What could have saved the Jag?

[Lostdragon]

3 hours ago, roots.genoa said:

I always felt the Jaguar was made with 3D in mind, at least the first 3D games like FPS based on raycasting. It was powerful enough for that kind of games, and I always assumed the keypad on the controller was added to select weapons easily like you would on a PC keyboard ; before games like Halo rethought the weapon system, most FPS on consoles require cycling with one or two buttons (which can be tedious in the heat of battle).

 

I know some people here told me the keypad was a "tribute" to old game systems, but frankly I have a very hard time believing that. It wouldn't be the first bad idea for an Atari system, including for its controller, but at the time video games were about blast processing, 64-bit, silicon graphics, VR, and stuff (according to marketing that is), so paying homage to old consoles would have been really strange... Especially since the only Atari system that got a keypad was the Atari 5200! Or was it a tribute to their rivals? ?

The suggestion during the rounds back in the day regarding the numeric keypad on the Jaguar controller, was so that it would encourage developers to port/produce more serious simulation type games to the console, as these required a lot of keyboard controls.

 

Gunship 2000 was started on Jaguar (only got as far as early 3D modelling so a Microprose source connected to it told me), TFX was rumoured. 

 

I can understand the reasoning but never seen it officially confirmed. 

[roots.genoa]

That explanation is perfectly fine to me!

 

About what other people say about raycasting, I'll add that in the early days of 3D, what we now consider a "hardware dedicated to 3D" was not that obvious. That's why I also think the 32X was made with 3D in mind, since it was some kind of continuation of the SVP chip for Virtua Racing. It might not have been the perfect way to display 3D, even back then and at that price point, but it was extra power that was required anyway. In the end, the picture on your screen is still 2D, so any hardware can do 3D as long as you program the engine yourself if the hardware doesn't provide specific tools, and as long as you don't expect a good framerate of course.

[alucardX]

28 minutes ago, roots.genoa said:

That explanation is perfectly fine to me!

 

About what other people say about raycasting, I'll add that in the early days of 3D, what we now consider a "hardware dedicated to 3D" was not that obvious. That's why I also think the 32X was made with 3D in mind, since it was some kind of continuation of the SVP chip for Virtua Racing. It might not have been the perfect way to display 3D, even back then and at that price point, but it was extra power that was required anyway. In the end, the picture on your screen is still 2D, so any hardware can do 3D as long as you program the engine yourself if the hardware doesn't provide specific tools, and as long as you don't expect a good framerate of course.

I seem to recall Tom Kalinske of Sega talking about the 32X and mentioning specifically what you just said about the extra processing power allowing 3D games.

[+cubanismo]

On 2/8/2022 at 5:54 AM, Bill Loguidice said:

I simply don't agree with that statement. They included 3D capabilities (like Sega on the 32X, 3DO, CD32, etc.), but it was not envisioned as a 3D system.

I think this is demonstrably wrong based on various statements from Mathieson in interviews, the efforts Atari made to push 3D titles, all their advertising, etc. It was designed from the ground up to be a 3D system, and I think that qualifies as having a "3D vision." If you read through the programming manuals, the most detailed documentation is aimed towards describing how to set up the blitter to rasterize polygon spans. Many sections make a point to note this or that big chunk of silicon exists to do something related to 3D. IIRC, I read some claim that the object processor was ported over from the Panther stuff late in the design cycle, after the blitter and RISC stuff. It was meant to be used for 3D games above all else.

 

Now that's just saying Flare/Atari had a vision of a 3D gaming future. Big deal. Like so many other failed tech endeavors, they didn't have a credible plan to make that vision a reality. They just made some pretty cool hardware that needed another iteration to produce compelling content but chose to release it as-is instead, borrowed Sega's marketing campaign for it, and hoped it would all work out.

 

There's still no way Atari inspired the PSX functionality. Sony would have had to have their chip design pretty close to finalized before the Jaguar ever launched. They were probably inspired by the industry at large. Things were clearly going 3D by this point.

