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Its 1993, you're in charge of the Jag, what do you do?


A_Gorilla

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Am I missing somethin or are you guys mistakenly posting in the wrong thread? What JOb would you have abandoned for a former?

I think they were answering the first post, imagining they were in charge of the Jag in 1993 and had to figure out how to save it.

 

Personally, if I worked in Atari in 1993 with the benefit of hindsight, I know exactly what I'd do...

 

Start collecting every design file, document, and line of source code, so that nothing of value is lost when Atari goes belly-up. ;)

 

- KS

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Am I missing somethin or are you guys mistakenly posting in the wrong thread? What JOb would you have abandoned for a former?

I think they were answering the first post, imagining they were in charge of the Jag in 1993 and had to figure out how to save it.

 

Personally, if I worked in Atari in 1993 with the benefit of hindsight, I know exactly what I'd do...

 

Start collecting every design file, document, and line of source code, so that nothing of value is lost when Atari goes belly-up. ;)

 

- KS

Well if that does not show how little regard the Tramiels had for Atari, I dont know what will convince

those that think they actually did. It was little more than a cash cow to them and nothing else.

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Well if that does not show how little regard the Tramiels had for Atari, I dont know what will convince

those that think they actually did. It was little more than a cash cow to them and nothing else.

 

No kidding. You know what would be "fun"... setting the Tramiels up, 'live victim impact panel' like with a bunch of Atari fans and force them to sit and listen to us lambast the nonsensical knobs to no end. They truly need to repent for all their sins. lol

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It seems like Atari Corp under Jack was managed pretty well (taking the massive debt from Warner and turning around to make Atari Corp profitable). It seems more like things started falling apart after Sam took over in the late 80s.

 

The same motive was behind Jack too...they dumped the ST like a used condom once they felt Jag would rule the world.

sorry anyone who fires the guy responsible for the 7800 is not any better. That machine could have saved Atari's game

name if they did not sit on it while Nintendo took over the world.

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The same motive was behind Jack too...they dumped the ST like a used condom once they felt Jag would rule the world.

 

Jack was gone. That was Sam that both introduced and cut the Falcon, as well as cutting the ST line.

 

sorry anyone who fires the guy responsible for the 7800 is not any better. That machine could have saved Atari's game

name if they did not sit on it while Nintendo took over the world.

 

WTF are you smoking? ;) The 7800 was by GCC, there was nobody at Atari to fire in regards to that. It was simply on hold while Warner and Atari Corp. figured out who owed GCC for development and ownership rights. It was finally decided that Spring of '85 Atari Corp. would, they paid GCC and got full ownership. Development started up that late summer/early Fall under pressure from Warner and it was re-announced that January of '86 at the Winter CES. There was no "sitting on it", and actually the 7800 got horrible reviews at the Summer '84 CES.

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The same motive was behind Jack too...they dumped the ST like a used condom once they felt Jag would rule the world.

 

IIRC, sales of the ST collapsed before the Jaguar arrived. They had to bet on the Jaguar.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/1992/08/29/business/company-news-atari-posts-39.75-million-loss-in-quarter.html

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The same motive was behind Jack too...they dumped the ST like a used condom once they felt Jag would rule the world.

 

IIRC, sales of the ST collapsed before the Jaguar arrived. They had to bet on the Jaguar.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/1992/08/29/business/company-news-atari-posts-39.75-million-loss-in-quarter.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

St/e's etc and limited falcon were still selling (in Europe/UK anyway)up to just before Atari pulled the plug on hardware manufacturing... Atari had even tried re-launching the plain, vanilla flavoured STFM again in the early 90's as not many companies were doing STe specific games/programs,

 

After about 1994 there was really no going back for Atari, since they'd stopped manufacturing and also were well into their manufacturing and distribution agreement with IBM

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The same motive was behind Jack too...they dumped the ST like a used condom once they felt Jag would rule the world.

 

Jack was gone. That was Sam that both introduced and cut the Falcon, as well as cutting the ST line.

 

sorry anyone who fires the guy responsible for the 7800 is not any better. That machine could have saved Atari's game

name if they did not sit on it while Nintendo took over the world.

