did the jaguar have the ability to be a commercial success?

[Osgeld]

 

You have critically failed to understand the question.

 

 

I don't really think so, DID it? on paper it had a large advertising budget, it had some "good" hardware, it had a LOT of hype and a all star 3rd party sign up, and what did they do with it

 

jack squat

 

 

 

so in reality, no it had no chance to succeed with atari's attitude, support, bullshit bit math (much like the lynx I might add, which is a 6502 system but that's another thread) and lack luster, LATE + slow start

Edited November 25, 2017 by Osgeld

[ZylonBane]

Well this thread just got a lot dumber.

[Osgeld]

Well this thread just got a lot dumber.

 

please explain other than making some jackass statement with no substance

 

did the jag have the ability to be a commercial success?

 

yes from a marketing and sales side

 

no from a technical side they didnt know what to do with it, the first year was a drought, the next year gave us 16 bit games that were not any better than what was already out and maybe a gem or 2, by the 3rd year they were still running TV ad's and slashing the price while shoving a broken CD attachment on board and finally getting with 3 years earlier with 6 button game pads

 

why is that a dumb statement? that's how it happened, sorry to butthurt your romance

[Lost Dragon]

I'd also say the Amiga 1200 and CD32 had more impressive updates of classic games than the Jaguar at times.

 

AGA Super Stardust a fantastic take on Asteroids..looked fantastic.

 

 

Looks better than what I have seen of Asteroids 2000 on Jaguar..

 

Guardian aka Sibwing by Mark Silly, who'd written a good few Defender games in his time, went the 3D route whilst Defender 2000 to myself looked like an Amiga title from years gone by..in terms of visual design etc.

 

 

I'm not saying Defender was well suited to 3D, but rather given Atari's marketing focus on power of the Jaguar, many like myself expected modern updates to be done in polygon 3D.

Edited November 25, 2017 by Lost Dragon

[pacman000]

 

I'm not saying Defender was well suited to 3D, but rather given Atari's marketing focus on power of the Jaguar, many like myself expected modern updates to be done in polygon 3D.

And that was the problem. It was designed as an expansion of what came before. Great 2D graphics with a side of 3D. In theory it could make better sprite-based games than the PS1, but it took a ton of work to get it to do polygonal stuff smoothly. (Based on what I've read from developers.)

[swapd0]

In theory it could make better sprite-based games than the PS1

 

No, the gap between Jaguar and PS1 is a lot smaller when you make a 2D game, but PS1 is still much faster than the Jaguar.

[Bill Loguidice]

 

No, the gap between Jaguar and PS1 is a lot smaller when you make a 2D game, but PS1 is still much faster than the Jaguar.

 

It's a fair question. I mean, the usual narrative is could the Jaguar do 3D games like the PS1, and the realistic answer is of course "no," but perhaps the better question is, is could the Jaguar at least match the PS1 in terms of its best 2D games? Even in 2D, the Jaguar might be a bit limited by its lack of RAM and also lack of CD storage space (and if we factor in the Jaguar CD, doesn't that put further limits on RAM?). Certainly Rayman (which was started first on Jaguar) was a wash, but could something like, for example, In the Hunt or Street Fighter Alpha 3, be pulled off on the Jaguar without compromises?

[Major Havoc 2049]

I don't really think so, DID it? on paper it had a large advertising budget, it had some "good" hardware, it had a LOT of hype and a all star 3rd party sign up, and what did they do with it

 

jack squat

 

 

Lol....Atari wish they had all that when the Jaguar launched. In reality, a company like Sega, Nintendo or Sony spent more in one month than Atari would spend in one year on marketing. The only hype in the media was by Diehard Gamefan, with everything else tepid at best to downright negative.

 

And why do you come in here acting like a bull in a china shop? Chill out, we're just discussing video games.

[leech]

I think if the Jag had come out a year earlier and instead had been up against the butt end of Genesis/Megadrive anf the SNES instead of competing against the huge amount of "mee too!" Systems that came out right around that time, they could have potentially sold a lot more and gotten more developers / games out of it.

 

The real problem was Atari itself. It was on its death bed at that point. Maybe if they had released the Falcon and Jag at the same time and made them compatible systems (more for the possibility of being able to make both cheaper and getting games that worked on both like the AGA Amigas and the CD32) they could have had more developers between the two and been more successful.

 

Who knows, if they had done that, maybe they could have made enough money to stay in the game.

