The Atari Jaguar Arcade Board - The CoJag
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- Опубликовано: 6 авг 2023
- Perhaps you've heard about the Atari Jaguar-based arcade board called CoJag. As a part of the 30 years of Atari Jaguar, let's take a look at the one I have one in my collection. If you haven't heard of this, it's the hardware that powered the popular Area 51 and Maximum Force arcade games - but a few other titles were in development for it before Atari Games went on to more powerful platforms. #arcade #atari #atarijaguar
If anyone lives in Utah, visit my arcade @ArcadeGalacticSaltLakeCity at the Valley Fair Mall In West Valley City.
What's really interesting to me about the CoJag, as I mention in the video, is that its spec is pretty much what Atari was originally considering to do for the Jaguar home release (with a 68EC020 and 4MB of RAM) before getting cold feet on that and cutting it down to save a few bucks. Perhaps that was one of the terrible decisions that sealed the Jag's fate, although the bugs present in the TOM chip still would have been present.
Either way, since this arcade board does exist, we can see what that hardware would've been like to some degree, essentially a "Jaguar 1.5" that bridges the gap between the home machine and the never released Jaguar 2 that I recently discussed.
Here's the full clip of Vicious Circle from @VideoGameEsoterica - • Vicious Circle Prototy... 
Игры
I'm stoked someone out there is keeping arcades alive for the public today. I myself grew up in the arcades during...well from 1989'ish until 2004'ish. We (fiancee and I) have a personal arcade in our home and we love it. Out of the 5 cabs we own my favorite by far is our 4-slot MVS cab (all of our games are from 1989-1990's). I am currently looking at a two seater sit-down Ridge Racer 2 cab.
Addendum- I did not know Atari made a Jaguar arcade cab! This is truly fascinating. Subbed. That board is freaking huge!
I actually didn't realize that Area 51 ran on this board until recently. I still remember that game being almost everywhere back in the 90s.
You nailed it when you said that the Jaguar was made more for 2D sprites than 3D polygons. The Jaguar should have been more focused on great 2D like Super Burnout and Power Drive Rally. Those games impressed me more than any of the 3D stuff that came out for the system.
Sadly, the press at the time, were under the impression 2D was old hat, many promising Saturn titles were belittled for being 2D.
Atari's marketing department got caught up in this and killed promising Jaguar titles like Deathwatch.
This was the best recommendation at 3 am ever!
Great vid. Fun look at the board!
Hey! I know you from another channel that specializes in Minecraft and Fortnite 👀
I was a subscriber to GameFan back in the day, and I remember ECM. I always liked his editorials and reviews. His enthusiasm for shmups got me into playing them. Sorry to hear he passed away. He seemed like a cool dude, and I always wanted to meet him.
Great video, thanks for sharing the board and going into so much detail on this. Also: you own an arcade, that is awesome! If it was in my neighborhood, I'd be there regularly! Cheers!
If he invited you 😂
This video was great. Really hoping we get to see some of the home brew stuff you were talking about at the end.
I wish the atari 2 chipset would've been release on a arcade board where atari can out a real time efficient 3d pushing games.
That’s great 😍. The big question, is it for sale 👀 ?
There is a great explaination of the internal workings of the Jaguar on the Atariage forum : "Balancing the Bus and Mastering Jaguar performance"
It must have been a BIG disappointment for the programmers who first saw the amazing specs of the graphics and sound (for the time) of the Jaguar to discover how limited the performance was because of the limiting architecture of the Jaguar.
Vicious circle also is in a game cabinet at galloping ghost
The 68020 would have been awesome but I’m also left thinking what would it have actually changed other than a higher FPS for games like iron soldier? The existing hardware bugs would still make it a pain to code for so I don’t think we would have seen more titles as a result. A cache for blitter would been a better call, at least then we could have proper textures for 3D objects.
From my understanding, but a coder can correct me if I'm wrong, the 68020 would have benefitted the system in various ways:
-Higher clock speed than the 68k
-Far less bus slowdown when being used
-Built-in cache
-Backwards compatible with the 68k so conversions of 68k based games from the likes of the Amiga or ST wouldn't have been a giant stretch
I believe that games which heavily use the 68k on the Jaguar used it for things like game logic - anything more powerful than the 68k should have benefitted there. But this is just my opinion/understanding based upon what I've read.
