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[RAIDEN1]

At the time circa 1994, never before could you play as all 3 "characters" in one game (ie a Marine, Predator or Alien)- this video talks about the development of the very first entry in the AVP series....it was the Jaguar's "killer app" but even this game wasn't enough to save Atari's doomed "64-bit powerhouse"....

 

[RAIDEN1]

One thing to add I am surprised this game never got a multi-platform release! ie PS-1/Saturn they could have quite easily handled this...

 

[EightBit Man]

It certainly had an ad I fondly remember:

 

[RAIDEN1]

"Interactive Multimedia System"....yeah right! I think that title is meant to go to the Phillips CD-i !!

 

[Freedom Gate Co.]

it could have been the Jaguar's "killer app" but even this game wasn't enough to save Atari's doomed "64-bit powerhouse"....

It was the Killer App, it sold most of the consoles, Atari didn't have enough money to produce more copies of the game or to produce more Jaguars to take advantage of it's success. People on AA even have articles about people complaining about stock.

 

[RAIDEN1]

It was the Killer App, it sold most of the consoles, Atari didn't have enough money to produce more copies of the game or to produce more Jaguars to take advantage of it's success. People on AA even have articles about people complaining about stock.

Even so it wasn't really the kick-starter to get all the big-wigs so to speak to jump on the console, (I mean Konami, Capcom, Namco etc...)

 

[stranno]

Interesting presentation, thanks for sharing.

 

[Freedom Gate Co.]

Even so it wasn't really the kick-starter to get all the big-wigs so to speak to jump on the console, (I mean Konami, Capcom, Namco etc...)

Those three companies took awhile to jump to next gen and Atari didn't need them but that's a bad comparison in the first place. AVP sold 1:1 with nearly every Jaguar, but if the numbers they produce for the game and the consoles are low, you aren't going to get many developers interested in backing a console where the company behind the machine can't even produce the device in large numbers. Atari had EA interest and MK3 was on they way but cancelled, what if MK3 also sold 1:1 with every jaguar, but Atari only produced 20,000 jaguars? What's the point? That's why it had limited support very early on.

Misinformation messes with the history but people need to realize unlike the 3DO, the Jaguar didn't technically release in 1993 like much of the internet tells you, it was test launched in select markets in 1993, so when AVP came out in 1994 that was one of the earliest games on the system during it's wider launch, and was a massive success but Atari could not produce enough consoles or copies of the game so they shot themselves in the foot really early with third party developers as a result, and that's why games like MK3 were cancelled.

 

[RAIDEN1]

I am no fan of the Jag, (as my post probably suggest...) but that console had one of the most hideous controllers around, I never understood why they went with that....it makes me wonder though, whilst in the testing "phase" didn't any developers pick up about the fact that having a Motorola 16 bit chip in the console would bottleneck its performance, (this info I came about from reading various posts here in the past 2-3 years...) you would think, during testing, whats good, what can we improve, and how do we meet potential demand? After all, the release of the jaguar was making Sega sweat....hence the release of their 32-bit plugin.... Then again Atari had a history of flopping against the competition...be it against the NES, Gameboy, Amiga...or in the mid 90's the PSX/Saturn...

 

[captainraincoat]

this was the one game that tempted me to buy this console......but i got burned by the Phillips CDi and was broke from buying/importing a Neo Geo

 

[molasar]

I am no fan of the Jag, (as my post probably suggest...) but that console had one of the most hideous controllers around, I never understood why they went with that....it makes me wonder though, whilst in the testing "phase" didn't any developers pick up about the fact that having a Motorola 16 bit chip in the console would bottleneck its performance, (this info I came about from reading various posts here in the past 2-3 years...) you would think, during testing, whats good, what can we improve, and how do we meet potential demand? After all, the release of the jaguar was making Sega sweat....hence the release of their 32-bit plugin.... Then again Atari had a history of flopping against the competition...be it against the NES, Gameboy, Amiga...or in the mid 90's the PSX/Saturn...

In the end it is all about killer aps.

 

[Cattlyst]

I had a Jaguar back in the day. Thing was cool but never lived up to the hype. People who complain about the controller have probably never held one. It's very light and actually quite comfortable to hold. As someone who played AvP back then, I will watch this with interest. Thanks OP!

