Not finding any sources that mention the different abilities of Jaguar console with and without the CD expansion unit attached

[Lostdragon]

On 1/20/2023 at 8:21 PM, oky2000 said:

Not sure why Atari were pushing for textured polygons when in 1992/1993 arcade F1 games were pushing the super sprite scaling hardware and it looks better than most polygon racing games before PS2 sort of era. Looking at Super Burnout I am sure they could have done something similar to F1 Super Lap in the arcade instead. 

 

Guess it was a specs war wanted to fight asking teams to texture polygons instead of doing spectacular arcade quality 2.5D which looked better than F1 on Saturn anyway. Oh well.

From what i remember, Leonard Tramiel had seen Shockwave Assault on the 3DO and been impressed and wanted developers to push for texture-mapping on Jaguar CD titles, so the Jaguar could be seen as being able to compete. 

 

 

Martin Hooley (Imagitec Design) at the time had claimed Atari had suddenly asked them to include lots of custom lighting effects and texture-mapping to Freelancer for the Jaguar CD, so it could compete with first wave PlayStation and Saturn titles, but Martin has since changed his story as to why the game was canned. 

 

There's always been a lot of anecdotal evidence of Atari asking for texture-mapping when coders warned against it. 

 

Atari marketing saying 2D was dead.. 

 

Etc etc. 

Edited January 28, 2023 by Lostdragon

[KidGameR186496]

2 hours ago, Lostdragon said:

From what i remember, Leonard Tramiel had seen Shockwave Assault on the 3DO and been impressed and wanted developers to push for texture-mapping on Jaguar CD titles, so the Jaguar could be seen as being able to compete. 

 

 

Martin Hooley (Imagitec Design) at the time had claimed Atari had suddenly asked them to include lots of custom lighting effects and texture-mapping to Freelancer for the Jaguar CD, so it could compete with first wave PlayStation and Saturn titles, but Martin has since changed his story as to why the game was canned. 

 

There's always been a lot of anecdotal evidence of Atari asking for texture-mapping when coders warned against it. 

 

Atari marketing saying 2D was dead.. 

 

Etc etc. 

Well, i read a 2000 interview with ATD where they state that they wanted Battlemorph fully texture mapped due to Sam Tramiel seeing Total Eclipse on 3DO

[Lostdragon]

55 minutes ago, KidGameR186496 said:

Well, i read a 2000 interview with ATD where they state that they wanted Battlemorph fully texture mapped due to Sam Tramiel seeing Total Eclipse on 3DO

Ahh that was the one, couldn't quite remember which early 3DO title it was, my head went with Shockwave Assault. 

 

Seem to remember ATD saying something like they ignored the wishes of the Tramiel family and opted to use texture-mapping sparingly, where as the I War team at Imagitec had to go along with the requests the Tramiel family made, as they were paying the bills. 

[KidGameR186496]

22 minutes ago, Lostdragon said:

Ahh that was the one, couldn't quite remember which early 3DO title it was, my head went with Shockwave Assault. 

 

Seem to remember ATD saying something like they ignored the wishes of the Tramiel family and opted to use texture-mapping sparingly, where as the I War team at Imagitec had to go along with the requests the Tramiel family made, as they were paying the bills. 

When i redid the Wiki article for Battlemorph, i had a hunch that there were more sources talking about the game. Then i came across with a thread at AtariAge showing scans from that 2000 interview. Finding which issue appeared was the big hurdle but i eventually found it.

Edited January 28, 2023 by KidGameR186496

[oky2000]

Slightly off topic but does this mean that World Tour Racing on a large enough cart would run identically to the CD game with CD add-on?

 

[42bs]

6 hours ago, oky2000 said:

Slightly off topic but does this mean that World Tour Racing on a large enough cart would run identically to the CD game with CD add-on?

 

Sure, any game can run from card, just put 700MB ROM on it.

[Lostdragon]

18 hours ago, KidGameR186496 said:

When i redid the Wiki article for Battlemorph, i had a hunch that there were more sources talking about the game. Then i came across with a thread at AtariAge showing scans from that 2000 interview. Finding which issue appeared was the big hurdle but i eventually found it.

We have another developer citing Atari being spooked by another rival platform and another title, but saying the same thing about Marketing.. 

 

 

"Marketing decided that the PSX was the big threat so they needed to compete head to head on 3D and that was never going to happen due to the 4k limit for 3D code." 

https://forums.atariage.com/topic/207172-david-wightman-baldies-s-creator-interview/

"Everyone involved on the Software side became fatigued by Atari Marketing pushing for 3D titles when the Jag never had any serious 3D ability. The PS1 just launched and Atari were spooked by Ridge Racer. 

http://www.atarijaguar.co.uk/2013/11/hawken-wightman.html?m=1"

 

That's the thing with anecdotal talks from commercial developers it seems, they all agree Atari's marketing department wanted to shift the focus away from the system being a SNES/MD killer, onto it being able to compete with systems doing texture-mapped 3D,but they have different ideas over which games and which systems caused such a shift. 

 

[agradeneu]

20 hours ago, KidGameR186496 said:

Well, i read a 2000 interview with ATD where they state that they wanted Battlemorph fully texture mapped due to Sam Tramiel seeing Total Eclipse on 3DO

Total Eclipse is a rail shooter unlike Battlemorph, Blue Lightning would be something similar.

