Questions about the Jaguar

[mDPm]

Let me start off saying I've never owned a Jaguar since i was too young at the time to buy one myself and now that i am, the prices on ebay are quite out of my range to get one. That being said, I've always been a fan of this machine since I played one years ago.

 

Now my first question relates to the graphical power of the jaguar.The jaguar seems, on paper, squarely positioned as a system between being slightly more powerful than the 3do and less powerful than the Saturn. In practice however, this seems to be rarely achieved by games. In which i mean the 3do has many examples of looking much better than the Jaguar. As a hobbyist programmer i am curious as what the cause of this is. I have heard the jaguar was "Difficult to program for" several times but my main question is why is it difficult to program for? I realize that multi processors were rare at the time, but i'm still surprised given that one of the five jaguar processors could theoretically had twice the processing power than 3dos single main cpu. Now that we are more used to multi-core processors today, would it have been possible to achieve the awe inspiring graphics that Atari was hyping for when marketing it as 64bit? Or am i looking at this incorrectly?

My second question is more of a hypothetical, given hindsight is 20/20, what changes, do you believe, should Atari have made to the jaguar to make it more successful (given the fact that Wikipedia says it sold less than 250k units)? I mean, for me, i think initially making it CD capable instead of an add-on would have helped because first and foremost addons never sell, would have had been able to cash in a little on the FMV craze. Or were there so many issues that few changes could not have helped?

I realize these questions have been asked before, i just haven't seen an in-depth reason for the graphics one in particular. (If someone could link to something that covers this i'd be happy too)

[high voltage]

You answered your own question, programmers didn't know how to 'program' the power of the Jaguar properly. You need years to get the grips of a machine. And the Jaguar's lifespan was to short to archive this.

Here's an article how Nintendo had difficulties getting the grips with the SNES:

You can't just program a machine and oh that's it, that's as good as it gets, it takes years....

Start programming the Jaguar, and over the years you will get better and better, look at the VCS, from Combat to Pitfall 2 and beyond.

[kskunk]

In which i mean the 3do has many examples of looking much better than the Jaguar. As a hobbyist programmer i am curious as what the cause of this is.

Careful, some people around here are still a bit touchy after 20 years.

 

In all seriousness, the Jaguar's difficulties arose because it was designed (in 1990) for one kind of graphics, but by 1994, the market, and Atari, was interested in a different kind of graphics - 3D texture mapped.

 

3DO's hardware came closer to that mark. It was woefully underpowered, but it was designed for 3D texture mapped graphics from the get-go. For that kind of programming, all the parts worked together well and the libraries and examples supported you.

 

Jaguar's hardware is more 'powerful' than 3DO's in the sense that the buses are wider, clocks are higher, and it can handle WAY more computation and pixels per cycle. But, it was all geared toward pseudo-3D games like Val d'Isère and smooth-shaded z-buffered games like Cybermorph. 3D texture mapping wasn't even on their radar. It can do it - the same way a 486 PC can run Doom - even though the designers didn't have that in mind.

 

Just like a 486, it takes a guy like John Carmack, who is used to bending uncooperative hardware to his will, who has no examples and no tools and no docs, who just does it all from scratch. And just like a 486, most of the hardware will be wasted and complexity/performance won't be nearly as good as, say, a Playstation.

 

The Jaguar also has some bugs and the docs and examples aren't very helpful. A lot of people harp on those issues, but I think the core issue is this: Atari saw 3D texture mapped games were fashionable, but only after the Jaguar was designed. They told developers "make 3D texture mapped games, those will sell best". But nothing about the Jaguar helps developers make that style of game. That makes programming the Jaguar really hard.

 

- KS

Edited August 31, 2013 by kskunk

[mDPm]

Thank you. I have to admit, i am missing some historical perspective. I never meant any insult on the 3do comment... Was the 3d texture mapping particularly difficult due to it's architecture? Since from documents that i have on the jaguar imply the 3d was done in software. also if i'm reading this: http://www.vgmuseum.com/systems/jaguar/ correctly, only one cpu had access to the ram? whereby the other chips had to make due with the onboard cache?

