I've made a video to correct an error I made along with clarifying some things that were not in the video: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/eceHZNlj1Zi0fZ8.html

Bad idea to use Sega Saturn images instead of Jaguar images during the video.

Right off the bat you say the Jag advertised that it had 128 bits. That’s so wrong can’t even finish this video.

The fundamental problem with the Atari Jaguar was Atari themselves. The issues with the hardware could have been ironed out with a bit more R&D time and money, but Atari didn't have that money. It's not that the hardware was even bad, but that Atari didn't have the capital to not release it as soon as possible. Fixed hardware doesn't fix a lack of good games & 3rd party support though, and both of those are, again, Atari issues, not hardware.

Jaguar and Cd32 has the same issue - in initial phase they cannont supply enough units to the market but people often don;t remeber this fact

The early Jaguar dev kits were monster machines - the thing to remember is that it was designed when people were still unsure what would come after the 16 bit, largely 2D console generation. PCs were being hyped up as interactive video players, there was absolutely no agreement on "how to do 3D" and no-one really knew which CPUs to bet on. The reason why it was so bad at texture mapping? Because outside of Doom (which used some very specific tricks), texture mapped games were not seen as practical on a low cost games machine - so Jaguar was only expected to need Gouraud shading to be "next generation". The PS1 was a complete shock to the entire industry. Yes, Atari rushed it to market, handled the launch badly and never got third party support. Yes, it was a complex architecture with some weird legacy 'features' - but it's completely understandable given the environment of the time that a company could make the wrong bet for all the right reasons (and others did, including Commodore, 3DO, Nuon and a bunch of other smaller players). So it's wrong to suggest that it was a "dumb move" that could easily have been avoided. The industry was a complete mess at the time.

but seriously now we need a new video "Fixing The Atari Jaguar's MANY hardware issues."

What bugs me about these "Jaguar could've been more successful if--" discussions is how they never touch on the system using carts with a CD add-on. If Sega shot themselves in the foot with Sega CD and Nintendo pushed away third parties by making N64 cart-based, how was Atari not doomed out the gate? For those who bought both system and peripheral at their launches, the real barrier to entry was $400. Even then, touting the Jag's price drop to $149 was dumb when they're asking people to buy the CD drive for another $149. Without making CD the default media fixing the Jag's hardware is redundant.

Alright so I understand everything correctly...the Jaguar was an incredible console. It was so far ahead of it's time that nothing came close to it's greatness. ;)

How... did they manage to produce a multi-CPU system on which neither could directly write to memory. This is the most bizarre thing I've ever heard, like SURELY you'd catch this way before mass production and then fix the fucking thing.

The problem is people compare the Jag to the PS1 and N64 when it was designed to compete against the Genesis and SNES.

I remember at the time - the Jag was the Joke of consoles. The disc attachment even made it look like a toilet! A friend of mine had a 3DO well before the Saturn and PS1 was around - and seeing the visuals on the PS1 was jaw dropping at the time - and then the Jag was advertised. My god - everyone knew this was failure so hard that it was going to leave an impact crater.

did you also use an atari 800 to rip the ad footage? :D

I don’t really understand what the point of suggesting replacing the monitoring CPU etc. is in this video. It’s clear that the machine would’ve been massively more powerful had there not been the crippling hardware defects. Wouldn’t it be better to just fix those problems rather than re-architect the whole thing around a different CPU? The Atari jaguar was rushed to market and could not recover from a fatal hardware flaw. In my opinion, they should have fixed the hardware issues in a new revision and issued a recall. I think in their hubris, they thought they could figure out a workaround, but then more and more issues popped up and it was doomed.

someone needed to make this. It's not like this has been covered by tens or even hundreds of people already.

I remember playing the Jaguar demo of Aliens at a Future Shop. Sweet game but the controller was a mess.

if atari changes the controller model even right now people would instantly buy it

Awesome review here. This is what I think is so unbelievable about this console, how many things it struggled with that were already made easy in the 16-bit generation. I remember when the system and games came out and how many were missing music. This was something standardized back in the NES 8-bit days and you did a great job showing just how awful the architecture here was and why so many developers were not able to put music in. In the end, the technical issues with the system were a huge problem, but even if this system had many of the hardware improvements mentioned here and in the addendum video, the main issue was that no one wanted to develop for it. Japanese studios had no reason to develop for American hardware (I love the huge MADE IN USA sticker on the box of the Jaguar) and American studios were already making numerous games for the 16-bit systems that had a massive install base. The 5th Gen cluster of horrible game systems (3dO, Cd-i, Virtual boy, etc.) made game developers have to really want to commit to making a game on a system that could likely fail. Sony obviously saw many of the flaws here and in other earlier 5th gen consoles and made sure that 3-D polygon games would work properly and would do so on a CD. Good video, love this in-depth technical stuff.