 

One thing they did that at the time seemed like a good marketing idea, but in retrospect was probably terrible, was pay a ton of money to IBM to manufacture the Jag. They probably could have saved a ton by making it where everyone else makes theirs.

[leech]

It's a fair question. I mean, the usual narrative is could the Jaguar do 3D games like the PS1, and the realistic answer is of course "no," but perhaps the better question is, is could the Jaguar at least match the PS1 in terms of its best 2D games? Even in 2D, the Jaguar might be a bit limited by its lack of RAM and also lack of CD storage space (and if we factor in the Jaguar CD, doesn't that put further limits on RAM?). Certainly Rayman (which was started first on Jaguar) was a wash, but could something like, for example, In the Hunt or Street Fighter Alpha 3, be pulled off on the Jaguar without compromises?

I wonder if we could track the devs of Rayman down and have them tell us for sure the gap between capabilities of the two systems. I found Rayman on the Jag to be the best looking version, but it is missing the cut scenes that the PC / PS1 versions have.

[VladR]

I'd also say the Amiga 1200 and CD32 had more impressive updates of classic games than the Jaguar at times.

 

Guardian aka Sibwing by Mark Silly, who'd written a good few Defender games in his time, went the 3D route whilst Defender 2000 to myself looked like an Amiga title from years gone by..in terms of visual design etc.

 

 

I'm not saying Defender was well suited to 3D, but rather given Atari's marketing focus on power of the Jaguar, many like myself expected modern updates to be done in polygon 3D.

This is an excellent example of the actual , real , strengths jaguar has in 3D : 256-color flatshading (not the gourard shading, which forces you to use 4x more bandwidth with Z-Buffer compared to 256 colors).

 

It's criminal that nobody did a HiRes 3D flatshading game on jag, as using the phrase blitter functionality (e.g. using the full 64-bit power instead of default 8-bit ) totally allows for higher resolution with minimal impact to framerate.

 

Everybody just jumped on to the gourard shading and we never saw games like the above run at 30-60 fps in high resolution.

[Lost Dragon]

Looking back at it, it seemed rather odd that Atari seemed to be under the impression Jaguar was going to be the only place to find updated versions of games like Asteroids, Defender etc..when people had been doing them for years.

 

2D wise we had seen Dropzone/Super Dropzone, Defender II, Anarchy, Star Ray etc on the ST and Amiga, A8/C64/gg etc then SNES and PS1 ..

in case of Dropzone..

 

 

And Guardian simply took the concept and turned it into the 3D realm..

 

(And it really was,visually) the type of game i expected Atari to be pushing developers to go for, fast, plain polygon 3D).

 

Stardust/Super Stardust showcased the fact there were talented developers out there looking to bring Asteroids kicking and screaming into the modern era.

 

Coders had the drive to update the classics, but seemingly not on the Jaguar..

 

I would of loved to of seen Archer Maclean doing a souped up IK+ or Dropzone on Jaguar.

[Bill Loguidice]

Updated classics are what you use to round out a library, though, not make a focal point. You want to sell to the masses and updated classics simply won't do it.

[ZylonBane]

It's criminal that nobody did a HiRes 3D flatshading game on jag, as using the phrase blitter functionality (e.g. using the full 64-bit power instead of default 8-bit ) totally allows for higher resolution with minimal impact to framerate.

 

The Jaguar came out in the standard definition era. Your obsession with squeezing higher resolutions out of it is silly and pointless.

[VladR]

Updated classics are what you use to round out a library, though, not make a focal point. You want to sell to the masses and updated classics simply won't do it.

Except at least it would show the masses that there actually is a 3D area, where Jaguar is very strong (flatshaded polygonal graphics).

 

I clearly recall an interview with the guy who coded that formula game (WTR, I think, if memory serves) and he was actually forced by Atari to put textures in, couldn't even leave it as an option.

 

So, the mindset in Atari was to screw what jag is really good at, and just push for what it can do only when you exert huge amount of engineering effort (e.g. textures) compared to other consoles who were coming up with ~free HW texturing (PS1, Saturn, 3DO).

 

The Jaguar came out in the standard definition era.

I can't be bothered to look up the exact date when HD-ready TVs were adopted by masses, but I do seem to recall they widely available roughly (give or take 5 years) around 1996-2000, which admittedly, was too late for jag.

 

 

Your obsession with squeezing higher resolutions out of it is silly and pointless.

This is jag forum. Anybody who is here is engaging in a silly and pointless exercise.

