I loved the numeric keypad on the Jag. There were lots of precedents for it, such as the Intellivision and Colecovision. With the overlays added, it enhanced control and immersion for me. A game that used the numeric keypad well was Iron Soldier.
Yes and of those sucked. I mean not the keypad. I guess that was… ok. Key (pun intended) problem was that the pads themselves was so bad. Great gamepad + keypad = great Bad gamepad + keypad = bad gamepad. So unfortunately there has never been a good gamepad with a keypad
@@litjellyfish I actually thought the Jaguar controller was pretty decent, only lacking in the number of face buttons and lack of shoulder buttons, which the Pro controller addressed. I agree with ScrapKing73, I actually liked the keypad on the Jaguar controller because it was something to differentiate the system and give it a multitude of extra buttons, with the overlays being a great way to map complex controls to it. Of course, keeping track of the overlays along with the cartridges was always going to be a problem and Atari really should have packaged them in robust cases that accommodated both, instead of just using flimsy cardboard boxes. But Atari was never going to do that, because that would cost more money and Atari wasn't interested in spending a dime more than absolutely necessary (sometimes less, as they stiffed developers out of promised payments).
I grew up an Atari fan and even had the 7800. So when I was 24, I had my first career job of a Store Manager at Montgomery Ward. So now (for the time), I was making money! We sold the Atari Jaguar so I purchased it with Alien Vs. Predator. I was still single at the time so I played a lot of Jaguar at the time and while I could see and feel its limitations, I still loved it. And it is still in my attic today.
For the time its pretty good to be honest. The console just costed too much for the average consumer to the time. Especially with the transition to CD slowly happening, considering the base Console used carts. One has to wonder how good Jaguar Doom could have been if it was on CD, the Playstation port shows that even with less cpu power, on CD you can do the best port of Doom.
I'm not an insane fanboy, but the Jag controller was comfortable. Older controllers had numberpads, and the overlays were supposed to take adv of it. However, why would put the keypad on there, but only a THREE BUTTON controller? Street Fighter 2 was the killer app for everything, and it was out in 1992! Plenty of time to adjust for this!
Street fighter 2 on jag was never happening. Mk3 had a chance though. The number pad addition was frankly baffling, and there was no comfortable way to use it.
@@jcaseyjones2829 Street Fighter 2 was released on pretty much every console and computer available at the time with the _exception_ of the Jaguar. A Jaguar version doesn't seem much stranger than Commodore 64 and Sega Master System versions. Of course, Capcom would never have bothered to developed a port themselves, but it could have been licensed out to some other (western) developer, like many of the other ports were. The keypad was a great feature for some games. Using it for changing weapons/items in games like Doom was much better than having to cycle through them one by one, as you had to do in every other console port at the time. Gamepads always struggled with inventories and menus.
@@jcaseyjones2829 In addition to the big consoles (SNES, Sega Mega Drive, PC Engine/Turbografx-16), versions of Street Fighter II or Super Street Fighter II were released on Game Boy, Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga, Amiga CD32, Fujitsu FM Towns, Sega Master System, Sharp X68000, ZX Spectrum, 3DO, PC/DOS and Atari ST. Do you really think it unfeasible a Jaguar version could have measured up in profitability to at least one of those?
@@todesziege I think you're not considering that those lowbrow computer ports were farmed out to budget labels who came to Capcom looking for the rights to make quick cash grab versions. I think you're overlooking, first, that you should be careful what you wish for, in that I don't think anyone would have really wanted to play what they would have produced, and, second, that it really says something that even these companies failed to attempt a jaguar port. Obviously even they disregarded Jag's chances of profitability. Sorry man, that's just how I see it.
A few corrections if I may. 1)Panther was a 16/32 - Bit Hybrid. 16-Bit CPU and 32-Bit GPU. it was also a colossal waste of resources. 2)Panther was originally intended to have a simultaneous release with the Lynx, but Atari lacked the resources to support 2 flagship consoles at launch, so Panther was put on the back burner.
@@ScotsmanGamer Actually I was trying to find the book on it I read years ago. It was during the great game crash of the 80's when all the arcades were going under. Sega and Nintendo wanted to enter the console market, but ATARI had all the patents on things like , a removable rom cartage, the plugs and cables etc and Atari had almost all the games as well as a much better system. Nintendo and Sega were booth tied up in lawsuits with Atari but put out their systems anyway. And then an Private investigator hired by Atari (public record btw ) caught them with a parabolic mike talking on the golf course, it happened. "in 1988, Atari sued Nintendo for unfair competition under the Sherman Antitrust Act. Nintendo responded by counter-suing Atari for unfair competition, copyright infringement, and patent infringement. The lawsuit was settled in 1994 with Atari paying Nintendo damages and using some of its patent licenses. " Nintendo sued Atari for bypassing their lockout to allow them to sell games for the Nintendo. "For unfair competition under the Sherman Antitrust Act" and Atari won PUBLIC RECORD LOOK IT UP! Sega lost their cases, but Sega won the patent case (easier to prove) and Atari had to pay (insult to injury) Toys R- Us however got the short end of that stick and got back at Atari as they had a sweetheart deal with Sega and Nintendo for selling games.
@@quintessenceSL NEC's failure has more factors than just sleazy competition though. I.e look at the TX16 vs the og PC-Engine. They made it as big as a hi fi unit, making it so its mostly empty plastic without components. Alot of the REALLY good pc-engine games also were JRPGs - something only really huge in the west by FF VII (FF III [VI in Japan) if youre generaous). The amazing arcade ports on there were more niche than something like a Sonic or Mario.
This doesn't really adress the more fundamental problems with Jaguar, and with 90s Atari in general: 1) Mid-generation consoles always struggle. They struggle with attracting customers, who are still satisfied with their current systems, and they struggle with attracting 3rd party developers, who won't spend much resources on an unproven (and unpopular) system while there are already established systems. The Jaguar _did_ get some decent-ish 3rd party support, but most of it was barely-improved 16-bit ports that didn't take advantage of the system's power, and might even hurt more than it helped as such releases made the system look weaker than it was. This would have likely remained the case even if the system was easier to develop for or better documented, because 3rd party developers won't put their full force behind a system without a userbase. 2) Atari's first-party games simply weren't up to the standard of Nintendo, Sega or even NEC/Hudson, neither in terms of gameplay nor tech/graphics. As such, few would buy the system and Atari'll remain unable to attract 3rd party developers. Granted, neither Sony or Microsoft had much in the way of 1st party games when they arrived either, but they compensated for it with very deep pockets that allowed them to _buy_ 3rd party support (and massive marketing). Which brings us to... 3) Atari didn't have enough money to begin with. Their alternate revenue streams -- from computers (Atari ST/400), the handheld Lynx and vintage/budget games (mainly 2600) -- was drying up or had disappeared entirely by 1993. Most approaches that could have _helped_ the Jaguar -- more marketing, better support for 3rd parties, more/better games -- were not realistically on the table as it would have cost too much. They probably knew they didn't have the muscle to launch alongside the PS1/Saturn/N64, so the early/mid-gen launch was something of a hail mary that was unlikely to ever work out. I really can't see what they could have done differently.
I agree. The Jaguar was the lacking money to launch successfully, the power to compete against its next generation rivals, and the games to attract consumers away from the competition. Even if the Jaguar got 3rd place for a brief moment during the 16-bit era of consoles, it wouldn't have been enough to propel the company forward.
Especially the money - Atari themselves knew this. They did the best they could with what they had knowing that unexpected success was the only shot they had. It's possible that without the PSX they might have scraped by, but Sony hit everyone with a launch in which they had the money to do everything right. If you haven't read it, search for Don Thomas's letter "Did Anyone Say Goodbye" for an inside view on the end of Jaguar and Atari.
It wasn't just that development tools were woefully inadequate, Atari was also extremely stingy with developer milestones, often not paying them out as promised (this is why Fight for Life was released in a broken form: the developer was mad that Atari hadn't paid them as promised, so they sent an earlier, unfinished build for manufacturing and Atari released it anyway). Atari also loved to use the smallest cartridges they could get away with (the system could support up to 6MB carts, but to my knowledge no game ever used that much space). Atari's rush to release software as cheaply as possible in almost any form with no regard for any kind of quality control gave it a bad reputation with both developers and gamers, which only magnified the issue of the poor software library. To my knowledge, Atari had no in-house developers for any Jaguar software and only served as a first-party publisher for games developed by other companies, so they were completely reliant on third-party studios, unlike 3DO which at least had a competent group of developers in-house. The cool thing about the Sega CD is it added a lot of processing power which enabled features like sprite scaling and rotation that the base Genesis hardware didn't have. The Jaguar CD, like every other CD add-on (including the unreleased SNES CD add-on), didn't add any processing power to the base system, so all it did was enable CD storage capacity at the expense of greater load times. Considering that a masterpiece like Super Mario 64 was able to fit in an 8MB cartridge, I'd argue that the CD add-on was completely unnecessary and a waste of money, but Atari seemed to like wasting money on things that made little sense, like the Jaguar VR headset. Atari was taken over by a hard drive manufacturer in 1996, which effectively ended any chance of the Jaguar remaining in the market, although by that point sales were so poor that it was only a matter of time. I'm pretty sure Atari still owed a bunch of developers a bunch of money, too, and rather than paying them either cancelled their games or released them as-is. The truth is, the Jaguar hardware needed further development, but also on a reduced time scale (they should have had the hardware ready for release in 1992, rather than 1993), along with vastly more robust developer tools that better utilized the hardware. At least then, they could have made a bigger impact against the existing 16-bit systems and beaten the 3DO to market. But Atari was never capable of doing any of that, nor were they capable of marketing the actual games properly.
Atari outsourced all console development to outside companies since the 5200. They stiffed the company who developed the 7800 causing it to be delayed by 3 years, despite them being finished, packaged, and shipped in warehouses. They basically had no money since the 5200 and their main business model was to have someone else do all the hard work, then just not pay them.
Wait?! The Jag CD was "kinda a scam" and "didn't really work"?? My Jag CD wasn't a scam and worked just fine, thanks. I think I'm done watching this channel now.
Alot of people confuse posthomeous info with contemporary info. Complaints about the Jaguar CD not working usually comes from retro collectors that got the add on after atleast 1 decade with parts breaking down.
For your next scenario, might I suggest an alternate timeline where project Iris was officially released as the fourth Gameboy. Project Iris was the original planned successor to the Gameboy Advance, a touch screen device inspired by the PDAs that were popular at the time. The story goes that Hiroshi Yamauchi’s final request to Satoru Iwata, before stepping down as president of Nintendo, was to develop a dual screen handheld to counter the widescreen PSP. Iwata gave the order to RND, they wired together two screens they had lying around, and Nintendo needing something to show off at E3 that year debuted it as the DS. Development on project iris would continue until 2008. After Steve Jobs announced the iPhone, Iwata realizing there was no way a PDA inspired device could fight the iPhone canceled the project. Lowspecgamer has pretty good video on this if you want a more in-depth version of the story.
