back then, first 3d sandbox game on consoles ever.
It's a cool idea. Not my favorite, but I respect it.
Personally I liked Cybermorph and is one of the Atari Jaguar games I beat. I also liked Hover Strike which I played lots of hours on. But yes I don't think those two games.Were ever going to appeal to majority of Atari Jaguar owners.
I honestly thought it looked garbage when I first saw it, and it absolutely hasn't even remotely held up in any way either. I mean, I had already played Star Fox on SNES by that point, and seeing something like this claiming it was on a supposedly vastly superior and more expensive 64-bit system did absolutely nothing to convince me I needed a Jaguar. I guess that's one of the reasons history is exactly what it is in this case.
I disagree with your math. I have access to the Devkit docs. The Tom chip is a 64-bit chip with a 64-bit bus. If you added up the bits to all of the different processors you would 192-bits. (Tom Chip (CPU1 GPU 32/64-bit, CPU2 Object Proc 64-Bit, CPU3 Blitter 64-Bit), Jerry (CPU4 DSP 32-Bit), CPU5 68k 32/16-bit Control) I agree that the hardware is hard to program for and could have been more powerful if improved caching had been implemented on the bus between the processors. (Many developers "phoned-in" games by using the 68k CPU instead of the Tom and Jerry chips.) The 68k CPU bus also throttled the system due to the 16-bit memory bus with 32-bit internal registers. The CoJag (Jag 1.5) arcade board ran on these same chips with the 68K CPU replaced with the 68020 CPU 32/32-bit or MIPS R3000 CPU 32-bit and 4 Meg RAM which ran much better. (Area 51, Maximum Force, etc.) Also, the speed problems and improved 3D implementation were worked out on the backward-compatible Jag 2 prototype, which never made it to market. This console suffered from mismanagement. They should have released the 32-Bit Panther to market and worked out more kinks on the Jag console hardware before releasing it to the market.
It's not that the company lied, it's that the entire concept of marketing for "bit-ness" is fundamentally flawed.
The Jag was indeed 64-bit on paper. But because it had no dedicated polygon rendering, the PlayStation massively outperformed it (and 3do, and saturn) in 3d. Ps1 was a 32-bit console. So the entire question is moot.
Having 2 Processors that are 32-bit doesnt add up to 64. The programmers just end up trying to use both at once and its worse than having 1 really advanced processor
The Jaguar has a 64bit Blitter processor sitting on top of 64bit registers. That's what made the system 64bit.
No calculations are happening on the console in 64bit.
Generally 64 bit means the data memory bus. So it is truly 64bit. However bits have little to do with performance in and of itself. In 64 bit can be slower due to the extra overhead. Outside of game consoles, bits increase to access more data, or perform more precise calculations. The extra speed is due to manufacturing quality and chip complexity, not the ‘bits’.
I once read that AMD CPUs have smaller bus widths on chip than Intel to save transistors. How much transistors would it have costs to route the full 64 bit over the whole chip. How many address lines do the smaller processors check? Don’t need to pass all 24 lines to the backyard. Just check if it is in IO space.
I hate that the blitter is a vector processor. It should have done the phrase leap ( every first pixel ), and then have a hardwired combinatorial circuit to interpolate.
Bits are a pretty horrible measure of power.
If you go by bits alone, the sega master system and snes are basically identical in every aspect.
Good point. In reality it's mostly just a number.
Who actually decides what aspects exactly measures bits?
If CPU, GPU and BUS all needs to be same number, then there was no 128 bit machines ever released.
Sure, Jaguar is not 64 bit as clearly as N64 is, but Jaguar does have 64 bit parts, as well as 32 bit and 16 bit.
So it is more 64 bit than say, PSX or old PCs.
However, Jaguar CPU is only 16 bit.
But "bits" are not as good measure of performance power as GFLOPS.
You meant 2mb ram not rom
MFer is so clueless he even gets RAM and ROM mixed up.
A major problem for Atari was that Jack Tramiel screwed a lot of retailers in his time at Commodore, and virtually no retailers trusted him. This caused Atari to have to agree to payment terms that were unsustainable, especially for a cash strapped company. When their consoles had prob;ems, or didn't sell, retailers would return product to Atari without ever paying them anything. People consider Jack Tramiel a great business man, but he really wasn't. He made terrible short sighted decisions that made future success virtually impossible.
