Clone Jaguar console - maybe one day?

[agradeneu]

1 hour ago, Zerosquare said:

If you want to compare the Jaguar to the NeoGeo, you should compare it to the NeoGeo CD. The latter has 4 MB of RAM just for the graphics and several separate busses (while the Jaguar's total amount of RAM is only 2 MB, with a single bus). And even with that, it can't pull off all of the cartridge-based NeoGeo games.

Why that? Comparing a cart system with a cart system is fair. I don't think we were talking about CD games  anyway. 

 

And why would the CD system be the preferable one? As far as I know it was never popular and the cart system was the preferable one. A well known downside of the NEOGEO CD system is that it has very long loading times and makes the system even more  expensive and unaffordable.

 

It looks to me like you just want to throw in that RAM number, 4 appearently bigger and better than 2 MB, do the math, all questions answered? Not really.

 

The NEOGEO CD drive is way too slow to load game data quickly enough, so it has 4MB built in RAM to cache graphics.

Is that really comparable to system RAM? What about bandwidht limit and RAM speed? What about bottlenecks? What about providing realistic numbers about "real world" data shifting capabilities?

Can you provide anything of that?

 

The same with your bus argument. Yeah, more is always better. Makes me wonder why every modern console system has a unified bus design then? 

Hasn't the SNES multiple busses too? Or the NES, or the Game Boy?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited December 23, 2020 by agradeneu

[phoboz]

The only reason graphics (sometimes) need to be shifted to RAM on the Jaguar is because 16-bit EPROM simply isn't fast enough for the 64-bit object processor.

 

For example, in Kings of Edom, the title screen I can rendered directly from ROM, as it is only one 192x128 pixels image.

 

In the game, the inventory screen (of the same size) which drawn on top of all the in-game graphics, has to be transfered to RAM before rendering. Because, the wait cycles for reading the 16-bit EPROM slows the whole rendering process down to much (e.g. the image flickers)

 

So if the Neo Geo would have been a 64-bit system, you probably would also need to transfer some graphics to faster memory when very much is going on.

 

Nevertheless, it's something you need to be aware about when programming the Jaguar, I am sure that there are other things you need to think about when are programming the Neo Geo.

 

Of course if you successfully want to port a Neo Geo game you would have to only unpack, and transfer the graphics to RAM when it is needed. So for a fighting game, you will not keep all the animation frames for all the fighter in RAM all the same time. Rather you only load the 2 fighters that are fighting each other, and when they are done, you remove them from RAM to give room for others.

 

PS. The Jaguar is not like a CD based system, because there a lot of things you don't need to transfer to RAM. For example, you never transfer any program code, you can play buffered sound directly from ROM, basically you can have all (non graphical) read only data in ROM. The loading times of the Jaguar (from ROM) is not even of the same magnitude as with a CD-ROM based system, and that was the part that really killed the Neo Geo CD.

Edited December 23, 2020 by phoboz

[Bill Loguidice]

45 minutes ago, phoboz said:

Of course if you successfully want to port a Neo Geo game you would have to only unpack, and transfer the graphics to RAM when it is needed. So for a fighting game, you will not keep all the animation frames for all the fighter in RAM all the same time. Rather you only load the 2 fighters that are fighting each other, and when they are done, you remove them from RAM to give room for others.

The bottom line I think is that we haven't any Neo Geo-level 2D-like games on the Jaguar and may never. There's a lot going on with those games on that hardware and it's a big question if most games would port over with all technical features intact. You'll likely get better results going the Rayman route and just coding specifically to the strengths of the hardware anyway than trying to shoehorn the Jaguar's capabilities to the Neo Geo's strengths. Still, I have no doubt that the Jaguar could come as close as other higher end systems of the era, like the 3DO. 

[Zerosquare]

1 hour ago, agradeneu said:

Why that? Comparing a cart system with a cart system is fair.

...if you're willing to disregard the massive difference in price, both for the system and the cartridges. And the fact that this difference is the reason why the NeoGeo hardware could achieve what it did back in 1990 or so.

