How would you have improved the Jaguar?

[eXeler0]

So I watched this Lady Decade video
[ Show youtube player ]
...about how piss poor the Jaguar was.
Now I'm a collector and know a bit about most of my systems I own, and I'm quite familiar with the Jaguar, but at some point in the video she mentions it was "rushed" into production. Never though of it from that perspective, so question is, if it hadn't been rushed, what would have been different.

Personally, i think the machine had potential but has some weird design decisions (like the Falcon) but regardless, I doubt a more mature machine would have done a lot of difference in the end due to the timing of the release.
but...
What would YOU have done if you had another 6 months to tweak the Jag?

[VladR]

1. RISC chip bugs - they are horrendous. Clearly, the HW was shipped waaaaay before it reached stable state. I'm sure engineers were dumbfounded by the decision, but ultimately, it's not their decision (it never is, in a corporation).

2. 8 KB of GPU cache (just like DSP has). 8 KB is still pitiful for a 32-bit CPU, but the current 4 KB isn't even laughable.

I can't say how many times I needed just 1 KB to fit all my code into 4 KB. But the moment you start swapping code, you're burning through a lot of GPU processing power (and that's assuming you're doing full 64-bit copy of the code via Blitter) as you end up doing it at least 3 times per frame.
There goes your MIPS, up in the air...

Of course, that's not what killed Jaguar, that's a whole different debate (and we don't have to go there, let's keep this civilized )...

Even 3 more months would have made a difference to the HW bugs, but it is what it is...

[TCD]

No idea about the technical side of things, but it did need more games that weren't shovelware or boring flat shaded polygon games like Cybermorph ("Where did you learn to fly") or Iron Soldier.

About the 'rushed' part: Atari dropped the 32-bit Panther and focussed on the '64-bit' Jaguar to get it to market. A bit like another company at the time (that we all know and love ) it didn't matter if the product wasn't really ready.

[eXeler0]

They probably also lacked a ”killer app” to go with the machine from the earliest launch. Alien vs Predator was pretty good at the time but it showed up a bit late. So they missed that window of opportunity.
Now if the hardware would have bern delayed to fix it they could have been better aligned with some proper software, but then again were getting into that unforgiving era of Saturn/Playstation that changed gaming forever with its focus on texture mapped 3d.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

Alien vs Predator was pretty good at the time but it showed up a bit late.

A whole year is more than a bit late You are right though that the Jaguar lacked something that was truly showing off the 2x32 bit CPUs. The launch titles all felt quite underwhelming and for sure not anywhere near '64-bit'.

[Amigajay]

Lack of 3rd party support was clearly a big deal and something not rectified from the 7800/Lynx/Falcon and latter ST days.

Imo it was too late to be cartridge based, CD-ROM consumer technology was already 5 years old by 1993 (not including uber expensive drives from 1985) so it was finally coming into fruition and becoming desirable by this time.

Plus to gain developer support they really don’t want the risk of paying for rom chips over cheap CD media.

Maybe a £299 CD Jaguar in Xmas 1993 with Aliens vs Predator and a 99% better Chequered Flag may have sold pretty well, but it’s too many if’s and but’s, maybe in a parallel universe where Nintendo didn’t screw Sony at CES!

[Galahad/FLT]

The biggest impediment to the Jaguars success was Atari themselves, specifically the Tramiels.

Devs and publishers were pissed off at the differing configuration for the ST, it ended up being a reason why they dropped it.

Coupled with that experience just before the Jags launch, Atari really didn't have the respect of devs and publishers at all.

Developing the Panther, and then quitting half way through for the Jaguar doesn't instill confidence, because a company like Atari shouldn't realise that their console isn't going to cut it at the hardware design stage, they should have known that in the design stage before anything was committed to silicon!

The serious hardware bugs that were already mentioned that caused bus lockups and instructions to simply not operate as they should on the RISC chips meant devs having to utilise the 68000 to get games running in a stable environment.

Much blame was put toward devs for relying on the 68000, but it was out of necessity not laziness.

Without that 68000, Jag would have been dead on arrival.

Everyone treated the 64bit claim with derision, no-one believed it was, it always felt like marketing.

And when it became apparent that the Jag absolutely wasn't as powerful as PS1, N64 and Saturn, the Tramiels brushed it off saying they had a successor to Jaguar in the pipeline to be released in two years time.

Once devs and publishers heard that, they knew they were dealing with idiots. Typical console lifespan is 7+ years, and here was Atari telling customers and publishers, its only got 2 years, financial ineptitude.

And the final nail should have been CD not cartridge, Atari are NOT Nintendo, they didn't have a devoted fan base that would just blindly follow Ataris decisions.

Jaguar never stood a chance, even though it is a powerful system, and easily more powerful than CD32, it never stood a chance because Atari were behind it, and they no longer had any cachet with customers.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Once devs and publishers heard that, they knew they were dealing with idiots. Typical console lifespan is 7+ years, and here was Atari telling customers and publishers, its only got 2 years, financial ineptitude.

Reminds me of those CD64 plans...

[AestheticDebris]

I think Atari and Commodore both saw the appetite for upgraded hardware in the home computer market and both imagined some sort of infinite gravy train of cash, where the moment you sold a product you'd be pushing the same customer to buy the next version.

You can see it in the A500+, A600, A1200 release cycle and both the Jaguar and CD32 clearly didn't have much lifespan in them and both companies were gearing up for "replacements" as soon as possible. But the consumer didn't want that, especially not in the game console market - they were used to the likes of the NES where you bought the cheap base unit once and the games kept getting better, either through clever programming or shoving extra hardware in the carts.