 

My "pointless obsession" however, will result in HiRes 3D games that you can play on modern TVs. On my 49" TV it's a huge visual difference between 256x200 and 768x200. Every now and then while coding, I switch back to 256x200 and it's just ugly (even without the hyperpixelated textures). My 3D engine's getting very close to be production-ready (even without multithreading on DSP that I thought -just few weeks ago- I'd have to undergo, but looks like not really), so roughly next year everybody will be able to make the comparison for themselves, on their own jag, as I definitely will include the option to choose the resolution at startup.

 

Lowres flatshading on jag is definitely not worth the minor performance difference (but you must be doing 64-bit blitting, not 8-bit). Especially with VSYNC on, why play at 30 fps in 256x200, when you get same 30 fps in 768x200 ? Really, the only difference is uglier more pixelated edges, and a mess in the distance at 256x200.

 

But if you do actually prefer uglier graphics at same framerate, the option will be there

[+madman]

So, VladR, when can we expect your first hires 3D game (or any game, for that matter) to be released? Will it be the Road Rash port? STUN Runner? F-Zero?

[VladR]

And Guardian simply took the concept and turned it into the 3D realm..

Spaceships / vehicles are things that jag handles very well in 3D from my experience. There's no character animation (although you can morph vertices between shapes at real-time, if you really want), just plain 3D pipeline processing.

There's just one other thing that is faster to render (comparing their screen coverage here) - and that's wide objects with long scanlines (e.g. a road or a 3D track), though that eventually starts to eat up bandwidth.

But Guardian works just fine even without the road/track, thus all bandwidth is available (as very little gets consumed by those ships).

 

And Guardian simply took the concept and turned it into the 3D realm..

 

(And it really was,visually) the type of game i expected Atari to be pushing developers to go for, fast, plain polygon 3D).

Couldn't agree more. Unfortunately, we all heard that non-textured games "looked bad" in magazines, as screenshots were supposedly pushing the sales (no YT yet)....

 

 

I would of loved to of seen Archer Maclean doing a souped up IK+ or Dropzone on Jaguar.

Dropzone I can imagine easily to look great, even in flatshaded 3D. But IK+ ? IMHO, polygonal human characters - to me of course - looked disgusting compared to even Atari 800's IK sprites even in PS-1 era, let alone what jag could push at 30 fps. Robots are OK, even at lowpoly.

 

I think Tobal (unsure if it's PS1 or 2, ATM, though) is the first visually acceptable threshold for me (prior to PS-2 fighting 3D games), where it's actually possible to play the game without screeching the teeth of how the game looks.

[Lost Dragon]

Updated classics are what you use to round out a library, though, not make a focal point. You want to sell to the masses and updated classics simply won't do it.

Yep..basically, there was huge potential for the Jaguar to host modern updates of classic games. ..just as there was for more PC conversions for example.

 

But to stand any chance of commercial success, even as a second console..Atari needed more Triple A exclusives like Iron Solider..AVP etc, rather than attempting update the golden oldies as a focal point.

[Lost Dragon]

Except at least it would show the masses that there actually is a 3D area, where Jaguar is very strong (flatshaded polygonal graphics).

 

I clearly recall an interview with the guy who coded that formula game (WTR, I think, if memory serves) and he was actually forced by Atari to put textures in, couldn't even leave it as an option.

 

So, the mindset in Atari was to screw what jag is really good at, and just push for what it can do only when you exert huge amount of engineering effort (e.g. textures) compared to other consoles who were coming up with ~free HW texturing (PS1, Saturn, 3DO).

 

 

I can't be bothered to look up the exact date when HD-ready TVs were adopted by masses, but I do seem to recall they widely available roughly (give or take 5 years) around 1996-2000, which admittedly, was too late for jag.

 

 

 

This is jag forum. Anybody who is here is engaging in a silly and pointless exercise.

 

My "pointless obsession" however, will result in HiRes 3D games that you can play on modern TVs. On my 49" TV it's a huge visual difference between 256x200 and 768x200. Every now and then while coding, I switch back to 256x200 and it's just ugly (even without the hyperpixelated textures). My 3D engine's getting very close to be production-ready (even without multithreading on DSP that I thought -just few weeks ago- I'd have to undergo, but looks like not really), so roughly next year everybody will be able to make the comparison for themselves, on their own jag, as I definitely will include the option to choose the resolution at startup.

 

Lowres flatshading on jag is definitely not worth the minor performance difference (but you must be doing 64-bit blitting, not 8-bit). Especially with VSYNC on, why play at 30 fps in 256x200, when you get same 30 fps in 768x200 ? Really, the only difference is uglier more pixelated edges, and a mess in the distance at 256x200.

