It was basically a 6 gen console 7 years earlier, no dev ever used the Tom and Jerry co-processors, no dev was ready for it.

Lmfao

>>11877139 (OP)
It shipped with a 16-bit CPU from 1979 and the "Tom and Jerry co-processors" were full of hardware and firmware bugs that made development hell.

How can Snoy even compete?

>>11877158
Don’t underestimate the 68, Neo Geo chugged on until 2004.

>>11877162
we had the chance for a starfox but badass and pussyslayer, but nope, it wasnt the right time. yet.

>>11877139 (OP)

>>11877139 (OP)
It was like the PS3's CELL

The Jaguar and 3DO are the only consoles I know of that feature games with JPG compression.

>>11877140
>>11877142
fpbps

legit loling here. That thing was 16-bit, flat out. 64? Get the fuck out of here with your system bus voodoo. Having just two good games didn't help matters either.

>>11878513
more good games than the saturn, at least

>>11878517
>the saturn
That thing was doomed from the start due to their stupid decision to use quadrilateral polygons.

>>11878348
>It was like the PS3's CELL
The cell was the wrong CPU for the PS3 but it was a solid bit of engineering with masses of power, if the device was designed to crunch supercomputing tasks which generally amount to massively parallel vector work. Something games do, but not so much of that you need a Cell to do it. Especially since the GPU handles most of it anyway.
The Jaguar RISC cpu was a heap of shit that wasn't fit for ANY purpose. Most of its runtime was taken up doing nothing but checking if it was safe to run anything. You had to avoid using half the instructions in general because they just didn't work.
If you want to call it "like" anything, it's more like the SEGA CD in that that too had a powerful CPU that was sadly wasted on avoiding bus contention and race conditions due to a hardware oversight. But even that's not fair as the SEGA CD CPU was solid, just hamstrung where the Jaguar was not solid at all, it was a flakey piece of shit with a manual that mostly says "this doesn't work, and that doesn't work, and you should probably only use this routine as it's the only one we could get to work..."

>>11878534
>That thing was doomed from the start due to their stupid decision to use quadrilateral polygons
Nah, quads are fine. We'd been happily using quads before and will continue to use quads into the future. The problem is the WAY they did quads. It was too much of a dick and didn't handle degenerate cases properly so you needed too much software handholding and modelling and texturing manual intervention so the quad renderer didn't shit the bed.
If they had supported arbitrary UV mapping at the very least and gracefully handled degenerate polygons where a side has length==0 then it not only would have been fine, but people might even have preferred it to the PS1 where you had to handhold it to minimise warping and "holes". Quads are less prone to warping, and not having the long edges of two triangles meeting means fewer holes in the rendering due to lack of subpixel accuracy.
If the saturn had supported triangles but kept all the other facets of its hardware, it STILL would have been just as shit. If the PS1 adopted quads it would still have been better than the saturn.

>>11878546
Granted, but they still could have chosen normal polyons. And the general architecture of the Saturn creates processing bottlenecks. It's junk, just admit it.

It's the coolest looking console case of the era. Definitely beats out SNES and Genesis. I'd argue it looks better than Dreamcast and Saturn too. Too bad it had nogames, lol.

>>11878565
>It's the coolest looking console case of the era. Definitely beats out SNES and Genesis.

What the fruck?

>>11878575
ya heard me, wanker.

>>11878583
lol it does look like a toilet, but to be fair I will probably play Trevor McFur later on my Switch.

>>11878565
Looks like an edgy 90s toilet

>>11878517
No.

>>11877139 (OP)
Atari could have solved this problem itself by making their own fucking games that actually utilized the console's full capabilities and showed other devs what was possible. There's honestly no excuse for them coming to market with what was their absolute last-ditch effort and not even having any idea what the killer app was supposed to be because they were waiting for someone else to do it for them.

And it's especially hard to understand with it coming after the 16-bit era where they saw Nintendo and Sega both develop or expand on their own in-house franchises. Nintendo didn't hope people made good launch games for the SNES. They made Super Mario world and included it as the pack-in game so every fucking person who bought a SNES had a game that showcased the system's possibilities right out of the gate. How the fuck do you watch them get it exactly right and then a full console generation later just go with some exceedingly mediocre, not particularly good looking game developed by somebody else as the launch title for your supposedly incredibly advanced system? The first impressions were so important and everyone's first impression of the Jaguar was "meh."