The Jaguar could've been a CD-based console from the start, it would greatly benefit from the larger space and higher quality audio tracks

what are you talking about? the Atari Jaguar was the first console that could do dedicated 3d graphics, and the first that had a true color display. yes it failed, but it was a pioneer.. hindsight is always 20/20 , sure the changes would have been "great" but also expensive, add into the fact that Atari was going into this blind, they didn't know what their competitors were upto, they didn't know when other products were going to be released., the Jag when it was released was competing with the SNES, the and the SEGA, . not the N64 or Sony, both of which were kept pretty secret.

The Sega Saturn was well over 10 times worse in its hardware design. Technically the Saturn needed a minimum of 4 full megabytes of work RAM to properly utilize its two main SH-2 CPUs. It has only 2 megabytes which was divided into 1MB low work RAM and 1MB of high work RAM. Then there was the convoluted mess of not two but actually 3 graphics processing chips; VDP-1, VDP-2 and the DSP math co-processor. This complicated graphics system required a 3rd system CPU in the processor controller chip just to keep the 3 graphics chips on speaking terms with each other. Then there was the severe lack of video and graphics memory with just a measly 1.5MB of on board graphics memory to work with. How anything ran on un-expanded Saturn hardware is literally a miracle to say the least. And don't get me started on the Saturn's audio hardware. Honestly the sound system working at all took an act of God. The Saturn needed both SH-2 CPUs converged into one dual core two threaded chip. The 4, yes *4* graphics related chips needed desperately to be unified into a single GPU. It needed a much better and easier to work with audio system. It needed at least 4 megabytes of main work RAM. At least 4 megabytes of video and graphics memory. It also needed at least another 512KB of sound RAM. And last but not least, the Saturn needed a quad speed CD-ROM drive. There are many reasons why the Saturn was considered by over 96% of game devs to be the single worst console ever created. The Jaguar is practically the Sony Playstation in terms of programmability compared to the Sega Saturn. And that's saying something! By all rights no games should've ever been able to work on the Saturn hardware and yet by some bizarre quirk of reality defying mind twisting impossibility, there were games successfully created on the Sega Saturn. That's the real reason the Saturn is soo interesting as a gaming machine. Just think of hard it has been just to emulate the system even today. Yes the Atari Jaguar was bad. The Sega Saturn was far far worse.

To the guy who made this video.. hey guy... the Super Hitachi CPU was CUSTOM developed for SEGA Enterprises LTD Japan because Hitachi and SEGA formed a partnership to develop the SH CPU, thus they developed the SH1 and then chose to improve on it and made the much more powerful SH2 CPU which itself was revised and made more powerful before being placed inside the Sega Saturn with the added benefit of using two of them. Thus it was impossible for Atari Corp to purchase the SH2 but more importantly, the staff and management at Atari Corp would never have used the Hitachi CPU anyway because of the way they saw things. The Atari Jaguar was the best piece of hardware Atari Corp could have developed for themselves given that they developed the Atari Lynx and later the Atari Panther project which itself was reformatted into the Atari Jaguar (hint the Jaguar was more powerful than whatever the Atari Panther was) That said as soon as Atari Corp launched their Jaguar and started throwing insults at gamers while comparing and claiming they were better than Sega and Nintendo and if you was a late teen back then with half a sense and no fanboyism, even you would feel insulted by a company that expected YOU to buy their machine to find out if it was better than a Sega or Nintendo. Meanwhile 3DO did the same type of marketing... lmao.

About the MHz: parts of the chip have this deep pipeline where register file access happens in one cycle and ALU operation in the next. But then then if a bus master wants to read over the system bus, address goes to over it, everyone checks if they are the target, memory controller converts between 16 and whatever bits, checks for a page flip and then someone sends back the data. There is no pipeline here. The whole bus is blocked until the master ( or how is it called today? I use the word from the manual) has sensed the data back from the bus. The bus design is the original one for the 68k from the 70s. 16 bit MUL in one cycle or the 32 bit division step in one cycle probably also limit the clock. The arm in the gba sticks to 8bit MUL per cycle. You can see what parts have been optimized and where Atari pulled in dated macros from a Motorola library. The Object Processor reads from the display list and then has to process this information before it can access the pixel data. But there is no pipeline. So memory is idle and has to wait a bit for each object. So typical NES 8px wide sprites are horribly inefficient.

I was only a kid when this console released and I never seen one in a store ever back then. It was as if it had stopped existing after its release. Learning how rare the Sega nomad was back then and having actually owned one back then as well I’m surprised one never made its way into a store or the pawn shop I used to frequently visit back then.