 

WTF are you smoking? ;) The 7800 was by GCC, there was nobody at Atari to fire in regards to that. It was simply on hold while Warner and Atari Corp. figured out who owed GCC for development and ownership rights. It was finally decided that Spring of '85 Atari Corp. would, they paid GCC and got full ownership. Development started up that late summer/early Fall under pressure from Warner and it was re-announced that January of '86 at the Winter CES. There was no "sitting on it", and actually the 7800 got horrible reviews at the Summer '84 CES.

 

 

Im not smoking anything. Did not Jack, tell someone who brought the 7800 to his attention to 'get that abomination out of my office'

and then fire him a bit later on?

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I think the word your looking for was 'pollution' gorf

 

I also remember hearing a story concerning the casings for the 7800 and that some bloke that someone at atari contacted said, for xxxx usd, i'll tell you where the 7800 casings are...i dunno whether atari bothered contacting the bloke again

Edited by carmel_andrews
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Im not smoking anything. Did not Jack, tell someone who brought the 7800 to his attention to 'get that abomination out of my office'

and then fire him a bit later on?

 

That's a little mixed. Here's a bit more about it, and as stated we found that the 7800 deal was being negotiated back and forth with who owed GCC -

 

http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/152359-the-adam-killed-the-colecovision/page__view__findpost__p__1865838

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Im not smoking anything. Did not Jack, tell someone who brought the 7800 to his attention to 'get that abomination out of my office'

and then fire him a bit later on?

 

That's a little mixed. Here's a bit more about it, and as stated we found that the 7800 deal was being negotiated back and forth with who owed GCC -

 

http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/152359-the-adam-killed-the-colecovision/page__view__findpost__p__1865838

Didn't one story go that Jack ended up throwing a 7800 on the floor durring a board meeting at some point? (also something about wanting to sell the console for $50 and games for $10 in the interview/presentaion on the 7800 with Stevel Golson -and commentary by Curt Vendel)

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Didn't one story go that Jack ended up throwing a 7800 on the floor durring a board meeting at some point? (also something about wanting to sell the console for $50 and games for $10 in the interview/presentaion on the 7800 with Stevel Golson -and commentary by Curt Vendel)

 

That was recorded 5 and a half years ago, before the information we have now. As Curt alluded to in the post I linked to, some people's memories might be a bit jaded. The facts state otherwise regarding why the 7800 was on hold during that time. It was one of several things that was being hashed out between Warner and Atari Corp. Previously, a number of deals were actually set up with Warner and then executed by Atari Inc., which is part of the issue of the dual management I mentioned. During the transition, they kept those deals and a number of other "open accounts", the Amiga deal being another. Likewise, we know for a fact that he started up the 2600 Jr. project in August again, so that contrasts against the other jaded statements regarding his supposed direction and the whole incident.

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Didn't one story go that Jack ended up throwing a 7800 on the floor durring a board meeting at some point? (also something about wanting to sell the console for $50 and games for $10 in the interview/presentaion on the 7800 with Stevel Golson -and commentary by Curt Vendel)

 

That was recorded 5 and a half years ago, before the information we have now. As Curt alluded to in the post I linked to, some people's memories might be a bit jaded. The facts state otherwise regarding why the 7800 was on hold during that time. It was one of several things that was being hashed out between Warner and Atari Corp. Previously, a number of deals were actually set up with Warner and then executed by Atari Inc., which is part of the issue of the dual management I mentioned. During the transition, they kept those deals and a number of other "open accounts", the Amiga deal being another. Likewise, we know for a fact that he started up the 2600 Jr. project in August again, so that contrasts against the other jaded statements regarding his supposed direction and the whole incident.

 

Though maybe none of that rumor is the case, it's not something I'd put past any of the Tramiels. Especially Sam

after his 'yuk, yuk, yuk,' statement regarding networked games...that I know was said to Scott Legrand as he told

me this himself. Talk about head up ass syndrome!

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  • 2 months later...