I would like to think if they hadn't botched the design of the Jaguar that they could have been a success. I think there was a niche to produce games that appealed to an adult market, like if the Megadrive had more power. Imagine buying Mortal Kombat: Mawled Edition with all the blood the SNES owners craved A version of Street Fighter would have been essential for its success and a quality racer would help their market share, I know Stunt Car Racer was rumoured but imagine a texture mapped racing game on a Jaguar shown alongside Stunt Car FX on the SNES. It would have been worth seeing. If they had enjoyed more success then perhaps Rayman could have continued their series of games on Atari hardware Perhaps the same with Doom II, given the good reputation the Jaguar version of Doom had, even better if new hardware could make Quake its home. I'd like to think Aliens Vs Predator would have got a sequel too and some fmv sequences on the CD attachments would have given people a reason to own one. The controller was such a strange choice, why you would choose to imitate the Megadrive three button design in the era of low/medium/high punch and kick I don't know, it's like they only understood the market of the 80s and not learned anything about the market of the 90s. It's a harsh lesson for any manufacturer that a poorly designed controller can play a big part in the downfall of your console. Atari were never going to invest the money required to correct their mistakes though. They lucked into a period of success with the home computer market when the components needed to make a home computer dropped in price then got squeezed out when home PCs became more affordable and games consoles offered a better gaming experience.
If only it had more and better games available upon launch. The potential was there. I wonder if it would have made a difference if it was backwards compatible with the 2600 and 7800.
Your videos are really good I really like the what if scenarios. You remind me of Archimedes 123 videos. Do what if Nintendo failed and what if Sony and Nintendo were still on the same team.
Thanks man! I made a video called What if Nintendo and Sony created the PlayStation, were it dives into the world were Nintendo continued the CD addon partnership with Sony.
Jeff Minter said if they had just 1 more bit in the registry, it would've handled polygons so much better. Even as it was, Iron Soldier 1 & 2 ran amazingly smooth and had an crazy far draw distance that beat most N64 games! Too bad almost all the rest made me feel nearsighted with the close pop-in horizon.
Alien Vs Predator on the Jaguar was incredible. Tempest 2000 was decent as well. There was so much potential in the system, just like with the Wii U. As for the controller, it was better than the Intellivision controller.
You'd add a numeric pad to your controller, if you were looking to have complex PC simulations like Falcon TFX, Gunship 2000 converted to the Jaguar, as they Atari were. These required keyboard controls.
I think ATARI would have solved the shortage of exclusive games if the console allowed backwards compatibility. It is true that the 2600/5200/7800 catalog is full of garbage, but it helps a lot while waiting for new games. The console should have been primarily CD-based but with a cartridge or expansion slot to add older titles.
1:17 True internationally, but the 7800 outsold the Master System in the U.S. (Going by memory, Tonka distributed the Master System stateside, & they didn't market it well.)
awesome this is literally the kind of shit I think about. I had a habit of getting POWERFUL systems not realizing that has nothing to with their success and longevity and quality of games.
Well yes. I do, it's on the back of my head, like any normal GameBoy. And to answer the question of games, I don't really play Pokémon, so I play Tetris instead. And not only Tetris, but the Mario Land series included.
While in reality there was only Nintendo, Sega, Sony, Microsoft ... and VM Labs, Panasonic, SSD, VTech and some handheld systems by Bandai, Nokia, Game Park, LeapFrog, Tapwave. 😮
Everyone says the Jag controller sucks but how many have actually used one? I had a friend who owned a Jag & honestly I lived the controller. The number pad doesn't get in the way (much like how the Xbox controller keyboard doesn't). But what the number pad did was give some play options. Like in FPS games allowing one to just hit a key to select a weapon rather than cycling. It's somewhat similar to the touchscreen on a Nintendo DS in how it can be used. Sure few games highlighted what it could be good at but it's not a bad idea honestly.
Jag controller was stiff on the dpad and buttons, like a Genesis controller's dpad. Atari likely just thought the number pad was a good idea from systems like Intellivision. A few things I would have done differently in this prediction; after Atari knocked out Sega, Sega would have been publishing games for Atari. At the same time, Atari being just 30 minutes down the 101 from EA, managed to talk them into publishing for the system as well, since Sega was now out of the console business. Also Atari restores a relationship with Atari Games (The arcade spinoff of Atari) and started getting that content onto the system as well. Older titles like Hard Drivin and Steel Talons. Newer titles like San Francisco Rush and T-MEK.
Assuming Sega does nothing different regarding the launch of the Saturn, I truly believe that in the what if scenario here, Jag could have passed it in North America.
it wouldn't ever happen. ps1 was... a monster, something we never gonna see ever again and unlike every other console maker. Sony had its own fabs and made its own hardware back then. just look at the frankstein that the Saturn ended being in order to compete with ps1, and it still was inferior in horsepower and a lot more expensive, and the ps1 could trade blows with the n64 that came out 2 years latter and had a GPU made by SGI, literally the only people in the world that understood 3d at the time. and to add insult to injury, more than half of the game developers back then were Japanese, and they were very unlikely to work in a system that was not popular in japan. Microsoft years latter tried to convince Japanese devs to develop for them, and even with their infinite pockets directly funding games, they had a hard time getting it to work. but it gets worse... Japanese developers were used to dev to multi processor machines that work all in parallel to each other: Arcades were all massively multi processor, Japanese computers had that kinds of architecture. and even consoles were always multiple processors each one doing their own thing. Western developers weren't, god they were not. they were used to computers where you had a CPU doing all the work and all the other processors just were receiving commands, if they even were there. there is a interview with a blizzard developer who worked on Blackthorne SNES port that spoke about how snes was a nightmare to work with if you doubt it. funnily enough, the ps1 is kinda of a fat CPU doing everything design, very easy to develop for. in some ways the ps1 years pretty much created the western game developer landscape Jaguar is just... weird, the design is weird, it was underpowered, the hardware did not worked properly, got released exactly in the years were CD players were still not cheap enough and the company had no money. it never had a chance
N64 has no cartridge. Doom and Wolfenstein3d fit into the cartridge. id software complained that N64 could not work with their 64x64px textures (game from 1992). I think that a lot of arcade games could compress their textures into 2 MB. Even lossless png compresses 16bpp by a factor of two. So 4 texture maps fit into 64k. Stone, dirt, brick, grass. Then have another 64k for the skins of two cars.
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt If it was CD based, maybe they would have managed to get Quake on N64? Doom 64 (a fully original sequel) was done because Quake couldn't fit. Quake also was set to release on PS1 but got cancelled there. Quake was THE fps after Doom.
@ I thought there are videos of Quake2 on PS1. They draw many quads for each level polygon. Just like powerslave on Saturn. N64 could do that two for hires textures. Yeah, CD. I don’t know how many textures appear in one level. Fighting games have completely independent levels and only two fighter in memory. Brawler need more RAM.
@ ruclips.net/video/iqNusdhQ1fA/видео.htmlsi=uHbvMyvah1uv2fLT Yeah, 3do games were pirated . With cartridges you have some protection against this, but Atari has no active lock-out chip in the cartridge. As I understand it, you could read out all contents and copy to your own ROM. They only prevented unlicensed games. Why? And even that lock was broken by some homebrew devs before the official master key was leaked. How was the revolutionary Amiga hardware ABI fully open from the start, but not for the Jaguar, runner up to 3do. I guess that Jaguar could have been sold at a slight win like 3do. Throw out the expensive lock-out . 8 bit cartridges like SNES. You gotta decompress anyway. The CD unit has its own processor. I guess that 68k is also expensive with vendor lock-in to Motorola.
Why didn't ATARI take the deal to co-distribute the Mega Drive (later named the Genesis), bringing all of their arcade games over. The Genesis could handle a 12MHz 68000, allowing the now defunct console maker to run Hard Drivin', Race Drivin', and other breakthrough games at much higher frame rates on an upgraded console.
The ad campagin is something to fix, it was horrendous. The Do the Math stuff was an insult to their potential customers. Sega and Nintendo had their banter too, but it was between them, when they talked about the customers always tried to focus in how cool they were going to be if they choose them.
First, they needed to have had that writeback bug fixed before rollout. Next, they needed a better CPU than a dinky Motorola 68000 in 1993. I would have chosen an ARM Level 2 or 3 clocked at ca. 25 MHz. It's cheap enough, powerful enough, and European developers would already have had a toolkit to make it sing and dance. Finally, they should have redesigned the controller to resemble, say, the Sega Saturn NIGHTS controller, wouch could have been easily done uising the DE-9 jack with just a microcontroller and a shift register. That would have been a much more comfortable layout. But alas, it just wasn't ro be.
@@ColdSnapVAmaybe the blitter? How it only writes back to memory slowly? Or the GPU, which can only write back phrases of which it loaded the top 32 bit from DRAM.
Fantastic content! I have some mobile-related topics if you're interested: - What if Bandai (WonderSwan) would have joined Nokia to make the N-Gage? (and had a complete overhaul; horizontal resolution, competitive $149 pricing, Bandai-licensed games, WonderSwan Color games carried over to the N-Gage) - What if Microsoft had taken Apple seriously and made their own Xbox handheld running Windows Phone in 2011 instead of Sony's Xperia Play? - What if Sony released the Vita at $199 instead of $249 (and used regular SD cards), with the trimming necessary for that price? - What if Sony gave the handheld market another chance and released a new model of the Xperia Play in 2019, right around the time of the Switch Lite and the discontinuation of the Vita?
Thank you! These are really interesting What if questions. I have a list currently on what my next What if video, I’ll try to get one of these questions if possible.
Well the Jaguar controller was inherited from the Atari Falcon computer so it isn't an original design Ie. recycled, repurposed. Frankly when it comes to inborn keypads I've had that thought all the way back to the Intellivision since so few developers could utilized them fully. Largely I think the Jaguar keypad should have been optional like the 360 Chatpad.😉 Really they should have been CD-ROM based immediately, the cartridges weren't exactly large with Cybermorph actually having a smaller later variant to save money. Probably wouldn't save them from hardware problems in the optical drive but even Sony had issues with the PS1. The development kits seem to be the biggest problem as even Sega with their Saturn had trouble getting developers to actually use dual chip architecture in tandem as they intended. As far as games missing they really should have got Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat on there, even 3DO had SSF2T if not more Capcom titles. The titles they did get were kind of cross platform filler like Bubsy unfortunately.😬 Lastly funny how US people say "Jag-wire", I think it must have been read like Jaguire like Jerry Maguire for some reason and just stuck is my theory. Wouldn't get that pronunciation divide if it were named Panther or Tiger ijs.😄
If games like Rayman were launch titles I think things could have been different but the launch titles kinda sucked but the good titles came in too late
Even what if Apple back in 1983 bought both the Intellivision and Coleco Vision creating a newer updated console 16-Bit Apple Vision? It would not compete with Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo as examples.