I don't know how much code from the 68K was used on the likes of Iron Soldier or Checkered Flag but I do imagine that if its extensive in any way, you'd see a performance boost, moreso if the code could be optimized for the 020.
@iratanongrata5973 plus the 020 is a 32-bit cpu which is a huge pro over the 68k.
Hmmm... Is there a scenario where the Jag was Atari's Neo-Geo? It begins in the arcade and has all the games the G42, GX and maybe the GT has. Then is released as home console in 93.
A lot of the stuff that Atari developed themselves started in the Arcade. Pong started in the arcade also.
It could have been but Atari Games was also not doing too well in '93~'95, Area 51 pulled them out of a lull (They were bought by Midway at the end of '98 though).
T-Mek was in development for the Jag but no ROM has been found; Aside from T2k, I think that Super Burnout, Missile Command 3D, a reworked version of Checkered Flag, a simulator version of Iron Soldier could have worked as arcade games.
unrelated to this specific video but maybe you can advise me, I have a Lethal Enforcers arcade machine and the light guns are kind of dodgy, just wondering are there more modern guns that can be used with that arcade board? It would be nice to use maybe some of those guns with the recoil built in
The first thing I'd check is the monitor. If the brightness/contrast isn't high enough, that has an effect on the calibration for any CRT light-gun game.
If the shells are still fine then you might just need to replace the sensors internally.
If you need full guns, I'm not 100% sure on the first Lethal Enforcers but I know that LE2 lets you use Suzo Happ guns. Here's a link to those parts: na.suzohapp.com/parts/arcade_parts/konami_usa/lethal_enforcers_2/
As long as the connectors are the same it should work. You also should be able to find LE replacement guns on Ebay. Hope that helps!
can a cojag board be modified to run jaguar cartridges/CD Roms? how much do they cost?
It should be possible, however, no one has attempted to convert an existing Jag game to do this yet. I was told by Tursilion, who created the Skunkboard among other Jag things, that he was looking into it, but didn't have much incentive to really go far into it.
Otherwise, if the tools were there, then it would be possible as the 68020 that the CoJag uses is backwards compatible with the 68000. The only issue that might pop up is for those CoJag boards out there which use the R3000 CPU instead of the 020; But as far as I am aware, there are many more with the 020 than the R3k.
I think it would be rad to port a game like IS2, Doom, or BattleMorph to the CoJag, have it optimized for the hardware, and see what it could do. But it would taking a coding wizard and some money to probably make that happen (unless some European demo coders out there want to take on the challenge?)
CoJag is not the original spec, sorry. The essential shortcomings of the hardware were not fixed with the arcade version. It is just a beefed up version to run FMV games like Area 51.
In terms of 3D or texture mapping it is not really faster.
Saying the Jaguar was cut down version by 50% is greatly exaggerated and historically wrong. The Jaguar was designed first and after that custom CoJag boards were designed.
Per Jag designer John Mathieson : "Atari were keen to use a 68K family device, and we looked closely at various members. We did actually build a couple of 68030 versions of the early beta developers systems, and for a while were going to use a 68020. However, this turned out too expensive. We also considered the possibility of no [Motorola 680x0 chip] at all. I always felt it was important to have some normal processor, to give developers a warm feeling when they start."
That is what I was referring to. I was not suggesting that the CoJag was started first or that they designed the home console Jag with arcades in mind. Just that the use of the 68020 and the 4mb of ram fit one of the specs they were looking at.
@@iratanongrata5973 He never Talked of using 4 MB and they decided to use 68k
very early. Most importantly, there is no historical context with Cojag or Performance cut of 50 percent. That is a completely made up story.
More so, comparison to the NeoGeo are wrong too. The Neogeo is the home Version of the AES arcade System and both are identical. The Jaguar was Designed as an home console from the Start and Cojag derived from it afterwards.
