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What could have saved the Jag?


Tommywilley84

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I agree it was doomed from the start, but if Atari had not been in a death spiral already it might have been Saturn doomed or Dreamcast doomed. Given what we know of the development schedule, system documentation, development toolkit, the way people were treated, the way contractors were paid, the general desperate throw-everything-at-the-wall “strategy”, Atari’s failing finances, the collapse of the computer business, and so on, though, I find what we did get to be faintly miraculous. Enjoy what we do have or make the games you want that we don’t have :)

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6 hours ago, Djmicklovin said:

It’s not obvious because I never said that game specifically had to be there, but more like it that took advantage of the Jaguar’s power. That’s the point here… You understand?

To be fair, just about every console (or computer) takes a while (sometimes years) to get its killer, system pushing software (a few notable exceptions are arguably Super Mario 64 for the N64 and Soul Calibur for the Dreamcast). And like just about every other platform, the Jaguar could have gotten by on good quality and good volume until that second generation of software (as developers got a better handle on the hardware) was ready to start to push the technology. It goes without saying that the platform really never stood a chance for a myriad of reasons, including Atari's own financial situation. We only have to look at the Dreamcast to see how even if you execute pretty darn well and have impressive hardware, if you don't have the funding to stick things out, you're still going to fail. In other words, we may as well say if the Jaguar was designed for x, y, and z, didn't have Atari as its producer, and got good support, it would have been a success. That's too many unrealistic changes.

 

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Concur on the killer app point from @Bill Loguidice often they wouldn't come for a year or two.  However, what companies like Atari lacked was a sound business plan.  Retro Man Cave had David Pleasance, long-time exec with Commodore UK, for a zoom.  He harped on the fact that Commodore NEVER had a business plan, going back to the early 80s.  This is why they failed, and you can lump Tramiel's Atari in there as well.  That's why internal projects were often deserted with management changes, entire marketing pushes submarined, etc.  He spoke of a case where they told him to set up with a major retailer a big push for the Commodore PET.  He spent awhile doing this, only to be informed, suddenly, they didn't have stock of PET's to sell!!  They would order thousands of units of another machine, with no plan where/how to sell them, and whether there was even a retail audience.  Atari Corp (and Inc. before it) operated just as aimlessly, as evidenced by the hasty conversion of the Atari 400 to the 5200, the 7800, Lynx development being outside and kind of falling, messily, onto their laps.  The canceled Panther.  These were companies who seemed to trip and fall into one thing or the other.  Meanwhile, Nintendo, Sony, and for a short time Sega, had business plans.  Nintendo didn't release a coloring book without full corporate buy in, reviews, tests, and marketing pushes. 

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On 2/6/2022 at 8:40 AM, Bill Loguidice said:

In terms of pushing the 3D capabilities of the Jaguar, I think it's easy to argue that that's precisely what Atari did wrong and perhaps did more damage to the Jaguar's reputation than almost anything else. The 3D stuff really wasn't an absolute requirement until Sony's correct gamble. The Jaguar really should have done more to showcase its 2D potential, which is what it was best suited for.

I think Cybermorph, AVP, Iron Soldier and other classics inspired Sony's 3D design requirements.

 

Maybe Atari should have shied away from anything that wasn't 3D with a few exceptions, players experiencing a 3D virtual world for the first time wanted to see more 3D. 

 

They needed the programmers to write more [time consuming] 3D games and should never have allowed Sega and Super Nintendo style games to be released that caused players to question the 64-bit system math. 

 

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37 minutes ago, Mr SQL said:

I think Cybermorph, AVP, Iron Soldier and other classics inspired Sony's 3D design requirements.

 

Maybe Atari should have shied away from anything that wasn't 3D with a few exceptions, players experiencing a 3D virtual world for the first time wanted to see more 3D. 

 

They needed the programmers to write more [time consuming] 3D games and should never have allowed Sega and Super Nintendo style games to be released that caused players to question the 64-bit system math. 

