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It blows my mind that the Jaguar was basically only around for 2 years


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On 9/30/2021 at 1:16 PM, Atlantis said:

And N64 had the Nintendo factor while Jag had the…… 2600 factor.

N64 iirc ended in 2003 so 7 years, and only really did great in the US, though that's better than the Jaguar only doing well in, uh.

 

The Office complex of Atari's HQ?

 

However, the Jaguar actually interested people enough post death to have a solid home brew scene, so you could argue Atari won in the end. Beating all the other competitors post shelf life.

Edited by Leeroy ST
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4 hours ago, Leeroy ST said:

N64 iirc ended in 2003 so 7 years, and only really did great in the US, though that's better than the Jaguar only doing well in, uh.

 

The Office complex of Atari's HQ?

 

However, the Jaguar actually interested people enough post death to have a solid home brew scene, so you could argue Atari won in the end. Beating all the other competitors post shelf life.

Was not releasing the 64DD at launch the biggest mistake Nintendo made with the N64?

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6 hours ago, PFG 9000 said:

This is the Jaguar subforum, at AtariAge.  Why don't you guys hate the N64 more?  It thought this was supposed to be a safe space for Jag fanboys like me.

 

Don't worry @PFG 9000, I've got you.

 

3 hours ago, JagChris said:

I don't know if that's true anymore. Might have been true 3 years ago but the 32X and Saturn homebrew scenes are starting to heat up quite a bit. 

 

What brought me here was the Jaguar HW architecture. Yeah, I also bought into the ads when I was a teenager, but couldn't really afford one and wanted to do some wish fulfillment, but that only got me to watch a few nostalgic youtube videos. It was the architecture described in those videos that got me to shell out for my first hardware at eBay prices a quarter century after the retail period ended.

 

I don't care if Jaguar could/couldn't beat the PS1/Saturn/GameBoy. I don't care if it had bugs that made it useless or weren't that big of a deal if you were aware of them. I don't care if Atari ran it into the ground with mismanagement or made the most of the money/resources they had and the environment they were working in. The Jaguar IMHO had a visionary HW architecture that was a good 3 years ahead of its time in some ways, decades in others. You look at Tom from the corner of your eye and it's a programmable GPU architecture, when most people were still trying to decide if rasterized triangles were really the way to go. The DSP is frankly ridiculously overpowered for sound processing. It's like a spare GPU just sitting there twiddling DAC registers a few times a second. I hadn't even really understood the power of the OP at that point. The m68k is... well it's still a 68k, but never mind that. They had it right: The CPU doesn't matter when the accelerators are what dictate the perf and visuals your arch is capable of.

 

Now you get down to the bus throughput, bugs, tools, dearth of local memory on Tom+Jerry, run into a circular fail loop of hitting the bugs again trying to work around the other problems, etc., it's really hard to make that architecture shine, but it's there, and since I've no real need to finish code by some deadline for the Jaguar, I knew it would be endless fun just messing around with it. It's not like I'm pushing the limits of the HW toying with bits here and there twice a month, but it's fun anyway. Also, I get to play Tempest 2k on the nights in between and finally found an excuse to learn to solder and lay out PCBs after working with computers+electronics for almost 30 years. Good times.

 

Now you look at the 32x and Saturn... meh. Throw a hodge-podge of off-the-shelf stuff and (for the time) piles of local memory together, AKA throw money at the problem. Write your homebrew for a comparatively massive potential audience. Knock yourself out coding for those. I'll stick to tinkering with the Jag for now. Not that I don't enjoy playing some Daytona on my brother's Saturn. I might even pick one up for myself eventually. The VDPs are still kind of cool, but everyone had an architecture like these out or on the way by then.

 

Now N64: I was just never interested in it. I don't even know what the tech looks like beyond the marketing stuff. I've just never cared to look. It sounded cool when nothing next-gen was out yet and it was a bunch of demos running on an SGI rig under a table cloth, but it didn't show up in time for me and my friends. Others seemed to be raving about Mario 64. I always thought it looked like butt. I thought Cybermorph looked way more awesome in the magazines TBH. I've never played Mario 64 to this day. All this coming from a guy who played the shit out off Mario World on the SNES. By the time Nintendo 64 came out, all my friends were playing Quake, and soon after, really playing it when we got 3dfx Voodoo cards in our PCs and Quakeworld with real networking. Why mess around with this cartoon-looking Mario stuff that looked like it had ~5 polygons per frame when there were gibs, gibs, gibs everywhere? Later I heard about this Golden Eye thing, and looking at it now, respect, that looks pretty fun, but 1997? We were too far gone into the PC world by then to notice. Mouse + Keyboard FTW. Saving every penny for a faster modem and another stick of RAM. I can make my own levels and learn to code my own games using free publicly available tools and docs? Even better. Thanks for the career path Id!

