I programmed on the Jaguar. We worked on an unreleased basketball game, however looking at the video it appears at 12:09. It was interesting because what we did was write our code on the 68K, then translated the code to the RISC processor. The processing speed was greatly increased. We had to program 3D matrix calculations in the RISC processor for speed. The game used a virtual 3D world for player, ball position, and court rendering, but was translated to a 2D+ visuals. The Jaguar didn't have a full screen video buffer - It had a single line buffer. It was double buffered, with one displayed, and the other being written to by the blitter. The buffers would swap at the beginning of the next line display. The blitter was extremely programmable as it would have to build the display from various graphical elements. I also worked on a football (American) game for the SNES shown at 12:03. It was the best playing football game at the time, but unfortunately the graphics was hindered by the SNES sprite limit shown on one line. Whole sprites would disappear, causing players on the screen to be torn. Rotating the sprite order, would help, but only just. The Genesis version was a lot better. I programmed the coin toss, referee animations, and the AI coach for person vs computer play. We could have put in different coaching styles for the various teams, but ran out of time.

I remember for my birthday my family were in tough financial times and my mom couldn't afford an NES so she got me an Atari 2600 from a thrift store and to this day I still enjoy hooking it up and playing on my old CRT. Great video!

I'm 48 now. I grew up with Atari. I have a pretty big Atari collection alongside all of my other video game collections. I can remember wanting one of these back when they were at retail. And I kept hearing how much they were behind in the market. I waited for a fire sale on them that I never saw happen. Still wish I had one to tinker with. But the current aftermarket prices have just kept me from getting one. I passed on a couple deals on the Lynx and kick myself now as I rarely find them locally much less a deal on them. Old video games and nostalgia......ugh.

3:57 The problem with the Lynx is that debuted at twice the cost of the Gameboy. From personal experience, my middle class parents weren't about to spend $180 (The equivalent to about $445 today) on a handheld system that I could potentially lose at such a young age. The gameboy was half the cost and a much more reasonable purchase for them. I'm sure there were a lot kids in a similar situation. I remember two brothers that came in to my local barbershop playing it each playing the handeld their own seperate unit when I was younger. To say I was jealous was an understatement.

Got one back in the day. It was not that bad considering Tempest2K, Alien vs Predator, Iron Soldier, Wolfenstein, Doom and a few others. Of course Atari made a lot of bad decisions and with the release of PS1 and Saturn the game was over for Atari as well as for 3DO and Commodore. I still own a Jaguar along with a Gamedrive allowing me to play Cartridge and CD Games without worrying about failing CD Drives. Tempest2K is still an awesome game and the Jaguar itself is a nice memory of the wild 90s.

I remember wanting it just for the hardware design, but then I couldn't find a single game I wanted to play. All these years later I still think it's very pretty hardware. In my dream world, it has a bunch of cool 2.5D turn-based RPGs. But, alas...

What a lot of companies assumed back then was all we wanted the best graphics. Companies seem to forget you can have the most or least powerful system out there. What sells systems is quality of games on it.

I wanted a Atari Jaguar, but changed my mind when I played a friend’s Jaguar. It was still pricey but felt it didn’t compare to my PlayStation.

That generation was so insane. People think the Saturn was a failure should take a look at all the other consols that launched.

I got one for Christmas, I think I only had the pack-in Cybermorph. It was a bad Christmas. But I asked for it, so it wasn't my parents fault. I think my mom ordered it from New York as it wasn't in wide distribution. I didn't learn to fly anywhere, lady.

Never owned one but I used to make a 45 minute commute to a store downtown that had the Jaguar on display just to play it. I was highly impressed by Aliens v Predator and Rayman.

I remember trading my SNES for this Jaguar I found at a flee market way back in the mid 90s. BIGGEST MISTAKE EVER

90s gaming got so out-of-hand with marketing that Atari got greedy and shot themselves in the foot. I was fine with my Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis/Mega Drive so the Jaguar was the last thing on my mind. Long story short, it was the summer before high school that a played the Jaguar at a family's friends house. After playing Kasumi Ninja and Cybermorph for a few minutes each, I learned what false advertisement means.

Just found your channel and only 10 minutes in I'm subscribed! I love deep dives into classic video game topics and you're one of the best I've seen do it so far, I'd say you're up there with Classic Gaming Quarterly which in my opinion is a great compliment. Looking forward to more videos in he future

Im about 40, and yeah Atari was not big for us when we were kids but they were like the sires of gaming and i think it was generally acknowledges even though only our older brothers would have played it. however when the jaguar commercials started up, personally I thought 'uh oh nintendo/sega the big boy is back in town' with all the hype those short commercials brought i though it was gonna be a crazy system and blow everything away...it never made it big, i never heard anyone talking about it and never even saw one for sale. that was the point when i was like Atari= irrelevant vintage gaming.