I wonder if in that world we'd have an english translation of Shin Megami Tensei Devil Summoner. Never been remade - not even in Japan - and the Saturn rom doesn't even have any unofficial english patches,
Interesting concept. I feel like the market would have really struggled to support Atari, Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. If we assume Atari is successful at making powerful systems, I would bet on Microsoft to drop. It was another American company that made powerful hardware, and the original XBox wasn't super successful. With more competition, they might not jump in the market, or not bother making the XBox 360.
I am a fan of Atari's obsession of making their consoles with most of the weirdest form factors of their era and naming them after big cat species but they bit the dust for trying to innovate way too much and lost their main focus that is making a gaming console, not a tabletop computer with a joystick, also their dual processor system is a pain in the ass to work with even today after so many years of tinkering that's why almost no one makes modern games and software for this console, also considering that it isn't even popular enough to justify making a game for it even today, they flopped and did it hard for having so many great developers and engineers but with ADHD.
90's Atari isn't getting past their garbage reputation in the states, no matter what they do. Forget gamers using Atari as a synonym for kusoge; retailers and third parties had good reason to cheer for the Tramiel family to fail. And Atari needed money, bad. They weren't rushing everything out the door because they hadn't considered the importance of good games. Hell, they wanted Rayman as a mascot. But Rayman, even as an alternate universe exclusive, isn't beating Donkey Kong and Sonic. And those small cartridges were an issue, even when compared to the 3DO. Which would drop price to compete with them. Not that it matters... Throw in the cost of the Jag CD, and Sony beats them both on price and power, Even worse for Atari, the number of talented western console developers was limited, and heavyweights like EA, Psygnosis, and Rare were otherwise committed. Japan, unfortunately, saw Atari as an even bigger joke than the Americans did...you just aren't competing in the 90's without Japanese developers on board. The only way they stood a chance of not humiliating themselves was to focus on Europe, where the ST gave them a decent reputation...despite how Amiga owners regarded ST games.
If Atari Jaguar was successful throughout the 90's (assuming developers mastered programming on it), one might argue that Sony would have taken it's place as the console that would bomb, or several other things could have happened like Atari not opposing the same restrictions like limiting game releases or mappers on cartridges. Atari could have also been the pinnacle of gaming for decades if game development was just a little further ahead when the 64-bit era hit. If Atari was on the thrown, the butterfly effect might have impacted legacies such as Roller Coaster Tycoon, or we could have even had a Star Fox-esque Galaga game. Nonetheless, it would have been one heck of a time line for the gaming industry if Atari had more success in the 90's.
With Sony's buy-out of talented teams and creation of easy to use libraries, there's no universe where Jack and Sam's Atari beats them. Not even in a universe where they didn't screw over as many people as possible. At best, it pulls a Dreamcast or a Colecovision.
If the Jaguar had been successful, the SEGA Saturn would probably bite the dust even faster instead of the Playstation failing, at least in North America.
@@marcelosoares7148 Depends - if the library stays the same definitely. All the really good games were too japanese for the west. If they adjust the library to the west, maybe itd have a chance though
Rebellion took planned concepts from the AVP CD wish list, put them in their PC AVP. AVP never got beyond contract negotiations between Atari and Beyond Games.
@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 (2) Rebellion was testing ideas on PS1 first if you do not know it as it was a lead platform before they started from scratch and decided to make it only on PC.
@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 (1)Why do you think I wrote about those games in my comment? I will answer it for you. Because I knew that they were in consideration. There are places where I contributed info about AvP under molasar name.
~2:00 -- one small quibble: not technically 64 bit since neither the graphics card, nor the CPU used 64bit word sizes. Though still ahead of it's time as it was a dual 32 bit core (think this wouldn't pop up again until the ill faited Saturn -- and possibly the play station 1, but I don't recall for sure on that one so I may be wrong and feel free to correct me if I am.)
I need to watch your skeletal rival again on his video on the system as I don't recall all the reasons it sold poorly, I remember above 64bit quibble was one of them (the console's games performed poorly or at least more poorly then the end users were expecting.)
~5:41 -- yeah, both of the rivals of yours I've watched ALSO made a point to complain, quite loudly about that controller. So, yeah, that controller is PRETTY BAD (it's basically the intellivision controller, but in 1992 -- at least the Intellivision had the excuse of being made in the 80s before people KNEW BETTER)
~9:27 -- though how much was shared between the XBox original and the Dreamcast (including the OS), a successful Tiger may change this possibly. Though if they were stuck in a successful 4th place, we may still see the XBox in this alternate future, especially if Sega were to slip into an unsuccessful forth and exit the market.
Check the manual. There are 6 64 bit registers starting at address F02240 . The block diagram shows that there is a 4*16 bit adder. It can add even registers onto odd registers and has 4 carry flags. Fixed point add goes like : fraction, integer, fraction, integer. With z-buffer enabled, there is 4 for phase cycle: intensity, z-buffer, intensity. Only one sourceData register is visible to the GPU, but “There are therefore two source data registers, “. There is a byte shifter. The address generator for the texture seems to be 32 bit. It also alternates between fraction and integer part, but only has x and y components. So every DRAM cycle one texel can be fetched. This was probably meant for two banks of memory as in the CoJag. With a single bank and z-buffer enabled, all the blitter would have to do is check if the four texels reside in the same phrase or the previously fetched one, and fetch them in one go. Actually, address generation should happen like z-buffer increment so that the texels are available within the cycle. So devs could up the fillrate by reducing texture resolution.
The panther would have been a better console as it was more in line with the SNES and Genesis and was from many reports much simpler hardware that would have been easier to develop. That being said, the Jag was not THAT hard to develop for. The problem was Atari's management either felt they couldn't give developers "too much control' or were to incompetent or understaffed to provide proper developer support for the console's special graphics chips (Tom and Jerry). When the Jag was long dead and the source code finally released, it was reveled that the Jaguar was not all that much harder to develop for than the SNES, Genesis, or even PlayStation and far easier than the Saturn, but when you are not given the tools, you don't have much to work with but the basic 68000 processor so most games just used that making the Jaguar a glorified Genesis.
According to many who worked on Panther Dev Kits, Panther sprite handling abilities were nothing like Atari had claimed, the system was also starved of RAM. Also speculation was rife Atari would of replaced the powerful soundchip with something cheaper and far more inferior. Panther was a colossal waste of resources.
In my opinion even if the Jaguar is successful they would still failed in the next generation because of the lack of revenue and the company still crippled by the bankruptcy which required alot of money to be fix, couple with a new generation and powerful video game company on the horizon they would stood no chances.
What if Square went bankrupt in 1987? The developers would found a new company called FantasyVision, which would create all new Final Fantasy games going forward.
I think that Megami Tensei and Final Fantasy would be rivals in the US RPG market, and Dragon Quest would be slightly more popular. Also, in this timeline, Square Enix would be named EnixVision (Enix + FantasyVision).
While I never grew up with the 7800 and 5200 I always knew them for innovative home graphics but by the time Sega and Nintendo happened just looking at what wasn't multiplatform looked terrible or seemed like a one off if it was special. Also games looked buggy and boring after Mario and Sonic coming from a kid at heart looking at it from a distance. Finally that damn controller was so ass but I think thats because I grew up without number pads despite consoles now trying to sell keyboard add-ons that we never buy BTW
The 68k would be too slow for the perspective effect in F-zero. I don’t understand why the pcEngine ran at 7 MHz 3 years before. Why not run the SNES at 12 MHz and introduce wait states only for cartridge and controller.
I think if Atari didn't use that they where a 64 bit system and just advertised as a new console with a better controller and as time went on the games would have been better and then advertised why buy another console when you own a Jaguar.
Maybe scam probably wasn't the best choice of words. I should've said faulty. As many CDs were pretty much unfinished and weren't properly developed. Sorry for the confusion
In effect, it WAS a scam. Tramiel claimed in an infamous interview that the CD addon would upgrade Jaguar titles to the point they could compete with Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation. The addon added no hardware upgrade of any kind, and CD games look like cartridge games. Tramiel attempted to scam us with his claims about the CD addon. There's no real way around it, even for jag fans sucking on copium.😊
@@jcaseyjones2829 no, in effect it wasn't a scam. It was a legitimate product. It offered the ability to produce larger games and FMV. You can't use the scam because you're unhappy with the product
Fantastic Video! You Should Make A Video About What If The Atari Video Music Was A Success? It Was Released Right Before The Atari 2600 And Was The First Ever Music Visualizer Ever Created Maybe Atari May Have Focused More On Their Computer Divisions And Other Experimental Venture's.
Atari proved that being first isn't always best. The 2600 was amazing for its time, but Atari trod water largely afterward. The competition quickly over took. Both Micro Computer companies like Commodore and Sinclair and console companies like Sega and Nintendo had better hardware and games. Outside the ST (and doomed Lynx), Atari had nothing to touch the competition until the Jaguar (so something like a ten year span) and even the Jaguar had a tiny games library. Atari should have had the Panther out (or even a non-handheld version of the Lynx) around or just before Sega and Nintendo came through. They could have leveraged brand recognition to stay ahead if they had even equal H/W and software. But by 1990, you either had a Sega or Nintendo. Atari was old hat. They missed the boat. Even a vaguely competent Jaguar wouldn't have outsold the N64, Playstation or even the Dreamcast IMO...however, now that Nostalgia is a boom industry, they could make a comeback...but it had better be a bloody good console....
Yeah, just imagine if you would increase the memory bus width of the Lynx from 8 bits to 64. And imagine if you increase RAM from 64k to 2000k. Clock from 16 MHz to 32 MHz . Random ROM access instead of a tape interface. And the CPU would have the zero page on die. In a second mode opcodes would be 16 bit. 6 bit address 4 bytes in the zero page. The Move instructions has another 6bit as target. ALU use 5bit as second source and 1 bit as target relative . Load store assumes that address and value registers are far apart on the 64 register ring. Branch stay. Legacy 1 byte instructions are grouped behind a prefix byte. JST and interrupt use the stack (256 words on die) and don’t steal registers from me. Or rather a 256 byte stack on die, but on over or underflow the stack in DRAM is used (128 bit bursts ). Load signed immediate 8 and 24 bit are straight forward. Load 16 bit and 32 bit have a 16 bit opcode for alignment. Maybe allow to specify two registers? When equal, then only one immediate is read . It would be funny if the CPU would still operate on 8bits. Like the 32 Bit a vector. We have 4 carry flags for ADC, SBC. SP and “wrap around”pointer are 8 bit. External SP is 8 bit, but has 128 bit alignment. Instructs have 16 bit alignment. Again there is an 8 bit PC , but two 23 bit rough pointers to cover two pages for fast branches. “Long jumps” then are really costly. Addressing modes with bit shift. Yeah, but there would need to be “resolve to 16:16 or 32 bit” instructions using up to 3 cycles to apply after any ADD ADC SBC SUB . And for shifts I propose to “cache” the shift in a register to the opcode 16 bit. So a signed shift. One bit for zero extension, but I also want a mask with start and end. And if target register bit is set (so write back next to the source0), then the inverted mask applies there. 32 bit variable shift is so expensive (clocks) that I want to make it count. Rotation uses one register as source, shift also pulls the next one.
