Was not releasing with CD at launch the biggest mistake Atari made with the Jaguar?

[phoboz]

9 hours ago, Lostdragon said:

If the Jaguar had dumped the 68k

Then I guess the Jaguar would have had only about 10-20 games, becuase a lot of games are ports of Amiga games (which used the 68k).

Sony had the MIPS which has a well established set of development tools, and the 68k also has good tools. Development for the RISC processors of the Jaguar on the other hand means development in pure assembly using the propreitary MADMAC, with strange hardware bugs to care about.

In my opinion, the 68k was really what saved the Jaguar, way more important than a built in CD-ROM drive.

 

The RISC processors of the Jaguar for graphics, and sound are fine, but it would be way to time consuming to write all game logic in assembler (for a serious game) Neither does game logic normally consume so much processing power it would be worth the effort.

 

However, I really whish the would have put in the more powerfull 68030 CPU instead. That would have made some differeance.

Edited July 24, 2021 by phoboz

[zzip]

On 7/22/2021 at 4:17 PM, Zerosquare said:

- Atari's lack of money

This is ultimately the issue,  everything else flows from this (poor advertising, poor quality control, etc)

 

I would also say that half-assing their game strategy post-84 allowed Nintendo and Sega to surpass them and put them in a hole they really had no hope of getting out of.

[Leeroy ST]

On 7/22/2021 at 4:17 PM, Zerosquare said:

The fate of the Jaguar (and the 3DO) was basically sealed as soon as the PS1 was released. Including the CD right from the start would have delayed the launch and made the console more expensive, thus reducing even further the window during which Atari wasn't competing with Sony.

 

Including the CD hardware right from the start also wouldn't have fixed:

- Atari's lack of money

- Atari's lack of understanding on why and how they should partner with developers

- Atari's lack of understanding of advertising

- Atari's lack of quality control (some first-party games were so bad they damaged the public's perception of the console)

- the pitiful documentation and software support for the CD hardware (it's so bad that even existing developers didn't want to touch it)

- the CD hardware's limitations (no extra RAM to compensate for the lack of cartridge ROM, so some games couldn't have been released on CDs)

- the CD hardware's lack of reliability

 

I strongly believe that it would have made the Jaguar fail commercially even harder.

The problem is most of your point are irrelevant for the Jaguar and instead would be larger obstacles in a successor. The mindset of some poster in this thread is omitting the fact the Jaguars only job was keeping the Jaguar a float in the early days of 32 gaming, a profitable 3+5 million selling Jaguar would have been enough to do that.

 

On 7/24/2021 at 9:42 AM, Lostdragon said:

You've only got to look at statements made by the likes of Rob Nicholoson of Handmade Software (Jaguar chipset needed at least another 2 revisions to iron out the bugs) and John Carmack :

 

If the Jaguar had dumped the 68k and offered a dynamic cache on the risc processors and had a tiny bit of buffering on the blitter, it could have put up a reasonable fight against Sony

 

Then you had the issue of  production issues with low chip yields of the Tom and Jerry Chipsets, meant the IBM Assembly plant couldn't produce the console in the numbers Atari wanted for launch.. 

 

 

Factor in the belief expressed by Mev Dinc of Vivid Image when Atari approached him with regards developing for the Panther:

 

 

 

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

 

 

And you get a basic idea of why third party support was always going to be a proverbial mountain for Atari to climb, even if the hardware had been a developers dream. 

 

We would of seen the Jaguar receive the same type of support the AMIGA CD32 received with it's existing 16-bit titles converted, but now with a CD intro, maybe an extra level or 2 thrown in. 

 

 

The likes of B. J West openly admitted Atari itself had no idea what CD games were supposed to equate into, the hardware flaws crippled the ambition and Atari itself killed the potential. 

 

 

 

'Before there was Black Ice, there was an open SKU for the next game we were going to make, but Atari had absolutely no idea what kind of game we should make.  The entire internal development team spent months pitching game proposals - everything from more cutesy animal-based platform shooters to Transfomer/Animporph style robot-cats-that-turn-into-other-stuff type games.