 

1 hour ago, agradeneu said:

And why would the CD system be the preferable one? As far as I know it was never popular and the cart system was the preferable one. A well known downside of the NEOGEO CD system is that it has very long loading times and makes the system even more  expensive and unaffordable.

Because its design is closer to the Jaguar hardware: it doesn't require huge ROMs with fast and random access, instead the graphics data is loaded from CD-ROM and kept in RAM. A cartridge Jaguar game would load it from ROM instead (so the load time is negligible), but once it's done, the result is the same.

 

1 hour ago, agradeneu said:

It looks to me like you just want to throw in that RAM number, 4 appearently bigger and better than 2 MB, do the math, all questions answered? Not really.

My point is: don't expect the Jaguar to achieve what the NeoGeo CD couldn't do, despite having twice as much dedicated memory than the Jaguar has in total.

 

1 hour ago, agradeneu said:

Is that really comparable to system RAM? What about bandwidht limit and RAM speed? What about bottlenecks? What about providing realistic numbers about "real world" data shifting capabilities?

Can you provide anything of that?

I could, if I had hours or days to spend doing benchmarking on both machines. Which I don't.

But I could ask the same: where's your data? What code have you written on the Jaguar?

 

1 hour ago, agradeneu said:

Makes me wonder why every modern console system has a unified bus design then?

Constraints on modern hardware are completely different from constraints on retro hardware, so the comparison makes little sense.

SNK didn't use the multiple bus approach just because they were lazy. They used it because they couldn't have achieved the same performance otherwise.

 

 

 

 

[agradeneu]

Just now, Bill Loguidice said:

The bottom line I think is that we haven't any Neo Geo-level 2D-like games on the Jaguar and may never. There's a lot going on with those games on that hardware and it's a big question if most games would port over with all technical features intact. You'll likely get better results going the Rayman route and just coding specifically to the strengths of the hardware anyway than trying to shoehorn the Jaguar's capabilities to the Neo Geo's strengths. Still, I have no doubt that the Jaguar could come as close as other higher end systems of the era, like the 3DO. 

Well I would say  Rayman and Native Demo are two very impressive 2D titles, even compared to NEOGEOs best games (on carts).

 

I think the main reasons we haven't seen NEO GEO like games or ports  on the Jaguar:

 

- Atari cost cutting  ROM space

- high license costs for ports

- NEOGEO games being very Japan specific

 

Regarding homebrews, technically some NEOGEO games  look feasible to port over to the Jaguar, as you can pack game data of ~250 Mbit on an 6MB cart.

But  licensing costs are unaffordable as these games are still popular and sold on modern systems like the Switch or PS4. 

 

The other thing are the high production values of graphics and animation - no hobby project could really compete with that, as we do all things in our free time.

And last but not least, professional artists of that high caliber are usually working in the game industry and probably expect some payment. None of them ever worked or would work on the Jaguar.

 

[agradeneu]

11 minutes ago, Zerosquare said:

...if you're willing to disregard the massive difference in price, both for the system and the cartridges. And the fact that this difference is the reason why the NeoGeo hardware could achieve what it did back in 1990 or so.

 

Because its design is closer to the Jaguar hardware: it doesn't require huge ROMs with fast and random access, instead the graphics data is loaded from CD-ROM and kept in RAM. A cartridge Jaguar game would load it from ROM instead (so the load time is negligible), but once it's done, the result is the same.

 

My point is: don't expect the Jaguar to achieve what the NeoGeo CD couldn't do, despite having twice as much dedicated memory than the Jaguar has in total.

 

I could, if I had hours or days to spend doing benchmarking on both machines. Which I don't.

But I could ask the same: where's your data? What code have you written on the Jaguar?

 

Constraints on modern hardware are completely different from constraints on retro hardware, so the comparison makes little sense.

SNK didn't use the multiple bus approach just because they were lazy. They used it because they couldn't have achieved the same performance otherwise.