 

I can't tell if you're joking or serious with this. If you're serious, I can't believe anyone would think that Sony would be influenced by anything on the Jaguar. It was a non-factor in Japan and a non-starter in the USA. I don't know why it would influence anything. If any system of that generation would be influential for Sony in any way, it would be the 3DO, which had a presence in Japan and a design more like what the PS1 ended up being like, and I'd have to see some strong evidence to even believe that. 

I still think the 3D pathway was a non-starter on the Jaguar and something consumers really didn't know they wanted until the PS1, which was the first system truly optimized for such a software pipeline. The Jaguar wasn't optimized for genuine 3D worlds, period. It did just fine in some cases with the flat-shaded stuff (when you remove the driving games), but certainly wasn't suited for texture-based 3D. While I suppose they could have doubled down on flat-shaded polygonal games, I don't see how that would have provided as much wow factor as 2D games with large, detailed objects, tons of color, and expansive sound (and I know we didn't get those either). I feel like it would have had to have shown superior 2D prowess over the mature 16-bit platforms to establish itself, which, as you indicate, it didn't (mostly by-the-numbers ports and minimal upgrades). They really didn't have to worry about 3D until a few years later, although we know they certainly tried hard to push that aspect earlier (and to poor effect).

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I'd think that the Jaguar had maybe room for one good year of 3D. Although the hardware wasn't really designed for it and it was 90% stuck in the roll-your-own-assembler software-rendering paradigm, they still had enough of an edge over the Genesis and SNES to impress, while the true 3D powerhouses (excepting the 3DO which cost a bomb) wouldn't debut until the end of the following year.

 

In an ideal world they'd have launched with AvP and followed up with Wolfenstein and Doom by the middle of the following year. After that though, no more 3D games, burn all marketing materials that mention them and, "we've always been a 2D powerhouse. Look! Rayman!" might just let them get away with it.

 

Mind you, they'd still need to be able to market the thing...

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What could have saved the Jaguar?

 

Nothing. BITD I was huge into video games. Bought a TG16 and then the $400 CD add on.  Had a Genesis and was day 1 buyer of the CD add on. 
 

Bought the Jaguar and Trevor McFur first time I saw it in a store. Played for a few days. Debated long and hard about returning it all but ended up not doing it

 

My BITD memory was the Jaguar had better than Genesis graphics but a lot of the games were just not much fun to play. 
 

Even BITD had the impression Atari did not have money to make or release games. Their big hits were incredibly hard to get. Wolfenstein 3D was barely available in the large Philadelphia metropolitan area. One store had 5 or 6 copies. Same with Tempest 2000.  One EB in the area got just a handful of copies. 
 

it was clear almost immediately Atari was not able to compete. 
 

Even when CD units were closed out I did not feel it was worth spending $25 for one. 

Edited by rayik
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5 hours ago, Bill Loguidice said:

I can't tell if you're joking or serious with this. If you're serious, I can't believe anyone would think that Sony would be influenced by anything on the Jaguar. It was a non-factor in Japan and a non-starter in the USA. I don't know why it would influence anything. If any system of that generation would be influential for Sony in any way, it would be the 3DO, which had a presence in Japan and a design more like what the PS1 ended up being like, and I'd have to see some strong evidence to even believe that. 

I still think the 3D pathway was a non-starter on the Jaguar and something consumers really didn't know they wanted until the PS1, which was the first system truly optimized for such a software pipeline. The Jaguar wasn't optimized for genuine 3D worlds, period. It did just fine in some cases with the flat-shaded stuff (when you remove the driving games), but certainly wasn't suited for texture-based 3D. While I suppose they could have doubled down on flat-shaded polygonal games, I don't see how that would have provided as much wow factor as 2D games with large, detailed objects, tons of color, and expansive sound (and I know we didn't get those either). I feel like it would have had to have shown superior 2D prowess over the mature 16-bit platforms to establish itself, which, as you indicate, it didn't (mostly by-the-numbers ports and minimal upgrades). They really didn't have to worry about 3D until a few years later, although we know they certainly tried hard to push that aspect earlier (and to poor effect).

Sony succeeded where Atari failed by keeping true to Atari's 3D vision. I think we agree Atari had pretty good foresight for 3D being the future.