Problem with your suggestions to fix it that for majority it would increase cost to point of not being that much cheaper than PlayStation. Also changes to the Tom and Jerry are not possible due to them then being larger than what could be produced.

If they'd merely added up the bits it would have been advertised as an 80-bit system, at the least. Why does everyone get this wrong? It had a 16-bit 68000 CPU, and two 32-bit RISC processors communicating over a 64-bit wide system buss. Atari felt that made it arguably a 64-bit system. Neo-Geo was advertised as a 24-bit system and in that case SNK absolutely did add up its 8-bit Z-80 and 68000 to come up with that number.

Interesting and refreshing to see a video more focussed on the technical failings of the Jag, as opposed to yet another 'why did the Jag fail?' video that's basically just Wikipedia copy and paste with no actual experience of the Jaguar when it was contemporary.

Very good video. I hope you do more document style content like this that I can enjoy.

Fantastic video saying it how it is. I say this as someone who brought a Jaguar shortly after release, and have a boxed example in my connection now. But the fact is, in the context of the time, it was shit. When you have a 90s system who's best game is from 1981 (Tempest) you know you're in trouble. I'll say it again, the Jaguar was and is shit.

Great video!

I like supporting smaller gaming channels, and you obviously put a lot of work into this, but I really didn't enjoy this video essay. You clearly set out to make a technical assessment of the Atari Jaguar system, yet immediately made a ridiculous factual error by claiming that the 64-bit Jaguar was 'advertised as 128-bits', a claim that you would continue to make several times throughout the video. Did you not notice that every reference material you were putting on screen clearly said '64-bit system'? Even the infamous Do the Math campaign has '64' written on the blackboard, and you even included a snippet of that very commercial, and still managed to get it wrong multiple times! You also made very little effort to provide any context around the discussion. You could have covered Atari's history and legacy; the shape of the company in the early 90s; what games released for the system; the competition of the time, i.e. the aging SNES, Turbo-Graphx 16, Genesis/Mega Drive, and the similarly maligned but more successful 3DO; the significance of the Motorola 68k microprocessor (which could be a video in itself) which developers fell back on as it was familiar architecture (hence the 16-bit looking graphics in most games); and any number of interesting areas of discussion that would have fleshed out the video and acted as a welcome counter to the barrage of dull technobabble that made up the majority of the runtime. And what an odd choice to use predominantly SEGA Saturn footage while discussing the Jaguar. Seriously, what was the thought process there? Was there a Panzer Dragoon game on Jaguar that I am unaware of?! And while a bit nitpicky, there's no such expression as 'failing downwards'. That's just failing. You're thinking of failing up, when a person or company makes poor decisions yet manages to come out on top. The inverse is failing and the downward trajectory is implied. Your conclusion meanwhile - i.e. what could have been had the system been released later - was probably the most interesting aspect of the discussion, but this almost felt like an afterthought. Again, provide some context around the fifth gen console race and what Atari could have done differently to secure those 18,000,000 sales you projected. In summation, it's incredibly difficult to take a video essay which aims to discuss the technical aspects of the Atari Jaguar seriously when the most basic facts are incorrect. You provided almost no context to the discussion, and what you actually focused on was incredibly boring. The gaming space is extremely competitive right now and many small creators are marking out a niche for themselves by making longer form video essays with a strong focus on research. This fails to compete on that basis.

I wonder why they built it like this. Sega at least had some very good reasons for putting the Saturn together the way it was, even though it had plenty of its own issues. But what was the Jaguar built for? When you look at the the games, it doesn’t come across as having any kind of main style of game design in mind

I knew no one who had a Jaguar, i seen the Commercials but never saw in person, everyone had a Ps1 or N64

How would these improvements would’ve cost back then?

>The Jaguar didn't have a texture cache *2600 flashbacks intensifies* And that boss fight at 8:22 reminds me of those popping pimples from their face 💀

I bought this when it was released, was a horrible console. Games were slow to release and almost every game was garbage, AvP and Doom were the only 2 games I enjoyed. I ended up selling it to a pawn shop for almost nothing and buying a PS1 from them. Was just glad to dump it have console that had a ton of great games.

By the time the Jaguar AND the 3DO came out they were outdated .

I don't think you can really say that, only if the Jaguar had better hardware, Atari would have sold millions and millions of units. Their problems extended far beyond just the hardware. Publishers had no interest in making games for it. Atari's 1st party output was pathetic at best. The marketing was absolutely horrible. And, as someone who was in the target age demographic at the time, Atari wasn't cool. Kids and teens in the 90s thought of Atari old people's video games. My grandpa had an 2600. I played it a couple times and it was far from cool to someone who grew up with an NES and SNES. It would have been a hard sell for Atari to capture the hearts and minds of the youth who already had Sega and Nintendo (and soon Sony) making consoles with modern games.