It's too bad that Nolan Bushnell - the original founder of Atari in the mid seventies - was not able to secure his deal to buy them back. That would have been the ultimate revenge, but I wonder what he would have done with the company.

In the utter end, the Jaguar case has been used by the medical industry. Now a grey and very medical looking device now. 🤦‍♂️

The Atari Jaguar CD, a modern necessity for gracious living

One correction: Atari Corporation, which made the Jaguar, merged with JT Storage, a hard drive manufacturer, on February 13, 1996. Atari Games, the arcade division, merged with WMS in April 1996. The two Ataris had split in 1984; before that, it was Atari, Inc. I've read that the Jag ceased production in November 1995, and new game releases ended shortly after - the last one during its main lifespan being on January 15, 1996. The Jag CD also likely ended production in November 1995, giving it a production run of probably 2 or 3 months - given the system's September 21 launch date, production likely began in August or early September. Its last game was in March 1996 (also its only game that year). Atari actually exited the console market and announced plans to become a PC game developer just before the merger with JT Storage. On January 2, 1996 they announced Atari Interactive, their PC game label. However, it was disbanded upon the merger with JT Storage, and they never released a game under that label. They did have a large unsold stock of Jaguars that they pitched on infomercials throughout 1996 and sold to a liquidator at the end of that year. From December 1996 to May 1998, after production was discontinued, Telegames released 5 games for the Jag and 2 for the Jag CD. ICD also released one. August 29, 2023 1:47 am

In 1995 I was working as a security guard to put myself through school. I spend a lot of late nights watching infomercials. I recall seeing Jack Tramiel on one of those infomercials trying to sell the Jaguar. Thinking back I wish I had a way to record those sales pitches.

You forgot to mention the 64 bit blitter and the 64 bit Object processor packaged up in Tom - again. Remember 5 processors... you only talk about 3 of them.

I've enjoyed the Jaguar as a game system since 1999, just in time for Battlesphere's game release. The development scene for the Jag is extremely active and between the homebrews and games ported from the Atari ST computer it is difficult to keep up with all the titles for the system at this point.

My brother still isn't happy with me and our mom. We listened to the people at kb toys that warned us about the system and lack of games. I mean it was only $50 but still $50 was a lot for us then. It was either late 97, 98 or mid 99 at the latest.

I remember seeing the Jaguar in gaming magazines and thinking it was the craziest thing ever. I didn’t get one until Kaybee (KB) was going out of business and legit bought one for $20 brand new. The games were even cheaper, but was so sad once I hooked it up to my TV. It sucked as a kid, but I wish I still had all of them today.

One misconception about the Jaguar, at 34:05. The Atari that was sold to WMS Industries was Atari Games (Atari's arcade division that had nothing to do with the home division, as Atari would be split in two separate companies by 1984), not Atari Corp. This is also why the post-1984 Atari arcade games aren't available in Atari 50, as Warner Bros. Currently owns the rights to Gauntlet, Paperboy and other post-1984 Atari arcade titles

One of the major problems with games is the way hardware was designed. It had the same Motorola 68000 chip as the Sega Genesis. In the Sega Genesis the chip was the main processing unit. It wasn't in the Jaguar. It was meant to be primarily used for controller input and extra processing . Games that used it as such looked amazing for the time. AVP, Rayman, Iron Soldier, and Tempest 2000 to name a few. And that is the problem. I can only name a few. Most games ended up using the Motorola chip like the Jaguar was the Genesis and didn't even touch Tom & Jerry ( The two chips that made this system next gen)

I don't recall seeing any jaguar consoles as a teen in Japan. I would have liked one though just for the collectable value (although I wouldn't have known it at the time).

It wasn't underpowered in terms of hardware... it was just a complicated machine and didn't have enough developers spending the time to figure it out and make great games with it.

I bought a Jaguar right when it was released. I was so disappointed with it as the only game really worth a damn on a system like this was Tempest 2000. Atari 50th is worth it to play Tempest 2000 (I want to support them by purchasing it) but you can use BigPEmu for free if you want to play Jag games. You might as well glue Tempest 2000 in the cartridge slot. There were a few other good games but they were available on other systems and the vast majority were awful stinkers. I had the Jaguar CD when it came out and oh boy, it's was bad. Blue Lightning is one of the worst games I have ever played. No one knew how to properly program games to the Jaguar and just used the 68000. My favorite things Atari were the arcade games, not so much any of the home systems as many of their arcade titles are legendary. One thing I vividly remember is returning like 4 or 5 games I purchased because they were just so bad. I don't recall ever doing that with any games for any other system I ever purchased.