You are the first person I ever heard state someone complain about the lynx using a 6502. The Lynx was perfect from the start

hardware wise. It was doing polygon based games even before some of the other consoles. It's tool kit and hardware are just

what you want for a system. If only the Jaguar had followed that model.

 

 

No, there were complaints about using the 6502 even before the initial release of the Lynx. There were online complaints as well as in EGM because it was another example of "pseudo 16-bit" just as the PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 was. 16-bit graphics, 8-bit CPU.

 

But yes, the Lynx was friggin' incredible. It is such a crime Nintendo was so successful with their POS Gameboy in comparison.

 

What is also incredible about the Lynx was that it had such a fast 6502 that neither Commodore nor Atari [nor Apple] used in their 8-bit computer lines.

 

Using a 65816 might've been a good idea but I think the Lynx's only true weak point was the sound chip.

 

 

Betting the farm is kind of what I attribute the success of the Genesis for Sega. They put it all on the line with that system. To some extent, they bet it again with the Dreamcast, too bad they burned the crops over the years and salted the ground in key growing areas like EA's front yard. OK, enough with the farm talk.

Had the Tramiels taken a chance on the Jaguar and went with it even with half of that money they made from the sale of land, they might have been able to get things going. There was a short time there that the Saturn and Playstation were pretty much equal, had Atari been able to position themselves in a better light with consumers they may have been able to stave off losing everything and maybe, just maybe been able to last to release another system, or a handheld.

 

 

If that "land" is what I think it is referring to, it is the money Atari made off selling their Taiwan manufacturing plant. It got demolished and a shopping mall was erected on the land.

 

That's not to say the Tramiel family didn't make money off allegedly manipulating Atari Corp. stock. Lots of people thought they were doing that although there's no known proof of it.

 

The feeling I have of what they did is they let us Atari fans finance everything without committing any of their own monies to the enterprise outside of the cash Jack dropped in the early days of Atari Corp. in finalizing the ST. Once Warner was repaid, everything else was gravy for them until the train ride ended.

 

 

Gorf, you forgot a couple of point which is why i mentioned the sega/ms tie up

 

sega and atari were sort of in bed together (as a result of the patent infringment case) which made sega a 7.5 percent stakeholder in atari and also both company signed software licensing agreements (a famous quote from atari eurpe's GM was 'the deal stops at sonic'...the guy was a tramiel yes man and didn't have a brain/mind of his own)

 

Also, if you know your ST history, MS were in the running to have supplied the front end or o/s for the ST, unfortunately ms couldn't get a stable version of 68k windows running properly within atari's/tramiels timeframe, which is why they went for DRI instead

 

I wouldn't call it "unfortunate" that Windows was not deployed on the ST.

 

If you've seen Windows circa 1985 you know that GEM ran circles around it back then. In fact, if Digital Research hadn't lost in the look-and-feel lawsuit brought by Apple, I suspect GEM would be the defacto copycat UI on the PC.

 

 

I loved GEM as a GUI. It made more sense than the MacOS GUI - even to this day in my opinion - and it certainly looked better than the Amiga Workbench, imho.

 

 

 

I rewind time and release the panther in 1991 or so=) hehe.

That would have been a worse idea. The Panther had little to impress anyone.

I was a Sega Genny with a little more color at best.

 

 

The ST line could've used such a graphics performance from those chips. It's a shame none of the tech Atari spent on the Panther/Jaguar made it into their computer lines [and vice versa].

 

 

As for 3D, the Jaguar II design should have been quite capable here.

The Jaguar I is already very capable. The Jaguar console design is the big issue here.

The Jaguar II would have put a serious hurt on the PS1 power wise. A Jaguar I with an

020 would have been enough to hold it's own and even surpass the Sony at times.

It would have also been quite more than enough to allow developers much easier and

faster dev time. The 020 is not only twice as fast and twice as wide but it also ascesses

its external bus a twice or more the efficiency of the 68k. Then you have the small cache

which further keeps it off the bus. The GPU and DSP would have owned the bus most of

the time instead of some of the time. Forget the bugs in the T&J hardware...they would

be livable with an 020 and probably not even noticable. The only hardware fix I would

have bothered with is the double buffered blitter registers. This with a 68k would have

made a large difference.