I campaigned hard to do a cyberpunk RPG, but the brass frankly knew almost nothing about gaming, and had no idea what I was talking about.  I gathered a few of my friends and put together a design doc and some presentation drawings, and pitched a game called The Chaos Agenda.  They totally didn't get it, but did some focus-testing anyway.  The results were so positive that they gave the project the green light.  The trademark department said there was some other game with a title too close to Chaos Agenda, so we renamed it Black Ice White Noise.

The very fact that I, who had never ever produced or designed a computer game or lead a team to create one, was able to muscle my way in and seize total control of a major SKU should have been the first warning sign that things weren't right at Atari.  All I had going for me was a passion for games, years of table-top gaming experience, a love of science fiction, and a loud voice.

That said, if we *had* been able to create the game we had designed, it would have been truly revolutionary.  It would have been the first open-world, non-linear adventure game, and Ken Rose's engine was (I believe) the first time anyone was able to run a large-scale continuous 3-D world streaming off of a disc with no loading waits.  That said, the Jag hardware wasn't really up to what we wanted to do.  Whatever power the chipset had was totally hamstrung by the lack of RAM, so our texture maps were tiny and chunky, and the lack of any way to save a game meant you'd have to play the whole thing all the way through in one go.  They kept promising some kind of cart you could save games to, but it never surfaced.

But the real obstacle we were up against was the company itself.  We spent the better part of two years and a quarter of a million dollars making Black Ice, but in the end, the development environment at Atari just wasn't up to the task.  They continually fought us on hiring artists and programmers, and buying contemporary computers - always trying to get us to scale back the game to something they could understand.  At times we were in talks with Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) to do the music, and were in talks with a movie production company about a film deal.  Atari tried to play hardball with both, and in the end, killed both deals, and in the long run, the entire game, and then the company as a whole'

 

 

We really should be amazed we got the titles with did, considering the state of Atari, the Jaguar hardware, the development environment and the working relationships between Atari and it's internal and external teams. 

 

A lot of people on Atari forums argue carmacks point, blaming the 68K for blocking access to the "secret sauce" but I'm not sure I can buy that 30 years later in 2021.

 

Also interesting tidbit about the open world streaming from the disc. That's a similar concept to what Immercenary did on the 3DO.

 

But I agree with your bottom point, I always though Jaguar owners were lucky we got Iron Soldier 1 and 2 and devs figured games like that out. We could have just been left with checkered flag and club drive with its box cat.

 

(Also I see your avatar went from an L to a T.)

[Leeroy ST]

2 hours ago, zzip said:

This is ultimately the issue,  everything else flows from this (poor advertising, poor quality control, etc)

 

I would also say that half-assing their game strategy post-84 allowed Nintendo and Sega to surpass them and put them in a hole they really had no hope of getting out of.

At this point your confusing two different Atari's, Atari Corp never had money from the start. There best third party support were on the ST family and the XE left overs because the support was already there if their computers had the power requirements.

 

On 7/24/2021 at 7:32 PM, phoboz said:

Then I guess the Jaguar would have had only about 10-20 games, becuase a lot of games are ports of Amiga games (which used the 68k).

.

This is a curious trade off to discuss.

 

Because when you think about it, how many of those Amiga ports, or cancelled carry overs (Like Bubsy) were actually good? Some were bad, some were very lazy. You'd have less games but the libraries reception arguably would ride higher as a result.

 

Arguably.

Edited July 26, 2021 by Leeroy ST

[zzip]

12 minutes ago, Leeroy ST said:

At this point your confusing two different Atari's, Atari Corp never had money from the start. There best third party support were on the ST family and the XE left overs because the support was already there if their computers had the power requirements.

They had money, but they didn't have money to do everything.  Most resources went to the ST.   Yes the ST had a good game selection eventually,  but that wasn't really in competition with Nintendo (too expensive for that).   They also never turned the ST into a console for the 16-bit era and capitalized on its game library.    So their console story jumped from XEGS/7800 to Jaguar,  effectively skipping the 16-bit generation.   That means a lot of the kids who might have been Atari fans were now minted into Nintendo/Sega/TG16 fans and Atari's next console would have a lot more to prove to win an audience.