Atari may not be the company they were in the past, but they're at least making an effort to return to their roots, with Atari 50 chronicling their history, and their Recharged series modernizing their classics and even bringing those games to arcades.
Atari was one of those companies full of potential, yet managed to mess up spectacularly so many times, it's amazing it lived so long. They had some very interesting computers as well, like the ST, STe, TT and Falcon lines.
Compared to Amiga and Atari computers, it's nearly unbelievable how the PC managed to become the dominant computing and gaming platform. It was so terribly crippled in so many ways, it was not even a fair comparison. But in the end, not being tied to a single company helped the PC molt and grow out of it's terribly limited shell many times.
Back in the 90s, I constantly wondered when was the Alpha, MIPS, SPARC or PowerPC would obliterate the puny x86 on the market. But one company after another, they just weren't able to compete at pricing, and intel's massive production capacity and sales volume eventually helped making their products outperform everything else, despite it's many technical disadvantages. We're seeing something similar again, with ARM constantly nibbling away Intel's dominance by focusing on low power, cheaper devices and eventually competing with it in it's core markets.
The PC used to be tied to a single company which is IBM. They opted to use off-the-shelf components which made it inferior to other 16-bit computers at the time such as the Macintosh, the Atari ST, and especially the Amiga which had incredible graphics and sound capabilities in the 80s and is comparable to the likes of 90s game consoles.
Since it used off-the-shelf components unlike Mac, ST, and Amiga, it made it very easy to clone and thus IBM PC clones such as the Compaq Portable and the Tandy 1000 were popping up in the mid-80s and became the dominant home computer platform even after the 80s. Heck, even Macs nowadays are essentially just IBM PCs (well, until they switched to their own ARM-based Apple Silicon chips for their Macs).
With Commodore being bankrupt in 1994 after the failure of the Amiga CD32 and Atari leaving the home computer industry to focus on the Jaguar which also failed and thus bankrupting their electronics division, Macs and PCs became the only home computer platforms after the 2000s and thus IBM both won the 16-bit home computer market while also losing to other companies that made clones of the IBM PC that were better and cheaper than the original and thus were forced to sell their entire home computer division that made the original IBM PC to Lenovo and the rest is history.
"Compared to Amiga and Atari computers, it's nearly unbelievable how the PC managed to become the dominant computing and gaming platform. It was so terribly crippled in so many ways, it was not even a fair comparison. But in the end, not being tied to a single company helped the PC molt and grow out of it's terribly limited shell many times."
You're leaving out the Acorn Archimedes. That is a computer that had way more wasted potential and it being British instead of American or Japanese. We're more than happy to buy foreign computers (see the Commodore 64 and Vic 20 before the Amiga and ST) they most certainly aren't!
It also doesn't help that when Olivetti bought out Acorn, Acorn didn't continue to develop the Archimedes/Phoebe/RISC PC line. At the very least you could have got some very sweet, very cheap UNIX workstations as well as home computers and maybe even consoles.
"Back in the 90s, I constantly wondered when was the Alpha, MIPS, SPARC or PowerPC would obliterate the puny x86 on the market. But one company after another, they just weren't able to compete at pricing, and intel's massive production capacity and sales volume eventually helped making their products outperform everything else, despite it's many technical disadvantages. We're seeing something similar again, with ARM constantly nibbling away Intel's dominance by focusing on low power, cheaper devices and eventually competing with it in it's core markets."
And ARM got its start in the Acorn Archimedes!
TurboGraffx 16 was also not completely honest about their system. The graphics hardware may have been 16-bit, but its processor was not.
The Jaguar was also a victim of the idiots in charge of Atari not knowing what they had and not understanding the consumers or the industry. Atari just shoved a bunch of stuff into the Jaguar and had a bunch of cool sounding listed capabilities on what it could do. But they didn’t give anyone enough time or guidance to properly make good use of the hardware, because they didn’t even know themselves! So we got a lot of lackluster crappy games that didn’t show off what the system could do. Its best game was Tempest 2000 for crying out loud!