They technically werent even the first. Pong Consoles were the first to hit the market, multigame consoles you could argue the Magnavox Odysee was the first, though it was basically afaik just bitflipping a pong engine to make different games with overlays.
The problem is, the hardware simply doesn't stand up to the psx and Saturn, even if developed properly. Just look at the specs. It was never, ever going to do real textures on it's polygons at a good frame rate. It couldn't do decent frame rates on simple colored polygons. Everything was 12 fps at best in polygonal environments. Personally, i think they should have released Panther as soon as humanly possible and focused on arcade ports it could keep up with, but that's another conversation.
What does Panther do what others did not already? If they want to port arcade games, they could port to SNES or genesis! And Tramiel did not allow big ROMs like on the NeoGeo . For real arcade artwork, Panther would need to have a CD. Also I don’t get why Atari did not include a simple tile based background layer. Their Object processor needs more time finding out what to do and destroys the display list then actually drawing a background. There is no way to repeat a sprite pattern for example for a second background or a skybox or fields and waves in outrun. Scaling is low precision for no good reason. Like: Use all bits of the position, and if we need to reduce the linebuffer resolution due to fillrate problems, still use all bits (fixed point)! The Nintendo DS later used the Object processor for 3d, but devs were not happy. So best case would probably have been to go all in with z-buffer. Deferred rendering would avoid overdraw of textures. Transform vertices, for each polygon {read z, write z} , for each polygon { read z, if visible then read texels, write pixels } . Video DMA. So 6 memory accesses per pixel. TV consumes 4 MegaPixel . 64Bit process 4 pixels at once. So a memory clock of 14 MHz should be enough. There is time left for transformation and overdraw.
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt my feeling is, and of course I am not the alternate timelines guru or anything here, but I think the jag hardware was so flawed, the development systems so bad, that it would have been near impossible to build a successful system out of it. You'd have to change things Atari had no money to change. That's why I say, it might have been better to try to kick the crap out of rival 16 bit systems with a 16/32 bit system rather than trying to leapfrog a generation and ending up competing with systems that just blew it out of the water. But hey, I don't know everything. Maybe I'm completely wrong.
@@jcaseyjones2829 I actually don't understand why development of the Panther was so slow. Does it already have this CSV color space? It is a bit lame that Raiden only uses it for shadows. RGB could do this with a bit shift left. Jaguar has JRISC. Like SH2 it was build on the idea that on-die cache is now possible. While ARM2 was optimized to use memory without cache, and MIPS has this uh everything needs to run scalar, no matter the cost philosophy, JRISC would just run at a higher (internal) clock (like CISC) and need two cycles for some instructions, but could start an instruction every cycle. This is genius. This is fresh air.
the jaguar should have come out in 1989 instead of 1993. then it would have been much more popular. it came out too close to the release of the playstation.
Intel released the i860 in 1989. That chip has more transistors and more MHz and is really 64Bit throughout and can do floats. So it was clear that these kind of chips will get cheaper over time. Why did IBM even has problems with yield? I say that the timing on the Jaguar was botched by the subpar hardware devs.
Another big issue is just - superficially looking at the games, theres not much there that makes you think "wow this is so much better than Snes/Genesis" - sure,. Doom runs better than on SNES and 32x and the graphics are a bit sharper, but it couldnt even rival the DOS version of the time. To a time where homecomputers were something entering every home.
@ yeah, if your parents support you and install games from the internet on their work PC and buy a good VGA and soundblaster in the first case … For all others, a bugfree Jaguar would be as good as a PC . PC components could only be changed every 6 years because they were extremely expensive. So you need to compare with a PC of 5 years (top components were too expensive for consumers even on a 6 year cadence).
When it comes to video game consoles, quality of games beats quantity. You just need a couple of killer games to get a good start. Halo almost singlehandedly supported the Xbox for years. But considering that the PlayStation displaced game juggernauts Nintendo and Sega, I doubt the Jag would have survived.
And all the Jaguar had was a mediocre port of Doom - which the PSX also ended up having, but with more bells and whistles. Jaguar Doom is missing bosses - PSX Doom readds them. PSX Doom reuses the Jaguar Lvel sets, but uses a new lighting engine and ost which heavily changes the atmosphere. Means nowadays decades later PSX Doom is the only port really worth playing, since nowadays every home console just gets a 1:1 conversion of DOS Doom.
I had the Jaguar with Disc drive It was pretty craptacular but, it had a few jems Rayman, Blue Thunder, Vid Grid, and Myst But yeah it was really weird
@ yes, I worded that poorly. I meant I had the disc drive and then the system generally wasn't great. I was just listening the games for the system in general that I liked. But yes, Rayman was on cartridge.
@ yes, I worded that poorly. I meant I had the disc drive and then the system generally wasn't great. I was just listening the games for the system in general that I liked. But yes, Rayman was on cartridge.
If they would have stuck it out with the Panther could they have shipped a product several years earlier providing more resources for Jaguar development?
Panther was not ready earlier. In fact it seems that the Object Processor of the Panther is a big Problem in Tom. I kinda like that Atari wanted ultimate video quality and included a line buffer from their 2600. A single line buffer would suffice: burst load in hblank, then isolate all contacts , separate power supply, and convert to analog at any pixel clock you want without jitter or moire pattern. Of course people on RUclips only show emulators…
“[The Jaguar] ultimately ended Atari’s career in the console market, never making a console again”. Wrong. Atari VCS was released in 2020, or 2021 to the general market. I do like this video though. A “what-if” alternate history, very interesting. Doing one for Sega would be great.
@@jcaseyjones2829 The company may have changed hands a few times but it has existed in one state or another ever since. Legally it’s still Atari and the IP holder of everything Atari. Of course none of them same people are involved but most people don’t keep the same job for 35 years either. It may not be Atari in its original form but it’s still Atari. Before being absorbed by General Motors, Chevrolet was its own company. None of the people at Chevrolet are still there, because they’re long dead. Does that make it not-Chevrolet?
@@2crude2crudeofficialband3 yes, it makes it not the Chevrolet that existed originally. The Atari that made the Jaguar was not the original Atari itself. That ended with the tramiel buyout. The tramiel Atari produced the Jaguar, and all vestiges of the original Atari died with it. The company that exists now is a completely different company that simply bought the name. From the last company that simply bought the name. Tramiel bought a company with employees and products. So did the company that bought Chevrolet. They aren't the original companies, but they bought companies. They continued something. The current IP owners of the Atari name simply threw together a cheap PC, called it the vcs like the vultures they are, and then begged for money to make it. Not exactly continuing the good name of the founders of home gaming.
A couple of the problems with the Jaguar is that the guys who designed it (Flare Technologies) had never developed custom hardware before. A lot of things were broken out of the gate, and needed workarounds. The machine needed more memory - John Carmack pointed out on Slashdot back in the day that scratchpad memory was tiny and system memory was crippling the machine's performance. Another problem was that the hardware was given a 68000 chip - it was there mainly because the rest of the chips were custom designs and Atari wanted a familiar processor that Atari ST computer developers would know, and would act as the first rung of the ladder to get them into the new hardware. But lazy programmers just ported over 68000 based games and didn't use much of the new chipset's potential.
Jaguar has 2MB of memory. 4kB of code cache would be far better than the 256 bytes in an expensive 68020 CPU. Sadly, neither flare nor Atari consulted someone to set the cache up. Why would they try (and botch) direct from external memory instruction fetch? It would have been neat if the other register bank would have been used for a stack (for interrupts). With *interrupts* on overflow to flush to external memory. MMUL does not allow interrupts anyway. CLI MOVETA MMULT.
I loved the numeric keypad on the Jag. There were lots of precedents for it, such as the Intellivision and Colecovision. With the overlays added, it enhanced control and immersion for me. A game that used the numeric keypad well was Iron Soldier.
Yes and of those sucked. I mean not the keypad. I guess that was… ok.
Key (pun intended) problem was that the pads themselves was so bad.
Great gamepad + keypad = great
Bad gamepad + keypad = bad gamepad.
So unfortunately there has never been a good gamepad with a keypad
@@litjellyfish I actually thought the Jaguar controller was pretty decent, only lacking in the number of face buttons and lack of shoulder buttons, which the Pro controller addressed.
I agree with ScrapKing73, I actually liked the keypad on the Jaguar controller because it was something to differentiate the system and give it a multitude of extra buttons, with the overlays being a great way to map complex controls to it. Of course, keeping track of the overlays along with the cartridges was always going to be a problem and Atari really should have packaged them in robust cases that accommodated both, instead of just using flimsy cardboard boxes. But Atari was never going to do that, because that would cost more money and Atari wasn't interested in spending a dime more than absolutely necessary (sometimes less, as they stiffed developers out of promised payments).
I grew up an Atari fan and even had the 7800. So when I was 24, I had my first career job of a Store Manager at Montgomery Ward. So now (for the time), I was making money! We sold the Atari Jaguar so I purchased it with Alien Vs. Predator. I was still single at the time so I played a lot of Jaguar at the time and while I could see and feel its limitations, I still loved it. And it is still in my attic today.
Pretty high level job for 24
For the time its pretty good to be honest. The console just costed too much for the average consumer to the time.
Especially with the transition to CD slowly happening, considering the base Console used carts.
One has to wonder how good Jaguar Doom could have been if it was on CD, the Playstation port shows that even with less cpu power, on CD you can do the best port of Doom.
Lucky you! It's worth an entire paycheck now 😂
I'm not an insane fanboy, but the Jag controller was comfortable. Older controllers had numberpads, and the overlays were supposed to take adv of it. However, why would put the keypad on there, but only a THREE BUTTON controller? Street Fighter 2 was the killer app for everything, and it was out in 1992! Plenty of time to adjust for this!
Street fighter 2 on jag was never happening. Mk3 had a chance though.
The number pad addition was frankly baffling, and there was no comfortable way to use it.
@@jcaseyjones2829 Street Fighter 2 was released on pretty much every console and computer available at the time with the _exception_ of the Jaguar. A Jaguar version doesn't seem much stranger than Commodore 64 and Sega Master System versions. Of course, Capcom would never have bothered to developed a port themselves, but it could have been licensed out to some other (western) developer, like many of the other ports were.