 

 

 

 

Thats interesting. The reason the CD can't do the same as the ROM system IS that with a huge ROM you don't need to have all data in RAM. Phoboz already explained that. It's also clear that you are comparing apples with oranges.

 

 Discussion closed.

Edited December 23, 2020 by agradeneu

[Zerosquare]

6 minutes ago, agradeneu said:

Discussion closed.

If you say so. Why don't you port a NeoGeo game to the Jaguar and show all of us wrong?

[agradeneu]

3 minutes ago, Zerosquare said:

If you say so. Why don't you port a NeoGeo game to the Jaguar and show all of us wrong?

Well actually I'm working on other games as you know.?

And with ports, no work for artists lol!

Edited December 23, 2020 by agradeneu

[Bill Loguidice]

17 minutes ago, agradeneu said:

Well I would say  Rayman and Native Demo are two very impressive 2D titles, even compared to NEOGEOs best games (on carts).

 

I think the main reasons we haven't seen NEO GEO like games or ports  on the Jaguar:

 

- Atari cost cutting  ROM space

- high license costs for ports

- NEOGEO games being very Japan specific

 

Regarding homebrews, technically some NEOGEO games  look feasible to port over to the Jaguar, as you can pack game data of ~250 Mbit on an 6MB cart.

But  licensing costs are unaffordable as these games are still popular and sold on modern systems like the Switch or PS4. 

 

The other thing are the high production values of graphics and animation - no hobby project could really compete with that, as we do all things in our free time.

And last but not least, professional artists of that high caliber are usually working in the game industry and probably expect some payment. None of them ever worked or would work on the Jaguar.

 

I did mention Rayman as an example of something that natively plays to the Jaguar's strengths. Native demo is nice enough, but far from complete and lacking in polish.  We have no way of knowing how the final product would turn out. It's a tantalizing glimpse of something that might be possible, but nothing more.

And yes, we never saw Neo Geo ports on the Jaguar for a variety of reasons, including the console's historically poor sales not making it a viable target. The discussion was more about what was possible. Of course it's possible to port Neo Geo stuff to the Jaguar, it's just a question of whether or not they could be nearly AES-perfect or just come really close like its contemporary system, the 3DO. It's unlikely it could match the Neo Geo's output dead-on, so we'd almost certainly see compromises like on all ports of the day.

Edited December 23, 2020 by Bill Loguidice
typo

[phoboz]

43 minutes ago, Bill Loguidice said:

The bottom line I think is that we haven't any Neo Geo-level 2D-like games on the Jaguar and may never. There's a lot going on with those games on that hardware and it's a big question if most games would port over with all technical features intact. You'll likely get better results going the Rayman route and just coding specifically to the strengths of the hardware anyway than trying to shoehorn the Jaguar's capabilities to the Neo Geo's strengths. Still, I have no doubt that the Jaguar could come as close as other higher end systems of the era, like the 3DO. 

I am sure that if someone really put the effort into it they could make a great fighting game for the Jaguar (because that is what the Neo Geo is all about, isn't it). I don't think that there are any specific technical limitations to the Jaguar that would prevent that. You have the same, or even more colors etc. If you use the 64-bit RAM in a clever way, because this is were you need to have the graphical data that you are about to display on a 64-bit system. There were indeed some attempts for the Jag, but you don't make a good fighting game just like that. I think that all of us that have played the earlier SNK fighters can agree to that, they didn't shine over night, it took several years of hard work to make a game that was comparable to for example Street Fighter II.

[agradeneu]

26 minutes ago, Bill Loguidice said:

I did mention Rayman as an example of something that natively plays to the Jaguar's strengths. Native demo is nice enough, but far from complete and lacking in polish.  We have no way of knowing how the final product would turn out. It's a tantalizing glimpse of something that might be possible, but nothing more.

And yes, we never saw Neo Geo ports on the Jaguar for a variety of reasons, including the console's historically poor sales not making it a viable target. The discussion was more about what was possible. Of course it's possible to port Neo Geo stuff to the Jaguar, it's just a question of whether or not they could be nearly AES-perfect or just come really close like its contemporary system, the 3DO. It's unlikely it could match the Neo Geo's output dead-on, so we'd almost certainly see compromises like on all ports of the day.