If Atari would’ve released the Panther, they might’ve learned how to properly deal with consumer demand and tastes and figured out how to build an audience. But I doubt it.
Jaguar barely managed to replicate Mario Kart. F-Zero with the more top down view is impossible. SNES can show ghost with translucency in Super Mario, Jaguar cannot. Jaguar can only do what genesis does. I think that 3 years after SNES for this is a bit weak.
Game consoles that are hard to develop for and have crude development tools will always have lame software.
@@bryede I mean, people should just look at Atari ST or PC. Lots of software. Many 3d games were developed outside of Japan. Just look how glide let PC 3d game numbers explode. In the end, Jaguar would have gotten ports from Japanese consoles.
I have had a jag and working jag cd cib since the later 90's.
It was anything but impressive. Atari Karts is probably the best thing on the system
Awesome !! It’s not pronounced -- “ jagwire .”
It’s pronounced -- jaguar
Its the SHAG-uar, baby!
Everything about the Jaguar was just kind of janky, except for the virtual light machine in the CD player.
Honestly this is why I love the retro-games development scene. There have been new games for the SNES, Genesis/MD, TG-16/PCE, Master System, C64, Saturn, Dreamcast...there's even a completely modern development console for GameBoy now. You can get most new-old titles on Steam usually as well but they tend to get limited physical releases at launch, so they're out there if you look. I am not sure if anyone's done a Jaguar game yet, but if they can come up with a decent way of developing for it, someone should.
Atari 5200 would eventually see its most technically impressive game, "Rescue on Fractalus" in 1985. No other home console of the time could do those kinds of graphics.
That would be so funny if they came out with some special cable for the Jaguar soon and call it the Jag-wire. Just to create more hilarity
Also I think pronouncing it wrong on purpose as the JagWire is a brilliant way to get lots of comments posted below.
I think its funny that one of the best looking Jaguar games is a Bubsy game.
Yeah the 2d pixel art ages better
Yeah maybe not a great sign lol. But there are some nice looking platformers on there, like Rayman
Jaguar had 67 games released for it I was trying to collect them all from 2010-2014 before giving up and selling it all off to focus on finishing my full collection of Original Xbox games (998 games).
I got an Atari Jaguar on its way out for about $50 retail and another $50 for the CD attachment. Games were pretty much dirt cheap and I had a lot of fun with them until eventually I got an N64 and saw what 64 bits really could do.
No mention of the Jaguar CD? Did it add any performance or anything to the base console? I remember back when this was still being sold people speculated that the Jaguar CD games were literally the cartridge rom equivalent files burned to a CD with no enhancements to the original game, (like an animated opening movie or something similar). Anyway just curious as to why no mention of the Jaguar CD.
Yes. CD is some matsushita audio CD drive converted to rip red-book CDs. Games added FMV in front and after the actual game. More levels. In game Music .
Good point. I would have liked to have talked about the CD, but it was already a long video, so I wasn't able to get to it.
Jerry needed to get off his butt because a lot of my Jaguar games came with no music.
I heard that Music was stored at the end of the file. When Tramiel cut the cartridge ROM, music fell off.
Nobody used the full power of this console. At all.
Very true.
@@pojrthat'd be news to Eclipse (Iron Soldier 2),Rebellion (Skyhammer) then...
Even the N64 had problems when using 64-bit registers, did not have the resources to take full advantage of 64 bit processing.
In most cases, using 32 & 16 bit functions were faster than using 64. You do get more accuracy, and can work with numbers higher than 6 billion and can use more than 4GB of RAM although the system only had a max of 8MB.
Kaze Emanuar has a pretty good video explaining.
Also, the GameCube uses a 32 bit power PC processor. So much for 64 bits.
Wanna get technical? The Turbografx-16 used a MOS-6502 derived CPU; 8-bit registers and data bus, 16-bit address bus.
So even in '89, there were arguments to be made about how many bits consoles were using.
Jagwire...lol
Go watch Apple talk about Mac OS X Jaguar. It’s how much of the US pronounces it.
Made me want to unsub like 12 times...not really.
Damn it POJR do better research. Your statement about Atari adding the 2-32-bit processors in the Jaguar to come up with 64 bits is a 30-year-old myth.