As to the Jaguar itself, aside from the myriad of hardware bugs that should have been fixed before release, I might have spent more than 10 minutes on the design of the controller and tried to come up with something that didn't just have a mass of buttons arranged in probably the least ergonomic way possible. The mind actually boggles at the idea that someone looked at that and went "Yeah, that looks like a great design for playing games with". Even the weird N64 controller made more sense than that.

[TCD]

While the controller was pretty bad, the 'number pad' idea wasn't completely rotten The overlays for the games (https://ibb.co/zSy33rH) worked okay, it was just 'ergonomically challenged'

[Tigerskunk]

The console market needed something better than the Jaguar (or 3DO) to topple the immensely successful juggernaut that was the SNES back in 1993.

Atari and Commodore had both been pushed out of the limelight by PCs on the strategy games, simulation games, adventures and RPG front, and by SNES and Megadrive for action games over the two years before 1993.

I remember seeing the Jaguar in a local department store in that time, and I was even surprised that Atari still existed. Same with Commodore, by the way.

[Phantasm]

Nothing was ever going to survive for long in that era with the release of the playstation. Sony pretty much did everything right and killed off everything that went before (except those that were already dead)

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

The serious hardware bugs that were already mentioned that caused bus lockups and instructions to simply not operate as they should on the RISC chips meant devs having to utilise the 68000 to get games running in a stable environment.

Much blame was put toward devs for relying on the 68000, but it was out of necessity not laziness.

Without that 68000, Jag would have been dead on arrival..

Good summary Galahad, this section in particular is not what you hear everyday, but highly impactful in terms of what software you could even create on the console.
Id guess most ppl assume it was due to lazy developers who couldn't care less about the true power of the hardware and just jumped in with some shovel-ware for a potential quick cash-grab without any of the risk.

From this perspective, "What could be improved" well, fixing these bugs might have had a larger impact than ppl think.
But yea, I also think we all agree these would have been minor changes in the history of gaming consoles. Sony would have steamrolled any version the Jaguear, improved or not...

[VladR]

Of course , it wouldn't have helped to fight against Sony (nothing really would, back then, given Atari's attitude)

But the HW bugs are an issue even in 2023. Most people think that it's not a big deal, as they're documented - but only a fraction of all broken instructions is officially documented. My list of all discovered bugs is more than double that of Atari's and I know for sure that there are some combinations of ops that occasionally don't work, I just don't feel like chasing it down.

Some bugs are quite insidious as they depend on the pipelining, so you must hit a very specific stream of ops to even have a chance of discovering the bug.

[VladR]

Few years ago I spent about a month setting up a dev environment for Sega Saturn. Absolutely incredible ! They have a C compiler that produces very fast code for both SH-2's, so only a very small amount of code needs to be manually written in ASM.

The documentation, the SDK, examples - it's a whole different world!

In comparison, Sega's Dev Env is like 5-star hotel, while Atari's is a shady half burnt-down motel in a 3rd world country...

[eXeler0]

You bring up another relevant point here. Poor documentation of a new never before seen system doesnt exactly help the devs who are already busy fighting bugs ;-)

[Old_Bob]

In defence of the thing, it was a great machine, as sold. Even with the rush to market issues and hardware bugs we now know about. In comparison to the other systems, that were available to buy when it was released, it certainly felt like a generational leap at the time when I bought mine. And, I still own the thing. Doom, T2K and Iron Soldier got plenty of time put in to them. Why, oh why, didn't they absolutely move heaven and earth to get a good quality port of Mortal Kombat ready for the thing in time for xmas '93?!?!? An SKU with two controllers and an MK cart in the box would have done pretty well, if you ask me.

Some things I might put on my hardware wish list... 64kb on chip cache RAM for each of the Tom and Jerry chips as is reserved in the memory map, instead if the measly 4kb and 8kb they actually got. Along with 4mb system RAM. I remember reading an interview with the ATD guys in Edge who mentioned that the chips were intended to be run at 40mhz but, they weren't able to hack that speed reliably in practice. That would likely hike up the performance quite a bit. I'll chuck in a 40mhz 68030 CPU, too.

Even with if my imaginary Jaguar had been the one released, I think the lack of faith in Atari as a company to do business within the industry, would have probably resulted in the same eventual outcome for them. Not even mentioning the competing systems on the way from Japan.

B

[oscar_ates]

Avgn James is asking where had the 48bits of Jag gone?

[ Show youtube player ]

[TCD]

@Old_Bob Good to meet somebody else who bought the thing back in the day Playing Cybermorph in late 1993 was a bit of mixed bag. It didn't feel the same as playing games like Virus or Hunter, but it didn't feel like a huge leap forward either and the gameplay wasn't great. All the better games for the system came out way later. Like you say at least one port that showed what the console was capable of would probably made a big difference in late 1993.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by Old_Bob

Some things I might put on my hardware wish list... 64kb on chip cache RAM for each of the Tom and Jerry chips as is reserved in the memory map, instead if the measly 4kb and 8kb they actually got. Along with 4mb system RAM. I remember reading an interview with the ATD guys in Edge who mentioned that the chips were intended to be run at 40mhz but, they weren't able to hack that speed reliably in practice. That would likely hike up the performance quite a bit. I'll chuck in a 40mhz 68030 CPU, too.

B

If you wanted a £399 priced Jaguar then those updates were great!

Seriously though in 1993 the 3DO was the most powerful console but came at a huge price ($700) the Jaguar was easily the best value money console for what you got for your money, no console is perfect and could have been bettered with better specs, the Jaguar’s downfall was always software support first and foremost.