How powerful was the cancelled Atari Panther compared to the Atari ST/Amiga?

[Leeroy ST]

A 1991 3D full-roam combat flying game like Cybermorph would have made gamers drool in 1991, and that was without waiting another 2 years for the SNES and Genesis to add "super chips" to their carts for Starfox and Virtua Racing.

 

St console would only really work if it was launched in 1990 or earlier. 1991? Panther was more than powerful enough, better sound, great graphics, and 3D out the box? That's a no brainer.

[zzip]

7 minutes ago, Leeroy ST said:

It's more likely if there wasn't a crash ColecoVision would have continued its domination regardless of what Atari had planned

I don't think the crash was avoidable.   The videogame market got way ahead of itself 1981-83 and a correction was inevitable

 

21 minutes ago, Leeroy ST said:

This is not true and the ST and the aggressive developer strategy proves it. Jack had limited money until the ST started coming through.

Courting developers and marketing videogames aren't the same thing though.  Yes they got a bunch of third party developers on-board.   But when it came to Atari's own game efforts, what were they offering on ST?   Joust, Crystal Castles, Star Raiders..   In other words ports of games that were several years old.  Packaged in some of the most boring boxes that didn't grab your attention in the store.  Nothing innovative like what NES was offering.

 

This marketing effort is night and day different from what was happening under Warner--   New games,  hottest arcade ports, Atari Club,  game-related comics, contests like the Swordquest stuff.   Yeah I know Swordquest sucked, but stuff like that got people excited.

[zzip]

19 minutes ago, davidcalgary29 said:

Okay, here's a fair question: if Atari had released the Panther in 1991, would anyone here have actually bothered to buy one? After I bought my Lynx in 1990, I didn't buy another Atari product until well after the Corp. went under. Let's say that cash was a problem for Atari, and they could only develop and release one product. Given the fludity of computing and gaming at the time, would you choose:

 

a) Panther

b) Falcon

c) ST MicroBox

 

?

It all depends on the timing.   An ST-based console, no later than 1989.   Panther 91.   Falcon, probably at least two years before it came.

 

in 85, the ST offered advanced tech for an affordable price,  but Atari wasn't able to repeat that.   Their follow up machines always seemed to come too late and be underspecced.   As cool as the Falcon was, they only managed to get it running at 16mhz

[Leeroy ST]

8 minutes ago, zzip said:

I don't think the crash was avoidable.   The videogame market got way ahead of itself 1981-83 and a correction was inevitable

I think if Warner actually killed the 2600 to die and replace with the 5200 there wouldn't have been an incentive for consoles like the Intellivision to hang around without a sucessor and there would only be two consoles with shelfspace in retailers and a dying Mattel that would have retailers take stock off their shelves.

 

The big problem by retailers was that you had games produced for multiple consoles, the 5200, Colecovision and Intellivision was already 3 competitors then you had some regions having the Odyssey 2, and then almost all parts of the country still having the 2600 after that.

 

If anything this market has shown that Three is usually the limit and one of those 3 usually falls to the niche lower selling side while two are in heated competition with the execeptions being the long drawnout 2600 and the NES filling in a void with marketing bucks from japan.

 

SNES>Genesis>>>TG16

PSX>>>>>N64>>>Saturn 

PS2>>>>>Xbox>>> GameCube

360>PS3|Wii bringing in an entirely different demographic in order to compete.PS4>>>>>Xbox One>>>>WiiU

Edited September 3, 2020 by Leeroy ST

[Leeroy ST]

 

15 minutes ago, zzip said:

Joust, Crystal Castles, Star Raiders..   In other words ports of games that were several years old.  Packaged in some of the most boring boxes that didn't grab your attention in the store.  Nothing innovative like what NES was offering.

 

This marketing effort is night and day different from what was happening under Warner--   New games,  hottest arcade ports, Atari Club,  game-related comics, contests like the Swordquest stuff.   Yeah I know Swordquest sucked, but stuff like that got people excited.