 

But if you do actually prefer uglier graphics at same framerate, the option will be there

Yep..WTR coder did say he wasn't even allowed to have a textures on or off option in the game.

 

Once it was moved from cart to CD..game had to have texture mapping.

 

I assume this is in part due to Atari's expectations of what a CD game should be and yet again wanting the Jaguar to be seen as being able to compete with games on 3DO, Saturn and Playstation.

Edited November 25, 2017 by Lost Dragon

[VladR]

So, VladR, when can we expect your first hires 3D game (or any game, for that matter) to be released? Will it be the Road Rash port? STUN Runner? F-Zero?

While I was a huge advocate of realtime jag texturing in a not-so-distant past, when I now run my RoadRash codepath, and then immediately run the StunRunner one, the level of visual disturbance with texturing is just too much for me now.

 

Flatshading is just so much cleaner and nicer, and automatically scales to higher resolutions. Also, it's a really great feeling, when you see objects from the far distance nicely blend into the foreground without any visual artifacts associated with 2D bitmaps that just aggressively pop.

 

I don't have any license to any of the games you mention, but I am currently very strongly leaning towards something like StunRunner - e.g. futuristic racer - so definitely an original game, with brand new art assets.

 

Assuming no major life changes, Q2'2018 looks like enough time for me to work on the audio library, menus and especially tools to import and test meshes from 3dsmax.

[Lost Dragon]

Spaceships / vehicles are things that jag handles very well in 3D from my experience. There's no character animation (although you can morph vertices between shapes at real-time, if you really want), just plain 3D pipeline processing.

There's just one other thing that is faster to render (comparing their screen coverage here) - and that's wide objects with long scanlines (e.g. a road or a 3D track), though that eventually starts to eat up bandwidth.

But Guardian works just fine even without the road/track, thus all bandwidth is available (as very little gets consumed by those ships).

 

 

Couldn't agree more. Unfortunately, we all heard that non-textured games "looked bad" in magazines, as screenshots were supposedly pushing the sales (no YT yet)....

 

 

 

Dropzone I can imagine easily to look great, even in flatshaded 3D. But IK+ ? IMHO, polygonal human characters - to me of course - looked disgusting compared to even Atari 800's IK sprites even in PS-1 era, let alone what jag could push at 30 fps. Robots are OK, even at lowpoly.

 

I think Tobal (unsure if it's PS1 or 2, ATM, though) is the first visually acceptable threshold for me (prior to PS-2 fighting 3D games), where it's actually possible to play the game without screeching the teeth of how the game looks.

Ik+ was ported to PS1 in it's 2D form.

 

I would of liked Archer to do IK++

 

Use the multi tap for 4 player fights..bigger, more varied arenas..bonus stages. .high resolution backdrops..stacks of samples from Bruce Lee flicks etc...

 

Had original IK games as easter eggs etc.

 

Probably far too obscure but i would of taken it over Double Dragon V or Dragon:Bruce Lee Story any day.

[+madman]

While I was a huge advocate of realtime jag texturing in a not-so-distant past, when I now run my RoadRash codepath, and then immediately run the StunRunner one, the level of visual disturbance with texturing is just too much for me now.

 

I thought your Road Rash code ran at 60fps? That is visually disturbing to you?

[VladR]

Ik+ was ported to PS1 in it's 2D form.

 

I would of liked Archer to do IK++

 

Use the multi tap for 4 player fights..bigger, more varied arenas..bonus stages. .high resolution backdrops..stacks of samples from Bruce Lee flicks etc...

 

Had original IK games as easter eggs etc.

 

Probably far too obscure but i would of taken it over Double Dragon V or Dragon:Bruce Lee Story any day.

Thanks, just looked it up on YT. Upon quick glance looks like a straight port, probably even using same art assets (doesn't look like they at least doubled the resolution of sprites), but it's a classic, so that's OK that they kept the original spirit.

 

I think the best way to accomplish something like that on Jag these days, without the excessive cost of drawing all animation frames manually, is to pre-render the animated 3d character into sprites in 3dsmax, but keep the textures out (to retain as much original spirit as possible), and keep lighting simple (cartoon-like).

 

Still, on 2 MBs of jag, while backgrounds could be swapped from cart at loadtime just fine, not sure about the animation frames. Looks like the character is about 70x70, or ~5 KB at 256 colors. If we spend 1.5 MB on animations, we can have 1536/5 = 307 frames.