  

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5 hours ago, Matt_B said:

I'd think that the Jaguar had maybe room for one good year of 3D. Although the hardware wasn't really designed for it and it was 90% stuck in the roll-your-own-assembler software-rendering paradigm, they still had enough of an edge over the Genesis and SNES to impress, while the true 3D powerhouses (excepting the 3DO which cost a bomb) wouldn't debut until the end of the following year.

 

In an ideal world they'd have launched with AvP and followed up with Wolfenstein and Doom by the middle of the following year. After that though, no more 3D games, burn all marketing materials that mention them and, "we've always been a 2D powerhouse. Look! Rayman!" might just let them get away with it.

 

Mind you, they'd still need to be able to market the thing...

There could have been more games that really took advantage of the 2D effects that Jaguar was capable of. Some of the trickery done on the SNES and MegaDrive looked really good and gave the perception of 3D even though it had nothing to do with being 3D. The Jaguar easily bested those effects and then some. If some really FUN games had been added to the catalog that included those types of effects gamers may have taken notice.

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27 minutes ago, alucardX said:

There could have been more games that really took advantage of the 2D effects that Jaguar was capable of. Some of the trickery done on the SNES and MegaDrive looked really good and gave the perception of 3D even though it had nothing to do with being 3D. The Jaguar easily bested those effects and then some. If some really FUN games had been added to the catalog that included those types of effects gamers may have taken notice.

So like SNES had f-zero + karts + wings . Even here the Jaguar hardware fails. You have to use the blitter for this. The SNES can blit as fast into the line buffer as the Jag. The SNES can render the sprites on top of that -- the Jag cannot. The SNES applies tiles on the fly. On the Jag you have to cache the visible part like you had to on the Amiga for all-direction scrolling. If Atari just had looked at this goal: Make mode-7 twice as fast as SNES, we would have gotten faster floor and ceiling in Doom and AvP . Super Burnout could have had less jaggies on the road curbstones because the blitter operates at higher precision than the OP.

Or is there a flag to let the OP start doing its thing after we used the blitter on the linebuffer? It can stop, but not start. You could try to render the road into the alternate address range between horizontal display end and horizontal display start ( in the border ).

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7 hours ago, Mr SQL said:

Sony succeeded where Atari failed by keeping true to Atari's 3D vision. I think we agree Atari had pretty good foresight for 3D being the future.

  

Atari didn't have a 3D vision. If that's the case, then Sega with the 32X and 3DO also had 3D visions. These were not 3D first platforms. These were 2D systems that had varying degrees of 3D capabilities. There's a big difference with what Sony did versus what came before.

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31 minutes ago, Bill Loguidice said:

Atari didn't have a 3D vision. If that's the case, then Sega with the 32X and 3DO also had 3D visions. These were not 3D first platforms. These were 2D systems that had varying degrees of 3D capabilities. There's a big difference with what Sony did versus what came before.

I have to disagree here, they are all 3D systems, compared to pure 2D systems like SNES and NEOGEO. 

Playstation was just the next step forward.

The computional power was at the level of 386/486 PCs. You dont need that for 2D. And the 32x and 3DO were not that good with 2D. 

 

Developer Eclipse wanted to do rail shooter with polygon gfx as their debut for the Jag. But Atari refused, they wanted a free roam 3D game, as they thought this was the next big step forward.

This concept became Iron Soldier. So, they clearly had the vision for 3D being the selling point for their new system. 

 

AvP was Ataris pivotal killer app, its a 3D game rendering a highly detailed virtual world. It was one of the few games that Atari invested some extra money into.

 

Edited by agradeneu
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3 minutes ago, agradeneu said:

It has a very fast RISC processor. Guess why its there. You dont need a SH-1 for rendering pixel graphics. 

It has two SH2s.
And you do need very powerful CPUs to be able to do decent 2D graphics on it due to how the rest of the system was designed.

Those scaler arcade ports wouldn't run at 30 fps with a single CPU much less with a less powerful CPU. All the scaling is done by software.