[alucardX]

29 minutes ago, cubanismo said:

I think this is demonstrably wrong based on various statements from Mathieson in interviews, the efforts Atari made to push 3D titles, all their advertising, etc. It was designed from the ground up to be a 3D system, and I think that qualifies as having a "3D vision." If you read through the programming manuals, the most detailed documentation is aimed towards describing how to set up the blitter to rasterize polygon spans. Many sections make a point to note this or that big chunk of silicon exists to do something related to 3D. IIRC, I read some claim that the object processor was ported over from the Panther stuff late in the design cycle, after the blitter and RISC stuff. It was meant to be used for 3D games above all else.

 

Now that's just saying Flare/Atari had a vision of a 3D gaming future. Big deal. Like so many other failed tech endeavors, they didn't have a credible plan to make that vision a reality. They just made some pretty cool hardware that needed another iteration to produce compelling content but chose to release it as-is instead, borrowed Sega's marketing campaign for it, and hoped it would all work out.

 

There's still no way Atari inspired the PSX functionality. Sony would have had to have their chip design pretty close to finalized before the Jaguar ever launched. They were probably inspired by the industry at large. Things were clearly going 3D by this point.

F**kin' A

Edited February 10, 2022 by alucardX
I profanitied.

[alucardX]

There were a number of things they did right with the Jag too. I actually really like the look of the console itself and the styling on the cartridges. Atari was proud of their name and I think they put it on the hardware in a way that was very appealing. The roar intro with the cube was brilliant and I always loved when I turned my system on and that played. There was a lot of promise for the system and that's why I still love it. I know the controllers get criticism for their size and the number pad but I really don't think any of that was a big problem. I think the controller is comfortable and had the Jag been more successful maybe the pro controllers would have been standardized. Gaming was up in the air back then and had the N64 not had an analog joystick would we have seen a Dualshock controller from Sony?

 

My Jag is sitting next to me with a nice GameDrive plugged into it and I just love the way it looks. Maybe Sony should have bought the molds for the system and made THAT the shell for the PS5.

[+cubanismo]

18 minutes ago, alucardX said:

There were a number of things they did right with the Jag too.

Yeah, I have a bad habit of taking shots at the things I love. I watch Jag-Ads all the time, for example. I loved the Sega marketing campaign, and consequently I loved the Jag's too.

 

If I were Atari looking at my balance sheet, my remaining partnerships, and the list of Tom&Jerry bugs, I probably would have made exactly the same choices they did.

[Matt_B]

From interviews with people at Sony, it can be gleaned that the spec of the PlayStation was largely worked out by 1992 and their main influence was from Sega's arcade games, particularly the Model 1 hardware that ran the Virtua games.

 

If anyone was paying much attention to Atari at the time, they've been very tight lipped about it.

[Bill Loguidice]

1 hour ago, alucardX said:

There were a number of things they did right with the Jag too. I actually really like the look of the console itself and the styling on the cartridges. Atari was proud of their name and I think they put it on the hardware in a way that was very appealing. The roar intro with the cube was brilliant and I always loved when I turned my system on and that played. There was a lot of promise for the system and that's why I still love it. I know the controllers get criticism for their size and the number pad but I really don't think any of that was a big problem. I think the controller is comfortable and had the Jag been more successful maybe the pro controllers would have been standardized. Gaming was up in the air back then and had the N64 not had an analog joystick would we have seen a Dualshock controller from Sony?

 

My Jag is sitting next to me with a nice GameDrive plugged into it and I just love the way it looks. Maybe Sony should have bought the molds for the system and made THAT the shell for the PS5.

I was never a fan of the 3 button controller's ergonomics, but the 6 button controller was/is very good. I'd say it was their best controller design since the Atari 2600 days. While I don't think anyone could reasonably have expected Atari to have analog controls for the Jaguar, they could have reasonably expected a full six face buttons or four and triggers. The three face buttons did them no favors on top of all of the other things that did the Jaguar no favors.

I also liked the look of the Jaguar console. It's a shame they didn't do a cartridge dust cover, though. 

[Lostdragon]

7 hours ago, roots.genoa said:

That explanation is perfectly fine to me!

 

About what other people say about raycasting, I'll add that in the early days of 3D, what we now consider a "hardware dedicated to 3D" was not that obvious. That's why I also think the 32X was made with 3D in mind, since it was some kind of continuation of the SVP chip for Virtua Racing. It might not have been the perfect way to display 3D, even back then and at that price point, but it was extra power that was required anyway. In the end, the picture on your screen is still 2D, so any hardware can do 3D as long as you program the engine yourself if the hardware doesn't provide specific tools, and as long as you don't expect a good framerate of course.