 

[Freedom Gate Co.]

I am no fan of the Jag, (as my post probably suggest...) but that console had one of the most hideous controllers around, I never understood why they went with that....it makes me wonder though, whilst in the testing "phase" didn't any developers pick up about the fact that having a Motorola 16 bit chip in the console would bottleneck its performance, (this info I came about from reading various posts here in the past 2-3 years...) you would think, during testing, whats good, what can we improve, and how do we meet potential demand? After all, the release of the jaguar was making Sega sweat....hence the release of their 32-bit plugin.... Then again Atari had a history of flopping against the competition...be it against the NES, Gameboy, Amiga...or in the mid 90's the PSX/Saturn...

Actually Raiden is on the Jaguar.

Imo, the controller plays fine it just looks weird, think N64 controller, except it actually works. Also Atari was well known for making profits despite losing to systems like the GB and the NES which is why they never competed in a sales race to the bottom. For game consoles anyway.

The Jaguar was the only console exception to that rule. Atari made the mistake of trying to launch an ambitious platform without money just like Sega would do 4 years later. Atari had IBM produce the consoles, hired a contractor to make the chipset, and had a third party developer make the dev kits since they didn't have the money to have their R&D teas produce the console.

The Motorola was originally put in to run cancelled Panther games but the system was so bugged and poorly designed most developers thought you had to code for the Motorola chip to access the GPUs which left less room in memory and on the bus for the GPUs themselves since the Motorola was a resource hog. Even if you try and program only for the GPUs some aspects still need the Motorola to be turned on, like HUDs and 2D special effects because of bugs.

Then you have situations where you try to make a 3D object move at 30fps but some sort of leak makes that impossible without disabling the background objects or lowering the polygon count.

That's how games like Zero 5 came to be


The above video is all the developers could do with the poor dev kits they had after a year of development. There were supposed to be some textures on the ship, and some on the enemies. The background was supposed to have flying ships and stars and meteors and colors, but the Motorola takes too much memory so you can only use a 5th of the GPUs power.

So you just end up with a polygon ship flying in a black background. But the game runs well at least.

With that said the Motorola is really good for 2D games, it only fucks up 3D titles.

 

[Freedom Gate Co.]

In the end it is all about killer aps.

AVP was a killer app tho.

 

[stranno]

I am no fan of the Jag, (as my post probably suggest...) but that console had one of the most hideous controllers around, I never understood why they went with that....it makes me wonder though, whilst in the testing "phase" didn't any developers pick up about the fact that having a Motorola 16 bit chip in the console would bottleneck its performance, (this info I came about from reading various posts here in the past 2-3 years...) you would think, during testing, whats good, what can we improve, and how do we meet potential demand? After all, the release of the jaguar was making Sega sweat....hence the release of their 32-bit plugin.... Then again Atari had a history of flopping against the competition...be it against the NES, Gameboy, Amiga...or in the mid 90's the PSX/Saturn...

I guess Atari thought that overlays were still cool in 90s, of course not.

 

[molasar]

AVP was a killer app tho.

I know, I got it when it was released.

 

[Dev1lXYZ]

I got the Jaguar for Christmas the year it launched. Cybermorph and Trevor Mcfur. For the time, Cybermorph was impressive, but Trevor was terribly laughable. Then Tempest 2000 hit and finally a few months later, AvP. AvP was highly impressive at the time, but was hard as hell because it was very unbalanced. I later got Raiden and that was it for the Jag. Never picked up Doom because I heard it had sound issues, and the CD unit failed to impress.

 

[RAIDEN1]

With all these troubles behind the Jag, it made the Saturn look like a PS-One killer ....reminds me of the point about the Dreamcast....big ambition...but no money to take on the juggernaut that was Sony...

 

[Freedom Gate Co.]

With all these troubles behind the Jag, it made the Saturn look like a PS-One killer ....reminds me of the point about the Dreamcast....big ambition...but no money to take on the juggernaut that was Sony...

Sega didn't have the money to release the console in general, the PS2 could have been delayed to 2003 and it wouldn't have mattered. I believe Sega should have dropped the price and pushed the Saturn as a cheap entry level platform and then courted investors for funding releasing the Dreamcast in 1999 in Japan and 2000 in America. The year delay would have helped them out a lot and they would have been able to come up with a strategy instead of making things up as they went.