 

 

Speaking of the 020, sometimes I wonder whether the "ST" and the Amiga should've started out with the 020 instead of the 68000. Of course, I do not know what the price of an 020 was back in 1985. It had only debuted the year before...

 

 

 

On point #4:

Many companies simply did not want to do business with Atari and were not willing to give them a chance because of the way Atari had done them wrong in the past. This is what I'm talking about. Promote that the old way of screwing companies is over and show them that Atari could keep promises and be good business partners.

 

 

Can you give some examples of this other than general loathing of the Tramiels in the industry? After all, it wasn't Atari's actual fault that software companies could not make titles for the 7800; it was the monopolistic contract Nintendo forced on companies that prevented them from publishing on other platforms, and sometimes even from licensing the titles for another company to publish on the rival platforms. Sega suffered from this as well on the SMS and NEC couldn't seem to even import and publish themselves all of the 3rd party titles that were on the PC-Engine in Japan for the TG-16 in the US. It was ridiculous.

 

How did Atari Corp. screw over publishers and other US industry types before?

 

If anything, there was interest in the Jaguar because Atari wasn't going to censor much of the content and plenty of companies were either cheesed off from Nintendo's policies and/or their heavy licensing fees.

 

The only thing I can think of was the initial high cost of the ST development kits back in 1985.

 

 

Though maybe none of that rumor is the case, it's not something I'd put past any of the Tramiels. Especially Sam

after his 'yuk, yuk, yuk,' statement regarding networked games...that I know was said to Scott Legrand as he told

me this himself. Talk about head up ass syndrome!

 

 

I don't think Sam would've thrown a 7800 but I don't think it is beyond what Jack wold do.

 

I would like to know more about the "network game" comment Sam allegedly made. It is probably more humorous than him trying to defend licensing a game based on the "Highlander" cartoon versus the mega popular tv series of the time which I criticized at the shareholder's meeting. Although nothing is stranger than the Froggo Games story [allegedly involving cocaine]... As the late Rick James said, "it's a helluvua drug".

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I don't think the Lynx's sound chip is week at all, it can do digital sound on all 4 channels unlike many other sound chips and has produced the best sampled sound I have heard on any console of the era in games like Klax, Checkered Flag, Awesome Golf, STUN Runner and Jimmy Connors Tennis.

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I don't think the Lynx's sound chip is week at all, it can do digital sound on all 4 channels unlike many other sound chips and has produced the best sampled sound I have heard on any console of the era in games like Klax, Checkered Flag, Awesome Golf, STUN Runner and Jimmy Connors Tennis.

 

 

What I mean is I find the Lynx sound to be "tinny" even with headphones. The bass is so so. To me, it doesn't sound better than music generated by the POKEY or SID.

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The ST line could've used such a graphics performance from those chips. It's a shame none of the tech Atari spent on the Panther/Jaguar made it into their computer lines [and vice versa].

 

 

It was, that's what Painter was (that page hasn't been updated). They were going to start up the Computer division again with what I believe was a Falcon/Jaguar combo. Sam had his heart attack, Jack came in and shut it (and all the other projects down) and did the merger.

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See, now a few years ago I might've whole heartedly agreed with you Steve, but I've gotten a real insider view of the happenings within Atari from emails and internal memo's. There was nothing spiteful or vindictive about the business done by the Tramiels. Now, I don't have anything conclusive, but I will say, judging from the press releases to the stock increasing to the sale of stock and profit taking --- yeah I'd say there was perhaps some monkey business with generating capital from false promises, which were so many from Atari, that many started to doubt anything would come out of the company, but then some real gem's like the laser printers, Lynx, Portfolio, the TT030 would come out and surprise everyone.

 

Now by the time 1991-1992 had rolled around, the Tramiels saw the writing on the wall, computer sales were in sharp decline and a decision had to be made - so literally everything would be stopped and all resources would go to a new gaming platform - that being the Jaguar 64, so it was really a matter of economics and cashflow more then anything else.