 

You seem to be forgetting about the limited internal budget and not buying Atari games, but regardless this statement is not relevant. They had third-parties with deep complex games and shallower arcade titles all with unique game design that Nintendo wouldn't get and many Ex Atari gamers left consoles to go play and who weren't interested in the NES.

 

An ST console would be bridging the console and computer markets before the Xbox came out many years later. Warner had more money, Atari Corp didn't and lost part of their developer team tot he arcades. That's not fortunate, but pretending the third-party couldn't fill the gap is ridiculous. 

 

Even if we are only talking about the ST in our current timeline where there isn't a console, one of the reasons why the ST did well early was because of games, you can't overlook that.

 

 

Edited September 3, 2020 by Leeroy ST

[carlsson]

I know that Cybermorph was carried over from Panther to Jaguar, but I don't know how well it ran on the Panther. If Atari had the resources to develop such wonderful hardware ahead of times, and also be able to sell it at an affordable price point, the question is why they simply didn't.

 

For that matter, how well would the Lynx hardware have performed as a full sized console instead of a handheld in 1989? Perhaps a little beefed up if required, if now the ST hardware wasn't quite consolidized.

[zzip]

10 minutes ago, Leeroy ST said:

You seem to be forgetting about the limited internal budget and not buying Atari games, but regardless this statement is not relevant. They had third-parties with deep complex games and shallower arcade titles all with unique game design that Nintendo wouldn't get and many Ex Atari gamers left consoles to go play and who weren't interested in the NES.

 

An ST console would be bridging the console and computer markets before the Xbox came out many years later. Warner had more money, Atari Corp didn't and lost part of their developer team tot he arcades. That's not fortunate, but pretending the third-party couldn't fill the gap is ridiculous.

I'm not forgetting that.   Jack didn't want Atari Games.    It previously gave Atari a pipeline of hot games that they could have as console exclusives if they wanted.   Imagine a 7800 with exclusive games from the arcade like Gauntlet, Marble Madness, Indiana Jones, Star Wars,  ROTJ, Roadblasters, etc, and released on-time.   Might have sold better than the 7800 we got with yet another version of Dig Dug, Asteroids, Joust, etc.

 

Yes money was tight.   But Nintendo isn't going to stop competing because Atari needs to wait for more cash.   The Warner Atari had the option to sell the NES because Nintendo was afraid to compete against them.

Edited September 3, 2020 by zzip

[+davidcalgary29]

19 minutes ago, zzip said:

in 85, the ST offered advanced tech for an affordable price,  but Atari wasn't able to repeat that.   Their follow up machines always seemed to come too late and be underspecced.   As cool as the Falcon was, they only managed to get it running at 16mhz

Perhaps true for the ST line, but I'm going to disagree with the rest of Atari's new products. The Lynx was far and away the best handheld when it was released, and not unreasonably expensive (although too expensive for their market, as it turns out); the Portfolio (more third-party tech) was genius for its time; the Jaguar was competitive for its era and not overpriced (no matter what your thoughts might be about its actual capabilities).

 

 

18 minutes ago, Leeroy ST said:

 

 

If anything this market has shown that Three is usually the limit and one of those 3 usually falls to the niche lower selling side while two are in heated competition with the execeptions being the long drawnout 2600 and the NES filling in a void with marketing bucks from japan.