 

Battlemorph on the Jaguar was a success considering the platform. You wont confuse it with a PSX game, but it's improvements over the original in nearly all aspects were welcomed. 

 

It had way better presentation, sound, game design, had texture mapping and ran better.

Edited January 29, 2023 by agradeneu

[agradeneu]

19 hours ago, Lostdragon said:

 

 

Seem to remember ATD saying something like they ignored the wishes of the Tramiel family and opted to use texture-mapping sparingly, where as the I War team at Imagitec had to go along with the requests the Tramiel family made, as they were paying the bills. 

 

I War uses textures very sparingly, I would say both Battle and Iron 2 show more textures on surfaces. 

[Lostdragon]

2 hours ago, agradeneu said:

 

I War uses textures very sparingly, I would say both Battle and Iron 2 show more textures on surfaces. 

It's be a great excuse for me to revisit Shinto's excellent Jaguar podcast on the game, but I seem to remember him talking about how the games coders had designed the game engine to push plain polygons and Atari then said they wanted texture mapped ones and the team, knowing it would hit the frame rate hard, had no choice but to add texture-mapping, as it was Atari funding the games development. 

 

 

The Imagitec team seem to echo the sentiments MC3D coder, MB had about Tramiel's pushing for texture-mapping, in order for Jaguar titles to be seen to compete with rival systems, even though they knew the hardware would really struggle. 

 

MB] Blame Atari... "Oh, and texture this, texture that, texture the other." 
"But textures are at least 8x slower than flat shaded" says I.  "Actually," 
says Atari, "they're at least 22x slower, but we want them anyway".  You saw 
how the motorcycle game (Supercross 3D --Ed.) game came out - really slow - 
that's because they gave in to Atari and textured everything, which the Jag 
just can't handle.

 

 

http://www.atarihq.com/jeo/archive/jeo_0101.zip

 

[agradeneu]

56 minutes ago, Lostdragon said:

It's be a great excuse for me to revisit Shinto's excellent Jaguar podcast on the game, but I seem to remember him talking about how the games coders had designed the game engine to push plain polygons and Atari then said they wanted texture mapped ones and the team, knowing it would hit the frame rate hard, had no choice but to add texture-mapping, as it was Atari funding the games development. 

 

 

The Imagitec team seem to echo the sentiments MC3D coder, MB had about Tramiel's pushing for texture-mapping, in order for Jaguar titles to be seen to compete with rival systems, even though they knew the hardware would really struggle. 

 

MB] Blame Atari... "Oh, and texture this, texture that, texture the other." 
"But textures are at least 8x slower than flat shaded" says I.  "Actually," 
says Atari, "they're at least 22x slower, but we want them anyway".  You saw 
how the motorcycle game (Supercross 3D --Ed.) game came out - really slow - 
that's because they gave in to Atari and textured everything, which the Jag 
just can't handle.

 

 

http://www.atarihq.com/jeo/archive/jeo_0101.zip

 

yeah this quote is well known and quoted as gospel. Nontheless, BM runs faster than Cybermorph, with textures.

 

[oky2000]

12 hours ago, 42bs said:

Sure, any game can run from card, just put 700MB ROM on it.

See, before I thought the Jaguar CD-ROM expansion added something to the system to help those CD games as the Mega CD adds to the Mega Drive hardware. So World Tour Racing is simply a triumph of coding and nothing to do with the actual CD-ROM expansion, fascinating.

[oky2000]

9 hours ago, Lostdragon said:

We have another developer citing Atari being spooked by another rival platform and another title, but saying the same thing about Marketing.. 

 

 

"Marketing decided that the PSX was the big threat so they needed to compete head to head on 3D and that was never going to happen due to the 4k limit for 3D code." 

https://forums.atariage.com/topic/207172-david-wightman-baldies-s-creator-interview/

"Everyone involved on the Software side became fatigued by Atari Marketing pushing for 3D titles when the Jag never had any serious 3D ability. The PS1 just launched and Atari were spooked by Ridge Racer. 

http://www.atarijaguar.co.uk/2013/11/hawken-wightman.html?m=1"

 

That's the thing with anecdotal talks from commercial developers it seems, they all agree Atari's marketing department wanted to shift the focus away from the system being a SNES/MD killer, onto it being able to compete with systems doing texture-mapped 3D,but they have different ideas over which games and which systems caused such a shift. 

 

 

Atari as whole must have had some input in this push towards texture mapped 3D games, how much control over the company's focus could the marketing department alone force onto the future prospects of the company. That's a really bad business organisational chart.

 

Ridge Racer was a game changer, jaws dropped when people saw it running on those Japanese PS1 units after the completely underwhelming Saturn titles like VF1 and Virtua Racer. Looking at the Saturn and the PS1 at the start of that battle you would assume the Saturn was utter garbage and overpriced, something much closer to 32X than PS1. 

 

It seems odd that a company would try and compete with that system. Not saying it didn't happen but it makes no sense, it would be like Commodore trying to go ahead and rival the Sega SMS graphically with their VIC-II technology, it just makes zero marketing sense or good business in general.

 

I don't doubt that marketing was filled with technically clueless people in all these rival companies with older hardware compared to the new Saturn/PS1, not just Atari Jaguar team, but somebody somewhere high up must have been told this will end in tears. It is just insane that they would do that at Atari  considering the cost of CD mastering vs building carts with large ROM sizes you would need to truly take on a 3D CD based console too.