The Atari Jaguar had a 64-bit system bus. The object processor and the blitter which are the heart of the graphics systems have no megahertz or performance rating related to them. In what John Carmack referred to as chips with no theoretical upper limit they were mostly dependent upon and only limited by the bus and available memory for their performance.
Use of the 68k crippled the bus and thus crippled the graphics system. According to programmers this crippling could be up to a factor of 20.
But since Atari did not support developers or give them tools to use their new weird and buggy graphic system programmers used the 68k just to get the product out the door. The heart of the GFX system became support chips. Basically a Genesis with a VDF chip. Their setup crippled the very 64bit set up they advertised so heavily.
I love the Jaguar, it's got some great games. I actually just purchased a copy of the Bubsy game lol ATARI KARTS IS AWESOME!
Sadly, awful documentation hampered game development for the Jaguar, it can do some really decent 3D if a developer has enough time, and knowledge.
Nice, how do you like the Bubsy game? I like Atari Karts a lot. It's a cool Mario Kart-type game and the graphics are colorful.
@@pojr bubsy is good too, I had a lot of fun playing it, the one hit deaths are really the only knock I have against it, but it's a good challenge!
1:07 why did you slow down and lower the pitch of the commercial? I can’t imagine that there would be a Contant ID claim for a 90s video game commercial
Surprised to see you on a video about the Atari Jaguar of all things
@@AnyilDragon I’m everywhere lol
When the Jag was new the only game I got to see it running was Wolf 3D, which did look incredible compared to the PC version. Based on that I wanted one but thankfully it failed before I got around to it. Dodged a janky bullet there.
Yeah I hear Wolfenstein 3D and Doom are excellent versions of the game.
@@pojr yup, i have both and they're great. both were ported by id Software themselves.
Never saw this console in person but I did see ads in magazines back then. Never left an impression, unlike their lynx thing which looked really cool in the ads(having colors). The funny thing is when I think back the same magazines that showed these consoles also showed the commodore 64. Never had any of these consoles/computers. it was either SEGA and/or Nintendo in our family.
I remember them saying on ITV's Bad Influence i think that it was more like 24 bit i think. The way the processers were split a bit of controversy. The PC Engine had a bit of the same problem they was flagging that as a 16 bit console then later on said something like it's 8 bit with 16 bit grafix. Looks like they were both made by Frank Spencer😅
"jaguire"? I'm not sure I get the joke, but overall .. nice video.
Fun video, but It's "Jag-you-are", not "Jag-wire" :D Reminds me of Benedict Cumberbatch trying to say "Penguin" :D
It’s pronounced that way in the much of the US.
@@mattl_ph yes ... Merica and their bad pronunciations
It depends on where you live. It's like Aluminum where it's pronounced differently between the US and England.
Thank you! And yeah I was considering which way I should pronounce Jaguar for the video. I decided to go with the way I usually say it lol.
I'm in the US and I pronounce it "jag-wahr". "jag-you-are" is too many syllables and it almost sound like an insult 😂
Xbox and PS5 are advertised as 64 bits, but all games only use the 32bit instructions and 32bit floats in the GPU.
After the 6th gen of consoles or so, the "power advertsiment" thing changed from bits to resolution. The PS5 has "8K" slapped on the box but there's maybe only 1 game that runs at such resolution and I remember Sony pushed the PS3 as a 1080p capable machine.
@@marcelosoares7148 Atari 2600 (1977) had all its games runs at 60fps and supported 8K
But they can address more than 4GB RAM…
They use teraflops as a power measurement now. Which is GPU based
@@Clay-iu2ht But they rarely specify the word size : is is 16, 32 or 64.
Maybe you don't know, but CPU do have floating point extension and vector extension that do pump a lot of teraflops not just GPU.
My first video of yours. Nicely done. I remember when the Jaguar came out. Its main competition was seen as the 3DO. Neither one made it.
Your video was great. Instant subscriber.
According to Leonard Tramiel (one of Jack Tramiel's sons), the Jaguar devkit was written over a weekend by adapting the Atari ST assembly devkit. As Leonard said, when you come up with a devkit over a weekend it's going to be rough on the edges. But "someone related to him" said "does it work? Yes? So ship it" and that was that. Doom programmer John Carmack (who was commissioned by Atari to port Doom) apparently loved the console, immediately understood its potential, and even ported Wolfenstein 3D over a weekend for fun. But most developers struggled to understand how to program Tom and Jerry and fell back on what they knew - the 68000 which was supposed to be a synchronizer.
