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What could have saved the Jag?


Tommywilley84

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On 2/2/2022 at 7:24 AM, Djmicklovin said:

What could have saved the Jaguar, 3DO, Saturn, Dreamcast, any of these consoles? The PlayStation not existing that's what... Sony just dominated everything, even Nintendo wasn't safe. They had some moderate success with the N64 and Gamecube but lost a lot of market share to Sony. In an alternate universe somewhere where the PlayStation never came to be i'm sure the Jaguar would have thrived and been a lot more successful.

 

On 2/2/2022 at 7:46 AM, Flojomojo said:

I don’t think it works that way. The PlayStation was popular and brought a lot of new customers in, and had hundreds of games available. 

 

The Jag struggled to release a few dozen games. It’s not like the Tekken and Ridge Racer crowd would have flocked to the Jaguar just because it was the only thing in the market. 
 

Jaguar was outsold handily by Super Nintendo, which despite its age was more of a competitor for the kinds of games on the Jag. 
 

There should be a statute of limitations for starting threads like this, since the anniversary of Jaguar’s failure was 25 years ago. 

^This. The Jaguar's failure had nothing to do with the PlayStation. The PlayStation was no doubt responsible for limiting the success of later systems, but in my opinion had little to do with limiting the success of systems that came out well before it. The 3DO platform got close to enough market saturation to become viable (including getting close to a successor system release), but even that fell well short. The Jaguar sold roughly 8x fewer systems than the 3DO and had a considerably smaller library (something like 5x fewer titles, assuming my poor math is correct). Even without the PS1's release, the Jaguar's death was inevitable unless many things were different well before the Jaguar launch and there was far better execution the first year. And as we saw with the 3DO, even with reasonable traction, it's still debatable if it ultimately would have been enough. For all the systems of this era, it could just be a simple matter of being caught in poor release timing technology-wise, basically just after the apex of wildly popular 16-bit systems and just before the launch of Sony's gamble on a 3D-centric system, which, as we know, paid off. At least it was an interesting time.

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On 2/2/2022 at 1:24 PM, Djmicklovin said:

What could have saved the Jaguar, 3DO, Saturn, Dreamcast, any of these consoles? The PlayStation not existing that's what... Sony just dominated everything, even Nintendo wasn't safe. They had some moderate success with the N64 and Gamecube but lost a lot of market share to Sony. In an alternate universe somewhere where the PlayStation never came to be i'm sure the Jaguar would have thrived and been a lot more successful.

SNES and Genesis were the competition the Atari was aiming for and the 16-bitters were still the best selling systems 1994-1995.

Even the 3DO sold better than the Jag, despite being an high priced Mutlimedia system.

 

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8 hours ago, ArneCRosenfeldt said:

The N64 has no optical drive and as such low detail assets and textures . Hardware developers invested time into a blurry edge antialias method for no good reason. It had Rambus Ram. So it could burst large amount of data. So they could just have rendered everything as low detail 640x480 and output as interlaced. Most games were 30 fps anyway. For me the N64 looked just bad.

Sin and Punishment was an example of a really nice looking N64 game.

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28 minutes ago, agradeneu said:

SNES and Genesis were the competition the Atari was aiming for and the 16-bitters were still the best selling systems 1994-1995.

Even the 3DO sold better than the Jag, despite being an high priced Mutlimedia system.

 

SNES and Genesis had some of the worlds best game designers at that time. If something like sonic or Donkey Kong Country had shown up on the Jagaur in addition to having a vast library of titles to choose from it may have helped.

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There are just a few things what could have saved the Jaguar:

 

1.) Pong 2000.

2.) A Super-Lynx (like the Super Game-Boy) to play Lynx games on the Jaguar.

3.) A Power-Claw (like the Power Glove) to play gems as Supercross 3D or Club Drive not in a better, but different way.

4.) Club Drive 2 - more energy balls, more 5-polygon cats, lower frame rate.

5.) A Super-Jaguar-128X add-on (like the 32X) to boost the 64-bit Jaguar onto the next level, including the commitment of some video game developers to port more 16-bit games (Lemmings?, Lost Vikings?) to the 128X. You can also put the CD-Add On on top of the 128X.