 

SNES>Genesis>>>TG16

PSX>>>>>N64>>>Saturn 

PS2>>>>>Xbox>>> GameCube

360>PS3|Wii bringing in an entirely different demographic in order to compete.PS4>>>>>Xbox One>>>>WiiU

I think that this pattern demonsrates shortsighted business practices and a limited business model more than it shows the actual retail limitations of the market. Besides, today's market is actually:

 

1. Android

2. iOS

3. PS4>>>Switch>>>X1 (and throw in the 3DS line somewhere in there as well).

 

[zzip]

1 minute ago, davidcalgary29 said:

Perhaps true for the ST line, but I'm going to disagree with the rest of Atari's new products. The Lynx was far and away the best handheld when it was released, and not unreasonably expensive (although too expensive for their

I'll grant that, but the Lynx wasn't developed at Atari, it wasn't even commissioned by Atari.   I would also add that their laser printer did the "power without the price" thing well.   But the ST didn't advance fast enough compared to the competition.  It took four years to release the STe which did only some of what the Amiga did.   Six years to produce an ST that went beyond 8mhz in an era where PC clock speeds were rapidly advancing.   Adding a hard drive was ridiculously expensive compared to PC too.   Serial port was stuck at 19200 and couldn't take full advantage of the speed of newer modems with data compression features.    It was stuff like that which became frustrating as an ST owner. 

 

Then there was the Falcon which looked amazing, until you realize it only amounted to the equivalent of a 386 in a world that already moved on to 486 with Pentium on the horizon.

 

3 minutes ago, davidcalgary29 said:

the Jaguar was competitive for its era and not overpriced (no matter what your thoughts might be about its actual capabilities).

Given that it was outclassed by Playstation and Saturn after about a year,  it probably needed to be released earlier than it was.

[Leeroy ST]

37 minutes ago, zzip said:

I'm not forgetting that.   Jack didn't want Atari Games.    It previously gave Atari a pipeline of hot games that they could have as console exclusives if they wanted.   Imagine a 7800 with exclusive games from the arcade like Gauntlet, Marble Madness, Indiana Jones, Star Wars,  ROTJ, Roadblasters, etc, and released on-time.   Might have sold better than the 7800 we got with yet another version of Dig Dug, Asteroids, Joust, etc.

 

Yes money was tight.   But Nintendo isn't going to stop competing because Atari needs to wait for more cash.   The Warner Atari had the option to sell the NES because Nintendo was afraid to compete against them.

There's a difference between didn't want and didn't want to pay for. Also you are talking about early games, you do realize that games released for the 7800 after 1986 right? Including near 3D games like f18 hornet which were ambitious projects at the time which of course wouldn't play to well on home console hardware for another 6 or so years.

 

Sure, yes Nintendo didn't want to compete against a 2600 but their console eventual famicom was inspired by the colecovision, warner again, had decided to drag out the 2600 than really put effort into a successor, when the 5200 had early signs of issues they said screw it and let it run until it became to much of an issue to drag it out further. Most likely in an event of a non-crash Coleco would have retained the lead and warner would be panicking to but a ton of money into the 7800 after launch in 84 without many games lined up. 

 

Nintendo likely still would have entered due to the lack of Atari interest in their machine.

 

40 minutes ago, davidcalgary29 said:

 

 

1. Android

2. iOS

3. PS4>>>Switch>>>X1 (and throw in the 3DS line somewhere in there as well).

 

You can't compare hardware driven traditional markets to phone digital mobile market that doesn't make anysense and they don't go together. It's just as crazy as swapping the Wii U with the switch,t he Wii U did happen and the Switch it its successor. 

 

[Leeroy ST]

31 minutes ago, zzip said:

I'll grant that, but the Lynx wasn't developed at Atari, it wasn't even commissioned by Atari.   I would also add that their laser printer did the "power without the price" thing well.   But the ST didn't advance fast enough compared to the competition.  It took four years to release the STe which did only some of what the Amiga did.   Six years to produce an ST that went beyond 8mhz in an era where PC clock speeds were rapidly advancing.   Adding a hard drive was ridiculously expensive compared to PC too.   Serial port was stuck at 19200 and couldn't take full advantage of the speed of newer modems with data compression features.    It was stuff like that which became frustrating as an ST owner. 

 

Then there was the Falcon which looked amazing, until you realize it only amounted to the equivalent of a 386 in a world that already moved on to 486 with Pentium on the horizon.