Carmack initally praised the Jaguar hardware, yes, but in later statements, expressed his sheer frustration with it
It's really too bad Atari couldn't attract more third party developers. I actually really liked how games looked on the Jaguar compared to the PS1 and Sega Saturn.
Common mistake in the console industry. Making your console imposable to code for.
Yeah imagine if Konami or Capcom made games on the Jaguar. Would have been insane.
Lordvoldamort. Impossible*
Sony PlayStation 3 was said to be hard to code for properly. And some development teams were not keen on it, as it required more effort to get the best out of the hardware. And the PS3 is still the lowest selling, home video games console released by Sony.
@@peterpereira3653PlayStation 3 has a single, powerful CPU and a graphics card from AMD. So like PS4. What is the purpose of cell? Physics? So just buy an engine?
Why did the two Processors had referenced Tom & Jerry? Like I’m confused, 2 video game chips name a cartoon?
The GPU is Dreamcast is called Holly. I like to think they named it after the ship computer from Red Dwarf.
It's normal for Atari to give them actual names. Stella for the 2600 and Maria for the 7800 (Lynx was originally developed by Epyx). My guess is they were looking for a popular duo and someone was a fan of the cartoon.
@@chriswheatley3146 I mean it makes sense since the Super FX Chip was first named “Mario” (only seen in Star Fox)
Chip naming. It's a thing.
I love the fact that it's called Tom and Jerry. And apparently the two chips cooperated with each other, just like the cartoon, right?
Great video :)
I think ultimately the jaguar suffered not because it was particularly bad but the vision and timing was poor.
It was good for 2D graphics, but so were the SNES and Genesis.
And it was too weak for smooth 3D, therefore unable to compete with N64/PS1. And the timing was poor. A lot of people were happy with their 2D console and Atari didn't make a good case for ppl to upgrade.
It's a bit sad, I like the 2600 and I like competition :(
Pojr do you think we'll get a jagwire core for mister ? I hope so
Great content hope to see what you think of the Neo Geo someday.
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. "
I'm surprised in all this talk about the Atari Jaguar in this review that you didn't mention the CD unit and how it constantly crashes.
It's strange that I've seen several videos about how Atari "lied" in calling the Jaguar 64-bit, yet I've never seen a video accusing NEC of lying in calling the TurboGrafx-16 16-bit.
Still remember all the hype surrounding the new Pitfall game on Windows 95. I didn’t even remember it being a Jaguar title.
Of course I remember all the hype surrounding the Jaguar and really didn’t hear much about it after its launch until years later on videos like this one.
Yet I'm sad Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure isn't talked about enough. It's actually a decent game, unlike Super Pitfall.
Yes the mechanics and gameplay are a lot of fun. I still remember clearly when the original Pitfall came out and how revolutionary it was.
The Mayan Adventure didn’t revolutionize gaming but it’s a worthy of the franchise and really fun to play. An overlooked gem.
Yeah I remember the nightmare Super Pitfall gave me as a rental back in the day. I guess someone made a rom hack that turned it into a good game. What it should have been.
The Lynx was awesome. I had one and liked it way better than the Gameboy due to the colour display with background lighting.
The first handheld Nintendo I actually liked (sort of) was the DSi. The PSP was more awesome though. Now the Switch is really great.
Yeah the lynx was a really cool console for its time. But despite the game boy being worse, it had better battery life and better games. If Atari had some better third-party support though...
Same here. When I got an Atari Lynx 2, a few years after trading my Gameboy for a Megadrive, I didn't miss my Gameboy ONCE. The Atari Lynx was so much better. It was amazing having graphics and sound fX like that in a handheld. Hardware sprite scaling etc
It was a 32 bit system to me as neither chip is 64. The system also suffered from the fact most game makers didn't know how to make a quality 3D game at least most didn't show that ability until we see Nintendo 64. I still wanted one, but never managed to get it which I am glad about.