The keypad was a great feature for some games. Using it for changing weapons/items in games like Doom was much better than having to cycle through them one by one, as you had to do in every other console port at the time. Gamepads always struggled with inventories and menus.
@@todesziege Capcom was never coming to the jag unless it was a profitable project, at least potentially.
@@jcaseyjones2829 In addition to the big consoles (SNES, Sega Mega Drive, PC Engine/Turbografx-16), versions of Street Fighter II or Super Street Fighter II were released on Game Boy, Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga, Amiga CD32, Fujitsu FM Towns, Sega Master System, Sharp X68000, ZX Spectrum, 3DO, PC/DOS and Atari ST. Do you really think it unfeasible a Jaguar version could have measured up in profitability to at least one of those?
@@todesziege I think you're not considering that those lowbrow computer ports were farmed out to budget labels who came to Capcom looking for the rights to make quick cash grab versions.
I think you're overlooking, first, that you should be careful what you wish for, in that I don't think anyone would have really wanted to play what they would have produced, and, second, that it really says something that even these companies failed to attempt a jaguar port.
Obviously even they disregarded Jag's chances of profitability.
Sorry man, that's just how I see it.
A few corrections if I may.
1)Panther was a 16/32 - Bit Hybrid. 16-Bit CPU and 32-Bit GPU. it was also a colossal waste of resources.
2)Panther was originally intended to have a simultaneous release with the Lynx, but Atari lacked the resources to support 2 flagship consoles at launch, so Panther was put on the back burner.
Toys R Us got caught colluding with NES to lock Atari out, they would leave the jaguar in the back and tell customers they were out of stock.
As I recall, Toys R Us and NES did this to a lot of companies (NEC being the one I'm familiar with).
To be fair, they probably weren't always lying with how scarce stock of the Jaguar was.
tin hat owner right here!!!!
@@ScotsmanGamer Actually I was trying to find the book on it I read years ago. It was during the great game crash of the 80's when all the arcades were going under. Sega and Nintendo wanted to enter the console market, but ATARI had all the patents on things like , a removable rom cartage, the plugs and cables etc and Atari had almost all the games as well as a much better system.
Nintendo and Sega were booth tied up in lawsuits with Atari but put out their systems anyway. And then an Private investigator hired by Atari (public record btw ) caught them with a parabolic mike talking on the golf course, it happened. "in 1988, Atari sued Nintendo for unfair competition under the Sherman Antitrust Act. Nintendo responded by counter-suing Atari for unfair competition, copyright infringement, and patent infringement. The lawsuit was settled in 1994 with Atari paying Nintendo damages and using some of its patent licenses. "
Nintendo sued Atari for bypassing their lockout to allow them to sell games for the Nintendo.
"For unfair competition under the Sherman Antitrust Act" and Atari won PUBLIC RECORD LOOK IT UP!
Sega lost their cases, but Sega won the patent case (easier to prove) and Atari had to pay (insult to injury) Toys R- Us however got the short end of that stick and got back at Atari as they had a sweetheart deal with Sega and Nintendo for selling games.
@@quintessenceSL NEC's failure has more factors than just sleazy competition though.
I.e look at the TX16 vs the og PC-Engine. They made it as big as a hi fi unit, making it so its mostly empty plastic without components.
Alot of the REALLY good pc-engine games also were JRPGs - something only really huge in the west by FF VII (FF III [VI in Japan) if youre generaous).
The amazing arcade ports on there were more niche than something like a Sonic or Mario.
This doesn't really adress the more fundamental problems with Jaguar, and with 90s Atari in general:
1) Mid-generation consoles always struggle. They struggle with attracting customers, who are still satisfied with their current systems, and they struggle with attracting 3rd party developers, who won't spend much resources on an unproven (and unpopular) system while there are already established systems.
The Jaguar _did_ get some decent-ish 3rd party support, but most of it was barely-improved 16-bit ports that didn't take advantage of the system's power, and might even hurt more than it helped as such releases made the system look weaker than it was. This would have likely remained the case even if the system was easier to develop for or better documented, because 3rd party developers won't put their full force behind a system without a userbase.
2) Atari's first-party games simply weren't up to the standard of Nintendo, Sega or even NEC/Hudson, neither in terms of gameplay nor tech/graphics. As such, few would buy the system and Atari'll remain unable to attract 3rd party developers.
Granted, neither Sony or Microsoft had much in the way of 1st party games when they arrived either, but they compensated for it with very deep pockets that allowed them to _buy_ 3rd party support (and massive marketing). Which brings us to...
3) Atari didn't have enough money to begin with. Their alternate revenue streams -- from computers (Atari ST/400), the handheld Lynx and vintage/budget games (mainly 2600) -- was drying up or had disappeared entirely by 1993.
Most approaches that could have _helped_ the Jaguar -- more marketing, better support for 3rd parties, more/better games -- were not realistically on the table as it would have cost too much.
They probably knew they didn't have the muscle to launch alongside the PS1/Saturn/N64, so the early/mid-gen launch was something of a hail mary that was unlikely to ever work out. I really can't see what they could have done differently.
I agree. The Jaguar was the lacking money to launch successfully, the power to compete against its next generation rivals, and the games to attract consumers away from the competition. Even if the Jaguar got 3rd place for a brief moment during the 16-bit era of consoles, it wouldn't have been enough to propel the company forward.
Especially the money - Atari themselves knew this. They did the best they could with what they had knowing that unexpected success was the only shot they had. It's possible that without the PSX they might have scraped by, but Sony hit everyone with a launch in which they had the money to do everything right. If you haven't read it, search for Don Thomas's letter "Did Anyone Say Goodbye" for an inside view on the end of Jaguar and Atari.
I agree but raise this point; if 7800 had been released properly THEN you mightve seen a big difference
@@animn7386 If Atari hadn't collapsed in the early 80s they would obviously had been in a better spot by the 90s.
I feel like Ataris massive failure in 1982 would have also detered future investors
It wasn't just that development tools were woefully inadequate, Atari was also extremely stingy with developer milestones, often not paying them out as promised (this is why Fight for Life was released in a broken form: the developer was mad that Atari hadn't paid them as promised, so they sent an earlier, unfinished build for manufacturing and Atari released it anyway). Atari also loved to use the smallest cartridges they could get away with (the system could support up to 6MB carts, but to my knowledge no game ever used that much space). Atari's rush to release software as cheaply as possible in almost any form with no regard for any kind of quality control gave it a bad reputation with both developers and gamers, which only magnified the issue of the poor software library. To my knowledge, Atari had no in-house developers for any Jaguar software and only served as a first-party publisher for games developed by other companies, so they were completely reliant on third-party studios, unlike 3DO which at least had a competent group of developers in-house.
The cool thing about the Sega CD is it added a lot of processing power which enabled features like sprite scaling and rotation that the base Genesis hardware didn't have. The Jaguar CD, like every other CD add-on (including the unreleased SNES CD add-on), didn't add any processing power to the base system, so all it did was enable CD storage capacity at the expense of greater load times. Considering that a masterpiece like Super Mario 64 was able to fit in an 8MB cartridge, I'd argue that the CD add-on was completely unnecessary and a waste of money, but Atari seemed to like wasting money on things that made little sense, like the Jaguar VR headset.
Atari was taken over by a hard drive manufacturer in 1996, which effectively ended any chance of the Jaguar remaining in the market, although by that point sales were so poor that it was only a matter of time. I'm pretty sure Atari still owed a bunch of developers a bunch of money, too, and rather than paying them either cancelled their games or released them as-is. The truth is, the Jaguar hardware needed further development, but also on a reduced time scale (they should have had the hardware ready for release in 1992, rather than 1993), along with vastly more robust developer tools that better utilized the hardware. At least then, they could have made a bigger impact against the existing 16-bit systems and beaten the 3DO to market. But Atari was never capable of doing any of that, nor were they capable of marketing the actual games properly.
Atari outsourced all console development to outside companies since the 5200. They stiffed the company who developed the 7800 causing it to be delayed by 3 years, despite them being finished, packaged, and shipped in warehouses.
They basically had no money since the 5200 and their main business model was to have someone else do all the hard work, then just not pay them.
Wait?! The Jag CD was "kinda a scam" and "didn't really work"?? My Jag CD wasn't a scam and worked just fine, thanks. I think I'm done watching this channel now.
Alot of people confuse posthomeous info with contemporary info. Complaints about the Jaguar CD not working usually comes from retro collectors that got the add on after atleast 1 decade with parts breaking down.
honestly, I think skipping the CD add-on would be the best way forward. No splitting game libraries between the console and CD.
It's NOT Pronouce Jag Wire.
I couldn't finish the video because he kept saying it wrong over and over. It's NOT jag-wire.
For your next scenario, might I suggest an alternate timeline where project Iris was officially released as the fourth Gameboy. Project Iris was the original planned successor to the Gameboy Advance, a touch screen device inspired by the PDAs that were popular at the time. The story goes that Hiroshi Yamauchi’s final request to Satoru Iwata, before stepping down as president of Nintendo, was to develop a dual screen handheld to counter the widescreen PSP. Iwata gave the order to RND, they wired together two screens they had lying around, and Nintendo needing something to show off at E3 that year debuted it as the DS. Development on project iris would continue until 2008. After Steve Jobs announced the iPhone, Iwata realizing there was no way a PDA inspired device could fight the iPhone canceled the project. Lowspecgamer has pretty good video on this if you want a more in-depth version of the story.
Great video
I'm sometimes amazed by this recommendations of channels by youtube
I would like to think if they hadn't botched the design of the Jaguar that they could have been a success.
I think there was a niche to produce games that appealed to an adult market, like if the Megadrive had more power.
Imagine buying Mortal Kombat: Mawled Edition with all the blood the SNES owners craved
A version of Street Fighter would have been essential for its success and a quality racer would help their market share, I know Stunt Car Racer was rumoured but imagine a texture mapped racing game on a Jaguar shown alongside Stunt Car FX on the SNES. It would have been worth seeing.
If they had enjoyed more success then perhaps Rayman could have continued their series of games on Atari hardware
Perhaps the same with Doom II, given the good reputation the Jaguar version of Doom had, even better if new hardware could make Quake its home.
I'd like to think Aliens Vs Predator would have got a sequel too and some fmv sequences on the CD attachments would have given people a reason to own one.
The controller was such a strange choice, why you would choose to imitate the Megadrive three button design in the era of low/medium/high punch and kick I don't know, it's like they only understood the market of the 80s and not learned anything about the market of the 90s. It's a harsh lesson for any manufacturer that a poorly designed controller can play a big part in the downfall of your console. Atari were never going to invest the money required to correct their mistakes though. They lucked into a period of success with the home computer market when the components needed to make a home computer dropped in price then got squeezed out when home PCs became more affordable and games consoles offered a better gaming experience.
If only it had more and better games available upon launch. The potential was there. I wonder if it would have made a difference if it was backwards compatible with the 2600 and 7800.