@@atarijaguarsgarage8873 There is evidence that they had considered 4mb of ram originally- I'm not at my PC atm so searching that up for you isn't convenient but like I said in the video, Eric ECM Mylonas of Gamefan Magazine told me more than once that they did cut it in half. I'm sure there is evidence for that in other things (I recall reading other sources years ago as is the spec that the Jag could do up to 6mb of RAM).
Also, where are you getting this 50% half power thing from? I'm at least backing my assertions up with sources, you're just making statements.
As for the NeoGeo, the insinuation here is that with an arcade platform, you can do more, which obviously the CoJag could do with a better processor in the pack, 2x the RAM and ability to have a hard drive for rom storage.
@@atarijaguarsgarage8873 You are missing the point.
I stated in the video what that quote stated about the Jag's development - they did in fact look at using the 68030 or the 68020. No, they didn't use them but the fact that it was considered means that the CoJag board fits with one of the original possible specs of the machine. Why you're interpreting it in a different way, I don't know.
The 4MB spec was well-known - again, I was friends with ECM of Gamefan fame. Every time the Jaguar came up in discussion, he lamented about the RAM spec being cut in half. I'll have to dig up our old conversations on that to "prove" it to you, although not sure that doing so is worth my time.
I also have no idea what you're talking about in terms of "performance cut of 50%." I'm not making that claim at all, just that there are those who worked for Atari who stated that with a 68020 removing the weak point of the 68k, it would have increased performance. You can look up the quotes and do the research, I don't need to do it for you.
The reason for bringing up the NeoGeo is simple but you're misunderstanding or misinterpreting it here. When I say NeoGeo, I'm talking about the arcade MVS, NOT the AES. I also did not assert that they made the Jaguar for arcades first, so not sure where you're getting that from.
I have never seen one thing in 30 years on the Jaguar that was impressive. Has anyone actually programmed a game utilizing all the custom hardware of the Jaguar, or is everything a crappy 68000 port?
Neither of those. The extra memory , processor speed and being able to get data from a big hard drive instead of a small ROM cartridge of max 6 Mb (Most were 2?) makes all the difference.
Games like Super Burnout, Iron Soldier, Wolf 3D, Missile Command 3D were not 68000 ports but the most detail comes from BattleSphere. Quoting their FAQ:
"Q. How does BattleSphere split up game functions among the Jag's many chips?
A. Doug sez, "That's a toughie, since we've pipelined so much. It would take a whole master's thesis to explain what every processor did and how they all tied together. It is not simple at all.
The easy ones might be:
Blitter - Final rendering of polygons to RAM and bitmap copies, GPU manager, DSP manager, RAM loader, etc.
Object Processor - Screen draws and overlays
68000 - Keypad and housekeeping, watchdog, time sync
DSP - 1st stage polygon pipeline, networking, sound, music, timers
GPU - Game loop, collision detect, 2nd stage polygon pipeline, special effects
Note that there's about 8 different "screens" in BattleSphere and each one uses the procesors a little differently. For example, the intro uses them in a different way than the main menu which is different than the ship-selector which is different than the gameplay views." That game was released in 2000.
Maybe use your eyes! Doom is not a 68000 game as no 3D game really could run on the 68000 reasonably.
The 68000 was used wisely by likes of Jeff Minter with Tempest 2000,plus a lot of Rayman's code is 68000.
If your looking for impressive games? AVP, has photorealistic textures, you just have to see past the blocky character models and slow frame rate (blame Jane Whittaker's Spaghetti A. I routine code, running on the 68000) Iron Soldier 1 and 2 might lack the full texture-mapping of Metal Head on the 32X,but is the far better Mech title in terms of feel.
Skyhammer by Rebellion was doing Descent/G-Police style gaming.
Then you've canned titles like Black Ice, White Noise and Dactyl Joust, that showed real potential.
Also of note, Jeff Minter did more coding on the GPU for Defender 2000,than he did with Tempest 2000 and D2K was a real dog to play, Hoverstrike on Jaguar CD saw code moved over from the 68000 to the GPU and the frame rate only increased by 3-5 fps..