As an owner of not one but two jaguars, I enjoyed your video. Tom & Jerry were both 32 bit processors that communicated over a 64 bit bus, hince the 64 bits. I think a lot of the features you mentioned were left out to keep costs down. The Agnus chip of the Amige had direct access to Fasr RAM. Not having the ability to talk directly to RAM would seriously impact preformanc.

Most games only used the 68000 chip skipping all the other chips so most of its games was 16 bit.

I would like to see the reasons why the engineers chose this architecture layout on top of just saying it’s bad.

Is not hilarious at all. It could happen to any product

I read in a gaming book it has a 16-bit bus and 2 32bit main processors unlike the n64

The jaguar failed due to a lack of a good amount of software. The original gameboy sold very well because it had tons of great software despite being a much inferior piece of hardware compared to everything else at the time. The Jaguar would have had the same success if it had tons of great games, despite the systems shortcomings.

I got the jaguar and jagcd around the end of it's life pretty cheap and kept it around. I've dusted it more than played it. I use to play music cds thru it but found out they break easy so I quit touching it 😂

Poor software ..!! I still have mine and, I like the console. But it was never programmed for properly. And many publishers ignored it entirely through its life cycle..

Wolfenstien, Tempest 2000, And AVP, are the only stand outs ..👍🏻

Forget words I can sum up why it failed in a single number, 68000. As in the Motorola 68000. It failed because they poured so much money into an anti-piracy system, instead of hardware. The price to use a 32-bit, 25Mhz 68020 instead of a 16-bit 12 Mhz 68000? $5 per unit!!! To quote a member of the team that created 'Fight for Life' the Jaguar was about "half as powerful as the Playstation". Piracy is no issue when nobody wants your games. But after years of bad moves, Atari deserved to fail anyways.

I found a sealed Jaguar on the cheap at a swap meet with Kasumi Ninja and some other game. I'll have to dig it out of storage. I also have a Saturn. Somewhere.

I'm just gonna say it....THERE WERE TOO MANY low tier European Development Companies ruining the presentation of a potentially decent System. This system couldn't even hold a candle to the SNES let alone the PS1. But wut do I know? 🤷🏾‍♂️

For arcade action you want a game loop. Control input, game logic, physics, graphics and sound effects. Each step loads its code into the scratchpads and utilizes the bus. Atari already created this buggy fragment shader. Surely, they did not want to hardwire the rasteriser. I almost wish that the fragment shader would also accept JRISC. I imagine that the address generator would shift through a phrase and only ( branch instruction ) load a new one on demand. So you could either load code for sparse sampling / scale down which loads fresh from memory every time, or code for zoom which can’t skip a phrase. Instructions to add the delta to either z or Gouraud. Instruction to add Gouraud to texture. Compare instruction for z buffer. Sounds slow to me. Better keep address generator and shader separated. So a pixel mode unit for address and gradient. The load unit would not be programmable, but just takes a list of addresses from the previous unit and fills in the values. A phrase mode unit to apply shading and do z-buffer.

one word: too many buttons!

FOURTEEN SECONDS.

The video is nice, but your mic quality is sooo bad

the jaguar failed because they screwed England. sending the first shipments to the United states denying the big crowd of Brit enthusiasts wanting to program for it.

64-bits were too powerful, too complicated, too soon. It was like a supercomputer.

I can hardly hear your voice over the music. Would be a much better video with sound issues ironed out.

The Jaguar started as the Panther and meant to compete with the SNES and Genesis. So it kinda started late 80's very early 90's and advanced from there. Making a powerful console meant one of two ways, Frankenstein a bunch of current processors or wait until more advanced processing came. Well, we know Wich route Atari took. The Panther looked promising but progress on the Jaguar was farther along, well initially. Had the Jaguar came out full in 93' it may have had a better chance but delays hindered it's success almost out of the gate when it finally did release full market. The Jaguar was my show horse for a year until I got my Saturn. Some games were fantastic on it at the time. Going from 16 bit to this was a leap.

The Jank-uar

But the 68000 has Blast Processing, it sure could have handled all the polygons and textures by itself, and probably calculated the size of the universe in the process.

It failed because it was crap lets face it. And it was in the era of the playstation

first!

Failed because it was shite. Simples.

This system will always be and still is trash I feel bad for anyone that has grew up with this trash system that is no good😊 And have manipulated people into buying it😊