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[Eddie-Griffin]

Lol, no.

Kasumi Ninja didn't even look as good as the home port of MK2 which had already released. Then you had Way of the Warrior which looked a full generation beyond Kasumi Ninja. And that's only comparing bad digitized games.

Way of the Warrior wasn't a Jaguar game.

Capcom and SNK had 2D stuff that was light years beyond what the Jaguar could do.

Not at the time they didn't.

and stuff like Air Combat 22 that were already in the arcades would be like comparing a 32x to a PS2.

Air Combat 22 is a 3D game.

<>
@ O Ozzie666 your post was put inside quotes by incident. But I believe this is what you said

I guess what I am trying to say poorly. If you gave both Systems Cartridge media, the PSX 2D would would either better or indistinguishable If you made the same game on both systems both on CD format, the playfield would be closer, if not indistinguishable. The cartridge format just makes things unfair. The format is wrong, the insides of the PSX are more than capable. In real world of course most cartridge system is going to excel at 2D, unless the CD system has lots of ram. I don't recall any great Jaguar 2D games off the top of my head.

I disagree, the Jaguar was more capable in 2D than the PSX with it's architecture which was clearly designed with that in mind, while the PlayStation was targeting 3D texture mapping. The main advantage Sony had was storage space due to the CD..

 

[wondermega]

Not sure what you mean by this, the Lynx sold millions but its life was cut short to focus on the jaguar that Atari launched DOA with no way of supporting it. If anything they should have discontinued the Jaguar in 1995 and put all hands on Lynx support, and bring out a successor, same capabilities ats the Lynx 1 but better, and have a larger screen with a better resolution.

I couldn't imagine they wanted to do anything further with the Lynx. They were pricing it to move the last year or so that it was on the market, I believe, and the software support was grinding to a halt. Lots of games had been announced in some capacity but not much was actually trickling out. I think at that point the world had basically accepted the notion that Nintendo was going to dominate the handheld market.

 

[Eddie-Griffin]

I couldn't imagine they wanted to do anything further with the Lynx. They were pricing it to move the last year or so that it was on the market, I believe, and the software support was grinding to a halt. Lots of games had been announced in some capacity but not much was actually trickling out. I think at that point the world had basically accepted the notion that Nintendo was going to dominate the handheld market.

Everything you're saying is due to what I said before, that Atari was letting the Lynx and everything else die to focus on the Jaguar. That's why there wasn't much support it's last year, 1995 was them giving the console a few last games just to say they did. Atari burned some of the same companies that were making games on the jaguar, that were also developing games on the lynx, and Atari's boneheaded idea to screw developers again with the late Jaguar CD cut off whatever support they had left, by the time the CD launched they only had a couple developers on board to make games for it, I don't even think the Jag CD had 10 official games released for it.

Basically, the Lynx didn't die out by itself, Atari was the reason the Lynx died out. No one stopped Atari from supporting the Lynx ad selling a few million more consoles and releasing a successor improving on the original, other than Atari.

 

[buenoblue]

In my opinion the answer is much more complicated than this. You can't tell that CDs suck based on a comparison with the Neo Geo, a system entirely designed around streaming content from ROM as if it was RAM, with two huge buses per cartridge, and the absurd cost of the games.

Video games meant for home play could never justify such a cost. That's why SNK made the Neo Geo CD. And with only 7 MB of RAM, this console could run almost all games with no or minimal cuts. And offer Redbook Audio. If anything, this makes a strong argument in favor of the disc format.

CD format has always been an enabler. You would never have seen anything like Lunar Eternal Blue, and the incredible amount of super high quality content it offers, if it wasn't for the CD format.

Does anyone know the read speeds of Jaguar/Megadrive/Snes carts. Quick Google I can't find a definitive answer.

But my simplyfied take was even though carts back then seemed to have instant loading it was down to the small game sizes on the carts. I always assumed if you had a game that was say 4Mb on a CD it would load instantly aswell.

 

[Eddie-Griffin]

Does anyone know the read speeds of Jaguar/Megadrive/Snes carts. Quick Google I can't find a definitive answer.

But my simplyfied take was even though carts back then seemed to have instant loading it was down to the small game sizes on the carts. I always assumed if you had a game that was say 4Mb on a CD it would load instantly aswell.

Genesis: 525ns

Lynx: 420ns

SNES: 375ns

Jaguar: 375ns

 

[baphomet]

I don't know how to use the reply function correctly

No shit it wasn't a jaguar game. Jaguar never came close to displaying 2D that good, let alone as good as the arcade.