And somehow the 3DO did the exact same fucking thing. Launched a $700 console with ONE mediocre game. Not one game as a pack-in. One game total. How did game companies five or six generations into the industry still not get that you needed games on your game consoles or nobody would give a shit? They just made these things and hoped somebody else would eventually figure out what to do with it. And we did figure it out. We put them in the trash where they belonged.

>>11878716
>How did game companies five or six generations into the industry still not get that you needed games on your game consoles or nobody would give a shit?
The Switch 2 just launched with one exclusive and it is selling like hot cakes.

>>11878776
>The Switch 2 just launched with one exclusive and it is selling like hot cakes.

Nta, but that thing is selling on FOMO alone.

>>11878776
What's your point? It launched with a game people give a shit about.

>>11878776
Nu-tendies are a cult

Hosenose and Booger would have saved the Jaguar

Has there ever been homebrew that showed this thing was some untapped powerhouse?

>>11879317
There is still autist discussing homebrew and ports on here:
https://forums.atariage.com/forum/14-atari-jaguar/

The last "big" game to release on the Jaguar was probably BattleSphere (2000), not that impressive to be honest:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1H-opqrX4s

Like many anons have mentioned it already, the hardware was shipped fundamentally broken.

>>11879317
Not homebrew, but Iron Soldier only used one of the CPUs for the game logic and it's already able to render whole cities with fully destructible environment and dozens of enemies shooting at you. With the Jerry DSP assisting Tom it could be more. Jaguar is lacking of 3D hardware acceleration and memory bandwidth that's up to par with other consoles, but the dual RISC CPU setup is very powerful for anything other than rendering. Scheduling two CPUs that also do other things like 3D rendering, image blitting, and sound making on a single slow FPRAM channel is a bitch though.

>>11879337
The biggest game made for Jaguar would have been Black Ice White Noise. Also Phase Zero which has voxel graphics and runs really well on the system.

>>11879317
Interesting demoscene shit, I'm sure, but that's literally just demos with no game logic or anything. Then again, I'm thinking of the Atari Falcon.

>>11877142
/thread

>>11878602
>>11878663
>HURRRR DAE AVGN???
kill yourselves

>>11879337
>JagStudio
That was something that Jaguar needed at lauch, not only was the hardware full of bugs but there were not tools or library to even get you started, meanwhile the PlayStation had really good tooling and you could only use Sony's libraries.

>>11879956
*at launch

>>11879956
Jaguar should've used R3000 like the PS1 instead of homegrown CPUs. It was cheap.

>>11877139 (OP)
> too powerful
> machine's design was so badly implemented that only less than 50% of the power could ever be used
cringe
>>11878716
>Atari could have solved this problem itself by making their own fucking games that actually utilized the console's full capabilities
they couldn't. nobody could. the hardware was flawed. atari knew it too. they still tried to make a product out of it as it was too late and too expensive to fix the problems. it's one of those cases where fixing the problems after launch would make games written for the bugged hardware crash or behave in strange ways. atari were stuck with a lemon.

>>11880139
> it was cheap
never happened. not even in the most schizo fantasy induced by LSD would make your claim seem plausible or even slightly believable. the 68000 was dirt cheap and common. it was not intended to be the main processor for the jag, the risc was. since the risc had trouble sharing memory without voodoo magic being performed, everyone used the 68000. most programmers were also more familiar with 68k series and just ignored atari's recommendations to use the flawed risc chip. let's say schizophrenia and revisionist history wins the day (lmao) and jag used two risc chips. it's still fucked because they still both can't share memory without voodoo magic due to atari's garbage hardware design. doesn't matter what cpu you use.

>>11880184
>never happened.
Not the cheapest, but far from pricy. This is from 1991, $30 for an R3000 based microcontroller off the shelf. By 1993 the price would have fallen a bit. Add an extra matrix math coprocessor into the die.
>68000 was dirt cheap and common
The 68K had no place in the Jaguar. It was bottlenecking the system. Too weak to run games, and keep up with the two powerful RISC chips, too powerful if it was to be a sound chip controller.
>jag used two risc chips
Jag uses two risc chips and one 68000. Tom runs game logic and rendering. Jerry controls the sound DSP.

Atari should've went with a more friendly and risk-free architecture while staying cost effective. Something like R3000 core with 3D coprocessor + Tom based GPU, with fewer CPU instructions + dedicated VRAM, 256KB or so, like 32X + sound DSP powered by 65C02 with small dedicated SRAM for the sound bank, all on a single chip like the later SNES revisions. That would make it work a lot more like the PS1 and give the devs an easier time.