What's mentioned in these pages seems to suggest the 32X hardware was indeed designed with 3D in mind, it simply did it in a different manner than the one used by the Saturn. 

 

 

 

Edited February 10, 2022 by Lostdragon
Amended uploaded files.

[Lostdragon]

On 2/8/2022 at 1:30 PM, Bill Loguidice said:

The point was that none of these systems (32X, Jaguar, 3DO) were 3D first, yet all three had varying degree of 3D (polygonal) capabilities. The PS1 was a 3D first design, although it obviously had impressive 2D capabilities as well. That's the distinction I was trying to make when arguing against the idea that Atari had a "3D vision" with the Jaguar. That was not their primary focus.

 

 

 

Martin Brennan:

 

 

But while I was over in California in '89, I actually convinced the bosses at Atari that 3D was the way to go, with the experience we'd gained on Flare one - if you didn't just do flat rendering, but shaded rendering you got a 3D appearance.
At the time, I was seeing pictures in magazines where computers were rendering photo realistic 3D wire meshes and I said "these are static images, but they only contain a very few number of polygons - we could take that, animate it and you could produce a game that was a quantum leap away from the current games".

 

So the Jaguar project was born from the Panther project.

In essence Atari looked at the Panther and looked at what we were promising for the Atari project and said can the Panther project.

The original design for the Jaguar was that it was actually going to be a 128bit computer, it wasn't going to be 64bit. We felt we had the pins to do it. We were going to have 2 banks of memory at 64bits and do double data rate and achieve a 128 bit architecture on 64 pins. It was really pushing it - but in the end the economics said that 128 wasn't necessary and it would have been too expensive.

 

 

https://www.konixmultisystem.co.uk/index.php?id=interviews&content=martin

 

[PeterG]

3 hours ago, Lostdragon said:

What's mentioned in these pages seems to suggest the 32X hardware was indeed designed with 3D in mind, it simply did it in a different manner than the one used by the Saturn. 

 

 

 

Thanks for sharing. I enjoyed reading that. The 32x/Saturn story is very interesting in itself. But it is the first time I think, that I read that Sega was afraid of Atari's Jaguar. This is kind of cool. A bit strange after all that we know now but still interesting to imagine what they thought when they saw what the Jaguar really turned out to be in the end. ?

[ArneCRosenfeldt]

3 hours ago, Lostdragon said:

 

 

 

Martin Brennan:

 

 

But while I was over in California in '89, I actually convinced the bosses at Atari that 3D was the way to go, with the experience we'd gained on Flare one - if you didn't just do flat rendering, but shaded rendering you got a 3D appearance.
At the time, I was seeing pictures in magazines where computers were rendering photo realistic 3D wire meshes and I said "these are static images, but they only contain a very few number of polygons - we could take that, animate it and you could produce a game that was a quantum leap away from the current games".

 

So the Jaguar project was born from the Panther project.

In essence Atari looked at the Panther and looked at what we were promising for the Atari project and said can the Panther project.

The original design for the Jaguar was that it was actually going to be a 128bit computer, it wasn't going to be 64bit. We felt we had the pins to do it. We were going to have 2 banks of memory at 64bits and do double data rate and achieve a 128 bit architecture on 64 pins. It was really pushing it - but in the end the economics said that 128 wasn't necessary and it would have been too expensive.

 

 

https://www.konixmultisystem.co.uk/index.php?id=interviews&content=martin

 

What is this bank thing? Why could they not do banks on 64 bit? I know it is the same old lame fast page mode thing, but with the current number of pins they could have run the 68k on one 16 bit bank and not trash pages on other 16 bit banks. One for audio streaming, one for blitter source, one for blitter target ( in pixel mode ). Each memory access would still take 2 cycles and you could only have one at a time, but they would not take 4 cycles. Of course it would have been better if Jerry would read PCM samples in phrases: One 32 bit as the memory puts it on the bus and then the other 32 bit multiplexed via TOM => two cycles for one phrase.

 

The Object processor could have emulated tile mode-7. 32 bit load of tile info, and then 16 bit of pixel load on the other bank and still 16 bit left for 68k.

 

Do people even know what RAS CAS signals are?