 

 

[Leeroy ST]

1 minute ago, zzip said:

They had money, but they didn't have money to do everything.  

 

Warner had to give them money to keep the lights on, they were on an extremely tight budget, it's why so much praise was given to the "turn around".

 

2 minutes ago, zzip said:

   They also never turned the ST into a console for the 16-bit era and capitalized on its game library.    So their console story jumped from XEGS/7800 to Jaguar,  effectively skipping the 16-bit generation.   That means a lot of the kids who might have been Atari fans were now minted into Nintendo/Sega/TG16 fans and Atari's next console would have a lot more to prove to win an audience.

 

 

Well the Atari fans were not really on Nintendo or Sega consoles (lol NEC)

 

But I believe the thing Atari should have done was make Falcon a console(with slight upgrade) as the Falcon we got was weaker than the jaguar and by doing so they wouldn't have pissed off software partners and burn bridges to start clean. Especially as you said, between ST console talk and panther there was a 5 year gap before the Jaguar was tested, 6 years before it actually came out.

 

You would think they at least would have had Jaguar ready when 3DO came out.

[+Sauron]

41 minutes ago, Leeroy ST said:

The problem is most of your point are irrelevant for the Jaguar and instead would be larger obstacles in a successor. The mindset of some poster in this thread is omitting the fact the Jaguars only job was keeping the Jaguar a float in the early days of 32 gaming, a profitable 3+5 million selling Jaguar would have been enough to do that.

No, they're not at all irrelevant, as they're the very things that contributed to the Jag's failure. Yes, the Jag didn't need to sell numbers akin to what Sega or Nintendo needed, but they sure needed a lot more than what they were able to accomplish.

 

[Leeroy ST]

6 minutes ago, Sauron said:

No, they're not at all irrelevant, as they're the very things that contributed to the Jag's failure. Yes, the Jag didn't need to sell numbers akin to what Sega or Nintendo needed, but they sure needed a lot more than what they were able to accomplish.

 

Honestly doing math they may have been able to hold with just 1 million sold, a CD drive and more Tap support, would likely get it close to that alone.

 

Sure it still wouldn't he a great console, wouldn't have that many games, and would still have many problems, but at least it would have had a better image than what it has now and Atari may have made a successor or go third party instead of what ended up happening.

 

There's also the dismissed possibility of Atari knocking 3DO early and getting a chunk of that support that should be considered.

 

But I'm not saying Atari would "win"  or sell "great" with a CD Drive alone, of course not. 

Edited July 26, 2021 by Leeroy ST

[+Stephen]

On 7/24/2021 at 10:02 AM, Lostdragon said:

ATD explained at the time they had wanted to include some limited textures with Cybermorph, but found they had hit the limitations with the DSP, it had no free cycles.

 

It's detailed in the interview they did with Edge magazine at the time.

 

There's also this..

ATD talking about Atari insisting on Texture Mapping:

 

It was Leonard that wanted us to texture map everything in BattleMorph, and it was Leonard that insisted everything was textured in Hover Strike with disastrous results. Something that had been quite playable at 15-20fps, was crippled down to an unplayable 5fps as a result (it was only later that the Iron Soldier guys discovered a ‘hack’ which allowed the texture palette to be a texture source, doubling the speed of texture mapping for small textures).

http://www.retrovideogamer.co.uk/rvg-interviews-fred-gill/

 

Atari's biggest problem was Atari... 

Exact same thing was done to Francois Yves Bertrand when coding Fight for Life, and again when Missile Command 3D was being coded.  I believe it was the latter, where the coder said he informed Atari that texturing made the code 22X slower than had they remained with flat shading.  Atari said "TEXTURE IT".

[zzip]

15 minutes ago, Leeroy ST said:

But I believe the thing Atari should have done was make Falcon a console(with slight upgrade) as the Falcon we got was weaker than the jaguar and by doing so they wouldn't have pissed off software partners and burn bridges to start clean. Especially as you said, between ST console talk and panther there was a 5 year gap before the Jaguar was tested, 6 years before it actually came out.