Damn, how do you only have 20 subs???
Imagine how many more he's have if he worked on his pronunciation
Your videos are really good I really like the what if scenarios. You remind me of Archimedes 123 videos. Do what if Nintendo failed and what if Sony and Nintendo were still on the same team.
Thanks man! I made a video called What if Nintendo and Sony created the PlayStation, were it dives into the world were Nintendo continued the CD addon partnership with Sony.
Jeff Minter said if they had just 1 more bit in the registry, it would've handled polygons so much better.
Even as it was, Iron Soldier 1 & 2 ran amazingly smooth and had an crazy far draw distance that beat most N64 games!
Too bad almost all the rest made me feel nearsighted with the close pop-in horizon.
I always wonder how atari Jaguar would look like if it didn't fail. Wonder what would the 3DO, Phillips CdI and amgia 32 CD
Thanks to the XBOX One & PS4, all those CD based systems would fail due to one thing: lack of quality software.
Alien Vs Predator on the Jaguar was incredible. Tempest 2000 was decent as well. There was so much potential in the system, just like with the Wii U.
As for the controller, it was better than the Intellivision controller.
You'd add a numeric pad to your controller, if you were looking to have complex PC simulations like Falcon TFX, Gunship 2000 converted to the Jaguar, as they Atari were.
These required keyboard controls.
Oh, ok that makes sense. It always was odd to me why companies back then added number pads to the controller. Thanks for the info!
I think ATARI would have solved the shortage of exclusive games if the console allowed backwards compatibility. It is true that the 2600/5200/7800 catalog is full of garbage, but it helps a lot while waiting for new games.
The console should have been primarily CD-based but with a cartridge or expansion slot to add older titles.
1:17 True internationally, but the 7800 outsold the Master System in the U.S. (Going by memory, Tonka distributed the Master System stateside, & they didn't market it well.)
I like your videos
Thanks man! I really appreciate that!
awesome this is literally the kind of shit I think about. I had a habit of getting POWERFUL systems not realizing that has nothing to with their success and longevity and quality of games.
do you have a cartridge slot?
Well yes. I do, it's on the back of my head, like any normal GameBoy. And to answer the question of games, I don't really play Pokémon, so I play Tetris instead. And not only Tetris, but the Mario Land series included.
So, the sixth gen would have nintendo, sega, sony, microsoft AND atari?👀
Thats Right!
While in reality there was only Nintendo, Sega, Sony, Microsoft ... and VM Labs, Panasonic, SSD, VTech and some handheld systems by Bandai, Nokia, Game Park, LeapFrog, Tapwave.
😮
Everyone says the Jag controller sucks but how many have actually used one? I had a friend who owned a Jag & honestly I lived the controller. The number pad doesn't get in the way (much like how the Xbox controller keyboard doesn't). But what the number pad did was give some play options. Like in FPS games allowing one to just hit a key to select a weapon rather than cycling. It's somewhat similar to the touchscreen on a Nintendo DS in how it can be used.
Sure few games highlighted what it could be good at but it's not a bad idea honestly.
Jag controller was stiff on the dpad and buttons, like a Genesis controller's dpad. Atari likely just thought the number pad was a good idea from systems like Intellivision. A few things I would have done differently in this prediction; after Atari knocked out Sega, Sega would have been publishing games for Atari. At the same time, Atari being just 30 minutes down the 101 from EA, managed to talk them into publishing for the system as well, since Sega was now out of the console business. Also Atari restores a relationship with Atari Games (The arcade spinoff of Atari) and started getting that content onto the system as well. Older titles like Hard Drivin and Steel Talons. Newer titles like San Francisco Rush and T-MEK.
Ironically, the number pad is amazing in Doom and AVP. Only console port where you can select Weapons as quickly as on PC.
Atari would be one of the big 4 with the Nintendo, Playstation, and Xbox.
Assuming Sega does nothing different regarding the launch of the Saturn, I truly believe that in the what if scenario here, Jag could have passed it in North America.
Wow, Didn't notice that you are starting as your content is actually too good, Good job buddy❤
Thank you so much!
it wouldn't ever happen.
ps1 was... a monster, something we never gonna see ever again
and unlike every other console maker. Sony had its own fabs and made its own hardware back then.
just look at the frankstein that the Saturn ended being in order to compete with ps1, and it still was inferior in horsepower and a lot more expensive, and the ps1 could trade blows with the n64 that came out 2 years latter and had a GPU made by SGI, literally the only people in the world that understood 3d at the time.
and to add insult to injury, more than half of the game developers back then were Japanese, and they were very unlikely to work in a system that was not popular in japan.
Microsoft years latter tried to convince Japanese devs to develop for them, and even with their infinite pockets directly funding games, they had a hard time getting it to work.
but it gets worse... Japanese developers were used to dev to multi processor machines that work all in parallel to each other: Arcades were all massively multi processor, Japanese computers had that kinds of architecture. and even consoles were always multiple processors each one doing their own thing.
Western developers weren't, god they were not. they were used to computers where you had a CPU doing all the work and all the other processors just were receiving commands, if they even were there. there is a interview with a blizzard developer who worked on Blackthorne SNES port that spoke about how snes was a nightmare to work with if you doubt it.
funnily enough, the ps1 is kinda of a fat CPU doing everything design, very easy to develop for. in some ways the ps1 years pretty much created the western game developer landscape
Jaguar is just... weird, the design is weird, it was underpowered, the hardware did not worked properly, got released exactly in the years were CD players were still not cheap enough and the company had no money. it never had a chance
N64 has no cartridge. Doom and Wolfenstein3d fit into the cartridge. id software complained that N64 could not work with their 64x64px textures (game from 1992). I think that a lot of arcade games could compress their textures into 2 MB. Even lossless png compresses 16bpp by a factor of two. So 4 texture maps fit into 64k. Stone, dirt, brick, grass. Then have another 64k for the skins of two cars.
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt If it was CD based, maybe they would have managed to get Quake on N64? Doom 64 (a fully original sequel) was done because Quake couldn't fit. Quake also was set to release on PS1 but got cancelled there. Quake was THE fps after Doom.
@ I thought there are videos of Quake2 on PS1. They draw many quads for each level polygon. Just like powerslave on Saturn. N64 could do that two for hires textures. Yeah, CD. I don’t know how many textures appear in one level. Fighting games have completely independent levels and only two fighter in memory. Brawler need more RAM.
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt wut?
anyway the advantage of CD was not storage, it was manufacturing price.
a cd can cost pennies to press.
@ ruclips.net/video/iqNusdhQ1fA/видео.htmlsi=uHbvMyvah1uv2fLT
Yeah, 3do games were pirated . With cartridges you have some protection against this, but Atari has no active lock-out chip in the cartridge. As I understand it, you could read out all contents and copy to your own ROM. They only prevented unlicensed games. Why? And even that lock was broken by some homebrew devs before the official master key was leaked. How was the revolutionary Amiga hardware ABI fully open from the start, but not for the Jaguar, runner up to 3do. I guess that Jaguar could have been sold at a slight win like 3do. Throw out the expensive lock-out . 8 bit cartridges like SNES. You gotta decompress anyway. The CD unit has its own processor. I guess that 68k is also expensive with vendor lock-in to Motorola.
Why didn't ATARI take the deal to co-distribute the Mega Drive (later named the Genesis), bringing all of their arcade games over. The Genesis could handle a 12MHz 68000, allowing the now defunct console maker to run Hard Drivin', Race Drivin', and other breakthrough games at much higher frame rates on an upgraded console.
The ad campagin is something to fix, it was horrendous. The Do the Math stuff was an insult to their potential customers. Sega and Nintendo had their banter too, but it was between them, when they talked about the customers always tried to focus in how cool they were going to be if they choose them.
First, they needed to have had that writeback bug fixed before rollout. Next, they needed a better CPU than a dinky Motorola 68000 in 1993. I would have chosen an ARM Level 2 or 3 clocked at ca. 25 MHz. It's cheap enough, powerful enough, and European developers would already have had a toolkit to make it sing and dance. Finally, they should have redesigned the controller to resemble, say, the Sega Saturn NIGHTS controller, wouch could have been easily done uising the DE-9 jack with just a microcontroller and a shift register. That would have been a much more comfortable layout. But alas, it just wasn't ro be.
Writeback bug?
@@ColdSnapVAmaybe the blitter? How it only writes back to memory slowly? Or the GPU, which can only write back phrases of which it loaded the top 32 bit from DRAM.
2:16 3:35 the eyes make this video so sad 😢
Fantastic content! I have some mobile-related topics if you're interested:
- What if Bandai (WonderSwan) would have joined Nokia to make the N-Gage? (and had a complete overhaul; horizontal resolution, competitive $149 pricing, Bandai-licensed games, WonderSwan Color games carried over to the N-Gage)
- What if Microsoft had taken Apple seriously and made their own Xbox handheld running Windows Phone in 2011 instead of Sony's Xperia Play?
- What if Sony released the Vita at $199 instead of $249 (and used regular SD cards), with the trimming necessary for that price?
- What if Sony gave the handheld market another chance and released a new model of the Xperia Play in 2019, right around the time of the Switch Lite and the discontinuation of the Vita?
Thank you! These are really interesting What if questions. I have a list currently on what my next What if video, I’ll try to get one of these questions if possible.
What if the TurboGrafix16 had the PC Engine library?
@@GameBoyss360what if wonderswan was released in the west😢
5:48 'Twas meant for passwords, & for slower-paced strategy games, which were popular on home computers at the time.
Well the Jaguar controller was inherited from the Atari Falcon computer so it isn't an original design Ie. recycled, repurposed. Frankly when it comes to inborn keypads I've had that thought all the way back to the Intellivision since so few developers could utilized them fully. Largely I think the Jaguar keypad should have been optional like the 360 Chatpad.😉
Really they should have been CD-ROM based immediately, the cartridges weren't exactly large with Cybermorph actually having a smaller later variant to save money. Probably wouldn't save them from hardware problems in the optical drive but even Sony had issues with the PS1.
The development kits seem to be the biggest problem as even Sega with their Saturn had trouble getting developers to actually use dual chip architecture in tandem as they intended.
As far as games missing they really should have got Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat on there, even 3DO had SSF2T if not more Capcom titles. The titles they did get were kind of cross platform filler like Bubsy unfortunately.😬
Lastly funny how US people say "Jag-wire", I think it must have been read like Jaguire like Jerry Maguire for some reason and just stuck is my theory. Wouldn't get that pronunciation divide if it were named Panther or Tiger ijs.😄
Do you use Chat GPT on your videos?
No. I do the research and the writing on my own. And then I do voice and then working on the video with capcut.
Jag-war
if you do, then would you play games like tetris and pokémon?