 

Unfortunately for the Tramiels, they got seriously hosed on the Jaguar system by their developers who used the platform more as a learning tool, then to produce good quality games. The lessons learned from the Jaguar by developers was taken to the Playstation to develop - which, lets face it, thanks to insight by Sony - had one of the single strongest and best created developer support networks ever seen for a gaming platform ever - in fact, Sony stumbled horribly by not having the same caliper of support when the PS2 came out.

 

 

 

Curt

 

It seems like Atari Corp under Jack was managed pretty well (taking the massive debt from Warner and turning around to make Atari Corp profitable). It seems more like things started falling apart after Sam took over in the late 80s.

 

The same motive was behind Jack too...they dumped the ST like a used condom once they felt Jag would rule the world.

sorry anyone who fires the guy responsible for the 7800 is not any better. That machine could have saved Atari's game

name if they did not sit on it while Nintendo took over the world.

Edited by Curt Vendel
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You are the first person I ever heard state someone complain about the lynx using a 6502. The Lynx was perfect from the start

hardware wise. It was doing polygon based games even before some of the other consoles. It's tool kit and hardware are just

what you want for a system. If only the Jaguar had followed that model.

No, there were complaints about using the 6502 even before the initial release of the Lynx. There were online complaints as well as in EGM because it was another example of "pseudo 16-bit" just as the PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 was. 16-bit graphics, 8-bit CPU.

That's a perceived flaw by people who don't know what they're talking about, otherwise thay'd have complained about the SNES's CPU more... (there are soem things the 65816 has over the C02, but at 1/2 the clock speed -less due to ROM/RAM speed and the context they were being used, it was generally a lot slower)

Besides, what does it matter, compared to handhelds (other than the Turbo Express) it was a good deal faster comparing CPU alone. It's just a stupid remark on EGM's part...

 

But yes, the Lynx was friggin' incredible. It is such a crime Nintendo was so successful with their POS Gameboy in comparison.

Hardware doesn't win the day though, otherwise things would have gone differently for the GameGear and Turbo Express as well. Price, convienience (size and battery life), marketing, and software are the big things of course. (granted, even with those you at least neat passable hardware, which the Gameboy most certianly was)

 

What is also incredible about the Lynx was that it had such a fast 6502 that neither Commodore nor Atari [nor Apple] used in their 8-bit computer lines.
I believe the Apple IIc Plus used a 4 MHz 65C02 standard. :)

 

Using a 65816 might've been a good idea but I think the Lynx's only true weak point was the sound chip.
Not bad really compared to contemporaries though, GB had (though it did have hardware ADPCM support), but especially GameGear with it's very basic SN76489. (I'd say the Lynx was ahead of both on average -especially due to the scarse use of the GB's ADPCM -which would be its lone advantage)

 

 

If that "land" is what I think it is referring to, it is the money Atari made off selling their Taiwan manufacturing plant. It got demolished and a shopping mall was erected on the land.

 

That's not to say the Tramiel family didn't make money off allegedly manipulating Atari Corp. stock. Lots of people thought they were doing that although there's no known proof of it.

 

The feeling I have of what they did is they let us Atari fans finance everything without committing any of their own monies to the enterprise outside of the cash Jack dropped in the early days of Atari Corp. in finalizing the ST. Once Warner was repaid, everything else was gravy for them until the train ride ended.

I'd immagine they also had private assets in reserve besides recent sales like the Tiwan plant, but that sale was specifically mentioned before. (in refrence to Atari competing with Sony's huge merketing budget iirc)

However, the main context I've mentioned using private funds in is to avoid the early release of the Jag and iron out a few last things in hardware, establish a decent array of launch titles, possibly revise the controllers and perhaps cartidge design prior to starting manufacturing and release it in mid 1994. (preferably to get started with some summer sales, but definitely by fall, in tiem for a holiday build-up)

 

As far as funding goes, Atarian63 suggested much earlier in the thread that oen possibility would be spinning off the Jaguar as a separate corporate entity, making it public, and playing off the strong market speculation of the time. (hinting at internet capabilities would be a big one too, even if they never materilized on the Jag)