The Saturn hadn't been originally designed for 3D graphics either and we have no real indication that the 32X was designed with a "3D vision" in mind. 

Saying that Atari had no vision for 3D and citing 32X as an example that Sega had one makes no sense. 

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11 minutes ago, Barone said:

It has two SH2s.
And you do need very powerful CPUs to be able to do decent 2D graphics on it due to how the rest of the system was designed.

Those scaler arcade ports wouldn't run at 30 fps with a single CPU much less with a less powerful CPU. All the scaling is done by software.

The Saturn hadn't been originally designed for 3D graphics either and we have no real indication that the 32X was designed with a "3D vision" in mind. 

Saying that Atari had no vision for 3D and citing 32X as an example that Sega had one makes no sense. 

I said both systems are 3D. 

Look, both Super FX chip and SVP were designed for 3D graphics and the Jaguar was way more sophisticated. 

 

For the 32X, you dont need 2 SH-1 to do super scaler graphics or 2D stuff. This amount of computional power makes only sense for polygon graphics.  If you dont believe me, look for the hardware specs of supercaler arcade machines.  You need RAM to store the bitmaps, but its not something you need a super fast CPU with 3D instructions for.

 

Regarding 2D, the 32X is just ok. Genesis renders the background graphics. It's a compromise.  

 

If you look at a perfect 2D system its the NEOGEO, and it has a simple 68K Motorola CPU. The SNES has a quite slow 3MHZ CPU but it gives the 32X a run for it's money with 2D pixel graphics.

 

 

I am puzzled ppl think you could compute and render 3D gfx of Virtua Racing or Iron Soldier without any 3D hardware. Crazy!

 

John Mathieson said it loud and clear, that the Jaguar was designed with 3D polygon graphics in mind, you can challenge me for that simple historical fact.

 

The mistake was the lack of support for texture mapping and some hardware bottlenecks, but that was the crucial thing Sony did right with the Playstation. 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited by agradeneu
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12 minutes ago, Barone said:

Saying that Atari had no vision for 3D and citing 32X as an example that Sega had one makes no sense. 

The point was that none of these systems (32X, Jaguar, 3DO) were 3D first, yet all three had varying degree of 3D (polygonal) capabilities. The PS1 was a 3D first design, although it obviously had impressive 2D capabilities as well. That's the distinction I was trying to make when arguing against the idea that Atari had a "3D vision" with the Jaguar. That was not their primary focus.

Edited by Bill Loguidice
Added 32X, Jaguar, 3DO for clarity
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7 minutes ago, Bill Loguidice said:

The point was that none of these systems (32X, Jaguar, 3DO) were 3D first, yet all three had varying degree of 3D (polygonal) capabilities. The PS1 was a 3D first design, although it obviously had impressive 2D capabilities as well. That's the distinction I was trying to make when arguing against the idea that Atari had a "3D vision" with the Jaguar. That was not their primary focus.

The 2D machine was supposed to be the Atari Panther.

The GPU of the Jaguar has custom instruction sets for fast 3D computing, hardware Z buffer,  CRY, a color format developed for more efficient Gouraud shaded polygons. 

 

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23 minutes ago, agradeneu said:

I said both systems are 3D. 

Look, both Super FX chip and SVP were designed for 3D graphics and the Jaguar was way more sophisticated. 

 

For the 32X, you dont need 2 SH-1 to do super scaler graphics or 2D stuff. This amount of computional power makes only sense for polygon graphics.  If you dont believe me, look for the hardware specs of supercaler arcade machines.  You need RAM to store the bitmaps, but its not something you need a super fast CPU with 3D instructions for.

 

Regarding 2D, the 32X is just ok. Genesis renders the background graphics. It's a compromise.  

 

If you look at a perfect 2D system its the NEOGEO, and it has a simple 68K Motorola CPU. The SNES has a quite slow 3MHZ CPU but it gives the 32X a run for it's money with 2D pixel graphics.

 

 

 

You keep wrongly stating the SH1 as a 32X CPU. 
The 32X uses SH2 CPUs. 