 

 While I'm pretty sure a lot of NEOGEO games could be ported to Jaguar, I don't think Rayman could be ported to the NEOGEO without major changes. 

 

Most likely a full Native game would have been an improvement. The demo was done within the limitations of homebrew CD, being forced to load all game data at once into RAM and go with it.

Interestingly, all graphics are packed into 1 MB RAM and unpacked on the fly into the other 1MB "working" RAM.  That means it effectively uses only 1 MB of Jaguars 2MB RAM.

Also note that it was Duraniks first work and optimizations were possible. 

 

As for the NEOGEO ports: The SNES could do some quite respectable ports of Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting, with much less ROM space and less memory. 

 

The 3DO is a CD based system. Because the CD is very slow you will need a lot of RAM. The trick of the NEOGEO games is to pull data from huge ROM space, which is fast enough to save limited RAM. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited December 23, 2020 by agradeneu

[agradeneu]

1 hour ago, phoboz said:

I am sure that if someone really put the effort into it they could make a great fighting game for the Jaguar (because that is what the Neo Geo is all about, isn't it). I don't think that there are any specific technical limitations to the Jaguar that would prevent that. You have the same, or even more colors etc. If you use the 64-bit RAM in a clever way, because this is were you need to have the graphical data that you are about to display on a 64-bit system. There were indeed some attempts for the Jag, but you don't make a good fighting game just like that. I think that all of us that have played the earlier SNK fighters can agree to that, they didn't shine over night, it took several years of hard work to make a game that was comparable to for example Street Fighter II.

I would take the shooters, e.g. Alpha Mission 2 or Last Resort 

 

[Koopa64]

19 hours ago, agradeneu said:

I think you are comparing apples and oranges: The Jaguar has much bigger system RAM (2MB), and that should be faster memory than ROM. 

Still, you can pull packed data from ROM and unpack in RAM on the fly. Needless to say, the Jaguar is much more faster with processing and shifting data, so much that you can juggle 8 bit and 16 bit graphics data. (compared to 4 bit sprites on NEOGEO)

Ask a programmer for details. 

 

To be a little bit more specific about graphics data, 16 bit graphics are roughly 4x bigger in memory than 4 bit, and 2x than 8 bit. The system is fast enough to shift big chunks of graphics data, e.g. like a bitmap that is 900 kbytes and 1580x600 while doing other graphics, like 16 bit sprites or scrolling a background bitmap in 16 bit color.

 

Graphics of NEO GEO games are not only lower color depht, but also tile based.....to save memory bandwidht. And in no realistic scenario the NEOGEO would be capable to handle big 16 bit bitmap graphics like the Jag does.

 

The reason NEO games look so great are the top notch production values and huge ROM space to minimize processing demands on the hardware (!).

The downside was expensive hardware  and insane prizes for games, and a very specific library of games, mostly 1vs1 fighting games.

 

On paper, the Jaguar might be more technically advanced than the Neo Geo, but the Jag is handicapped by its complicated and buggy hardware design with those special custom chips. The Neo Geo was much simpler with just the 68000, Z80 and the few other processors, all specifically designed to quickly throw around sprites on the screen. The Neo Geo has no bitmap mode or anything, it just draws a ton of sprites of varying sizes as needed by the programmer.

 

I understand the Jag can run code with just the 68000 and ignoring the custom CPU, but that cripples any power advantage the Jag could have had.

[Clint Thompson]

12 minutes ago, Koopa64 said:

I understand the Jag can run code with just the 68000 and ignoring the custom CPU, but that cripples any power advantage the Jag could have had.

That's impossible, unless you're literally not displaying any graphics or playing any sounds, in which case, whatever you are running on the 68k is most likely completely pointless. The 68k does not produce video and/or sound of any kind. Just like the 68k is not responsible for any of the video graphics or sound on the Neo Geo.