Falcon-console would be cool, but I think the Falcon tech came too late.   I think an STe with more on-screen colors could have competed with Genesis/Megadrive.  It would at least need a blitter or screen updates would be sluggish.

[Leeroy ST]

2 minutes ago, zzip said:

Falcon-console would be cool, but I think the Falcon tech came too late.   I think an STe with more on-screen colors could have competed with Genesis/Megadrive.  It would at least need a blitter or screen updates would be sluggish.

I meant the Falcon in place of the Jaguar. Not the Panther. It would have also allowed Atari to release in 93 and kneecap 3DO.

[Leeroy ST]

10 minutes ago, Stephen said:

Exact same thing was done to Francois Yves Bertrand when coding Fight for Life, and again when Missile Command 3D was being coded.  I believe it was the latter, where the coder said he informed Atari that texturing made the code 22X slower than had they remained with flat shading.  Atari said "TEXTURE IT".

What's hilarious about all this is untextured colorful and shaded polygons games would have been the best visually pleasing 3D games of the period. In fact even now they have aged the best. Better than the others.

 

On the other hand the Jaguars textured games are some of the worst looking.

[zzip]

4 minutes ago, Leeroy ST said:

I meant the Falcon in place of the Jaguar. Not the Panther. It would have also allowed Atari to release in 93 and kneecap 3DO.

I'm confused, isn't the Falcon weaker overall than the Jag?  (And more expensive)

[Leeroy ST]

5 minutes ago, zzip said:

I'm confused, isn't the Falcon weaker overall than the Jag?  (And more expensive)

I said this:

 

Quote

But I believe the thing Atari should have done was make Falcon a console(with slight upgrade) as the Falcon we got was weaker than the jaguar and by doing so they wouldn't have pissed off software partners and burn bridges to start clean. 

If you take the hardware of the Falcon focusing on gaming it ends up cheaper than the Jaguar even if you improve it choosey to the next tier. More importantly the internals would have more synergy.

 

The next step up would put on on par with 3DO except it would have a slight disadvantage in texturing, but the trade off is it would be faster than the 3DOs slow processor.

 

With the had no synergy in the internals leading to multiple bottlenecks all with arguably pointless custom chips adding to cost. 

 

Starting new with the Jaguar never made sense to be compared to a consolized gaming focused falcon with the next generation chipset imo. 

 

 

Edited July 26, 2021 by Leeroy ST

[+Sauron]

17 minutes ago, Leeroy ST said:

I said this:

 

If you take the hardware of the Falcon focusing on gaming it ends up cheaper than the Jaguar even if you improve it choosey to the next tier. More importantly the internals would have more synergy.

 

The next step up would put on on par with 3DO except it would have a slight disadvantage in texturing, but the trade off is it would be faster than the 3DOs slow processor.

 

With the had no synergy in the internals leading to multiple bottlenecks all with arguably pointless custom chips adding to cost. 

 

Starting new with the Jaguar never made sense to be compared to a consolized gaming focused falcon with the next generation chipset imo. 

 

 

You're getting way ahead of yourself here. A 16Mhz 030 would not compete that well with the ARM processor used in the 3DO, and probably cost a lot more to boot. I'm willing to bet the Jag's designers went the route they did precisely because they thought the Jag's custom RISCs would offer more bang for the buck than any off-the-shelf parts. 

 

 

[Zerosquare]

1 hour ago, Leeroy ST said:

they may have been able to hold with just 1 million sold

If you think Atari could have sold anywhere near that number, with a console that would have been harder to develop for, more expensive and released later than the Jaguar, I have a great bridge to sell you.

 

1 hour ago, Leeroy ST said:

If you take the hardware of the Falcon focusing on gaming it ends up cheaper than the Jaguar even if you improve it choosey to the next tier. More importantly the internals would have more synergy.

 

The next step up would put on on par with 3DO except it would have a slight disadvantage in texturing, but the trade off is it would be faster than the 3DOs slow processor.

With the had no synergy in the internals leading to multiple bottlenecks all with arguably pointless custom chips adding to cost. 