I own one - picked it up from when I was in high school. Interesting, but it was hard to acquire games!
Nice! How do you like it?
Jag was awesome, I had Tempest, AVP, Doom, Wolfenstein and NBA Jam.
That's an excellent lineup of games to have.
@@pojr I still have them somewhere. I'm an old dude, I remember going to Toys R Us every month to pick up a new Jag game.
Odd that the annoying "where did you learn to fly?" face in Cybermorph wasn't mentioned. AVGN really emphasized this in his video.
Surprisingly during my playthrough, she didn't say it at all. But she did say "avoid the ground".
This video reminds me of the time Benedict Cumberbatch voiced a documentary on penguins, and he kept saying "penwings"
hey dude, your video editing skills and presentation are great. i bought a Jag two years ago and quite enjoy it. expensive as heck though.
it's worth noting that the tom chip barely worked, and you would have to use a lot of slow workarounds to get it to work correctly.
4:39 The processors are named after the cartoon duo
Pitfall the Mayan Adventure should be part of the Activision classic. If XBOX decided to make one.
FWIW my favorite port of Flashback is on the Jaguar.
Hum.. I think I saw shenanigans like this recently. As I recall the box said 8k 120hz or something. 🤪
It also cant be understated that the Jag had zero development tools and devs were not exactly lining up to make games for Atari, they were doomed from the offset
I convinced my little brother to return his Jaguar and get a Turbografx 16 instead. He didn't like Turbo at all and I ended up with it. I'm still convinced he made the right choice.
John Carmack once said that if they had doubled the cache on Tom and Jerry, there was very real possibility that it could have kept up with the Ps1/Saturn. But because of the lack of cache the system spent far too much time just spinning in place waiting for memory requests to get things done. A shame really but that just how it falls. Also when it comes to difficult programming, one of the reasons the Ps1 had such a rapid pick up from developers was that Sony proved actual decent development tools. You could program in C and C++ unlike Jaguar/Saturn that was still a primarily assembly based development base.
Atari was working on a Jaguar 2 that fixed most of these issue but it all came far too late. There are a few photos of a prototype motherboard and some early documentation on what it was going to be but it never amounted to anything. About the only legacy of that was the Nuon, another system that had a fate even worse than Jaguar.
And it is sad, every system except for the 2600 is superior to the competition.
There's also a 64-bit data bus which could have contributed to the 64-bit claim. One of the print ads talked about the 64 bit data bus.
I don’t understand why the low 16 bit of this bus go over the whole PCB. Cartridge and 68EC00 could have been 16 bit ( like TurboGrafx) with a bridge (with cache) to the 64 bit data bus. Memory address bus is separate anyway.
It had all the bits!
SNES having 32k colours is very misleading. It has a small number of layers each which can display their own set of 256 colours. If you multiply them together, you get 32k yeah, but it doesn't look like a 32k colour image. Remember those old MS-DOS VGA games? They were 256 colours. It would be like having a handful of layers of those kinds of graphics. None of them together are going to look photorealistic like a single 32k colour image would. Instead you get the cartoony graphics we saw on the SNES. And digitised photos or pre-rendered graphics would have that grainy look to them, like the MS-DOS games had, because the layers are still limted to 256 colours.
The first 16-bit console was the Mattel Intellivision back in 1979. Yet the ColecoVision (a bona fide 8-bit console) was at least as good in terms of graphics. So "16 bit graphics", "32 bit graphics" doesn't always mean much. Also, the Atari developers did NOT call it a 64-bit console because it had two 32-bit processors, but because "the parts that matter" are 64-bit (like the blitter).
Wish Atari would have had more support. Could have had some great games.
Yeah 100%. In a lot of my console reviews, I talk about the lack of third-party support. You need good games to bring out a good console.
It's not about the number of bits. It's the size of bits that counts.
I can tell you that in my life I only knew one person with a Jaguar and he was never enthusiastic about it.
I’ve had two of them in my life so far. They’re not great.
I don't know a single person with a Jaguar lol.
Its a decent video games console but certainly not great. Has some good games in its small library. Way I see it a video games console is as good or bad, as the games you bought. I have around 25 games for it. I never bothered with buying an Atari Jaguar CD unit.