16 minutes ago, Koopa64 said:

...but the Jag is handicapped by its complicated and buggy hardware design with those special custom chips.

If anything, those "complicated, special custom chips" give the Jaguar its edge and capabilities with flexibility. It seems the hardware has become a scapegoat somehow (instead of the actual issues being addressed like inexperienced coders, budgets and time constraints in almost every scenario which 9 times out of 10, are the Jaguar's actual handicap).

[agradeneu]

2 hours ago, Koopa64 said:

On paper, the Jaguar might be more technically advanced than the Neo Geo, but the Jag is handicapped by its complicated and buggy hardware design with those special custom chips. The Neo Geo was much simpler with just the 68000, Z80 and the few other processors, all specifically designed to quickly throw around sprites on the screen. The Neo Geo has no bitmap mode or anything, it just draws a ton of sprites of varying sizes as needed by the programmer.

 

I understand the Jag can run code with just the 68000 and ignoring the custom CPU, but that cripples any power advantage the Jag could have had.

No.  The NEOGEO builds everything with 16x16 tiles (also the big sprites), but the number per scanline is limited. 

 

Actually the Jaguar can render bitmaps of any size in 4, 8 or 16 bit color. The number of sprites it can draw is unlimited.

You can't display any graphics without the 64 bit video processor, which means you have to use the custom chips and not only the 68000.

 

 

 

A limiting factor is ROM space, but with Jaguar GD, there is potential to get access to Gigabytes of space!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited December 24, 2020 by agradeneu

[Clint Thompson]

Fixed that for you...

9 minutes ago, agradeneu said:

The number of sprites it can draw is unlimited... *as long as the number doesn't exceed 4.

[agradeneu]

3 minutes ago, Clint Thompson said:

Fixed that for you...

It's a theoretical number of what can be drawn on screen. However the limit is surely not 4!!! LOL

 

There is a demo called F.A.C.T.S., that draws thousands of sprites.

 

 

Edited December 24, 2020 by agradeneu

[phoboz]

The object processor is a verycapable device. It can do just like you describe about the Neo Geo, to draw a large arbitrary sized sprites, in large numbers (I think up to 512). It can even draw scaled sprites, with no, or very little additional overhead. So this is in my opinion really the strength of the Jaguar.

 

The blitter (which you need to use for real 3D games) is a different story.

 

Edited December 24, 2020 by phoboz

[agradeneu]

17 minutes ago, Clint Thompson said:

Fixed that for you...

For a tile maps engine and animation, say 16x16,  you need to draw more like hundreds of sprites on screen.

Some homebrew games draw 64 frames/sec animation for every sprites. The bottleneck comes with processing the collisions.

E.g. the Lynx is not limited with sprites, but with a certain number of them everthings slows down because of CPU limits.

Edited December 24, 2020 by agradeneu

[Clint Thompson]

15 minutes ago, agradeneu said:

However the limit is surely not 4!!! LOL

Yeah, I was mostly joking

Edited December 24, 2020 by Clint Thompson

[Koopa64]

9 hours ago, Clint Thompson said:

That's impossible, unless you're literally not displaying any graphics or playing any sounds, in which case, whatever you are running on the 68k is most likely completely pointless. The 68k does not produce video and/or sound of any kind. Just like the 68k is not responsible for any of the video graphics or sound on the Neo Geo.

If anything, those "complicated, special custom chips" give the Jaguar its edge and capabilities with flexibility. It seems the hardware has become a scapegoat somehow (instead of the actual issues being addressed like inexperienced coders, budgets and time constraints in almost every scenario which 9 times out of 10, are the Jaguar's actual handicap).

You misunderstand me, I've been told before that many Jag developers relied on the 68000 as much as possible as the main CPU instead of using primarily the Tom and Jerry chips as intended. By that I mean the other custom chips were used, but not at their full potential because lazy developers just used the 68000 as the main CPU, making the Jaguar more of a 16-bit machine in practice. Is this not true?