 

It really wasn't until the mid 1994 (iirc) Sega lawsuit windfalls startign coming in that Atari again had soem decent cache to work with. (though they don't seem to have done so very efficiently)

 

The ST line could've used such a graphics performance from those chips. It's a shame none of the tech Atari spent on the Panther/Jaguar made it into their computer lines [and vice versa].
The Jaguar yes, but not the panther, it was not really practical in that role either. (the heart of th epanther is an object processor, the preurser to the jag's, and requires fast SRAM on a 32-bit bus, hence why the Panther only had 32 kB... it doesn't have the blitter like the Jag either, let alone the custom RISC cores) The Jag chipset could have been nice in such a role, but I think th epanther would have been better off being cancelled sooner if anything. (perhaps a bit more work could have been done on the Jag earlier)

 

 

Speaking of the 020, sometimes I wonder whether the "ST" and the Amiga should've started out with the 020 instead of the 68000. Of course, I do not know what the price of an 020 was back in 1985. It had only debuted the year before...
Heh, we go off on the Jaguar tangent int he ST/Amiga thread, I point out this one, and now the ST/Amiga stuff id bleeding over here too. :D I all fairness, the ST line has coem up quite a bit earlier in this thread, at one point suggestions about an STe or Falcon based game system came up. (once it was established at the Panther was useless)

 

 

 

If anything, there was interest in the Jaguar because Atari wasn't going to censor much of the content and plenty of companies were either cheesed off from Nintendo's policies and/or their heavy licensing fees.

It was also around that time (1993) that ratings systems were emerging, which would result in Nintendo platforms starting to see less censored content in the West.

However, one lack of interest would simply come from the relativel inactivity of Atari Corp in the US marketplace by the early 90s. Europe (especially UK) was another story entirely and it seems a fairly heft mistake that Atari didn't put more focus into pushing the Jag in Europe. (again, they even cancelled the London+Paris test markets in '93) Atari Corp had an established reputation from their computers and the Lynx to some extent (I've heard it was even more popular than the GameGear in the UK -granted the GG was surprsingly unpopular as far as Sega products go in the UK iirc)

 

In that same line, they possibly shoudn;t have even bothered with a Japanese release of the console at all given the harsh marketplace for US video game products. The PSX and Saturn also launched earlier there, plus the Saturn was much more competitive as well -whereas the Sega was so messed up that generation in the west, I think the Jag actually might have had a chance to encroach on Sega's market (in Europe if not the US) with soem really tactful management. (which obviously was not the case) In the UK in particular they were in a good position, potentially, with relatively good immage Atari Corp had there, and with Sega having a huge presense the sharp decline in the mid 90s would leave a big hole to fill. (which Sony did handily)

 

 

 

I would like to know more about the "network game" comment Sam allegedly made. It is probably more humorous than him trying to defend licensing a game based on the "Highlander" cartoon versus the mega popular tv series of the time which I criticized at the shareholder's meeting.

Yeah, that is pretty wierd, I was a kid at the time, around the right age, and I didn't even know that cartoon existed, but I watched the TV series with my dad a lot. (never saw any of the films though)

I'd initially though the Jag game was based on the TV series, or possibly the film franchise, I didn't realize otherwise until last year soem time (I think) when I watched part of a playthrough on youtube and saw a cutscene clip play. (I didn't even know there was an animated series prior to that :lol:)

 

 

What I mean is I find the Lynx sound to be "tinny" even with headphones. The bass is so so. To me, it doesn't sound better than music generated by the POKEY or SID.

Heh, that's because the sound generation IS a lot like that of POKEY. This actually came up in a discussion I had before. Like above though, compared to what the GB and GG have, it's fine really and probably capable of better PCM playback than the GB and definitely GG. (GB has the advantage of hardware ADPCM playback, so samples are going to be a lot smaller than comperable ones in linear PCM format for the lynx) One neat thing about the lynx sound hardware is you get 84x 8-bit linear DACs you can work with directly, so possibly multichannel audio without doign software mixing. (granted it's CPU intensive, so probably for special effects for transitions and title screens -perhaps a software mod player)

It's a bit like POKEY in that respect too, which allowed its 4x 4-bit linear DACs to be accessed directly.