By 1994 the CPSII and Neo Geo were far beyond what the Jaguar would ever come close to.

The Jag wasn't even matching 2D arcade games from the 80's. Forget actually competing with arcade games from 94/95.

Even Native, which is the best looking 2D the Jaguar ever did, was only roughly on par with DKC.

 

[nkarafo]

But my simplyfied take was even though carts back then seemed to have instant loading it was down to the small game sizes on the carts. I always assumed if you had a game that was say 4Mb on a CD it would load instantly aswell.

Don't look at the small home console roms.

Look at the bigger, Arcade board roms.

 

[Eddie-Griffin]

No shit it wasn't a jaguar game. Jaguar never came close to displaying 2D that good, let alone as good as the arcade.

By 1994 the CPSII and Neo Geo were far beyond what the Jaguar would ever come close to.

Maybe you shouldn't completely edit out my post when you quote me so it's easier to follow along what you're getting at.

There is not a single game in 1994 or in 1993 that the Neo Geo could do better than the jaguar. They both COULD have, but that wasn't in the output. Real bout FF and SamShoIII were not even until 1995, Metal Slug and AOF3 until 96. The Neo Geo launched with freaking Magician Lord, it took time for the more impressive games to release.

This applies even more for CPS II, even the 3DO could handle some of those earlier games, ran one of them at 60fps even and that system was bad at 2D (and had to sacrifice parallax in some stages to run at 60fps).

Everything about the Jaguar in this case also applies to the Saturn. Every game that required the Saturn's 4MB memory expansion was released between 1996 and 2000 with the exception of the 1995 Marvel Super Heroes. So until 1995 we wouldn't see the 3rd generation of Neo Geo games and the 2nd generation of CPS II games.

Don't look at the small home console roms.

Look at the bigger, Arcade board roms.

As I said to you earlier, the issue still isn't the CD itself, and is instead the cost of the the CD drives and the low ram. I don't think blaming CD is fair.

The Jag wasn't even matching 2D arcade games from the 80's.

Yes it was and the gifs shown prove that.

Forget actually competing with arcade games from 94/95.

You do realize that the Neo Geo and CPS II weren't the pinnacle of 2D hardware in 94/95 right? There were games with graphics good enough to make someone believe they might be 3D in screenshots.

Even Native, which is the best looking 2D the Jaguar ever did, was only roughly on par with DKC.

DKC isn't an impressive 2D game, by sprite capabilities, it was impressive by the pre-rendered sprites. Comparing a homebrew space shooter a niche genre, to DKC is already crazy, but there are clear examples of more demanding 2D titles than both the games you mentioned here in the OP.

 

[Daniel Thomas MacInnes]

This is an interesting thread, as I just bought an Atari Jaguar from eBay in one of those sudden impulse decisions that I'm still feeling slighting undecided about. I might keep it and become a diehard fan, or I might turn around and sell everything and get all my money back. I certainly don't like the crazy prices this console and its software library commands on the used market, but that's a testimony to its enduring cult following. Jaguar seems to be more popular than ever, but you have to be of a certain mindset, just a little crazy in the head, and maybe you just had to be around in the early 1990s. If Sega Saturn is the "Velvet Underground" of videogames, what does that make Jaguar? The Pixies? Maybe Moondog or Metal Machine Music, something deliberately quirky and non-commercial and completely weird for its own sake.

I do remember Jag's 1993 launch and was not impressed at all. Cybermorph was the premier title, and that was, well, interesting. It looked better than Starfox on Super Nintendo and was suitably atmospheric, but was altogether a bit boring and sedate. It did, however, inspire that legendary Dave Halverson essay that he composed on LSD. In its own way, it fits.

For my peer group of gaming zine publishers and writers, 1994 is where Jaguar came into its own, and Jeff Minter put that console on the map. Within a flash, Tempest 2000 became one of the hottest videogames of the year, turning Atari Corp's console from a running joke to a real contender. Add in Alien vs Predator, Iron Soldier, Brutal Sports Football (a game I absolutely adored when I reviewed it for GamePro), a very good version of Doom (coded by the God-King Carmack himself) and the finest home version of NBA Jam TE, and this system was looking very good, indeed. Jaguar had struck a chord of underground cool that perfectly fit the time, those days before Sony flew in and completely obliterated the videogame industry as we had known it.

Unfortunately, the moment would pass, and Atari Corp's destructive tendencies would take over. There were too many bad games, too many lazy 16-bit ports, too many embarrassing 3D polygon games that were clearly beyond the machine's limits--Checkered Flag will always feel heartbreaking to every fan of the Atari Lynx classic. Don't even get me started on Fight For Life. Did we ever get the final version of that game, the one the programmer withheld because the Tramiel Family refused to pay him? Not that it would have made any difference.