You don't have any idea of what you're talking about. Besides its high price and lack of suitability for a games console, the Falcon hardware is the one that's full of bottlenecks caused by bad compromises.

Edited July 26, 2021 by Zerosquare

[phoboz]

3 hours ago, Leeroy ST said:

This is a curious trade off to discuss.

 

Because when you think about it, how many of those Amiga ports, or cancelled carry overs (Like Bubsy) were actually good? Some were bad, some were very lazy. You'd have less games but the libraries reception arguably would ride higher as a result.

 

Arguably.

Don't forget the ST ports that made it to the Jaguar in recent years. Apparently there was also a deal with SEGA to port Phantasy Star II from Genesis, which also used the 68k.

 

I am sure they could have switched to higher color visuals for the Jaguar ports of Amiga games, but that is not the fault of the 68k, it was the lack of motivation by the artists. For example, the Another World port uses higher color backgrounds than the Amiga/ST versions without any problems. No need to change much of the code to take better advantage of the higher color graphics of the Jaguar.

 

Processing power is only an issue for 3D games, for 2D games the differance is made by the artists. I am sure a game like Rayman does not need processing power beyond what the 68k can offer.

[Clint Thompson]

5 minutes ago, phoboz said:

Processing power is only an issue for 3D games, for 2D games the differance is made by the artists. I am sure a game like Rayman does not need processing power beyond what the 68k can offer.

Maybe not processing power but bandwidth on the other hand... that's where the 68K+GPU+DSP worlds seem to collide. It would be interesting to see the test results they must have ran during the time of creating the Jaguars with 68020 and 68030. Had they realized it to be a very minimal gain in performance overall, they should have noticed it as a serious design issue elsewhere. Maybe Atari just said no too early on for them to really give it any in-depth analysis though.
 

2 hours ago, Leeroy ST said:

What's hilarious about all this is untextured colorful and shaded polygons games would have been the best visually pleasing 3D games of the period. In fact even now they have aged the best. Better than the others.

 

On the other hand the Jaguars textured games are some of the worst looking.

Didn't appear to do Cybermorph any favors and I'm not necessarily a hater just looking back on the game now (as I loaded it up a week or so ago for the first time in forever) it seemingly runs painfully slow for what it is but is definitely visually pleasing against just being textured to death. I didn't mind it as a pack-in because it was just that but it definitely didn't have any addictive allure going for it. I remember playing it for like an hour or two and immediately felt that I needed to get some more games.

[phoboz]

1 hour ago, Clint Thompson said:

Maybe not processing power but bandwidth on the other hand... that's where the 68K+GPU+DSP worlds seem to collide.

Yes the bandwith issue is something to take care about. For Asteroite (a game we have been working on for some time now), it took a few tries to get everything tuned correctly for high color sprites (65536 color), a 256 color tile map, a 256 color background, sound samples, and MOD music. E.g. I had to find the correct sample rate for the sound, as I was told that the DSP has the lowest prio on the bus.

 

The next project (which hasn't been revealed yet), we are using several layers of high color (65536 color) backgrounds, 16 colors for each game character, but each game character can have an unique palette (up to 16 different palettes on the screen at the same time), and there will also be some visual effects using high color animations. I will see if we can use the same settings for the DSP in this game.

 

The bottom line is that I have seen that some quite impressive results can be achevied, still using the 68k for game logic, if some time is spent on tuning everyting to avoid overload on the bus.

 

I have also seen that the blitter is quite hungry on the bus, and it also keeps blocking for every task, so currently I am avoiding this one. So you might as well advise to skip the blitter, but this won't work for a 3D game of course. So in the end Atari could have skipped the blitter, but now we can select ourselves which devices we want to use, and which not to use, depending on the type of game.

Edited July 26, 2021 by phoboz

[Leeroy ST]

1 hour ago, Clint Thompson said:

Maybe not processing power but bandwidth on the other hand... that's where the 68K+GPU+DSP worlds seem to collide. It would be interesting to see the test results they must have ran during the time of creating the Jaguars with 68020 and 68030. Had they realized it to be a very minimal gain in performance overall, they should have noticed it as a serious design issue elsewhere. Maybe Atari just said no too early on for them to really give it any in-depth analysis though.
 