 

BTW, here's that other discussion: http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/144632-atari-lynx-was-superior-over-gameboy/page__st__25__p__1769780#entry1769780 (note this also notes why the 68k would have been a detriment to the Lynx architecture compared to the 65C02)

followed by this later entry: http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/144632-atari-lynx-was-superior-over-gameboy/page__st__50__p__1787828#entry1787828

 

 

 

Unfortunately for the Tramiels, they got seriously hosed on the Jaguar system by their developers who used the platform more as a learning tool, then to produce good quality games. The lessons learned from the Jaguar by developers was taken to the Playstation to develop - which, lets face it, thanks to insight by Sony - had one of the single strongest and best created developer support networks ever seen for a gaming platform ever - in fact, Sony stumbled horribly by not having the same caliper of support when the PS2 came out.

One of the huge differences was the development tools and friendliness to work with of the PSX, the PS2 is not even close (PS3 isn't much better), neither is the Jag. The Dreamcast was aparently rather liek the PSX in that respect, and I've heard good things about the lynx from a programming/tool set standpoint. (apparently the 3DO was very oriented towards this as well, or at least providing strong support for C, though perhaps to the extent of ignoring proper doccumentation for programmers wishing to do some direct hardware accessing)

Of course Sony also poured tons of money into advertizing and marketing -including slashign the hardware price- (which would have soem impact on developer interests), but that was also true for the PS2.

Edited by kool kitty89
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Unfortunately for the Tramiels, they got seriously hosed on the Jaguar system by their developers who used the platform more as a learning tool, then to produce good quality games.

I always felt that was the major downfall of the Jaguar, more so than all the technical issues that us technical types like to harp on.

 

I was actually a teenage intern at a game company in the Jaguar's heyday and I perfectly matched your description! But thanks to good business leadership, I was prevented from working on the Jaguar. (Of course, I still play with it in my free time... I don't mind negative profits like those boring old suits...) :D

 

Back in 1994, I harassed my boss to start a Jaguar project, and after enough dodging, he took me aside and tried to gently introduce me to Business Reality. No well-managed company would partner with Atari, he explained. They were too small, too fragile, had too few marketing dollars to make any impact. Sega and Nintendo were actively courting partners, and Sony was rumored to be pouring billions of dollars on 3rd parties.

 

The other consoles promised C, they promised reusable assets, ease of development, cost-efficient multiplatform releases, PC-like file systems, virtually unlimited storage, etc... (Not all of them delivered, of course...)

 

Meanwhile, the Jaguar insanely boasted, 'Be a man! Devote yourself to weird non-standard tools, invest in thousands of lines of assembly for a RISC you will NEVER see again, tickle strange new registers in an architecture unlike anybody else's! And don't forget to design all your art for CRY, RGB is dead! Spend weeks counting bytes in ROM, like it's 1990 again! Design your own file system for our CD! This is what real men do!'

 

Seriously, I'm still a huge Jaguar fan, but it makes me shake my head to imagine the Jaguar in 1994 from the perspective of an experienced adult in the computer industry.

 

In my opinion, Atari ended up with young ambitious inexperienced students because people experienced in the industry knew better. I don't blame Atari. I don't think they knew much about the game industry in the 90s.

 

- KS

Edited by kskunk
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It was, that's what Painter was (that page hasn't been updated). They were going to start up the Computer division again with what I believe was a Falcon/Jaguar combo. Sam had his heart attack, Jack came in and shut it (and all the other projects down) and did the merger.

 

 

I would update that page to include the info that that MicroBox is cited in Sony's PS2 patents which is no surprise since the later PS2 case turned on its side does resemble the MicroBox.

 

What I meant earlier was that it was a shame that the Panther work didn't get incorporated into the STe, and then of course later, the Jaguar development with the Sparrow/Falcon.