When I got an Atari Lynx 2, a few years after trading my Gameboy in for a Megadrive, I didn't miss my Gameboy ONCE.
The Atari Lynx was so much better. It was amazing having graphics and sound fX like that in a handheld. Hardware sprite scaling etc
I heard the system was particularly tricky to take advantage of the full potential of the system and seen some gameplay of technically impressive fan made games for it
Supposedly the plastic shells housing the jaguar's innards were repurposed for dental x-ray equipment
What's a jag wire ?? Confusing video hearing that but not knowing what you're talking about 🤷♂
I keep seeing tens of videos about the same topic. But it would be interesting having some company insiders interviewed, so they could actually answer about why such complicated hardware was chosen for consoles like the Jaguar or the Saturn.
I recall selling my Sega CD and games to buy an Atari Jaguar while on Spring Break 1994. Wow this is the 30th Anniversary of my buying the Jaguar! I bought it from a mom and pop Video Rental store in Hartselle,AL while visiting my grandparents. It came packed with Cybermorph and that was the only game I owned for it for like 2 months because it was hard to find games to buy for it. When I was back home in Wisconsin my local Electronics Boutique had about 8 games for the Jaguar and the first game I bought was the amazing Wolfenstein 3D. To this day in my opinion it's the greatest Jaguar Game ever made. It's 3D graphics looked hi resolution especially when compared with the shit version of Doom that came out for the Jag. I beat Wolfenstein many times the final boss was Hitler in a mech suit with miniguns/Gatling Guns. Just keep moving and shooting and Hitler's dead before too long. I ended up buying around 5 games for the Jaguar before deciding it was a lost cause and sold it off to buy the new Playstation (PSX/PS1). Doom on PS1 makes Jaguar look like a babies toy.
Jag-you-are, not Jag-wire.
There was also a similar debate regarding the Turbographix 16 since while it did have a 16 but GPU the CPU was only 8 but.
TurboGrafx looks 8bit because it can’t draw parallaxe backgrounds like the Amiga before it.
Did you know the voice for "Pitfall Harry" was done by Bruce Campbell of Evil Dead fame?
Excellent analysis. This console needs a revival through a dedicated homebrew community and a thorough understanding of its weird hardware, this would allow for a better development of indie games, and a better harnessing of its hardware, things that couldn't be achieved not even by its own developers because of its awkward overall planning.
BTW, I heard the Nintendo 64 was somewhat of a scam about the 64-bit thing. I would like you to develop on that, although that rumor probably is unlikely and stretched.
Yo tuve un Jaguar en esos tiempos, y aun lo tengo en alguna caja, después de este video me dio ganas de buscarlo. También tenía el lector de CD, que no se mencionó en el video.
Siempre pensé que el Panther era la consola que estaban desarrollando para sustituir el Jaguar, no un esfuerzo anterior del Jaguar. Gracias por la información.
Hehe. Now there's a lesson here:
Making good products takes time, so it's never good to rush something out.
Atari Jaguar was basically two 32 bit cpu's which means really hard to understand hardware. Probably the thing is that this device could do bigger things... But it just was too complex.
And in the end, Sony took the time to develop a 32 bit console that was properly optimized for rendering polygons! It did not need to be more powerful, it just was better because developers could actually make good games, while Jaguar just ended up with trash!
Back when we didn't know what bits meant and thought it just meant better graphics.......
Still kicking myself over selling my Jaguar. I got one off some online site back in 1998 (new old stock or whatever they call), got the system and 3 games (incl Tempest 2K, some driving game and Pitfall) and for $99. I ended up selling it to a guy at work for $250 about 2 years later because I needed money to get the PS2 at launch (yeah money was tight then with 3 little kids and all, luckily I kept all my older stuff). I just didn't realize how rare the Jaguar was back then and it wasn't impressed with the graphics compared to the Genesis or PS1.
Oh yeah, what's wrong with upstate NY? (I say as I look out the window at yet another rainy gray day).
Goes to show you that, at the end of the day, no shmancy technology or marketing hyperbole is going to save you from a mediocre game library.
I get so aggravated when people dis the 5200 controllers. I have had many controllers throughout the years and other than having to clean them I have never had issues with mine. Plus they were way ahead of their time.