Didn't appear to do Cybermorph any favors and I'm not necessarily a hater just looking back on the game now (as I loaded it up a week or so ago for the first time in forever) it seemingly runs painfully slow for what it is but is definitely visually pleasing against just being textured to death. I didn't mind it as a pack-in because it was just that but it definitely didn't have any addictive allure going for it. I remember playing it for like an hour or two and immediately felt that I needed to get some more games.

Well you basically echoed what I said about the untextured polygons aging better lol. Yeah Cybermorpth is visually ok, the game itself is another conversation.

[Agent X]

On 7/24/2021 at 10:02 AM, Lostdragon said:

ATD talking about Atari insisting on Texture Mapping:

 

It was Leonard that wanted us to texture map everything in BattleMorph, and it was Leonard that insisted everything was textured in Hover Strike with disastrous results. Something that had been quite playable at 15-20fps, was crippled down to an unplayable 5fps as a result (it was only later that the Iron Soldier guys discovered a ‘hack’ which allowed the texture palette to be a texture source, doubling the speed of texture mapping for small textures).

http://www.retrovideogamer.co.uk/rvg-interviews-fred-gill/

 

 

 

Atari's biggest problem was Atari... 

 

That's a very revealing interview.

 

I still feel that Battlemorph and Iron Soldier 2 were among the finest Jaguar CD games, where the game design and artistic elements all gelled together just right. Both development teams did incredible work.

 

4 hours ago, Leeroy ST said:

What's hilarious about all this is untextured colorful and shaded polygons games would have been the best visually pleasing 3D games of the period. In fact even now they have aged the best. Better than the others.

 

On the other hand the Jaguars textured games are some of the worst looking.

 

It all has to do with game performance, particularly with regard to frame rate. Many of Jaguar's 2D games were ridiculed for not offering a big enough leap over similar games on 16-bit systems, but a lot of those games have held up very well over the years.

 

As we could see in certain cases (e.g. the aforementioned Battlemorph and Iron Soldier 2), the Jaguar could handle some level of 3D games when its strengths and weaknesses are taken into careful consideration. Atari management apparently insisted on forcing developers to stretch the Jaguar outside of its comfort zone, just to have pretty looking screen shots on the box.

 

It's a shame, because (in retrospect) we can see that many of these developers were competent and knew what they wanted to accomplish, but the meddling of Atari management negatively impacted the quality of some of these games in the end.

 

[Leeroy ST]

2 minutes ago, Agent X said:

 

That's a very revealing interview.

 

I still feel that Battlemorph and Iron Soldier 2 were among the finest Jaguar CD games, where the game design and artistic elements all gelled together just right. Both development teams did incredible work.

 

 

It all has to do with game performance, particularly with regard to frame rate. Many of Jaguar's 2D games were ridiculed for not offering a big enough leap over similar games on 16-bit systems, but a lot of those games have held up very well over the years.

 

As we could see in certain cases (e.g. the aforementioned Battlemorph and Iron Soldier 2), the Jaguar could handle some level of 3D games when its strengths and weaknesses are taken into careful consideration. Atari management apparently insisted on forcing developers to stretch the Jaguar outside of its comfort zone, just to have pretty looking screen shots on the box.

 

It's a shame, because (in retrospect) we can see that many of these developers were competent and knew what they wanted to accomplish, but the meddling of Atari management negatively impacted the quality of some of these games in the end.

 

This is why World Tour Racing was slow, they wanted texturing and effects in places. While the game runs surprisedly well as is, it may have his a solid 20-30 without them.

 

Does the Jaguar have a solid 30fps polygonal game? 

[Clint Thompson]

20 minutes ago, Leeroy ST said:

Well you basically echoed what I said about the untextured polygons aging better lol. Yeah Cybermorpth is visually ok, the game itself is another conversation.

Yeah, I guess my point was it still ran like ass lol textured or not.