Atari's biggest problem in those days was a complete lack of focus. Sam Tramiel, bless his heart, seemed to have the attention span of a hummingbird. First we have the Panther, which is 16-bit, then 32-bit, then scrapped in favor of the 64-bit (ahem) Jaguar. Then we have the Jaguar CD which looks like a giant toilet and dilutes precious software resources. Then we have the Jaguar VR helmet which is never released--although two or three are known to exist to day, fully completed, and one Jaguar fan has even posted videos and photos of it in action. Needless to say, I am jealous. But it dilutes things even further and jacks the price even higher. Then there is talk of a "Jaguar 2." Meanwhile, Atari was burning through countless machines: Lynx, STe, TT, Portfolio, Stacy, Falcon. It must have been hell for software developers and retailers, most of whom were already burnt out from years of abuse from the Tramiels.

You really have to have a certain mindset to love this company. You just have to appreciate the chaos, the surrealism, the absurdity. I swear this company had the strangest ideas for videogames. Ed Wood couldn't do any better--Todd's Adventures in Slime World, Ninja Golf, Midnight Mutants Starring "Grandpa" Al Lewis, Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy, White Men Can't Jump (I swear I am not making that one up), Attack of the Mutant Penguins. Good? Bad? Atari Jaguar exists in a realm where such words have no meaning.

 

[buenoblue]

Genesis: 525ns

Lynx: 420ns

SNES: 375ns

Jaguar: 375ns

Yeah this is what I found. I think that's access time. But I can't find actual read speed that the data can be transfered.
Like I said would I just wanna see a comparison of the same game at the same size on cart and CD and see the difference in load times.

 

[consoul]

The Jaguar had untapped potential, yes, but was never a real contender. Atari management was probably the biggest problem the Jaguar had. They failed to read the market properly and didn't secure enough good developers.

2D games like Super Burnout and Val-d'Isère look good, but aren't actually fun to play. Rayman and Power Drive Rally are fun, but it takes more than a couple of good games to save a system.

I've played the last revision of Black Ice/White Noise, an unreleased first-party Jag game that would have been amazing for its time (think Cyberpunk 1995), but the platform was critically ill by then and Atari pulled the plug on it.

Jaguar's 2D capability was good, but not good enough to seriously compete.

Tl;dr: Atari did the meth.

 

[Drew1440]

The hardware was badly designed from what I've read, with the 68000 crippling the system since it relied on a 16bit databus which slowed everything down when it was used. Whist not as capable as the PlayStation, it should have been able to handle the early PS1 titles.

Using carts from launch probably didn't help either.

 

[cireza]

I think in Sega CDS case is that it was restricted by the Mega Drive, and should have been it's own consoles. The Genesis was already getting cheaper and cheaper every half year or so, and the Sega CD being the flagship with all the capabilities it has, with a higher color pallet would have been perfect for 3 or 4 years before the Saturn was launched, and then they could discontinue the Mega Drive. and have the Sega CD become the $99 console while he Saturn was the new flagship.

This would have made the console even more expensive. With all the things included I don't see how it would have ever dropped to 99$.

 

[cireza]

Several of the best arcade machines were using cartridges as well

And they were very expensive because of the huge amount of ROM embedded.

 

[cireza]

But my simplyfied take was even though carts back then seemed to have instant loading it was down to the small game sizes on the carts. I always assumed if you had a game that was say 4Mb on a CD it would load instantly aswell.

This is wrong. A 4 MB game would not load instantly on SEGA CD for example. A lot of games are enhanced MD ports, they probably aren't that much bigger, they still have loading times. Mortal Kombat is an example. You get loadings for Shang Tsung morphs as well. This remains true for all following games on 32 bits systems with discs.

Loading data is super slow in these old disc drives. Unless you can fit the entirety of the game after an initial loading, nothing is going to be instant.

I don't know the exact read speed of the MD or SNES, but it was fast enough to stream animations of both fighters in fighting games. The exact same technique is used on 8 bits consoles by the way.

 

[cartman414]

Theres been much misinformation about history regarding losers and/or failed consoles, however the Jaguar had been most impacted by early internet revisionism from early gaming sites, big names hwo knew nothing of it rambling, and eventually the video platforms. There's been a very slow information spread about the Jaguar and as a result many untruths and myths still presist, but this isn't new with Atari consoles, we have een great revisionism regarding the crash, the 2600, and NES, and we've seen it with the Lynx and others too, but with the jaguar people beleive any information that comes from someone on it.