Gotta sleep for shift-work but few things make me as happy as seeing a long-form lady decade work hit the feed. Now I have something to look forward to through my tough Monday. Maybe even watch it at work? 😮😅❤

I'm probably, the only one who liked the "toilet" design of the Jaguar CD.

9:02 it was called the "Consumer Electronics Show", not Entertainment show! Those days were great, I'd get my issue of EGM in the mail and there were 2 CES shows every year (one in summer, one in winter) that would feature all the games. That was before E3.

You did a good job here explaining the dubious claim regarding the Jaguar's architecture being 64-bit. By any and every industry metric, the Jaguar is a 32-bit platform. You did raise the question regarding its 64-bit wide bus, however. Regarding the dual 32-bit processors Tom & Jerry, this would make sense so that both can have immediate access to memory and the like. But this isn't the case with the Jaguar, as while Tom has full 32-bit access to the bus, Jerry has only 16-bit wide access the same thing. Perhaps this is accounting for the (ahem) "system manager" 68000 (which, also by any and every industry metric, is the CPU. Even the Jaguar developer docs label it the CPU.) The system bus has never determined the bit architecture of a system, as Atari tried desperately to do with the Jaguar. Consider Windows NT 3.1, which is a fully 32-bit OS (Linux works for this example too.) A 25Mhz 386SX is considered to be a 32-bit CPU. Pair them together, you have what the industry will define as a fully 32-bit platform -- ... except the "SX" in "386SX" denotes a 16-bit data bus. This restrictive bus limitation took a toll on overall performance (best demonstrated by Doom at the time) but it's still considered to be a 32-bit architecture. Atari tried to apply the inverse of this arrangement to arrive at the same conclusion. Anyway, great video.

Grew up as a Genesis gamer in the 90s definitely remember hearing about the Jaguar, just thankful I never had one

I feel guilty for having my father buy this. I had him get it from the WIZ for $399 - he also got Trevor McFur, and a second controller. Back then, "$500" was like $1000 today. The system was initially interesting, but it was trash. The games had no music and were technology demonstrators that hadn't been refined. I ended up selling it for $50 - a move I regret to this day as the retro gaming industry is alive and well. Never sold any of my other systems.

I wish I still had my Jaguar and Jaguar CD. A friend of mine borrowed it and later sold it.

I bought one and sold it two days later. 😆

Love your videos Ma'am! your voice always brings a solace to my otherwise hectic day!

I do not think it was a bad console at all. I also had the CD drive. The problem was the games! When I was young, I learned BASIC on an Atari 800XL that I purchased from K-Mart that I had to put on Layaway, Fun times.

Atari was so confident in the specs of this console, that they missed the most pivotal aspect of a video game console, the games. It could have been the most powerful console of all time and it wouldn't have mattered since it lacked games that would get people interested. Consoles need killer apps, must-have games that sell the console. N64 had Mario64 and OoT. PS1 had RE, FF7, MGS. What did the Jaguar have???

I beat Cybermorph. It wasn't hard to figure out. Just follow the yellow arrow. I bought Atari 50th anniversary game. I started playing Cybermorph again. lol plus other games on there.

idk why but that slight smug smile of satisfaction on the thumbnail followed by "COMPLETELY DESTROYED" makes me lol

I Read somewhere the shell for the jaguar Was used for dentist Maschines

Jack Tramiel was the main reason for Commodore's success, especially since the company seemed to lose direction after his departure... yet Atari's failure reeks of someone chasing ego, though I don't know how involved Jack was at the time. Sam Tramiel trying to copy his father's success?

Well written and funny comments throughout. Also educational with the Jaguar history. Thanks for the video.

I remember Target had the Jaguar on end caps at the front of the store, no other game system was sold that way. I even remember being tempted to buy one when they went on clearance. They were briefly like $50

I lost it with your head popping up to chastize my flying. Bravo, Lady Decade! 🤣

I bought one when it was released, I was excited as a then 13 year old who loved his Atari Lynx (which I still display in my display case to this day!). I took it back to the shop the next day so disappointed with it. I think Cybermorph itself killed it for me, I absolutely despised it!