If games like Rayman were launch titles I think things could have been different but the launch titles kinda sucked but the good titles came in too late
Even what if Apple back in 1983 bought both the Intellivision and Coleco Vision creating a newer updated console 16-Bit Apple Vision? It would not compete with Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo as examples.
Can you do what if sega won the console war aka if sega actually beat Nintendo
I wonder if in that world we'd have an english translation of Shin Megami Tensei Devil Summoner. Never been remade - not even in Japan - and the Saturn rom doesn't even have any unofficial english patches,
Interesting concept. I feel like the market would have really struggled to support Atari, Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. If we assume Atari is successful at making powerful systems, I would bet on Microsoft to drop. It was another American company that made powerful hardware, and the original XBox wasn't super successful. With more competition, they might not jump in the market, or not bother making the XBox 360.
I am a fan of Atari's obsession of making their consoles with most of the weirdest form factors of their era and naming them after big cat species but they bit the dust for trying to innovate way too much and lost their main focus that is making a gaming console, not a tabletop computer with a joystick, also their dual processor system is a pain in the ass to work with even today after so many years of tinkering that's why almost no one makes modern games and software for this console, also considering that it isn't even popular enough to justify making a game for it even today, they flopped and did it hard for having so many great developers and engineers but with ADHD.
Jag UAR not wire
Nope
He's an American, that's just how it's pronounced here.
90's Atari isn't getting past their garbage reputation in the states, no matter what they do. Forget gamers using Atari as a synonym for kusoge; retailers and third parties had good reason to cheer for the Tramiel family to fail.
And Atari needed money, bad. They weren't rushing everything out the door because they hadn't considered the importance of good games. Hell, they wanted Rayman as a mascot.
But Rayman, even as an alternate universe exclusive, isn't beating Donkey Kong and Sonic. And those small cartridges were an issue, even when compared to the 3DO.
Which would drop price to compete with them. Not that it matters...
Throw in the cost of the Jag CD, and Sony beats them both on price and power,
Even worse for Atari, the number of talented western console developers was limited, and heavyweights like EA, Psygnosis, and Rare were otherwise committed. Japan, unfortunately, saw Atari as an even bigger joke than the Americans did...you just aren't competing in the 90's without Japanese developers on board.
The only way they stood a chance of not humiliating themselves was to focus on Europe, where the ST gave them a decent reputation...despite how Amiga owners regarded ST games.
If Atari Jaguar was successful throughout the 90's (assuming developers mastered programming on it), one might argue that Sony would have taken it's place as the console that would bomb, or several other things could have happened like Atari not opposing the same restrictions like limiting game releases or mappers on cartridges. Atari could have also been the pinnacle of gaming for decades if game development was just a little further ahead when the 64-bit era hit. If Atari was on the thrown, the butterfly effect might have impacted legacies such as Roller Coaster Tycoon, or we could have even had a Star Fox-esque Galaga game. Nonetheless, it would have been one heck of a time line for the gaming industry if Atari had more success in the 90's.
With Sony's buy-out of talented teams and creation of easy to use libraries, there's no universe where Jack and Sam's Atari beats them.
Not even in a universe where they didn't screw over as many people as possible. At best, it pulls a Dreamcast or a Colecovision.
If the Jaguar had been successful, the SEGA Saturn would probably bite the dust even faster instead of the Playstation failing, at least in North America.
I doubt it. The PS1 would still have been a cheaper option. Its why Sega was so pissed over Sony's rrp announcement.
@@marcelosoares7148 Depends - if the library stays the same definitely. All the really good games were too japanese for the west. If they adjust the library to the west, maybe itd have a chance though
Maybe Alien versus Predator the expanded CD version, AvP VR with VR headset and AvP2 would be made and released.
Rebellion took planned concepts from the AVP CD wish list, put them in their PC AVP.
AVP never got beyond contract negotiations between Atari and Beyond Games.
@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 (2) Rebellion was testing ideas on PS1 first if you do not know it as it was a lead platform before they started from scratch and decided to make it only on PC.
@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 (1)Why do you think I wrote about those games in my comment? I will answer it for you. Because I knew that they were in consideration. There are places where I contributed info about AvP under molasar name.
~2:00 -- one small quibble: not technically 64 bit since neither the graphics card, nor the CPU used 64bit word sizes. Though still ahead of it's time as it was a dual 32 bit core (think this wouldn't pop up again until the ill faited Saturn -- and possibly the play station 1, but I don't recall for sure on that one so I may be wrong and feel free to correct me if I am.)
I need to watch your skeletal rival again on his video on the system as I don't recall all the reasons it sold poorly, I remember above 64bit quibble was one of them (the console's games performed poorly or at least more poorly then the end users were expecting.)
~4:00 -- oh, you address the failures (I just didn't wait long enough, so that one is on me)
~5:41 -- yeah, both of the rivals of yours I've watched ALSO made a point to complain, quite loudly about that controller. So, yeah, that controller is PRETTY BAD (it's basically the intellivision controller, but in 1992 -- at least the Intellivision had the excuse of being made in the 80s before people KNEW BETTER)
~9:27 -- though how much was shared between the XBox original and the Dreamcast (including the OS), a successful Tiger may change this possibly. Though if they were stuck in a successful 4th place, we may still see the XBox in this alternate future, especially if Sega were to slip into an unsuccessful forth and exit the market.
Check the manual. There are 6 64 bit registers starting at address F02240 . The block diagram shows that there is a 4*16 bit adder. It can add even registers onto odd registers and has 4 carry flags. Fixed point add goes like : fraction, integer, fraction, integer. With z-buffer enabled, there is 4 for phase cycle: intensity, z-buffer, intensity.
Only one sourceData register is visible to the GPU, but “There are therefore two source data registers, “.
There is a byte shifter.
The address generator for the texture seems to be 32 bit. It also alternates between fraction and integer part, but only has x and y components. So every DRAM cycle one texel can be fetched. This was probably meant for two banks of memory as in the CoJag. With a single bank and z-buffer enabled, all the blitter would have to do is check if the four texels reside in the same phrase or the previously fetched one, and fetch them in one go. Actually, address generation should happen like z-buffer increment so that the texels are available within the cycle.
So devs could up the fillrate by reducing texture resolution.
The panther would have been a better console as it was more in line with the SNES and Genesis and was from many reports much simpler hardware that would have been easier to develop. That being said, the Jag was not THAT hard to develop for. The problem was Atari's management either felt they couldn't give developers "too much control' or were to incompetent or understaffed to provide proper developer support for the console's special graphics chips (Tom and Jerry). When the Jag was long dead and the source code finally released, it was reveled that the Jaguar was not all that much harder to develop for than the SNES, Genesis, or even PlayStation and far easier than the Saturn, but when you are not given the tools, you don't have much to work with but the basic 68000 processor so most games just used that making the Jaguar a glorified Genesis.
According to many who worked on Panther Dev Kits, Panther sprite handling abilities were nothing like Atari had claimed, the system was also starved of RAM.
Also speculation was rife Atari would of replaced the powerful soundchip with something cheaper and far more inferior.
Panther was a colossal waste of resources.
In my opinion even if the Jaguar is successful they would still failed in the next generation because of the lack of revenue and the company still crippled by the bankruptcy which required alot of money to be fix, couple with a new generation and powerful video game company on the horizon they would stood no chances.
What if? Geppetto was not a real boy but was made of oak wood and Pinocchio was the creator and not the puppet...
3:51 the Atari VCS (2019) are you sure about that?
Atari VCS is in the bottom Right corner 3:57
@@GameBoyss360 yeah, I saw that. I thought it was funny.
What if Square went bankrupt in 1987? The developers would found a new company called FantasyVision, which would create all new Final Fantasy games going forward.
I wonder if in that case Megami Tensei would be THE mainstream RPG in the west instead of Final Fantasy.
I think that Megami Tensei and Final Fantasy would be rivals in the US RPG market, and Dragon Quest would be slightly more popular.
Also, in this timeline, Square Enix would be named EnixVision (Enix + FantasyVision).
While I never grew up with the 7800 and 5200 I always knew them for innovative home graphics but by the time Sega and Nintendo happened just looking at what wasn't multiplatform looked terrible or seemed like a one off if it was special. Also games looked buggy and boring after Mario and Sonic coming from a kid at heart looking at it from a distance. Finally that damn controller was so ass but I think thats because I grew up without number pads despite consoles now trying to sell keyboard add-ons that we never buy BTW
Im confused why there is eyes drawn on every console
To make it more interesting, and goofy
What if snes have a fast cpu?
The 68k would be too slow for the perspective effect in F-zero. I don’t understand why the pcEngine ran at 7 MHz 3 years before. Why not run the SNES at 12 MHz and introduce wait states only for cartridge and controller.
I think if Atari didn't use that they where a 64 bit system and just advertised as a new console with a better controller and as time went on the games would have been better and then advertised why buy another console when you own a Jaguar.
Atari Pallas Cat
The CD add-on was a scam? Why was it fake, vapourware, broken? What made it a scam? Or don't you know what the word scam actually means?
Maybe scam probably wasn't the best choice of words. I should've said faulty. As many CDs were pretty much unfinished and weren't properly developed. Sorry for the confusion
In effect, it WAS a scam. Tramiel claimed in an infamous interview that the CD addon would upgrade Jaguar titles to the point they could compete with Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation. The addon added no hardware upgrade of any kind, and CD games look like cartridge games. Tramiel attempted to scam us with his claims about the CD addon. There's no real way around it, even for jag fans sucking on copium.😊
I got you, Gameboy.
@@jcaseyjones2829 no, in effect it wasn't a scam. It was a legitimate product. It offered the ability to produce larger games and FMV. You can't use the scam because you're unhappy with the product
@@jcaseyjones2829 nice to see my response was removed.
Fantastic Video! You Should Make A Video About What If The Atari Video Music Was A Success? It Was Released Right Before The Atari 2600 And Was The First Ever Music Visualizer Ever Created Maybe Atari May Have Focused More On Their Computer Divisions And Other Experimental Venture's.
Atari proved that being first isn't always best. The 2600 was amazing for its time, but Atari trod water largely afterward. The competition quickly over took. Both Micro Computer companies like Commodore and Sinclair and console companies like Sega and Nintendo had better hardware and games. Outside the ST (and doomed Lynx), Atari had nothing to touch the competition until the Jaguar (so something like a ten year span) and even the Jaguar had a tiny games library. Atari should have had the Panther out (or even a non-handheld version of the Lynx) around or just before Sega and Nintendo came through. They could have leveraged brand recognition to stay ahead if they had even equal H/W and software. But by 1990, you either had a Sega or Nintendo. Atari was old hat. They missed the boat. Even a vaguely competent Jaguar wouldn't have outsold the N64, Playstation or even the Dreamcast IMO...however, now that Nostalgia is a boom industry, they could make a comeback...but it had better be a bloody good console....