I think one of the biggest lies told is that nobody wanted the system when in actuality people did want the system and unfortunately for them, in several cases would never see the console release at their retailers as promised. The software was not excempt from this same issue/ I've seen many compare Atari releasing the Jaguar to Commodore releasing the CD32, and while I do agree both were released without much of a plan, I disagree on that comparison beyond that point as the the Jaguar was being developed in tandem with the Panther, and ended up going further along, so it made sense for Atari to go for the more powerful system but why not prepare for release properly? They had a test market that was successful but they shipped so few consoles for it that it was obvious they didn't have the capacity or the money to produce anything in mass so the whole thing is just confounding. But anyway.


The controller is actually fine if you use it. Some games have odd configurations but that's the worst of it, almost anyone complaining about the controller never used it or already had bias. I'm not saying the controller is great, things like complaining about the D-pad which works perfectly well for most Jaguar games and are designed for it as is, isn't a valid complaint, because when that same situation comes up with say the N64 or Saturn no one says anything. Even the 3DO gets less flak and it's D-pad is worse.

Huh? Only the original US d-pad was rightly criticized. The standard one is perhaps the GOAT of d-pads.

 

[buenoblue]

This is wrong. A 4 MB game would not load instantly on SEGA CD for example. A lot of games are enhanced MD ports, they probably aren't that much bigger, they still have loading times. Mortal Kombat is an example. You get loadings for Shang Tsung morphs as well. This remains true for all following games on 32 bits systems with discs.

Loading data is super slow in these old disc drives. Unless you can fit the entirety of the game after an initial loading, nothing is going to be instant.

I don't know the exact read speed of the MD or SNES, but it was fast enough to stream animations of both fighters in fighting games. The exact same technique is used on 8 bits consoles by the way.

The trouble is the original Sega Genesis version of Mortal Kombat is 971 kbs. But the Sega CD version of Mortal Kombat is 56MB. That's 61 times the file size. I'm pretty sure the game doesn't take 61 times longer to load.

I'm pretty sure if you put that original 971kb game on a CD it would load just as fast.

 

[UnNamed]

Atari didn't have power to turn Jaguar in a home arcade machine. It was already full of debits at the Jaguar release and there were no money for exclusives and ports. Also executives were really incompetent, unable to handle any product even with a shitload of money.

The controller is actually fine if you use it. Some games have odd configurations but that's the worst of it, almost anyone complaining about the controller never used it or already had bias. I'm not saying the controller is great, things like complaining about the D-pad which works perfectly well for most Jaguar games and are designed for it as is, isn't a valid complaint, because when that same situation comes up with say the N64 or Saturn no one says anything. Even the 3DO gets less flak and it's D-pad is worse.

I think the Jaguar controller was the worst controller ever, even worse than the Joycons. Too big, but the main problem were the tree buttons and the Dpad in a slope position

The stupidest idea ever, unconfortable and unreachable unless you have big hands.

 

[InfiniteCombo]

Their slogan was do the math. People did the math and did not buy it.

 

[NeoIkaruGAF]

There’s something strangely… arousing about these two gifs. The smoothness is incredibly sexy.

This one must have looked amazing on CRTs.


The most interesting thing about that era is the abundance of different propositions from all those consoles. Almost nobody seemed to have a clear grasp of the market, yet everyone seemed to see promise in it. Yet you can see nobody really got why Nintendo was successful and Sega managed to compete with them for a few years, and nobody seemed to have a solid vision of the future.

 

[Ozzie666]

All this thread does is remind me how small fish Atari was and that they never outgrew their early 80's attitude. The subsequent consoles and the Jaguar were just confusing and messy. I mean the jaguar went back to an early 80's style controller number pad design? They were just so out of touch with anything and lacked creativity. I remember reading one of their publisher contracts for the Jaguar, and it was a complete disaster. It's a miracle that Nintendo is so well run from a business perspective. Atari just got stuck in the 80's and had no money to actually compete. Even the upstart 3D0 was superior and more successful. The only great thing from post 2600 Atari, was arguably the ST. Looking back, it's hard not ask what where they thinking, what the hell was Sega thinking (32x).