I would argue the Saturn was a bigger disaster for Sega than the Jaguar was for Atari. Sega wasn't too rich and were losing money even before the Saturn released, but they had a lot of cash on hand when the Saturn launched, but lost all of it and their reserves in only 3 years. Atari was run by an idiot and was already broke when the Jaguar came out so there wasn't much to lose.

I got the Jaguar for Christmas the year it launched. Cybermorph and Trevor Mcfur. For the time, Cybermorph was impressive, but Trevor was terribly laughable. Then Tempest 2000 hit and finally a few months later, AvP. AvP was highly impressive at the time, but was hard as hell because it was very unbalanced. I later got Raiden and that was it for the Jag. Never picked up Doom because I heard it had sound issues, and the CD unit failed to impress.

It's funny because the Jaguar port was the best port of doom compared to all the other console ports at the time.

 

[EightBit Man]

I regret not getting a Jaguar. Some games were really solid, like Tempest 2000. The system and its games were really cheap at one point. Why? WHY?

Bet I would've enjoyed it more than the utterly disappointing Nintendo 64, later.

 

[SpiceRacz]

A few years ago, my wife, who does not play video games, saw a Jaguar kiosk at my local game store with AvP and for whatever fucking reason decided to try it. She insisted we get a Jaguar and this garbage game.

 

[Cattlyst]

I got the Jaguar for Christmas the year it launched. Cybermorph and Trevor Mcfur. For the time, Cybermorph was impressive, but Trevor was terribly laughable. Then Tempest 2000 hit and finally a few months later, AvP. AvP was highly impressive at the time, but was hard as hell because it was very unbalanced. I later got Raiden and that was it for the Jag. Never picked up Doom because I heard it had sound issues, and the CD unit failed to impress.

I had McFur too! It looked great but it had no music wtf?! Also I had the CD unit. Only format I played Myst on.

 

[molasar]

AvP was highly impressive at the time, but was hard as hell because it was very unbalanced.

Actually it was balanced alright and was not hard if you understood its core mechanics.

She insisted we get a Jaguar and this garbage game.

Do you mind to elaborate on this? I guess you experienced better games in the same category (survival horror) by the end of 1994.

 

[Freedom Gate Co.]

I had McFur too! It looked great but it had no music wtf?! Also I had the CD unit. Only format I played Myst on.

Trevor looked better than a lot of 2D games and was rendered well at the expensive of taking up resources which included music due to a bug that caused leaking. They did fix the issue but that release only produced a few hundred copies or less so good luck finding those.

 

[Romulus]

Game was great at the time, but didn't age well. I remember my snes/genesis friends being blown away by it and talking about it in school. Lol. I even had one friend that road his bike like 3 miles to see it.

 

[SpiceRacz]

Actually it was balanced alright and was not hard if you understood its core mechanics.



Do you mind to elaborate on this? I guess you experienced better games in the same category (survival horror) by the end of 1994.

I played better FPS games at the time. I was never fond of it and I don't think it's aged well at all.

 

[molasar]

I played better FPS games at the time. I was never fond of it and I don't think it's aged well at all.

Still better than Wolfenstein 3D and Doom (if we force AvP into the same category but in reality it is more of an FPS and Resident Evil mixture) which were even so boring back then.

What better games did you play at the time?

 

[SpiceRacz]

Doom and Doom 2 were/are so much better. The game controlled like shit back then and controls like shit now. Also, looks like shit since you have to run it through RF. It was never very good. It just stood out on a really bad console.

 

[molasar]

Doom and Doom 2 were/are so much better. The game controlled like shit back then and controls like shit now. Also, looks like shit since you have to run it through RF. It was never very good. It just stood out on a really bad console.

Doom 1/2 games were a disappointment for me. Especially with a hype they got which did not deliver and lack of interesting narrative. However I liked atmosphere and new look of Doom 64. Back to AvP, its controls were OK as it was not supposed to be a Doom clone by design, but if you were approaching it as a typical FPS then no wonder it failed you. I had my Jaguar connected to TV set with an RGB EuroSCART cable so quality of picture was pristine.

I see that you have just mistaken AvP for something else because its first person gameplay perspective.