I was there for it all and still am to this day lol. When you said “grandpa played the 2600” - back in the late 70s and early 80s, we played it (we meaning 6-8 year old gen x’ers), and generally not adults. Arcades were a big deal at the time, and adults were more into that.

Great video! I doubt it would have a large audience, but I'd love to see a video on the Atari ST. I grew up with one, but don't know too much about it

Atari corporation (the company in this video) did a merger with JTS a hard drive manufacturer in 96. WMS industries bought Atari games corp a separate arcade company.

A mad man out there managed to reverse engineer the software and game code, so you can actually try out (kinda) what the Jaguar VR would have been like on current VR headsets via BigPEmu version 1.07 . It's not great, but well, it is interesting.

I bought my Jaguar in a Rumbelows closing down sale for £80. I couldn't afford a PC and wanted to paly Doom and the Jaguar let me do that. It's still working and I sold it last year to a chap who lets people use retro computers and consoles at various conventions.

Oh Atari... Being over 50, I knew you back in the day...

Reminds me of my first car. The speedometer listed up to 140 mph, but it wouldn't go above 100 mph. And at 100 mph, you could actually watch the gas gauge go lower. Imagine advertising that car as a 140 mph machine.

atari managment once told me personally that they thought the jaguar was going to be another success like the 2600, my response to them, i said its all about the games, they said what do you mean, i said you need games, lots of them, all types, and i got back was crickets. i knew it was doomed. the rest is history.

I remember shortly after we had got the PlayStation me and my buddy Nathan found an original Atari 2600 with the wood grain on it and everything inside of a junk mobile home that my dad had stored on the property down in the woods!! My dad ran a junkyard and so he was always ending up with other peoples “junk“ which consisted of old cars, trailers, mobile homes, boats and pretty much anything you can imagine!! But that Atari 2600 was just laying on the floor inside of the empty mobile home and because I didn’t have no cords or anything to it I ended up giving it to my buddy Nathan whose brother had cords and controllers from his 2600 that he got when he was our age and wouldn’t you know it, the thing still worked perfect!

i am not gonna lie i wasnt apeal to click on the video .. but i gave it a shot and im so impressed great work! i subscribed too!

My reaction to Atari's attempt at home VR is "Almost 30 years later and VR has yet to prove itself as a better option than just playing a game on a TV with a controller."

I miss the classic console wars. Now we're stuck with Ps5 and Xbox - either one can run the same games. But, the real money has a PC. My 13900k, 4090, 32GB DDR5, SSD build can run any game on the entire market.

This is what gaming is all about! Great content!

This video sheds new light to the real reasons why the Jaguar CD is so rare.

Would love to see a Lady Decade video on the new Atari 2600+. That video would be a necessity for gracious living!

Maybe they should've released the Panther in 1991 and got their foot in the market before the newer systems came out. I owned an Atari Jaguar with the CD attachment and 56 games. I ended up selling it for cheap. The CD unit had trouble right out of the box. Had interference to the tv. By the way, Battlemorph was actually fun.

Very informative and very amusing...particularly liked the commentary about the green head being called a trollop, the jaguar called the little black box of lies...and all the toilet humour around the CD add-on......Although I live in Australia, and thankfully the Jaguar was never released here, I do recall it well through US video game magazines of the day.....there was never anything positive about it (except perhaps the Alien vs Predator game)

A 64-bit memory bus has absolutely nothing to do with how many 'bits' the CPU architecture is.

Man. A 30 min video with an add break every two minutes. I like video game history channels, but not one that are throwing ads that often

😊Une autre superbe vidéo de Lady Decennie, merci belle reine du monde du jeu rétro

The Jaguar was designed to use a 68030 from the onset but was versatile enough to interface (unfortunately) with lesser processors. It was also supposed to have 4MB of RAM. Atari are the ones to blame in the end for cheapening out the system. Though the designers should have made it where only a 68030 or better could have been used.

I always wondered why they went with new franchises rather that carrying the flag of Atari Classics into the new Era. Sadly the Jaguar was like a wanna be Sega Genesis complete with CD Add On that failed just as badly.

great video, theres nothing more i need to know about the Jaguar

I was such a HUGE ATARI FAN!! I remember getting emotional when I read the title of an article in a gaming magazine entitled "Atari Is Dead" in the 90's. Might have been "Next Generation" magazine or something. Anyway, have major memories of bringing home an ATARI 2600 home from Hess's in the 80's. I was SOOOOO EXCITED!! SOOOOO many hours of magical memories of playing ATARI after that. Wish I could go back and relive every single one!!