6.) A "Professional Pack", containing a keyboard, mouse, ATARI TOS on cart and monochrome monitor to upgrade the toy to the first 64-bit home computer.

7.) Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy 2.

8.) A SNES adapter, to play SNES games on the Jaguar. Works better with the SNES joypad adapter to use the SNES joypad on the Jaguar too.

9.) Combat 2000 (incl. the classic VCS2600 Combat game).

10.) Genie of the lamp (no, not a video game ... talking about the REAL Genie).

 

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1 hour ago, 42bs said:

it is no real 64 bit

None of the games for the N64 was 64-bit, and Nintendo even had the "64" in the name of the console. Technically the MIPS CPU of the N64 could run 64-bit programs, but none of the games for the N64 used that mode. Question if it would even be compatible with the rest of the hardware in the N64? Besides from that, the only effect of having a 64-bit program for the N64 is that the program would be twice as large. Given that the N64 used cartridges, it would just mean that cartridges would be more expensive to produce. The only benefit of running in 64-bit mode on a MIPS CPU is that you can have larger precision calculations, but this is not something that 3D games may benefit much from. You may also address a larger memory space, but that is neither a benefit given the limited size of the cartridges, and limited ammount of RAM in the system.

 

On the Jaguar the 64-bit is used for shuffeling graphics with a higher bandwidth,  which is something that is beneficial in games. On the other hand, you have so many sub-systems sharing the same bus, so it is no so easy to get the full benefit of that.

Edited by phoboz
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The Jaguar couldn't be saved.

 

Right now though; for those that stuck with the Jaguar, we're almost spoilt for choice with the amount of quality titles being made and released for it.

Gravactic Mines looks awesome, Asteroite gives us some Metroidvania action, Last Strike gives us the shooter we deserve, and many many more.

 

 

 

 

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On 2/3/2022 at 10:43 AM, 42bs said:

You seem to read a lot. Any practice. For your info, most (if not all) machines which use an 68k do not boot from 0. As RAM at 0 is precious so why waste with ROM. If you wonder why: Read the 68k manual again.

http://www.verycomputer.com/154_788d2fbc48f510ff_1.htm

So it says that the 68k reads , huh, The 68000 starts reading from $000000.from 0000 . So you have to put ROM there. The 6502 reads in the high address space because it is not meant as high, but 6502 was a microcontroller and it was assumend that other chips apear throught the address space and address lines function as chip-enable. But the 6502 needs its zero page at low address and likewise the stack. So it does not also expect the boot code there. You could always go the C64 way and insert a PLA who constantly mixes up the address space .. but on a CPU with 32bit addresses?? Why?

After power on, the 8086 will execute the code at address 0xFFFF0  because again, at 0000 is the interrupt table which better is RAM and not ROM.

Here, for 68k you better place ROM at 0 : https://segaretro.org/Sega_Mega_Drive/Memory_map
Amiga has chipMem. Some would consider it IO space or VRAM. It seem weird to place it at 00 in CPU address space. Ah, it is the old problem, the CPU needs Code in ROM, but Stack in RAM. 6502 is weird anyway. Code in ROM is a given, but I like large stack pointers so that you can place you stack anywhere. Instead of zeroPage you better use a segment. And with a fast enough CPU any interrupt could just jump into the very same routine whose position is stored in a register. C64 has two priority levels. So be it, have two register for two interrupt routines. The Jag does it the correct way. It has internal SRAM and internet routines are there at fixed positions. So no conflict with ROM.

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3 hours ago, Gunther said:

The Jaguar couldn't be saved.

 

Right now though; for those that stuck with the Jaguar, we're almost spoilt for choice with the amount of quality titles being made and released for it.

Gravactic Mines looks awesome, Asteroite gives us some Metroidvania action, Last Strike gives us the shooter we deserve, and many many more.

 

 

 

 

Jepp, JagServer and BJL was little late _and_ Atari did not see the momentum of a vivid Atari demo-scene to come up with killer games.

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A community such as this is what's saving the Jaguar. Gamers & collectors have shown far more support for this awkward device than even Atari could muster. Sites like AA define the Jags legacy.

 

For me the Jag lives in this neat little realm alongside systems like the Vectrex; it's got this charm that you cannot quite put into words. Does any of it make any logical sense? Of course not. Leave me alone and get off my lawn.

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