 

[Cattlyst]

Trevor looked better than a lot of 2D games and was rendered well at the expensive of taking up resources which included music due to a bug that caused leaking. They did fix the issue but that release only produced a few hundred copies or less so good luck finding those.

Wait. There's a version of McFur...with music?!

 

[Freedom Gate Co.]

Wait. There's a version of McFur...with music?!

Good luck finding a copy unless you get lucky on ebay and the seller remembers to mention it's the one with music. The boxes are exactly the same outside an area on the bottom left corner iirc. So it's likely that if someone sells it they'll think it's the original.

Same with the fast version of Fight for life that was recently discovered.

 

[Cattlyst]

Good luck finding a copy unless you get lucky on ebay and the seller remembers to mention it's the one with music. The boxes are exactly the same outside an area on the bottom left corner iirc. So it's likely that if someone sells it they'll think it's the original.

Same with the fast version of Fight for life that was recently discovered.

Nah. I have no desire to ever play McFur ever again - music or not. Or Fight for Life. Or a Jaguar, come to think of it. Some things are best left in the past! Still, interesting to know

 

[Soleil rouge]

I got the Jaguar for Christmas the year it launched. Cybermorph and Trevor Mcfur. For the time, Cybermorph was impressive, but Trevor was terribly laughable. Then Tempest 2000 hit and finally a few months later, AvP. AvP was highly impressive at the time, but was hard as hell because it was very unbalanced. I later got Raiden and that was it for the Jag. Never picked up Doom because I heard it had sound issues, and the CD unit failed to impress.

I used to drool over screen shots of Trevor McFur.

 

[MiguelItUp]

This is so awesome, thank you for sharing! Alien Vs Predator is why I got an Atari Jaguar, haha. It was literally the only game I had on the system cause the games were so expensive. Thankfully another friend had one, and we ended up just trading games. Or rather, I'd lend AVP and he'd lend other games, haha.

Also that ad, and the Jaguar controller covers. Ugh, so much nostalgia!

 

[Freedom Gate Co.]

Nah. I have no desire to ever play McFur ever again - music or not. Or Fight for Life. Or a Jaguar, come to think of it. Some things are best left in the past! Still, interesting to know

Jaguar had good games and a regular goes pretty well and since Atari stuff keeps increasing in price that could be a good investment.

I used to drool over screen shots of Trevor McFur.

If you guys play Trevor Mcfur (non-music version) while pretending it's a shareware PC game then the lack of audio and odd sound effects would make perfect sense and you'd feel right at home.

Not trying to bag on PC players but there's a reason most computer gamers brought Amigas and ST's for games lol.

 

[RAIDEN1]

Having seen the making of in full, it would have been interesting to see how AVP-2 would have shaped up on the Jag-CD....that could also have been the attachment's killer app...

 

[Freedom Gate Co.]

Having seen the making of in full, it would have been interesting to see how AVP-2 would have shaped up on the Jag-CD....that could also have been the attachment's killer app...

Wouldn't have been much different outside better audio. CD can't fix the Motorola memory issue.

The only game I know of that tried that was Iron Soldier 2(Cd version not cart version) when they streamed data from the disc and had a software on and off switch that would try to command the Motorola to turn off when in-between movements.



As the video shows, the Jaguar GPUs are quite capable, a game with destructible objects, open environments, a multitude of enemies, music, with several shots on screen, and well animated explosions.

But you can also see how some objects and buildings have textures and some do not. There are also objects and buildings that are coded to have no textures until you are within 5 feet. Each stage is a zone that appears to be acity crawling with enemies, however the city itself is not that big each stage, some are bigger than others yeah, but the surrounding area is usually nothing but flat single colored desert, or in a couple levels, water when your mission is to destroy boats. The water does not move.

You also notice that sometimes enemies that are destroyed slow the game at times.


Here was a Atari game demo during it's life that was cancelled that showed 95-97 PS1 level textures but it destroyed the frame rate



It's impressive but very slow and they had to contain it to a very small footprint. This is because they couldn't get more resources out of the GPUs, and trying to run the rest of the specifications through the Motorola isn't possible because it's a memory hog so you basically had a stalemate.

But some people have manged to get more out of the GPUs overtime.