 

Looking back, it may have been foolish that they didn't release that ST Game System way back when, but then again, thanks to the Reagan Administration's last ditch effort with anti-dumping restrictions on imported DRAM, prices went through the roof and Atari and Commodore equally shifted their focus on the European market which did not enact similar provisions - surprisingly - on DRAM. If I recall, the XE Game System's main purpose was to encourage the game companies to not stop developing software for the XE line since they had pretty much made the XE the scapegoat for the industry's piracy problem....

 

 

See, now a few years ago I might've whole heartedly agreed with you Steve, but I've gotten a real insider view of the happenings within Atari from emails and internal memo's. There was nothing spiteful or vindictive about the business done by the Tramiels. Now, I don't have anything conclusive, but I will say, judging from the press releases to the stock increasing to the sale of stock and profit taking --- yeah I'd say there was perhaps some monkey business with generating capital from false promises, which were so many from Atari, that many started to doubt anything would come out of the company, but then some real gem's like the laser printers, Lynx, Portfolio, the TT030 would come out and surprise everyone.

 

 

What was always fishy to me was Lee Isgur's recommendations on buying Atari Corp. stock. He'd put out the recommendation, the stock would go up and then rapidly decline. One of our user group's members lost about $4k over it.

 

 

Unfortunately for the Tramiels, they got seriously hosed on the Jaguar system by their developers who used the platform more as a learning tool, then to produce good quality games. The lessons learned from the Jaguar by developers was taken to the Playstation to develop - which, lets face it, thanks to insight by Sony - had one of the single strongest and best created developer support networks ever seen for a gaming platform ever - in fact, Sony stumbled horribly by not having the same caliper of support when the PS2 came out.

 

 

Everyone said the PS2 was hard to program for but it still destroyed the superior Xbox. Then again, it looks like everything caught up with Sony with the PS3. Awesome system - and yes, I have one - but it seems like a good segment of the industry [cough, Valve, cough] complain about how hard it is to program.

 

As for the Tramiels, it would seem like they weren't totally innocent when it came to the Jag. As many have said, had they chosen the 020 instead of the 68000 to be in the machine, it would've alleviated quite a bit of the problems.

 

 

That's a perceived flaw by people who don't know what they're talking about, otherwise thay'd have complained about the SNES's CPU more... (there are soem things the 65816 has over the C02, but at 1/2 the clock speed -less due to ROM/RAM speed and the context they were being used, it was generally a lot slower)

Besides, what does it matter, compared to handhelds (other than the Turbo Express) it was a good deal faster comparing CPU alone. It's just a stupid remark on EGM's part...

 

 

EGM had a total bias against Atari Corp. When they had originally launched as Electronic Game Player, they gave quite a favorable review on the 7800, but it was downhill thereafter [wait, they liked the Panther]. Their review of AvP was ridiculous. All 5s out of 10.

 

 

I believe the Apple IIc Plus used a 4 MHz 65C02 standard. :)

 

But the Lynx had a 16Mhz 6502 processor.... :)

 

 

As far as funding goes, Atarian63 suggested much earlier in the thread that oen possibility would be spinning off the Jaguar as a separate corporate entity, making it public, and playing off the strong market speculation of the time. (hinting at internet capabilities would be a big one too, even if they never materilized on the Jag)

 

But that would've made no sense. Atari Corp. had already shut down the computer division so if they spun off the Jaguar "division" as a separate IPO, then what good would Atari Corp. shares be... for a split of the $50 million in the bank they had at the time? I guess Atari Corp. could've been made into a holding company for all the IP.

 

 

Now by the time 1991-1992 had rolled around, the Tramiels saw the writing on the wall, computer sales were in sharp decline and a decision had to be made - so literally everything would be stopped and all resources would go to a new gaming platform - that being the Jaguar 64, so it was really a matter of economics and cashflow more then anything else.

 

 

If they saw the writing on the wall, they should've sold the company back to Time Warner. EGM and other mags at the time were reporting that Time Warner approached the Tramiels about selling their stake back [to Time Warner] but were rebuffed. Had the Lynx and the Jaguar been controlled by the Atari Games Corp./Tengen/Time Warner Interactive and not the Tramiels, things would've been massively different, I think...

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