 

Given that it was outclassed by Playstation and Saturn after about a year,  it probably needed to be released earlier than it was.

Considering that the ST was a profit driver with as little cost put into it as possible while still having decent specs to raise profit margins all those moves make sense exceptt for launching the STE too late. They also tried a PC clone they should have went all in on that in hindsight.

 

As for the Jaguar the launch of the Playstation or the Saturn was not its problem. The 3DO released nationwide a year before the Jaguar with 1 game for months and outsold it like rat poison and was compared to the saturn and even the PSX in media for a short time, even having in some cases better ports. So that's not really an excuse for the Jaguar. On paper, some gearhead say that the Jaguar was stronger than the 3DO, which brings up the real reason why it failed, architecture which worsened the developer situation, and manufacturing ability, they couldn't even make enough Jaguars to put in store.

 

Keep in mind articles were Atari was touting its 20,000 initial shipments selling out during its testing phase as a way to try and attract developers to its system. 20,000!!!!!

 

 

[+davidcalgary29]

1 minute ago, Leeroy ST said:

You can't compare hardware driven traditional markets to phone digital mobile market that doesn't make anysense and they don't go together. It's just as crazy as swapping the Wii U with the switch,t he Wii U did happen and the Switch it its successor. 

 

Why on earth not? That's just the reality of today's gaming market and manner in which most people (not just enthusiasts) play game these days. And sure, throw in the Wii too! But that just undermines the argument that the market's only big enough to three platforms at once. 

[Leeroy ST]

6 minutes ago, davidcalgary29 said:

Why on earth not? That's just the reality of today's gaming market

No it's not, even in present times those two industries are separated and not integrated together. I don't get the controversy here, they aren't the same, they don't even have the same core fundamentals and operate differently, even the performance lists have different criteria.

 

They will remain separate until consoles evaporate into thin air and everyone has to subscribe to a Xbox/PS service on their computers or phones in an app for a yearly fee to access proprietary games and that's assuming we don't have a new game format by then.

 

I actually think what's likely going to happen is consoles will continue but you have to by a stream box that has proprietary access to games and verification.

 

But anyway, they are two separate things currently.

 

Now the WII is a valid argument, it just managed to strike a fad audience into the industry but ut was in the same market despite the "HD twins" shenanigans and Nintendos own words for being a "separate" competitor. Although the Switch is on the line with that one.

Edited September 3, 2020 by Leeroy ST

[+davidcalgary29]

1 minute ago, Leeroy ST said:

No it's not, even in present times those two industries are separated and not integrated together. I don't get the controversy here, they aren't the same, they don't even have the same core fundamentals and operate differently, even the performance lists have different criteria.

 

They will remain separate until consoles evaporate into thin air and everyone has to subscribe to a Xbox/PS service on their computers or phones in an app for a yearly fee to access proprietary games and that's assuming we don't have a new game format by then.

 

I actually think what's likely going to happen is consoles will continue but you have to by a stream box that has proprietary access to games and verification.

 

But anyway, they are two separate things currently.

 

Now the WII is a valid argument, it just managed to strike a fad audience into the industry but ut was in the same market despite the "HD twins" shenanigans and Nintendos own words for being a "separate" competitor. Although the Switch is on the line with that one.

Well, I'll certainly agree that this side conversation has completely moved away from the original topic. Back to the Panther!

[Lost Dragon]

2 hours ago, Leeroy ST said:

A 1991 3D full-roam combat flying game like Cybermorph would have made gamers drool in 1991, and that was without waiting another 2 years for the SNES and Genesis to add "super chips" to their carts for Starfox and Virtua Racing.

 

St console would only really work if it was launched in 1990 or earlier. 1991? Panther was more than powerful enough, better sound, great graphics, and 3D out the box? That's a no brainer.