A fan managed to make a demo really pushing the textures by having the Motorola overwritten within an area of the game map but not much outside that area, which they wisely blocked off so you don't notice, especially when you go into the building (50 seconds in)



It's impressive but as you can see it's a demo without much going on.

So as long as that Motorola can't be shut off you are going to have limitations, people have done well turning it off for during some instances but never long enough to really push the Jaguars GPUs.

That being said the Motorola usually doesn't obstruct the GPUs for 2D games, in fact you can actually run both and produce amazing results, that's why games like Raiden run so well, the Jaguar is also the original system for Rayman.

Here's a demo that is a must watch that shows what kind of 2D games people can produce with the Jaguar by combining the two



The developers have said they are considering finishing the game and it may be coming out as a homebrew soon. If they can keep the same animations, scaling, and polish seen here it will be a major breakthrough in what capabilities that Jaguar can do, at least in 2D. It's definitely a showcase title.

Atari has the wrong idea imo, they should have just stayed with shaded polygons with small textures here and there while having some amazing 2D titles. They tried way to hard to force higher polygon counts and texture mapping beyond it's resources. If the Jaguar wasn't so buggy and the Motorola was never added that may have been possible to an extent, but not with the current hardware.

Curiously, despite the 3DO being closer to the PS1 and much stronger than the Jaguar, it's chipset and slow CPU hurts it for intense 2D games, Gex is likely the best it can do, and don't get me wrong, it's a next generation amazing looking game, but the Jaguar is closer to the Saturn with 2D while the 3DO is closer to the PS1 in 3D.

 

[Freedom Gate Co.]

The best official release that shows off some of it's capabilities at a decent speed and high textures was Skyhammer. It was made by Rebellion the developers behind AVP from the thread topic, and the makers of most of the Jaguars dev kits. It was released post death a year later by a third party publisher after Hasbro got the rights to Atari's name

youtube.com/watch?v=uuCIJIaK1vE&t=287s

It's clear they were finally getting a hang of it, and since they were a key developer making tools for the system, other developers could have made some nice games out of the new engines Rebellion was building, but the Jaguar was dead by this time as Atari went bankrupt.

Other than the draw distance it's a pretty heavily textured game, some of the signs actually light up and there are multiple towering structures, but the game plays almost like it's a tech showcase so maybe not too much fun to play. But that's probably what they were going for in the first place.

This is probably the only finished 3D game on the Jaguar that could be confused for an early PS1 game or 3DO game. Especially if we are talking budget titles for $19,99 as many PS1 bargin bin games had grainy graphics and darkness hiding the draw distance similar to Skyhammer. I've heard some people give props to Hoverstrike as a great looking textured 3D Jaguar game, but I don't see why they think that's a good looking textured 3D game, as far as the Jaguar is concerned.

 

[RAIDEN1]

Wouldn't have been much different outside better audio. CD can't fix the Motorola memory issue.

The only game I know of that tried that was Iron Soldier 2(Cd version not cart version) when they streamed data from the disc and had a software on and off switch that would try to command the Motorola to turn off when in-between movements.



As the video shows, the Jaguar GPUs are quite capable, a game with destructible objects, open environments, a multitude of enemies, music, with several shots on screen, and well animated explosions.

But you can also see how some objects and buildings have textures and some do not. There are also objects and buildings that are coded to have no textures until you are within 5 feet. Each stage is a zone that appears to be acity crawling with enemies, however the city itself is not that big each stage, some are bigger than others yeah, but the surrounding area is usually nothing but flat single colored desert, or in a couple levels, water when your mission is to destroy boats. The water does not move.

You also notice that sometimes enemies that are destroyed slow the game at times.


Here was a Atari game demo during it's life that was cancelled that showed 95-97 PS1 level textures but it destroyed the frame rate



It's impressive but very slow and they had to contain it to a very small footprint. This is because they couldn't get more resources out of the GPUs, and trying to run the rest of the specifications through the Motorola isn't possible because it's a memory hog so you basically had a stalemate.

But some people have manged to get more out of the GPUs overtime.

A fan managed to make a demo really pushing the textures by having the Motorola overwritten within an area of the game map but not much outside that area, which they wisely blocked off so you don't notice, especially when you go into the building (50 seconds in)



It's impressive but as you can see it's a demo without much going on.