[LordKraken]

Just a reminder what the 32x could achieve... To me whether it was designed to do 3d or not is irrelevant. It could do 3d very well, maybe better than the jag actually.

 

 

[JagChris]

33 minutes ago, LordKraken said:

Just a reminder what the 32x could achieve... To me whether it was designed to do 3d or not is irrelevant. It could do 3d very well, maybe better than the jag actually.

 

 

Nah it just had better tools. Those are excruciatingly important. Doom32X is running into a hardware limit of 180x160 for full screen. We already know the Jag can at least beat that. 

[Lostdragon]

1 hour ago, ArneCRosenfeldt said:

What is this bank thing? Why could they not do banks on 64 bit? I know it is the same old lame fast page mode thing, but with the current number of pins they could have run the 68k on one 16 bit bank and not trash pages on other 16 bit banks. One for audio streaming, one for blitter source, one for blitter target ( in pixel mode ). Each memory access would still take 2 cycles and you could only have one at a time, but they would not take 4 cycles. Of course it would have been better if Jerry would read PCM samples in phrases: One 32 bit as the memory puts it on the bus and then the other 32 bit multiplexed via TOM => two cycles for one phrase.

 

The Object processor could have emulated tile mode-7. 32 bit load of tile info, and then 16 bit of pixel load on the other bank and still 16 bit left for 68k.

 

Do people even know what RAS CAS signals are?

I honestly have no idea and it would be nice to have other sources confirm what Martin claims.

 

 

There had been claims about the Jaguar GPU and DSP being cut back to half speed due to overheating issue and  originally you were able
to run programs from outside the GPU's memory ( and DSP) but production
machines could not do this.. 

 

Chipsets needing at least another 2 revisions etc. 

 

The more developer comments I find, the more tortured the hardware R+D side seems to be regarding the Jaguar. 

[Lostdragon]

1 hour ago, LordKraken said:

Just a reminder what the 32x could achieve... To me whether it was designed to do 3d or not is irrelevant. It could do 3d very well, maybe better than the jag actually.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Certainly had some impressive 3D titles to it's credit. 

[roots.genoa]

2 hours ago, LordKraken said:

Just a reminder what the 32x could achieve... To me whether it was designed to do 3d or not is irrelevant. It could do 3d very well, maybe better than the jag actually.

I didn't mention it on the topic about moments that wowed us, but I think Star Wars Arcade on 32X was my first experience of 60 fps in a 3D game (at least on a home system). The framerate is of course not always that high mind you, but I think it was not locked so during missions in (empty) space, sometimes you would see a lone Tie Fighter passing by in an incredibly fluid way, and that was quite surreal... ?

[agradeneu]

2 hours ago, LordKraken said:

Just a reminder what the 32x could achieve... To me whether it was designed to do 3d or not is irrelevant. It could do 3d very well, maybe better than the jag actually.

 

 

It's quite limited compared to the Jaguar. The Jaguar is certainly better with colors and shading.  But 2x Sh-1 is a lot of firepower, surely.

However, the 32X is not really good with texture mapped graphics or any adavanced techniques like Gouraud shading (Darkxide and Metal Head are both slower and uglier than comparable Jaguar offerings).  Its good with those flat shaded polygons with limited color palettes (like VF or VR).

 

Edited February 10, 2022 by agradeneu

[Bill Loguidice]

3 hours ago, JagChris said:

Nah it just had better tools. Those are excruciatingly important. Doom32X is running into a hardware limit of 180x160 for full screen. We already know the Jag can at least beat that. 

I think the 32X's Doom Resurrection project shows that a better Doom could be made on it, but I suppose the same could be said on the Jaguar side as well (and we know what happened with the 3DO port).

[Lostdragon]

38 minutes ago, Bill Loguidice said:

I think the 32X's Doom Resurrection project shows that a better Doom could be made on it, but I suppose the same could be said on the Jaguar side as well (and we know what happened with the 3DO port).

You can look at 32X Doom Resurrection for prove that the original was rushed to market. 

 

 

We have Jim Bagley saying if Carmack had let him use the Saturn hardware in the manner he wished, Saturn Doom would of been far superior 

 

 

John Carmack has talked of how if he started from scratch and coded Doom specifically for the Jaguar hardware, he'd target a higher resolution, better frame rate etc. 