Yeah, just imagine if you would increase the memory bus width of the Lynx from 8 bits to 64. And imagine if you increase RAM from 64k to 2000k. Clock from 16 MHz to 32 MHz . Random ROM access instead of a tape interface.
And the CPU would have the zero page on die. In a second mode opcodes would be 16 bit. 6 bit address 4 bytes in the zero page. The Move instructions has another 6bit as target. ALU use 5bit as second source and 1 bit as target relative . Load store assumes that address and value registers are far apart on the 64 register ring. Branch stay. Legacy 1 byte instructions are grouped behind a prefix byte.
JST and interrupt use the stack (256 words on die) and don’t steal registers from me. Or rather a 256 byte stack on die, but on over or underflow the stack in DRAM is used (128 bit bursts ).
Load signed immediate 8 and 24 bit are straight forward. Load 16 bit and 32 bit have a 16 bit opcode for alignment. Maybe allow to specify two registers? When equal, then only one immediate is read .
It would be funny if the CPU would still operate on 8bits. Like the 32 Bit a vector. We have 4 carry flags for ADC, SBC. SP and “wrap around”pointer are 8 bit. External SP is 8 bit, but has 128 bit alignment. Instructs have 16 bit alignment. Again there is an 8 bit PC , but two 23 bit rough pointers to cover two pages for fast branches. “Long jumps” then are really costly. Addressing modes with bit shift.
Yeah, but there would need to be “resolve to 16:16 or 32 bit” instructions using up to 3 cycles to apply after any ADD ADC SBC SUB .
And for shifts I propose to “cache” the shift in a register to the opcode 16 bit. So a signed shift. One bit for zero extension, but I also want a mask with start and end. And if target register bit is set (so write back next to the source0), then the inverted mask applies there. 32 bit variable shift is so expensive (clocks) that I want to make it count. Rotation uses one register as source, shift also pulls the next one.
They technically werent even the first. Pong Consoles were the first to hit the market, multigame consoles you could argue the Magnavox Odysee was the first, though it was basically afaik just bitflipping a pong engine to make different games with overlays.
The problem is, the hardware simply doesn't stand up to the psx and Saturn, even if developed properly. Just look at the specs. It was never, ever going to do real textures on it's polygons at a good frame rate. It couldn't do decent frame rates on simple colored polygons. Everything was 12 fps at best in polygonal environments.
Personally, i think they should have released Panther as soon as humanly possible and focused on arcade ports it could keep up with, but that's another conversation.
What does Panther do what others did not already? If they want to port arcade games, they could port to SNES or genesis! And Tramiel did not allow big ROMs like on the NeoGeo . For real arcade artwork, Panther would need to have a CD.
Also I don’t get why Atari did not include a simple tile based background layer. Their Object processor needs more time finding out what to do and destroys the display list then actually drawing a background. There is no way to repeat a sprite pattern for example for a second background or a skybox or fields and waves in outrun. Scaling is low precision for no good reason. Like: Use all bits of the position, and if we need to reduce the linebuffer resolution due to fillrate problems, still use all bits (fixed point)!
The Nintendo DS later used the Object processor for 3d, but devs were not happy. So best case would probably have been to go all in with z-buffer. Deferred rendering would avoid overdraw of textures. Transform vertices, for each polygon {read z, write z} , for each polygon { read z, if visible then read texels, write pixels } . Video DMA.
So 6 memory accesses per pixel. TV consumes 4 MegaPixel . 64Bit process 4 pixels at once. So a memory clock of 14 MHz should be enough. There is time left for transformation and overdraw.
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt my feeling is, and of course I am not the alternate timelines guru or anything here, but I think the jag hardware was so flawed, the development systems so bad, that it would have been near impossible to build a successful system out of it. You'd have to change things Atari had no money to change. That's why I say, it might have been better to try to kick the crap out of rival 16 bit systems with a 16/32 bit system rather than trying to leapfrog a generation and ending up competing with systems that just blew it out of the water.
But hey, I don't know everything. Maybe I'm completely wrong.
@@jcaseyjones2829 I actually don't understand why development of the Panther was so slow. Does it already have this CSV color space? It is a bit lame that Raiden only uses it for shadows. RGB could do this with a bit shift left.
Jaguar has JRISC. Like SH2 it was build on the idea that on-die cache is now possible. While ARM2 was optimized to use memory without cache, and MIPS has this uh everything needs to run scalar, no matter the cost philosophy, JRISC would just run at a higher (internal) clock (like CISC) and need two cycles for some instructions, but could start an instruction every cycle. This is genius. This is fresh air.
what if Sega did what Atari and made a new console?
the jaguar should have come out in 1989 instead of 1993. then it would have been much more popular. it came out too close to the release of the playstation.
Intel released the i860 in 1989. That chip has more transistors and more MHz and is really 64Bit throughout and can do floats. So it was clear that these kind of chips will get cheaper over time. Why did IBM even has problems with yield? I say that the timing on the Jaguar was botched by the subpar hardware devs.
Another big issue is just - superficially looking at the games, theres not much there that makes you think "wow this is so much better than Snes/Genesis" - sure,. Doom runs better than on SNES and 32x and the graphics are a bit sharper, but it couldnt even rival the DOS version of the time. To a time where homecomputers were something entering every home.
@ yeah, if your parents support you and install games from the internet on their work PC and buy a good VGA and soundblaster in the first case … For all others, a bugfree Jaguar would be as good as a PC . PC components could only be changed every 6 years because they were extremely expensive. So you need to compare with a PC of 5 years (top components were too expensive for consumers even on a 6 year cadence).
Pls also make a video on who would manage the western video game industry after the 1980's crash if Nintendo didn't didn't take it over.
What if Microsoft had bought sega
How about an Atari console called the Atari Tiger ?!? GROWL !!!!
Yeah, Atari Domestic Shorthair has a ring to it
When it comes to video game consoles, quality of games beats quantity. You just need a couple of killer games to get a good start. Halo almost singlehandedly supported the Xbox for years. But considering that the PlayStation displaced game juggernauts Nintendo and Sega, I doubt the Jag would have survived.
And all the Jaguar had was a mediocre port of Doom - which the PSX also ended up having, but with more bells and whistles.
Jaguar Doom is missing bosses - PSX Doom readds them.
PSX Doom reuses the Jaguar Lvel sets, but uses a new lighting engine and ost which heavily changes the atmosphere.
Means nowadays decades later PSX Doom is the only port really worth playing, since nowadays every home console just gets a 1:1 conversion of DOS Doom.
Imagine a Console called The Atari Lion.
I had the Jaguar with Disc drive
It was pretty craptacular but, it had a few jems
Rayman, Blue Thunder, Vid Grid, and Myst
But yeah it was really weird
Rayman was on a cartridge, not CD on Jaguar.
@ yes, I worded that poorly.
I meant I had the disc drive and then the system generally wasn't great.
I was just listening the games for the system in general that I liked.
But yes, Rayman was on cartridge.
@ yes, I worded that poorly.
I meant I had the disc drive and then the system generally wasn't great.
I was just listening the games for the system in general that I liked.
But yes, Rayman was on cartridge.
Never making consoles... again atari vcs ?
Look at the Bottom Right Corner 3:57
Ha okay so the editing, lol maybe make it a little more prominent. I will say that for you starting out great job.
And that also was a massive failure no one heard of. Making the Ouya after the Ouya already failed is quite a milestone.
I wish you didn't pronounce it jagwire.
he does pronounce it "jagwar" though.
WTF is an Atari Jagwire???????? learn to say the damn word right!!!!!!
There is no “w” or “I “ in Jaguar. I still believe it failed because the owners kept stealing everyone’s silverware.
The Atari Jaaaaaaaaaaag
Probably why it failed, not enough towels and silverware collected.
Nope. In America we pronounce it like he does.
If they would have stuck it out with the Panther could they have shipped a product several years earlier providing more resources for Jaguar development?
Panther was not ready earlier. In fact it seems that the Object Processor of the Panther is a big Problem in Tom. I kinda like that Atari wanted ultimate video quality and included a line buffer from their 2600. A single line buffer would suffice: burst load in hblank, then isolate all contacts , separate power supply, and convert to analog at any pixel clock you want without jitter or moire pattern. Of course people on RUclips only show emulators…
Whats a jag wire?
What do you mean the CD drive didn't work properly 😂
I think you're just repeating what you saw the angry video game nerd saying in his video
“[The Jaguar] ultimately ended Atari’s career in the console market, never making a console again”. Wrong. Atari VCS was released in 2020, or 2021 to the general market.
I do like this video though. A “what-if” alternate history, very interesting. Doing one for Sega would be great.
Wrong. Totally different company, and I suspect you knew that.
@@jcaseyjones2829 The company may have changed hands a few times but it has existed in one state or another ever since. Legally it’s still Atari and the IP holder of everything Atari. Of course none of them same people are involved but most people don’t keep the same job for 35 years either. It may not be Atari in its original form but it’s still Atari.
Before being absorbed by General Motors, Chevrolet was its own company. None of the people at Chevrolet are still there, because they’re long dead. Does that make it not-Chevrolet?
@@2crude2crudeofficialband3 yes, it makes it not the Chevrolet that existed originally. The Atari that made the Jaguar was not the original Atari itself. That ended with the tramiel buyout. The tramiel Atari produced the Jaguar, and all vestiges of the original Atari died with it. The company that exists now is a completely different company that simply bought the name. From the last company that simply bought the name. Tramiel bought a company with employees and products. So did the company that bought Chevrolet. They aren't the original companies, but they bought companies. They continued something. The current IP owners of the Atari name simply threw together a cheap PC, called it the vcs like the vultures they are, and then begged for money to make it. Not exactly continuing the good name of the founders of home gaming.
@@jcaseyjones2829 Wow such anger! That’s amusing. Stay mad, it’s funny.
At the end of the context, I put the VCS on the bottom right corner, 3:58. But I guess it's not really clear enough, my bad
A couple of the problems with the Jaguar is that the guys who designed it (Flare Technologies) had never developed custom hardware before. A lot of things were broken out of the gate, and needed workarounds. The machine needed more memory - John Carmack pointed out on Slashdot back in the day that scratchpad memory was tiny and system memory was crippling the machine's performance.
Another problem was that the hardware was given a 68000 chip - it was there mainly because the rest of the chips were custom designs and Atari wanted a familiar processor that Atari ST computer developers would know, and would act as the first rung of the ladder to get them into the new hardware. But lazy programmers just ported over 68000 based games and didn't use much of the new chipset's potential.
Jaguar has 2MB of memory. 4kB of code cache would be far better than the 256 bytes in an expensive 68020 CPU. Sadly, neither flare nor Atari consulted someone to set the cache up. Why would they try (and botch) direct from external memory instruction fetch?
It would have been neat if the other register bank would have been used for a stack (for interrupts). With *interrupts* on overflow to flush to external memory. MMUL does not allow interrupts anyway. CLI MOVETA MMULT.