So as long as that Motorola can't be shut off you are going to have limitations, people have done well turning it off for during some instances but never long enough to really push the Jaguars GPUs.

That being said the Motorola usually doesn't obstruct the GPUs for 2D games, in fact you can actually run both and produce amazing results, that's why games like Raiden run so well, the Jaguar is also the original system for Rayman.

Here's a demo that is a must watch that shows what kind of 2D games people can produce with the Jaguar by combining the two



The developers have said they are considering finishing the game and it may be coming out as a homebrew soon. If they can keep the same animations, scaling, and polish seen here it will be a major breakthrough in what capabilities that Jaguar can do, at least in 2D. It's definitely a showcase title.

Atari has the wrong idea imo, they should have just stayed with shaded polygons with small textures here and there while having some amazing 2D titles. They tried way to hard to force higher polygon counts and texture mapping beyond it's resources. If the Jaguar wasn't so buggy and the Motorola was never added that may have been possible to an extent, but not with the current hardware.

Curiously, despite the 3DO being closer to the PS1 and much stronger than the Jaguar, it's chipset and slow CPU hurts it for intense 2D games, Gex is likely the best it can do, and don't get me wrong, it's a next generation amazing looking game, but the Jaguar is closer to the Saturn with 2D while the 3DO is closer to the PS1 in 3D.

Interesting....I'll will check those videos out, meanwhile reading more about AVP on the Jaguar, apparently not only was there going to be a CD-ROM version but also a version for its VR-Headset.....on paper that would have been something...but then again would the Jag really have the horsepower to provide the immersive experience that you could have potentially have got with the VR headset? What I don't understand is, if you are Atari, and you know your prized system is clearly has major flaws with it, why even bother launching the console? They were better of cancelling the console like Panasonic did with the M2....you are flaunting your 64 bit of power, but by the sounds of it, the console would have struggled to start its engines for a game like Daytona USA irrespective of how bad the Saturn port was...64 bit of 2d power, but 3d power? Naa not so much, what made them think that in the state the console came out in it would have saw off the competition....where as with the 3DO I don't think it would have had any issues with a port of AVP....

 

[Freedom Gate Co.]

Interesting....I'll will check those videos out, meanwhile reading more about AVP on the Jaguar, apparently not only was there going to be a CD-ROM version but also a version for its VR-Headset.....on paper that would have been something...but then again would the Jag really have the horsepower to provide the immersive experience that you could have potentially have got with the VR headset? What I don't understand is, if you are Atari, and you know your prized system is clearly has major flaws with it, why even bother launching the console? They were better of cancelling the console like Panasonic did with the M2....you are flaunting your 64 bit of power, but by the sounds of it, the console would have struggled to start its engines for a game like Daytona USA irrespective of how bad the Saturn port was...64 bit of 2d power, but 3d power? Naa not so much, what made them think that in the state the console came out in it would have saw off the competition....where as with the 3DO I don't think it would have had any issues with a port of AVP....

Because the head of Atari was an idiot and had cancelled all other projects. They didn't buy the Arcade division, Midway ended up buying the arcade division, that division was running as its own company since 1985. Then he discontinued all the other Atari consoles and computers outside the Lynx and the Jaguar, the Lynx after the first year of the Jaguar was barely supported than discontinued, and he also messed up the launch of the last new ST computers and the Falcon.

He also cancelled several accessories, the Panther, and multiple games. So by 1994 all they basically had was the Jaguar, which launched with few games because many were cancelled or delayed, and because Atari wasn't getting money from any other location afterthey cancelled and discontinued everything, they had to use the cash they had on hand to market, produce, and develop for the Jaguar and hope that the Jaguar would make up for them being extremely stupid.

Effectively, they had no choice but to release the Jaguar, In their eyes and in the industries eyes, especially the companies they partnered with, the Jaguar was basically their only product, as everyone ignored the Lynx for no rational reason, so they had to make money from the Jaguar.

That's the part people often get confused about, Atari did not know where things were going in the industry they were just guessing, just like Sega. In fact, the Jaguar scared Sega and caught them completely off guard so for all Atari knew they were going to be the first company with next generation 2D titles and the first console offering 3D until CES, which is when the 3DO was shown off.