IK has - how many - about 10-12 moves per character ? If we want nice and smooth 25 frames per each move, that's 250-300 frames.

Of course, RLE compression could be used at run-time (GPU would be decompressing each frame), which usually reduces space by 30-50% (lots of empty space in bitmap in these characteres). Reducing it to 16 colors would further reduce space taken by 50%, but that would probably be very old-school for jaguar I suspect...

 

I thought your Road Rash code ran at 60fps? That is visually disturbing to you?

Yes, it runs at 60 fps. But the texturing of buildings is actually visually disturbing to me. It's nowhere near as nice and clean as the flatshading is, since those building textures are too high-frequency (too much detail). For texturing to be non-disturbing/clean we need something blurry like on N64, where textures don't shimmer like crazy during movement. I'm playing RoadRash on my Saturn right now, and what that version does with textures is just god-awful, visually speaking. 60 frames per second don't really mean much there.

 

I think the only place I'd use texturing with flatshading is something like HiRes Pole Position, and only use texturing on road, as that can be made visually pleasing by manually adjusting contrast of neighboring texels (e.g. make texture low-frequency - almost cartoon/flatshaded like). Plus, on GPU, you can do bilinear filtering on a road within scanline for free, basically (long story).

 

I also made a texturing test with run-time filtered mipmaps and that's actually very nice in HighRes - doesn't shimmer, no bright texels pop up randomly, nothing catches your eye while playing - looks waaay better than road on any driving game on PS1 using Sony's built-in crappy HW texturing. But the road takes full frame's time, so the game would have to be 30 fps (or have multithreading on DSP to keep 60 fps with 1-2 vehicles). Or have beautifully textured 3D road and 2D vehicle bitmaps and keep 60 fps (lame, but a possibly useable compromise).

 

Then again, that test was run at 1536x200, so it should be faster in 768x200...

[AtariORdead]

 

Nintendo got their clock cleaned by Sega in Europe. So it really depends on where you actually lived. Nintendo never had a chance with 8 bit on that continent. Sega also kicked their ass in Brazil. So Sega "won" the 8 bit war in both South America and Europe. Just because it happened in the USA, doesn't mean it happened worldwide.

 

Atari Corporation got propped up by Europe for years -- despite nearly constant failure in their home market.

Are we going to ignore the fact that a) Nintendo did not give a shit about Europe at the time, and ) B never really put much effort into the Region.

[AtariORdead]

OK, what exactly are you seeing there that looks impossible on jag ?

 

- Those lowres level textures with prebaked lightmaps (hence no runtime cost during rasterizing) should easily fit into 1024x1024 = 1 MB

- Great majority of gameplay is with only 1 character and 50-polygon environment in a top-down camera angle with axis-aligned texturing (exactly same as I did for RoadRash proto or H.E.R.O., both of which runs fullscreen at 60 fps on jag).

- While GPU is driving Blitter, the DSP is rasterizing the character in parallel. At the given screen coverage of the gameplay, the character drawing will come close to 1-1.5 full frame. So the worst case scenario is 30 fps for that.

- Each additional character will bring the framerate down linearly.

- So, if you got 3 of them, it will fall down to 15 fps. But, since GPU will be done drawing in second frame, it would be just plain stupid for it to wait on DSP for full 2 frames, so GPU would take over remaining characters and render them after it's done with the cheap environment.

 

Cutscenes, where the characters occupy majority of screen space (the slow generic texturing ) would fall down to ~10 fps, but cutscenes don't affect gameplay, so who cares about that.

 

 

 

Without the cutscenes (no hours of audio discussions, and scripted sequences with hundreds of animations), this could easily fit a 6 MB cart. The 3D mesh for any given screen takes literally couple dozen bytes (per object - just index (1 byte) into the object array which further indexes into vertex array and material ID). The 3D environment for the level would take under 100 KB, so it's easy to page from cartridge at level-loading time.

 

I'm busy with other stuff on jag, so can't really be bothered to tweak my H.E.R.O. engine for MGS-style.

 

 

If I did, I'd much rather go for something like Alien Breed on PS3 - camera fixed at both an angle&position above character, and lego-like environment with jag-friendly axis-aligned walls. Render characters as sprites, and you got 20-30 fps action game. I never really liked the constant movie-style interruption of the gameplay in MGS, so I really only played it for few levels just to see what the hype is about. But Alien Breed, you fight constantly and don't get distracted by the camera (like in MGS).

Sorry, but all I see is a load of hypothetical guesswork with nothing at all to back it up.