 

If Rebecca "burgerbecky" Heineman had 

been given months, not weeks, 3DO Doom could of been much better. 

 

 

I'm hard pressed to think of a PC title converted to so many platforms, that couldn't of been improved if circumstances were different. 

 

 

[Chris+++]

The Jaguar Doom was the first I ever played, and it really hooked me. In fact, it led to my purchase of the first PlayStation in '97, expressly so I could get the two Doom releases for that console and have even more levels! I still think Carmack's Jaguar version is excellent.

 

Anyway, what could have saved the Jaguar was a greater number of people being made aware of how awesome Cybermorph is! I admit that this is based completely on my personal tastes, but I surely wouldn't have been the only one to get into such an astonishingly huge and compelling game. Nobody who wrote contemporary magazine articles about the Jaguar seemed to have played the game to any involved extent, so of course the main thing that's become known about it over the years is the bald chick's repetitious voice. "Where did YOU learn to fly?"

 

But she can be seen and not heard -- the option to easily mute her exists, so that's a non-factor. If you really get into the game, it's practically Doom in a spaceship. It's nothing like the on-the-rails games to which it was compared at the time, like StarFox. You can stop, turn around, leave objects or enemies to find later in the same places, fly entirely around every one of the massive number of planets you can visit (along any trajectory you wish), etc. In other words, it's spatially logical, not a forced 3-D scroller, and it involves a lot of exploration, which I love in games.

 

That, Iron Soldier, Tempest 2000, Alien Vs. Predator and Doom kept me glued to my Kay Bee-bought Jaguar for months without a break for my other platforms. I was captivated. Atari, you had done it again!

 

I know that's subjective stuff, and that there are valid and well-informed opinions of what could have been done differently in terms of treating developers more fairly, choosing to create or convert games that played more to the console's available strengths at the time, etc. But Cybermorph came free with the console, incredibly, and I'll grab any chance to offer an uncommon opinion and talk about what I think is a vastly underrated game!

 

Edited February 10, 2022 by Chris+++
Forgot something.

[alucardX]

7 hours ago, LordKraken said:

Just a reminder what the 32x could achieve... To me whether it was designed to do 3d or not is irrelevant. It could do 3d very well, maybe better than the jag actually.

 

 

We're not sure that the Jaguar couldn't have pulled this off. That looks really low resolution, low color and the frame rate does look like it's dipping at times. To me that looks like a bunch of flat shaded polygons with really low poly count too. Also, there are very few animation frames when tie fighters explode. That might have been due to cart space...I have no idea. The artists just knew how to deal with those limitations really well. Honestly though, does it look all that much better than this?:

 

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=Br3araX_FZw

 

 

[alucardX]

6 hours ago, Lostdragon said:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Certainly had some impressive 3D titles to it's credit. 

Darxide looks really cool but that draw distance is bad and the frame rate chugs. I really like the look though. If you look at Black Ice White Noise, the Jag was doing something very similar to what Metalhead was doing, or so it would appear.

 

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=tLNWDSrBWMQ

[Bill Loguidice]

16 minutes ago, alucardX said:

We're not sure that the Jaguar couldn't have pulled this off. That looks really low resolution, low color and the frame rate does look like it's dipping at times. To me that looks like a bunch of flat shaded polygons with really low poly count too. Also, there are very few animation frames when tie fighters explode. That might have been due to cart space...I have no idea. The artists just knew how to deal with those limitations really well. Honestly though, does it look all that much better than this?:

 

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=Br3araX_FZw

 

 

From a game release standpoint - not a paper numbers standpoint - it seems like the 32X was able to at least stand toe-to-toe with the Jaguar in 3D. Each had their really good games in this area and really, really bad games (like the respective motocross games). The only console platform of this era with better 3D capabilities than those two would be the 3DO.

EDIT: I'll also add that I feel like the Jaguar was just starting to get some better second gen titles (from a "taking better advantage of the hardware" standpoint), and the 3DO was clearly into its second gen of releases, while I don't feel like the 32X quite got there. Being what it was - a stop-gap add-on - it really didn't get a chance to show quite enough of its potential despite being on the market for about as long as the Jaguar and selling 4x more units thanks in part to the Genesis/MegaDrive install base. 

Edited February 10, 2022 by Bill Loguidice
Added second paragraph