They could have just focused on the Lynx and possibly a successor but they believed they would be first to the market with 3D so I won't give them too much flak on that. They weren't expecting the 3DO to be at E3 and launch months before them, or the japanese PlayStation to launch a year later. So when you bring up games like Daytona (Saturn) those didn't have consoles releases yet, Sega hadn't even reacted to the Jaguar or PS1 yet when the arcade version came out.

Don't forget that Atari didn't have much in the way of money after their CEO burned all the companies revenue down to the ground, so they had to work with IBM to produced the consoles, contracted a third-party developer to make the developer tools, and partner with another company for the chipsets. They couldn't afford to do everything in house, and that's how I believe they ended up with an unoptimized buggy product. They also ignored many developer complaints the first year, ignoring all the problems so it wouldn't become news.

 

[Afro Republican]

Lots of misinformation but nothing unusual.

Btw, the "motorola" is the 68k and most games need the 68k to boot. You can't have the RISC processors (Tom and Jerry) run at the same time as the 68k because then it locks up the system. Memory management on the Jaguar is piss poor and Atari knew that ahead of time but thought they were so amazing and ahead of everyone that developers would figure it out. Very similar ideology to Sony with the PS2 and PS3.

That Shoot em up demo video looks nice but good luck still having those animations in the background if you want sound. Did you notice that the video has no audio? There's a reason for that, you have to program audio through the DSP and the DSP is responsible for a lot of what you're seeing in the video.

When you have a competitor that costs $500, $700 with a game included and a light gun, and they outsell you 5 to one that's what you call fucking up a launch. Look at how long it took for Jaguar developers to get just 30% of the RISC processors power into games, the 3DO had that power from the start. After many years of homebrew development and demoscenes almost everyone now believes you can't access more than 40% of the both RISC processors when making a Jaguar game.

 

[RAIDEN1]

Lots of misinformation but nothing unusual.

Btw, the "motorola" is the 68k and most games need the 68k to boot. You can't have the RISC processors (Tom and Jerry) run at the same time as the 68k because then it locks up the system. Memory management on the Jaguar is piss poor and Atari knew that ahead of time but thought they were so amazing and ahead of everyone that developers would figure it out. Very similar ideology to Sony with the PS2 and PS3.

That Shoot em up demo video looks nice but good luck still having those animations in the background if you want sound. Did you notice that the video has no audio? There's a reason for that, you have to program audio through the DSP and the DSP is responsible for a lot of what you're seeing in the video.

When you have a competitor that costs $500, $700 with a game included and a light gun, and they outsell you 5 to one that's what you call fucking up a launch. Look at how long it took for Jaguar developers to get just 30% of the RISC processors power into games, the 3DO had that power from the start. After many years of homebrew development and demoscenes almost everyone now believes you can't access more than 40% of the both RISC processors when making a Jaguar game.

Well this is it, did the Atari exec's think with the Jaguar, let the $h!t hit the fan so to speak with the console, and hope for the best? You've got a "broken" console, and yet you still feel confident enough to bring it to market...what did they ultimately gain from it? Nothing...For all the flaws of the PS2 and 3 it could still go toe-to-toe with the competition ie Microsoft, Sega for a short-while and Nintendo....then again Sony had deep enough pockets unlike Atari...you even look at the CD32 from Commodore, and when I see the 3DO games over the years, my feeling is the CD32 should have been capable of the games that were coming out on the 3DO at the time....but thats a whole different topic...

On another note how the hell can someone greenlight a project like Kasumi Ninja......(which was mentioned in the video I originally posted...) that is an abomination of a fighting game.....

 

[Afro Republican]

my feeling is the CD32 should have been capable of the games that were coming out on the 3DO at the time....but thats a whole different topic...

Noooooooooooooooooooooooo.......

Nope not even close.

zero chance.

It could run some Jaguar games probably though. Some Jaguar games were Amiga ports.

On another note how the hell can someone greenlight a project like Kasumi Ninja......(which was mentioned in the video I originally posted...) that is an abomination of a fighting game.....

Kasumi Ninja was a graphically impressive title copying MK's digital sprite style, and since it was on the Jaguar and not on the Genesis or Super Nintendo you had better sprite quality so the game looked really good in magazines and in animation during video demos. The problem with Kasumi Ninja was the gameplay was trash but I completely understand why Atari greenlit the product. I guess they just forgot to play it first before they published it.The game still managed good sales thought just on the graphics and marketing.