The Jaguar launched with 3 games. 3 games in Nov 93. It wasn't until the following March that it got another game. Only 8 games were released for the system before Holiday 94. December 94 got a decent number of games (six). Only 19 of the 50 cartridge Jag games were published by third party companies.

The wwwwiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiild and colorrrfull pronunciation is back. And i loooooooooooooooooooooooove it :) (or would it be iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii love it, i don't know, i don't know but i love it :)))) ) And nice video btw. I knew for the jaguar and the do the math is forever engraved in my memories but i didn't knew for the jaguar CD. Thank you :)

What AVGN did to the Atari jaguar was hilarious. You should have had that clip in this video

Great Stuff, as always!

I must say that i love that you specify it as the American Console Game Crash, and not he Video Game Crash everyone else everyone else addresses it as. The people in Europe never even raised their eyebrows to the NA Crash. We got along just fine, anyway great video!

their big mistake was throwing in the Motorola 68000 in there. Though intended to be a system manager, developers knew how to program for the 68k so they just used that and ignored the two 32 bit processors.

We’ve been on 128 bit memory on pc for almost two decades. Larger memory bus means more memory bandwidth

12:32 both games are completely différents ! Starfox is a rail shooter, cybermorph is a full 3D World where all is calculated is Real time. There is not à lot of 3D elements in the Nintendo's game. To compare both games is a non sense.

Look at those two Jaguars pushed up close together. I don't think one will fall out despite what you say.

I remember a friend of mine having this console, I think it got used once to play Doom then went back in the cupboard and the snes and mega drive was out for Mario and Sonic lol

I remember those ads. I knew from gaming magazines that the Jaguar was just smoke and mirrors, and I really was fine with the SNES at the time.

i remember playing AVP on this. loved it.

Still to this day I haven't had to blow into a single Atari 2600 cartridge.

The Jaguar was certainly as powerful as some 32 bit systems and even more powerful than some 32 bit systems (such as the very expensive 3DO).

I swear you have had this video on before?? I remember your cybermorph take on it. Anyways... great video as always!

At the time the arcade systems were all becomming 32bit systems, being the state of the art they were it was pretty hilarious that Atari of all brands to have come up with a 64bit system. I did the math alright back then...

Playstation showed you why 3D graphics were never going to work on the low memory physical cartridges of the time. The CDROM was destined to take over.

So great to view this video less than two weeks after Atari announced the Atari 2600+ for november

I know nothing about electron devices in terms of their core design but I am curious about this.. if you have two 32 but processors and a 64 bit bus.. could the two processors be made to operate on the instructions together as though they are one 64 bit processor? In a 64 bit system is each individual instruction the full 64 bits? I can see how if that is the case then no it would not work but if the instructions could be shared between the two then why is it not possible? Is the board design set up to allow the bus to access only one processor per cycle? If not then would it be a 64 bit system if the device was using both processors in unison and the bus is piping in all of the bits from each one every cycle? 64 bits per cycle. Or is that the limitation? The bus can hold 64 bits but can only grab 32 per cycle? Of course its only a curiosity driven by my ignorance of the system. It was lack luster as a system and probably would have been even at 64 bits, it seems as though game developers were not doing their finest work on the jaguar.

I have a Jaguar. However, it doesn't work because a friend spilled a beer on it while we were playing 'Tempest 2000' back in 1999.

great vid... But the biggest success of the jaguar cd (imho) was that after its discontinuation its plastics from unsold units were converted to dentistry equipment (so more userbase... yey?) !

I remember going to k-bees toy to buy a jaguar and left with a sega cd.

"hhehe, bit wars, 64 bit, 32 bit, 16 bit, 8 bit, 4 bit, 2 bit, 1 bit, half bit, quarter bit, the wrist game!!!" -AVGN

I had a 2600 and didn't really like it. I bought a Lynx when it came out and didn't really like it. I bought a Jaguar when it came out and was very disappointed. I stick with P.C. gaming now. 😑

You can still get brand new unused Jaquar's w/the CD addon for about $3000

Just imagine how much worse the Jaguar would have done without the Atari brand behind it. People still had a nostalgic connection with Atari even though they were way past their prime.

9/10 year old me desperately wanted a Jaguar. To be fair I desperately wanted a CDi and a 3do as well. As a child you can’t appreciate the reason your parents don’t just buy you what you want. Looking back, the CD consoles were hideously expensive and terrible for gaming and the Jaguar was crap. I couldn’t see that but I think my dad knew.

The jaguar wasn't underpowered. True 3d was in it's infancy. And companies weren't properly informed of how to program for it.