Unlicensed internally designed RISC chip might have been dirt cheap to make, but way harder to use and full of undocumented quirks. Spending like $15-$20 more on a much more popular MIPS based solution would have been wise. They could save up everywhere else to keep the manufacturing cost low. Jaguar didn't need that CD quality sound chip when it's running mostly cartridge games. Nor it needed to have much higher color depth than SNES SuperFX games when it wasn't even capable of UV mapping.

Their objective should've been to run games with the same complexity as PS1 games but without textures, transparency, and complex shaders. Same CPU, slower RAM, much simpler GPU. And perhaps with SNES quality sounds. Making the Jaguar a poor man's PS1 would've made it more marketable to players without deep pockets and devs who wanted to make effortless ports.

>>11880160
>only less than 50% of the power could ever be used
By thar logic, N64 was the same. Both systems are RAM bus bottlenecked.

>>11880139
>>11880184
Or they could have dropped the meme RISC shit and ship it with a good 32-bit CPU like the 68030 at something like 33MHz with a FPU from Motorola too.
By 1992/1993 the 68030 was cheap.

>>11880818
68030 had inferior IPC to RISC chips. You also couldn't add custom math, blitter, sprite controller, and other kinda of custom processors on the same die. Tom and Jerry were VLSI and had 64-bit bus, they're the reason Jaguar was so cheap to produce.

>>11877139 (OP)
The whole system was based on marketing lies, 64-bit my ass, the Jaguar could have never achieved something like Gran Turismo 2 even on the hands of a good programmer, hell, John Carmack couldn't intergrade music into the Jaguar DOOM port because he had to use both the Tom GPU chip and Jerry DSP chip to get some decent performance.

>>11879915
Even despite the avgn, it still looks like some retarded "future toilet" from some 90s magazine

>>11877139 (OP)
We're they called Tom and Jerry because they didn't get along?

>>11882041
kek, actual good one

>>11882008
>64-bit my ass
It's got 32-bit CPUs and 64-bit GPU. Turbografx has an 8-bit CPU and 16-bit GPU yet people call it a 16-bit system.
>Gran Turismo 2
PS1 had a geometry math chip and a UV wrap texture mapping chip, the key to fast 3D textured graphics. It had nothing to do with bits. The PS1 does have 80-bit memory bus combined though.
>John Carmack couldn't intergrade music into the Jaguar DOOM
Fans managed to. Carmack said he didn't have time to program it.
>he had to use both the Tom GPU chip and Jerry DSP chip to get some decent performance
How many chips do you think the PS1 has?

>>11878602
>>11878663
>>11882009
Have zoomers never seen a discman?

>>11882192
Yes, I have. The jaguar doesn't look like one though, it just looks like some concept toilet, even without the add on

>>11882180
Yet the DOOM port on PS1 mogged the Jaguar port.

>>11882192
At best, it looks more like a weird ass toilet trying to look like it has a big cd walkman on top for some strange reason

>>11882192
have you ever seen a toilet?

>>11882198
>yet
On top of the 80-bit combined RAM bus which include RAM channels for the CPU, GPU, and sound (on Jaguar, there's one 64-bit channel for every single component, one at a time), it's a much faster SDRAM modules being used by the GPU compared to Jaguar's cheap off-the-shelf FPRAM that could be found on PCs and 16-bit consoles. And also the geometry and texture chips. Actually it's a bit embarrassing PS1 Doom only runs marginally better than Jaguar Doom despite all the advantages the consoles had. Each PS1 unit cost around $500 to manufacture.

>>11882192
Yes, specifically I had one that looked just like that but had MP3 support that I used to listen to music between classes during college, much easier to burn a few hundred MP3s on a CD-R than roughly 15-20 songs as audio tracks and not have to switch out disks as often.

Now.... have you ever seen a JaguarCD?

>>11880818
Funnily enough the Jaguar originally did have a 68030, you can found proof of this in Cybermorph's code and some early dev interviews, Atari swap it out for a bare 68k to save money.
Could have released the console at 299 instead of 249 and kept the 68030, remember that 3DO released at 500 to 600 US$ in the same year.