Assuming your talking of something in the style of Cybermorph, but not actually Cybermorph as that's been confirmed by ATD and Atari Corp to of been built from ground up for the Jaguar. 

 

People passing off footage for early Jaguar version as Panther footage, caused a lot of misinformation. 

 

 

You'd probably be looking at something like Revenge Of Starglider on the equally ill-fated Konix Multisystem :

 

http://www.konixmultisystem.co.uk/index.php?id=games&content=starglider#start

[Lost Dragon]

1 hour ago, carlsson said:

I know that Cybermorph was carried over from Panther to Jaguar, but I don't know how well it ran on the Panther. If Atari had the resources to develop such wonderful hardware ahead of times, and also be able to sell it at an affordable price point, the question is why they simply didn't.

 

For that matter, how well would the Lynx hardware have performed as a full sized console instead of a handheld in 1989? Perhaps a little beefed up if required, if now the ST hardware wasn't quite consolidized.

Your getting confused with early Jaguar footage ?

Sources from ATD, Atari Corp, Imagitec Design etc have all confirmed NO Jaguar titles started life on Panther. 

 

Panther RPG, The Crypt however, was carried over from the Konix Multisystem. 

[carlsson]

Yeah, I got fooled by the general grapevine. Thanks for the correction.

[atarian1]

10 hours ago, zzip said:

I'll grant that, but the Lynx wasn't developed at Atari, it wasn't even commissioned by Atari.   I would also add that their laser printer did the "power without the price" thing well.   But the ST didn't advance fast enough compared to the competition.  It took four years to release the STe which did only some of what the Amiga did.   Six years to produce an ST that went beyond 8mhz in an era where PC clock speeds were rapidly advancing.   Adding a hard drive was ridiculously expensive compared to PC too.   Serial port was stuck at 19200 and couldn't take full advantage of the speed of newer modems with data compression features.    It was stuff like that which became frustrating as an ST owner. 

 

Then there was the Falcon which looked amazing, until you realize it only amounted to the equivalent of a 386 in a world that already moved on to 486 with Pentium on the horizon.

I get really tired of the same "the Falcon should have been released earlier" argument over the years, so here we go again. I DARE you to find a computer that had the specs and price of the Falcon when it came out. You will NOT find it! I remember looking and nothing came close. In order to match the Falcon specs, you had to add this and that to a Mac or PC system which adds more to the cost of the system.

 

PC clock speeds don't mean much. Everyone with a decent amount of computer knowledge knows the Motorola 68000 is a lot more efficient that any Intel processor. A decent 486 system still costed more than a Falcon and didn't have the specs of the Falcon. I know because my brother bought one because he needed it for college work.

[Lost Dragon]

11 hours ago, carlsson said:

Yeah, I got fooled by the general grapevine. Thanks for the correction.

No worries. 

It's a situation that's been made worse by people putting screens of the Jaguar footage in Panther articles and others stating as fact the only Panther games in development were... and not being aware of just actually what was in development or used to test development machines. 

[Lost Dragon]

2 hours ago, atarian1 said:

I get really tired of the same "the Falcon should have been released earlier" argument over the years, so here we go again. I DARE you to find a computer that had the specs and price of the Falcon when it came out. You will NOT find it! I remember looking and nothing came close. In order to match the Falcon specs, you had to add this and that to a Mac or PC system which adds more to the cost of the system.

 

PC clock speeds don't mean much. Everyone with a decent amount of computer knowledge knows the Motorola 68000 is a lot more efficient that any Intel processor. A decent 486 system still costed more than a Falcon and didn't have the specs of the Falcon. I know because my brother bought one because he needed it for college work.

The Falcon couldn't of been released any earlier. 

 

Atari used manufacturing plants in the Far East as they were cheaper than those in the USA. 

 

Falcon machines from the first 2 production runs failed Q. A testing, which delayed the Falcon launch. 

 

It was later found the Q. A  machines were at fault, not the Falcons. 