[Agent X]

On 12/22/2020 at 4:47 AM, agradeneu said:

Potentially the Jag could do better pixel graphics than the SNES or MD yes, but pulling off a SNES quality game is hard work and only a very few homebrews are at that level actually.

True.

 

On 12/22/2020 at 4:47 AM, agradeneu said:

To make matters even less optimistic, lots of high level indie devs are releasing high quality games for Game Boy, Mega Drive and SNES (e.g. Xeno Crisis). I don't see how the Jag can compete with that outside of the niche Atari hardcore audience. 

Well, you're right. Many of these indie developers create games for Genesis, SNES, Game Boy Advance, NeoGeo, or Dreamcast, but won't touch the Jaguar for whatever reason (limited resources, unfamiliarity with the hardware, or just plain don't have any interest).

 

The situation is not that the Jaguar hardware cannot handle games like (for example) Xeno Crisis or Pier Solar, it's just that the developers behind those games simply aren't making them for the Jaguar. In essence, it similar to the reason why the Jaguar never got "big" games like Earthworm Jim, Castlevania, Street Fighter II, and so on.

 

On 12/22/2020 at 11:16 AM, Bill Loguidice said:

The PC Engine/TG-16, SNES, and Genesis (and ignoring the Neo Geo AES for the purposes of this specific discussion) had some of the best teams in the world working on a notable percentage of their games, so audio-visually they compare very well (and sometimes better) to the best the Jaguar showcased in 2D with its more limited support. In other words, there's arguably not enough of a gap for anyone to be pulled away from those systems, particularly - as has been stated by others in this thread - homebrews have yet to pull off anything truly next level on the Jaguar.

I agree with this as well. That was one of the biggest problems Atari faced when the Jaguar was on the market--they just couldn't manage to attract the top games from the top talent in the industry. Good game design and good art direction goes a long way.

 

What would help is for some of the active homebrew developers in the Jaguar community to reach out to some of those other development teams in a collaborative effort. The original developers could provide the Jaguar teams with their source code and art assets, while the Jaguar teams could use their programming skills and intimate knowledge of the hardware to put it all together and make it work on the Jaguar.

[Clint Thompson]

4 hours ago, Koopa64 said:

You misunderstand me, I've been told before that many Jag developers relied on the 68000 as much as possible as the main CPU instead of using primarily the Tom and Jerry chips as intended. By that I mean the other custom chips were used, but not at their full potential because lazy developers just used the 68000 as the main CPU, making the Jaguar more of a 16-bit machine in practice. Is this not true?

It's just kind of a generic excuse really as to why the games aren't very good on the Jaguar. There's no way Iron Soldier 2 or Skyhammer would be possible (both great games mind you) if the programmers relied only on or too heavily on the 68k for their code, it's just too damn slow. Realistically, those games are very much as close to using the Jaguar to its full potential as possible.

 

A lot of people relied on the 68k and many for valid reasons, since you only do complex code or math in GPU/DSP if the game is 3D and really requires it or moreover if your game would benefit from doing so, otherwise those chips are fully capable of doing some serious tossing of graphics and sound around (Super Burnout / Rayman) on their own at a much better rate than a Neo Geo could with both using the same 68k to run code, not to discredit how great the NG hardware is or was for how it was used.

Most examples point back to inexperienced (not necessarily lazy) coders and games rushed out the door to meet Atari's deadline. It's hard to put up a fight when your paycheck is on the line.

 

Quick examples:

Checkered Flag - programmer's first game, not optimized, fate of deadline and inexperience

Highlander CD - same programmer of Checkered Flag, (second game) but same issues as first

SuperCross 3D - programmer's first game, clearly not optimized, inexperienced, released unfinished (even the title screen says SuperCross X)
Kasumi Ninja - programmer's first game, rushed due to production deadline, major cutbacks by Atari from 4MB cart to 2MB, story remains the same as the others

 

[+CyranoJ]

There's also a large group of totally ignorant youtube 'experts' who think the 64 in the documentation means it can compete with the gamecube - and have thus raised a generation of people who believe the same and have expectations beyond all reality.