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41 minutes ago, cubanismo said:

 

Don't worry @PFG 9000, I've got you.

 

 

What brought me here was the Jaguar HW architecture. Yeah, I also bought into the ads when I was a teenager, but couldn't really afford one and wanted to do some wish fulfillment, but that only got me to watch a few nostalgic youtube videos. It was the architecture described in those videos that got me to shell out for my first hardware at eBay prices a quarter century after the retail period ended.

 

I don't care if Jaguar could/couldn't beat the PS1/Saturn/GameBoy. I don't care if it had bugs that made it useless or weren't that big of a deal if you were aware of them. I don't care if Atari ran it into the ground with mismanagement or made the most of the money/resources they had and the environment they were working in. The Jaguar IMHO had a visionary HW architecture that was a good 3 years ahead of its time in some ways, decades in others. You look at Tom from the corner of your eye and it's a programmable GPU architecture, when most people were still trying to decide if rasterized triangles were really the way to go. The DSP is frankly ridiculously overpowered for sound processing. It's like a spare GPU just sitting there twiddling DAC registers a few times a second. I hadn't even really understood the power of the OP at that point. The m68k is... well it's still a 68k, but never mind that. They had it right: The CPU doesn't matter when the accelerators are what dictate the perf and visuals your arch is capable of.

Around 2002 when I started browsing the internet regularly and looking up Jag stuff I found quite a few ex Jag developer blurbs about what impressed them about the hardware. 

 

I thought they would rave about the blitter but to my surprise they would rave about the OP and what a beast it was. 

 

Several years later Oliver Nallet expounded upon that a bit. 

 

And the DSP thing yeah a few developers have used it to help the GPU besides doing sounds and music.

Edited by JagChris
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2 hours ago, madman said:

Jeff

Strange off topic jab involving something that wasn't mentioned but ok.

 

5 hours ago, JagChris said:

I don't know if that's true anymore. Might have been true 3 years ago but the 32X and Saturn homebrew scenes are starting to heat up quite a bit. 

Someone recently posted home brew counts, but just going off the dates of release of the recent ones, it still seems Jag is a bit ahead.

 

But eventually yeah. There's no catalyst for Jag these days and you can't get 500k views on youtube attacking it anymore. So the attention will dry up.

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41 minutes ago, agradeneu said:

The Jaguar homebrew community is quite small, Iam not even comparing it to Genesis, Game Boy, NES or the 2600. 

It even trails the Lynx in terms of releases and active developers.

I don't know what he was comparing it to but in my mind i was comparing it to it's more successful contemporaries. 

 

Such as 3DO, 32X, Saturn and PSX.

 

I think now the Jag only beats the 3DO scene. 

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On 10/1/2021 at 1:49 AM, madman said:

If you go by years that games were actively released, I'd imagine the NES is close to a decade. 

ETA: Well that might not be a fair judge of lifespan since 4 "Just Dance" games add 4 years to the Wii's lifespan using that logic.

The SNES was released 1990-1992, so a decade feels a bit far fetched? 

The NES was released 1986 and by 1996, big N already released the N64.

 

 

 

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1 minute ago, JagChris said:

I don't know what he was comparing it to but in my mind i was comparing it to it's more successful contemporaries. 

 

Such as 3DO, 32X, Saturn and PSX.

 

I think now the Jag only beats the 3DO scene. 

What about Dreamcast? I think releases really dried up recently?

 

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3 hours ago, Leeroy ST said:

Strange off topic jab involving something that wasn't mentioned but ok.

 

Someone recently posted home brew counts, but just going off the dates of release of the recent ones, it still seems Jag is a bit ahead.

 

But eventually yeah. There's no catalyst for Jag these days and you can't get 500k views on youtube attacking it anymore. So the attention will dry up.

What?

 

I'm talking about actual activity not YT views.

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12 hours ago, PFG 9000 said:

This is the Jaguar subforum, at AtariAge.  Why don't you guys hate the N64 more?  It thought this was supposed to be a safe space for Jag fanboys like me.

Why does liking the Jag mean hating the N64? I certainly don't hate it, and I'm about as big of a Jag fan as anyone else. 

 

1 hour ago, JagChris said:

I don't know what he was comparing it to but in my mind i was comparing it to it's more successful contemporaries. 

 

Such as 3DO, 32X, Saturn and PSX.

 

I think now the Jag only beats the 3DO scene. 

Pretty much any other mainstream console will most likely beat the Jag when it comes to the homebrew scene, just due to sheer numbers. I don't see it as a "race", though. Jag fans and homebrewers will keep the system alive for as long as there are fans wanting more games and developers making them.