[+Stephen]

2 hours ago, Clint Thompson said:

5 hours ago, Leeroy ST said:

What's hilarious about all this is untextured colorful and shaded polygons games would have been the best visually pleasing 3D games of the period. In fact even now they have aged the best. Better than the others.

 

On the other hand the Jaguars textured games are some of the worst looking.

Didn't appear to do Cybermorph any favors and I'm not necessarily a hater just looking back on the game now (as I loaded it up a week or so ago for the first time in forever) it seemingly runs painfully slow for what it is but is definitely visually pleasing against just being textured to death. I didn't mind it as a pack-in because it was just that but it definitely didn't have any addictive allure going for it. I remember playing it for like an hour or two and immediately felt that I needed to get some more games.

Check out Tobal #1 on the Playstation, and compare it to Tekken 1.  Tekken 1 looks like total ass comparatively.  rather than block warped textures in 320*240, we got flat shading at 60fps in 640*480.  It was seriously jaw dropping when I first played the game.  I've not seen anything that showed why texture mapping was completely unnecessary in many instances.

[Keatah]

To us CD or no CD didn't matter much.

 

Can't speak with much authority on the internal marketing forces and decisions affecting Atari at that time. I can tell you, though, as consumers my buddies and I were not passionately interested in the console. For a good number of reasons:

 

1- It came at a time when we were all wrapping up coming of age. Cars, girls, jobs, causing trouble, that sort of thing. It took priority over the latest and greatest console. And we were the early consumers for the likes of the VCS, Intellivision, Colecovision, Genesis, NES. We gave those consoles and carts tons of sales. We made that market. We made the arcades. We were seasoned. And we expected more.

 

2- We were kinda burned out on videogames in general. The market was filling up with Sega and Nintendo. There's only so much an immediate post-teen can afford. Or even be interested in.

 

3- Affordability was a factor. The Jaguar and all its perceived sophistication created $ $ $ in the heads of would-be purchasers. Our heads. No way we could afford it.

 

4- New consoles had to be spectacular to catch our interest. I clearly recall when the original PlayStation came out. A game console from Sony? The people that made high quality A/V equipment? My first tape recorder was a Sony. And it exuded professional craftsmanship throughout. Same thing with the D5 portable CD player. This console oughta be interesting. We knew there would be tons of software for the PS because it was coming from Japan. And so did the vast libraries of Genesis and NES. All in the latter half of the 80's.

5- Atari was busy languishing with the 7800 and XEGS. Rehashing. Nothing was inspiring.

 

6- We were becoming interested in PC's. Machines that were seemingly infinitely expandable and simple to understand. It was all about MHz then and for the next decade. A simple metric. And real 3D acceleration was getting under way. So our attention was there. Between PlayStation and PC.

 

7- There were no compelling games we wanted. Nothing that wasn't available on other platforms we already had.

 

8- We were confused by 64-bit power. What did it all mean? Any dive into tech specs was confusing. The Jag's internal workings didn't make sense to us. With the PlayStation we only had to know about 1 or 2 chips. The PC, essentially 1, the CPU. And later the graphics card.

 

Like it or not it's how myself and other consumers in my area saw it.

 

5 hours ago, Leeroy ST said:

With the had no synergy in the internals leading to multiple bottlenecks all with arguably pointless custom chips adding to cost.

Absolutely 100% correct.

 

We were just developing an awareness of what a liability, a trojan horse, custom chips were becoming. And the Jag was no exception. The many system blocks seemed to have too many rules of what could and couldn't be done. 

 

The system felt like it was patched together. And each patch added performance, only to be limited by the exceptions caused by how that chip/patch was inserted in to the overall system. You can now do this, but not this this and this. Lots of internal friction.

 

The seemingly scattershot arrangement of RAM, memory on the custom chips, the varying bus widths, multiple processors running at different speeds.. none of that was creating a clean architecture.

 

And we felt that in the games we played in the kiosks.

 

Creative Labs (the world renowned maker of soundcards) had fallen in to the same trap. Some 30-40% of their cards had chips on them that no one made use of. Eventually they were removed from future designs. And in the end anything "soundcard" was absorbed by the CPU.