>>11879440
Iron Soldier seems to have more polygons than decent number of N64 games but its possible with texturing you don't notice as many polys

>>11882008
>>11877139 (OP)
Even John Carmack said he used both chips in Doom which is why there is no music. There is video footage of developers saying its kind of tricky but not that hard once you get used to it.
The big question is if they would have been better to just release the Panther in 1990/91, no 3D or anything like Doom but probably some of the cool effect like in Tempest or Defender 2000. As it was it sort of spent a year as the most powerful console, it seems to be more promotion and management that killed it. I know 3do but Jag seems better in some ways such as the 3do running 2d games at 30 fps.

>>11878565
the tv remote control controller is a fucking travesty

>>11883201
Yeah Cybermorph uses the 68K to handle the AI. Hence it doesn't run too great. Should've run everything on the Tom and Jerry. Iron Soldier runs everything on Tom except for the music, and the framerate is really stable.
>Could have released the console at 299 instead of 249 and kept the 68030
There's no reason to. Tom simply has vastly superior performance despite the bugs. Carmack wished there was a third RISC CPU instead of a 68K.
>Atari swap it out for a bare 68k to save money
It makes sense, Jerry has 32-bit bus. A 68030 would have occupied another 32-bit.
>Could have released the console at 299 instead of 249 and kept the 68030,
Would've been unwise. The 68000 was a good decision. They should've used used a popular RISC CPU like R3051 instead of Tom and Jerry from the start of the R&D. And it should've been a 32-bit RAM + 32-bit VRAM instead of a 64-bit Unified RAM system with lower color depth. The 24-bit color depth bottlenecked the GPU and proved to be not a very effective selling point. 12-bit would've performed better.
>remember that 3DO released at 500 to 600 US$ in the same year.
3DO's business model was utterly retarded and Trip Hawkins was lucky it even sold 1.5 million units, thanks to the VCD.

The Jaguar honestly should've been an even cheaper console. Maybe like $200. And it needed a floppy drive to let all the bedroom coders publish cheap games for it for free. That's what Konix Multisystem was supposed to be.

>>11883218
>There is video footage of developers saying its kind of tricky but not that hard once you get used to it.
One guy is already working on a music patch since last year. It's called Doom Slayer Edition.
>The big question is if they would have been better to just release the Panther in 1990/91
Nope. Bad idea. It only had 32KB internal SRAM and nothing else. It was meant to run games straight from the cart ROM, with the CPU, GPU, and sound processor connected straight to the ROM PCB just like the NES did, and that meant it needed expensive fast ROM chips. Panther was going to be a really cheap console, but the games would've been expensive and probably slow to manufacture. Jaguar might've been more expensive, but there would be no reason to own a Panther when Jaguar could do everything the Panther could with much cheaper ROM chips.
>it seems to be more promotion and management that killed it
They never had much faith in it. What ultimately killed it was the bug found in the GPU that would've delayed the production and launch.
>Jag seems better in some ways
Jag was better in every way except at rendering textured 3D. 3DO had a texture/sprite transformation chip that worked like Saturn's GPU. But the Jaguar had faster CPUs. Tom and Jerry were faster than ARM60.

>>11883230
Why? It allowed fast weapon swaps in Doom.

>>11883350
Wow. Sounds pretty convenient actually.

>>11878776
1993 is not 2025. There were far fewer diehard system loyalists back then, especially for Atari.

>>11883816
This, and you had to remember, the jaguar was following up consoles like the lynx, which weren't that popular, versus the switch 2 following up a literal money printer

>>11883816
>1993 is not 2025. There were far fewer diehard system loyalists back then, especially for Atari.

There has always been Atari loyalists. Atari was still in the home computer industry around 1993 with the ST and Falcon lines. The micro computers scene was full of rampant fanboyism and loyalists. Plus the 16-bit 'console war' was a thing. The problem with Atari getting back into consoles was that the Tramiel's were really hard to work with when it came to dealing with developers. Jack and his son really didn't know how to manage a game company back then. Jack was notorious for cutting corners on hardware specs to save a few bucks per unit.

>>11884570
There are more nintendo loyalists, even in the early 90s there were more.

>>11884573
>There are more nintendo loyalists, even in the early 90s there were more.

Of course their was. Nintendo had a monopoly on third party developers throughout the 8-bit generation. Nintendo Power Magazine was quite popular. By 1993, there was a lot of Sega loyalists too. I was only pointing out that it doesn't matter who owns Atari, because there have always been loyalists to the brand since Pong.

>4MB max cartridge size
Shit was doomed from the start.