And, then again, you're comparing apples to oranges. The Neo Geo has hardware dedicated to sprites, sprite shrinking, etc. The 32X has none of that.


The 32X hardware has no features dedicated to 3D graphics. Unlike the Jaguar, unlike the 3DO. 

"Oh but it has a powerful CPU that can do 3D!", no one is arguing that but to state that the 32X is a product of a 3D vision is an awful stretch, to say the least.
Sega already had a deal for the SH2 CPUs due to the already on going Saturn development. The 32X was a project put together in a couple of months.
It was released by the end of 1994 and it has no 3D graphics features at all when compared to 1993 consoles such as the Jaguar and the 3DO. As I said, hell of a 3D vision.
 
 

21 minutes ago, Bill Loguidice said:

The point was that none of these systems (32X, Jaguar, 3DO) were 3D first, yet all three had varying degree of 3D (polygonal) capabilities. The PS1 was a 3D first design, although it obviously had impressive 2D capabilities as well. That's the distinction I was trying to make when arguing against the idea that Atari had a "3D vision" with the Jaguar. That was not their primary focus.

The 32X has no hardware 3D capabilities. You can only do 3D with it using software rendering; which is the same way we got 3D games on the Amiga and Mega Drive.

Edited by Barone
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2 minutes ago, agradeneu said:

The 2D machine was supposed to be the Atari Panther.

The GPU of the Jaguar has custom instruction sets for fast 3D computing, hardware Z buffer,  CRY, a color format developed for more efficient Gouraud shaded polygons. 

 

Let's reset here. My statement was against Mr SQL's idea of (and this is a direct quote): "Sony succeeded where Atari failed by keeping true to Atari's 3D vision. I think we agree Atari had pretty good foresight for 3D being the future." I simply don't agree with that statement. They included 3D capabilities (like Sega on the 32X, 3DO, CD32, etc.), but it was not envisioned as a 3D system. It was obviously too early for that. I'm not going to give Atari or any of the other company credit for having 3D "foresight." They didn't. They just included technology of the time that would allow them to play 3D or 3D-like games of the time. The only company who truly had the foresight of 3D being the future was Sony with the PlayStation, who also had both the resources and timing (technology-wise) to be able to do it "right."

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12 hours ago, Matt_B said:

 

 

In an ideal world they'd have launched with AvP and followed up with Wolfenstein and Doom by the middle of the following year. After that though, no more 3D games, burn all marketing materials that mention them and, "we've always been a 2D powerhouse. Look! Rayman!" might just let them get away with it.

 

Mind you, they'd still need to be able to market the thing...

AVP was nowhere near ready to be a launch title. 

 

If you look at comments made by Rebellion, Bob Brodie etc (and ignore the bullshit ones by Jane Whittaker)... 

 

 

A launch AVP would of only been on a 2 Meg cart, missing lots of samples, level design would of been 64x64 grid designs, large, sprawling environments, sparsely populated by enemies. 

 

You'd would into rooms where Xenomorph eggs wouldn't peel open, you'd not have face huggers running around. 

 

 

Gamesmaster TV programme here in the UK reviewed the AVP Beta by error, thinking it was the final version and it took flak for being pretty boring to play. 

 

Maybe a ideal world scenario would of been to have Rebellion focusing on AVP and not having teams split between it and Checkered Flag 2.

 

 

Teque could of been left to handle the Virtua Racing clone Atari wanted with the game they were working on, which Atari had moved to CD and became World Tour Racing. 

 

 

It wouldn't of saved the Jaguar, but it would of spared it some embarrassment at the hands of the press. 

 

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1 hour ago, Bill Loguidice said:

The point was that none of these systems (32X, Jaguar, 3DO) were 3D first, yet all three had varying degree of 3D (polygonal) capabilities. The PS1 was a 3D first design, although it obviously had impressive 2D capabilities as well. That's the distinction I was trying to make when arguing against the idea that Atari had a "3D vision" with the Jaguar. That was not their primary focus.

I may be incorrect in my understanding, but I didn't think the PSX had any 2D oriented hardware and all 2D stuff was just drawn on polygons as pseudo tiles.

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