 

- Everyone only used the 68000 (myth)

- GPU in main will fix everything (myth)

- The console is faster than the PSX (myth)

- The console was hard to develop for (myth)

- The bugs in the hardware cripple the system totally (myth)

 

I could go on and on with 'facts' repeated ad-nausium that are utterly incorrect, but there's no point, and its Xmas Day.

It's a fun console. Enjoy it for what it is, not spending your senior years waiting for what you think it could be (whatever the hell that is)... the cool-aid bottles are long empty... they're just full of fumes now.

[Lost Dragon]

2 hours ago, Clint Thompson said:

It's just kind of a generic excuse really as to why the games aren't very good on the Jaguar. There's no way Iron Soldier 2 or Skyhammer would be possible (both great games mind you) if the programmers relied only on or too heavily on the 68k for their code, it's just too damn slow. Realistically, those games are very much as close to using the Jaguar to its full potential as possible.

 

A lot of people relied on the 68k and many for valid reasons, since you only do complex code or math in GPU/DSP if the game is 3D and really requires it or moreover if your game would benefit from doing so, otherwise those chips are fully capable of doing some serious tossing of graphics and sound around (Super Burnout / Rayman) on their own at a much better rate than a Neo Geo could with both using the same 68k to run code, not to discredit how great the NG hardware is or was for how it was used.

Most examples point back to inexperienced (not necessarily lazy) coders and games rushed out the door to meet Atari's deadline. It's hard to put up a fight when your paycheck is on the line.

 

Quick examples:

Checkered Flag - programmer's first game, not optimized, fate of deadline and inexperience

Highlander CD - same programmer of Checkered Flag, (second game) but same issues as first

SuperCross 3D - programmer's first game, clearly not optimized, inexperienced, released unfinished (even the title screen says SuperCross X)
Kasumi Ninja - programmer's first game, rushed due to production deadline, major cutbacks by Atari from 4MB cart to 2MB, story remains the same as the others

 

I'd add a few side notes to most of the titles above:

 

You've got to factor in internal politics when it comes to accounts from staff working on Checkered Flag and Kasumi Ninja. 

 

Rebellion staff at the time on Newsgroups described it as a mere contract title-Atari wanted a plain polygon Racer, so that's what Rebellion gave them, they also hinted at Atari not allowing them as much control over the product as they would of liked. 

 

It was rushed to market, as Atari badly needed product on the shelves.. 

 

There were massive internal staff conflicts within Rebellion itself, with the Kingsley Bros talking of coders leaving after they couldn't do the math, disputes over taking undue credit for work, massively overstating their roles. 

 

 

The Kingsley Bros themselves can't even give the same account of how they got the Jaguar development contract, one claims he wrote Star Raiders on the Atari 8-bit.

 

Rebellion want to take credit for AVP concepts Purple Hampton and his team came up with. 

 

 

Mike Beaton and others from Rebellion refuse to talk about their Jaguar development. 

 

Jane Whittaker has spent years lying to press and public alike. 

 

I doubt we will ever know the true story behind the internal relationships or that of Rebellion and Atari.. It's an utter mess. 

 

 

The same applies to Handmade Software and Kasumi Ninja. 

 

Jim Gregory puts the entire blame on Atari and the Tramiel family, yet conviently leaves out the fact the company was riddled by debts from his previous company, Mr Micro.. that HMS had staff conflicts, lot of friction between staff and Gregory and Rob Nicholson it seems. 

 

Staff wages and bonuses went unpaid. 

 

Gregory deliberately played the press, had staff knock up fake screens and demos, to generate press interest. 

 

HMS sources also blame Atari for over hyping Jaguar sound engine tools.. 

 

Lot of festering wounds relating to both companies, which has made documenting what really happened with the titles in question very difficult, despite multiple sources being interviewed. 

 

 

Everyone wants blame to fall on others. 

 

With Supercross.. We still don't have a definite answer as to who demanded the game be texture-mapped. 

 

 

One camp puts the blame firmly on Leonard Tramiel, the other swears blind it was in fact Tiertex bosses..