 

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8 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Why does liking the Jag mean hating the N64? I certainly don't hate it, and I'm about as big of a Jag fan as anyone else. 

 

Pretty much any other mainstream console will most likely beat the Jag when it comes to the homebrew scene, just due to sheer numbers. I don't see it as a "race", though. Jag fans and homebrewers will keep the system alive for as long as there are fans wanting more games and developers making them.

 

I agree, its not a competition. But its always interesting what other devs do on other system. Generally, homebrew/indie is mostly about 2D games and on Genesis and Gameboy they reached a quality level comparable or even better than commercial releases during the 90s. I think that is highly inspiring. 

 

 

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Yes, but it's clear that the homebrew community is often stronger than what people would think on less popular consoles like the Jaguar, the Lynx, the Atari 7800, even the Virtual Boy, and systems that have suffered more than others from the Atari crash (ColecoVision, Vectrex, etc.). Imho the reason is not only to right a wrong, but since it's easier (in terms of design/graphics only) to port a classic rather than creating a (good) original game, it seems straightforward to port games on systems that didn't get them at the time (Castlevania for Intellivision, for instance).

 

That being said, the choice of a platform is before all based on the existence of devkits and tools, which explains why there are a lot more homebrew games on the Genesis than on the SNES typically.

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5 hours ago, JagChris said:

What?

 

I'm talking about actual activity not YT views.

Those were two separate paragraphs I don't know why you combined them.

 

I said in the first paragraph literally I used a homebrew game list and the Jag is barely still ahead(of the two consoles you mentioned). The second was explaining why what you said will eventually (soon) be correct.

 

There's no longer anything to bring attention to the Jaguar anymore.

 

As much as people for years were upset at multiple social media and video sites spreading misinfo, it did prolong attention to the console, and created interest in finding the non-existant secret sauce on the side as well.

 

Thus resulting in some really nice 3D tech demos for the Jag, but sadly I don't think we will actually see a full original 3D game using any of those techniques. 

 

There were projects but no one's heard from those or they were canned and after 20 years how many people are left who want to make a full time consuming 3D game on the Jaguar?

 

The reason why that's important is if someone did put out an original 3D game showing the Jag had a bit more juice than previously though, it could cause another wave of interest for the console, but I just don't see that happening, so in another 1-2 years I expect the Jaguar scene to nearly be dead outside current projects.

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8 minutes ago, Leeroy ST said:

Those were two separate paragraphs I don't know why you combined them.

 

I said in the first paragraph literally I used a homebrew game list and the Jag is barely still ahead(of the two consoles you mentioned). The second was explaining why what you said will eventually (soon) be correct.

 

There's no longer anything to bring attention to the Jaguar anymore.

 

As much as people for years were upset at multiple social media and video sites spreading misinfo, it did prolong attention to the console, and created interest in finding the non-existant secret sauce on the side as well.

 

Thus resulting in some really nice 3D tech demos for the Jag, but sadly I don't think we will actually see a full original 3D game using any of those techniques. 

 

There were projects but no one's heard from those or they were canned and after 20 years how many people are left who want to make a full time consuming 3D game on the Jaguar?

 

The reason why that's important is if someone did put out an original 3D game showing the Jag had a bit more juice than previously though, it could cause another wave of interest for the console, but I just don't see that happening, so in another 1-2 years I expect the Jaguar scene to nearly be dead outside current projects.

It will be our pleasure to prove you wrong. ;-)

 

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9 hours ago, agradeneu said:

Genesis, Game Boy and Lynx too. For homebrew/indie, they are all "old consoles".;-)  BTW what homebrew releases are popular on 32x and Saturn? Iam not up to date atm.

There doesn't seem to be a cohesive all in one video for the 32X. Just search for 32X homebrew. 

 

Here is one from near the beginning of the year for the Saturn.

 

 

 

 

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14 hours ago, JagChris said:

There doesn't seem to be a cohesive all in one video for the 32X. Just search for 32X homebrew. 

 

Here is one from near the beginning of the year for the Saturn.

 

 

 

 

The 3D shooter looks rad! However, I am a bit surprised that there are no beautiful 2D games, given the strong capabilities of the Saturn.

 

For the port of FF1, I wonder where these guys have to sources from and if they don't fear to be sued by Square Enix? IMO it's too risky to make bootleg versions/hacks of huge franchise games like FF. 

 

Maybe you can do a game from scratch inspired by it, like Wyvern Tales for the Lynx. 

 

 

 

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1 hour ago, JagChris said:

I think these guys are doing it for free for fun.

 

Unlike StormWorks Interactive who intend to get paid for their Heretic work etc.

Is that project still going on?  It's been years since I heard anybody mention it.  When was the last time they gave any sort of update? 

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