[+thegoldenband]

3DO's hardware came closer to that mark. It was woefully underpowered, but it was designed for 3D texture mapped graphics from the get-go. For that kind of programming, all the parts worked together well and the libraries and examples supported you.

 

A couple of ex-3DO employees (ewhac and GammaDev) put together a great series of videos where they play through different games and talk about their experiences at 3DO and/or programming that particular game. It was interesting to listen to their commentary, particularly for the FPS Escape from Monster Manor (which is obviously 3D). They characterize the 3DO as a very developer-friendly architecture (though some of the development tools were apparently quite shoddy), and they both seem to have very fond memories of working on it.

[kskunk]

Was the 3d texture mapping particularly difficult due to it's architecture? only one cpu had access to the ram? whereby the other chips had to make due with the onboard cache?

Since you're a programmer, there's no substitute for reading the developer docs yourself and learning how it works. Once you learn it for yourself, you discover that most things written about the Jaguar's technology are misremembered or misguessed or even made up.

 

The architecture of the Jaguar is fine for texture mapping, but the implementation sucks. Carmack once noted that a single buffer could make Jaguar texture mapping 4x faster. He's right. That buffer is missing because they didn't know texture mapping was important, not because the architecture made it hard to add a handful of transistors.

 

It's true that only one processor had access to the RAM at once, but that's better than the 3DO. In the 3DO, there was no scratchpad (what you called cache). So, the CPU locks up while graphics are drawn. At least on the Jaguar, you can keep the GPU and DSP busy while the blitter works.

 

As for "hardware" versus "software" 3D: It's a mix of software and hardware like the other consoles of its day. The mix is a bit higher level in the 3DO than the Jaguar. In the 3DO, you can tell the 3D hardware to draw an entire polygon. On the Jaguar, you tell the 3D hardware to draw one line at a time. That sucks, but it's better than no 3D hardware.

 

People usually bring up the 68K at some point, but you wanted to know about graphics. (The 68K is too slow to run complex game engines on the Jaguar, but the ARM on the 3DO has the same problem.) The graphics differences are due to the different emphasis of each design. For example, the Jaguar can do a scaled sprite game like Afterburner or T-Mek a dozen times faster than the 3DO. Smooth-shaded polygons are also much faster. The 3DO team just didn't care about those types of games.

 

- KS

Edited August 31, 2013 by kskunk

[mDPm]

Thanks Moonsweeper, this kind of information was what i was looking for . I do have a few of the documents (not sure if i have them all) but there was some confusion and plus since i don't have a console (yet) it's sometimes harder to grasp finer points.

[JagChris]

Isn't this a typo?

 

 

 

Bus bandwith: 106.4 Megabyte per second

 

I thought it was 108 MB per second or around there.

[JagChris]

Used Jag on Ebay for $150. Kinda steep but new they are $200 at Best Electronics.

 

http://www.best-electronics-ca.com/jaguar.htm#Jaguar System

[kskunk]

Isn't this a typo?

Bus bandwith: 106.4 Megabyte per second

Seems okay to me. Approximately 26.6MHz * 1/2 speed bus * 64-bits / 8-bits per byte = 106.4 MB/sec.

[Willard]

it's too bad Atari didn't have a serious internal dev team like Studio 3DO, so that they could've had programmers experienced with the jaguar continue building upon their knowlege.

 

If you look at some of the best looking 3D Games on the Jaguar (Skyhammer, Iron Soldier 2, Battlemorph, Defender 2000) they were produced by devs who had already programmed at least one jaguar game. Even Imagitec managed to put out Iwar after their previous unspectacular looking efforts. The Zero 5 programmer spent so long coding the game he probably revised the engine several times

 

There were some exceptions like Carmack on Doom and Brownlow on Missile Command 3D who were extremely talented, would've been cool to see what they could've done had they produced additional games or spent more time on the ones they did.

 

I guess you also have to keep in mind that the jaguar was capable of more than the competition (SNES, Genesis) and to really push it you had to put some serious money into development. High quality 3D graphics that would've pushed the system were cutting edge as were impressive prerendered CG graphics. Atari didn't have the money to finance these kind of games unless the jaguar was a commercial hit right away.