Here is a chart of some of the Jaguars best selling titles, it doesn't include all games and stops at 1995:

Many of the games with low units were new releases, were cancelled, or they had insufficient data.

1. AVP: 52k
2. Tempest 2000: 33.3K
3. Doom: 33.1k
4. Wolfenstein:q 27k
5. Kasumi Ninja: 24k
6. Trevor MCfur: 23k
7. Raiden: 22k
8. Iron Soldier: 21k
9. Checkered Flag: 20k
10. Dragon The Bruce Lee Story: 19k

These are the top 10 most popular games on the console by the 2nd quarter of 1995. We don't have anything after this but I doubt the top 10 would really change.


Also poor Bubsy, lost to Zool. They don't even write the full title of the game, just "Bubsy".

 

[Freedom Gate Co.]

Lots of misinformation but nothing unusual.

Btw, the "motorola" is the 68k and most games need the 68k to boot.

No you don't wtf? You can program without it.

 

[Afro Republican]

No you don't wtf? You can program without it.

I didn't say that you couldn't.

I said most games use it to boot, as in most games released for the Jaguar. This is because it's easier to code for the 68k and that's where most developers program in their tricks to access as much of the RISC processors power as they can, in short It's a gateway chip.

When studios only had a few months to program and release a game by a set deadline, you didn't have time to do things the long way.

Even then, with the many homebrews and demoscenes we've seen for the Jaguar, very few of them did it from scratch and the ones that did usually never had as much access to RISC that coding through the 68k gave them. I believe after 20+ years we have seen what the Jaguar is capable of and we won't see anything different, sorry.

World Tour Racing is the best looking title the Jaguar will ever have when looking for a game that balances graphics and performance. People didn't want to believe it years ago but I think it's time to close the book:

The frame rate is inconsistent but I think it's a nice looking title, just don't expect the Jaguar to ever look better than this in any fashion. It all ends here,

 

[Havoc2049]

Cool presentation. I didn't pay attention to the Portland Retro Gaming Expo for 2019. If I would have know James "Purple" Hampton was a speaker, I would have made an effort to attend.

Atari's window of opportunity for the Jag to be even a mild success was really slim. Atari initially built up quite a bit of hype for AVP, with a slick marketing campaign and media hype. The only problem though, all the hype came in the first and second quarters of 1994. AVP was supposed to be a launch window (1st/2nd qrt of '94) game for the nationwide/international roll-out of the Jag, but they missed their target date. AVP didn't launch until October of 1994. In the time it took Atari to finish AVP, all the hype for the new systems from Sega, Sony and Nintendo started to roll out and the Jag became yesterday's news.

I was a hardcore Atarian back in the late 80's and early 90's. I've been a Jaguar owner since early December of 1993. I love the Jaguar version of AVP. It has an awesome survival horror vibe to it, which was really unique back in 1994. Tons of scary and intense moments in AVP.

This is from my collection:

 

[Freedom Gate Co.]

In the time it took Atari to finish AVP, all the hype for the new systems from Sega, Sony and Nintendo started to roll out and the Jag became yesterday's news.

I like your collection but I disagree with this statement.

Nintendo didn't have anything to show and the Ultra 64 was already delayed once, but I can still see how the magazine and the arcade advertisements for it generated some hype for it. The PS1 hype however, didn't build up hype in magazines until spring 1995, and Sega had overshadowed the Saturn themselves with the 32X, which was a weaker machine than the Jaguar.

 

[molasar]

Nintendo didn't have anything to show and the Ultra 64 was already delayed once, but I can still see how the magazine and the arcade advertisements for it generated some hype for it. The PS1 hype however, didn't build up hype in magazines until spring 1995, and Sega had overshadowed the Saturn themselves with the 32X, which was a weaker machine than the Jaguar.

Actually Nintendo had something to show. It was Donkey Kong Country for SNES and Killer Instinct Arcade together with Cruis'n USA Arcade as their next gen games.

 

[Freedom Gate Co.]

Killer Instinct Arcade together with Cruis'n USA Arcade as their next gen games.

As I said, arcade advertisements.

 

[molasar]

As I said, arcade advertisements.

Yes, but it was big enough to stop people from getting Jaguar.