[carlsson]

Are those Panther articles genuine at all, or just doctored to look real? Pasting different screenshots into old articles sounds completely twisted, in particular if the supposed magazines can be located elsewhere and shown the screenshots never were there in the first place.

[Lost Dragon]

OTo answer the question of how powerful the hardware was, let's let those who worked on it answer.. 

 

Rob Nicholson, HMS :

 

The Panther had a pathetic amount of RAM. Maybe 128K. Certainly not

enough to create two bit-maps as big as the whole screen and implement

standard double buffering. I think there was 32K of static RAM for the

display list. This was a good idea as it sped up generation of the

display. The same system was used on the Jaguar but the object processor

was beefed up and made more flexible to handle other features such as

read-modify write (for shadows etc). Unfortunately, on the Jaguar the

display list was in normal DRAM which meant the whole system stopped

when the video processor wanted to access memory. It also meant that on

the Jaguar, the advantages of page mode RAM where accessing the next

byte/word along was often defeated as different devices (display,

blitter, 68k and GPU etc) kept reading from different pages.

 

 

Jeff Minter :"Hmmm - well I certainly never had it displaying 65,535 sprites

simultaneously!

 

The sprite hardware was a lot like the OLP on the Jag, and had similar

limitations - putting too many sprites on one scanline would cause

"tearing" where the OLP had insufficient time to traverse the entire

list during the time of a scanline. Also, sprites that were scaled up

would take twice the bandwidth of standard, unscaled sprites, ISTR.

 

I did a demo with this whopping great dinosaur about 2 screens high, a

couple of ground planes and 40 bouncing, scaling antelopes that bounced

along the ground. ISTR that if you had too many beasts land at the one

time, you'd get a bit of tear at the bottom of the screen.

 

You could do some nice warping though by using an IRQ per scanline to

twiddle scaled sprite params... had some nice stuff with wibbly,

colour-cycling Mandy images that warped and scrolled, ISTR..."

 

\

(:-) - Y a K

/

[Lost Dragon]

Mev Dinc on why he turned the Panther down:

 

MEV:I believe it must have been around 1991, we had started developing our First Samurai title around this time...

I guess at the time Atari was also challenging the Amiga  with their Atari ST. Most of us developers believed the Amiga was superior to the ST, but we did a very good version of First Samurai on it.

 

Maybe at the time I felt Atari wasn’t capable of challenging the other hardware manufacturers although they were one of the early pioneers.

 

[Lost Dragon]

14 minutes ago, carlsson said:

Are those Panther articles genuine at all, or just doctored to look real? Pasting different screenshots into old articles sounds completely twisted, in particular if the supposed magazines can be located elsewhere and shown the screenshots never were there in the first place.

You'd have to ask the article writers for why they made claims about Psygnosis having a development kit, DOMARK doing Pit Fighter etc etc, it created a lot of Red Herrings when i looked into it on behalf of GTW. 

 

Same applies for those who deliberately took early Jaguar footage captures of Cybermorph and passed it off as Panther screens.. 

 

I'd guess the need to present some imagery to go with the incorrect claims? 

 

A lack of credible research? 

 

[Lost Dragon]

Guildo H. Who created 1 level of the Panther RPG, The Crypt, before project was canned.. 

 

From a technical standpoint Panther did put Mega Drive and SNES to
shame, I remember. They were getting a bit long in the tooth already,
especially compared to some of the things you started seeing on the
Amiga. The Panther was like an Atari ST on steroids with a console
design, meaning without the operating system overhead. Even though the
architecture was very different than that of the ST-line of computers,
it was following the same lean and mean approach. The architecture had
quite a bit in common with Atari’s Lynx, if I recall correctly, and
had some powerful incredibly sprite hardware that exceeded Sega’s and
Nintendo’s capabilities.

However, with the Jaguar’s accelerated development schedule, I think
they were smart to cancel Panther and shift focus to Jaguar instead.