 

[InfiniteCombo]

This is an interesting thread, as I just bought an Atari Jaguar from eBay in one of those sudden impulse decisions that I'm still feeling slighting undecided about. I might keep it and become a diehard fan, or I might turn around and sell everything and get all my money back. I certainly don't like the crazy prices this console and its software library commands on the used market, but that's a testimony to its enduring cult following. Jaguar seems to be more popular than ever, but you have to be of a certain mindset, just a little crazy in the head, and maybe you just had to be around in the early 1990s. If Sega Saturn is the "Velvet Underground" of videogames, what does that make Jaguar? The Pixies? Maybe Moondog or Metal Machine Music, something deliberately quirky and non-commercial and completely weird for its own sake.

I do remember Jag's 1993 launch and was not impressed at all. Cybermorph was the premier title, and that was, well, interesting. It looked better than Starfox on Super Nintendo and was suitably atmospheric, but was altogether a bit boring and sedate. It did, however, inspire that legendary Dave Halverson essay that he composed on LSD. In its own way, it fits.

For my peer group of gaming zine publishers and writers, 1994 is where Jaguar came into its own, and Jeff Minter put that console on the map. Within a flash, Tempest 2000 became one of the hottest videogames of the year, turning Atari Corp's console from a running joke to a real contender. Add in Alien vs Predator, Iron Soldier, Brutal Sports Football (a game I absolutely adored when I reviewed it for GamePro), a very good version of Doom (coded by the God-King Carmack himself) and the finest home version of NBA Jam TE, and this system was looking very good, indeed. Jaguar had struck a chord of underground cool that perfectly fit the time, those days before Sony flew in and completely obliterated the videogame industry as we had known it.

Unfortunately, the moment would pass, and Atari Corp's destructive tendencies would take over. There were too many bad games, too many lazy 16-bit ports, too many embarrassing 3D polygon games that were clearly beyond the machine's limits--Checkered Flag will always feel heartbreaking to every fan of the Atari Lynx classic. Don't even get me started on Fight For Life. Did we ever get the final version of that game, the one the programmer withheld because the Tramiel Family refused to pay him? Not that it would have made any difference.

Atari's biggest problem in those days was a complete lack of focus. Sam Tramiel, bless his heart, seemed to have the attention span of a hummingbird. First we have the Panther, which is 16-bit, then 32-bit, then scrapped in favor of the 64-bit (ahem) Jaguar. Then we have the Jaguar CD which looks like a giant toilet and dilutes precious software resources. Then we have the Jaguar VR helmet which is never released--although two or three are known to exist to day, fully completed, and one Jaguar fan has even posted videos and photos of it in action. Needless to say, I am jealous. But it dilutes things even further and jacks the price even higher. Then there is talk of a "Jaguar 2." Meanwhile, Atari was burning through countless machines: Lynx, STe, TT, Portfolio, Stacy, Falcon. It must have been hell for software developers and retailers, most of whom were already burnt out from years of abuse from the Tramiels.

You really have to have a certain mindset to love this company. You just have to appreciate the chaos, the surrealism, the absurdity. I swear this company had the strangest ideas for videogames. Ed Wood couldn't do any better--Todd's Adventures in Slime World, Ninja Golf, Midnight Mutants Starring "Grandpa" Al Lewis, Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy, White Men Can't Jump (I swear I am not making that one up), Attack of the Mutant Penguins. Good? Bad? Atari Jaguar exists in a realm where such words have no meaning.

Love your musical references but I think the Saturn was far too mainstream to be considered The Velvet Underground.

The Jaguar being Metal Machine Music is pretty funny though, although Atari didn't design the Jaguar as a "fuck you" to anyone, unlike Lou Reed who composed Metal Machine Music as a "fuck you" to the record company.

 

[thicc_girls_are_teh_best]

Didn't the Jaguar have a hardware register bug which limited the amount of actual RAM that could be addressed? Combining that with the already small size of carts compared to CDs, and how the Jaguar CD had its own hardware design failures (they used the audio CD standard instead of the CD-ROM one for more space, but that made consistently reading data much more finicky plus the disc drive itself would mess up the discs), I don't think we'd of gotten much more in the way of showstopping 2D games from that system over the course of the generation unless the design shortcomings were addressed with a Jaguar 2.

The Jaguar did have great blitter functionality. However I think another issue that would've held back 2D on Jaguar looking as good as the best 2D on the Neo-Geo or Sega Saturn is the level of developer talent Atari had compared to SNK and Sega. The art direction for some of the games you listed like Kasumi Ninja are just straight-up garish in a few ways, there's not a lot at an artistic level that melds to provide a thematic consistency, and IMO any game's visual prowess is a strong mix of technical and artistic traits.

There are some 2D Jaguar games which avoid that issue like Super Burnout, the rally game and of course Rayman (which has an extremely interesting history with its ports, considering some of the wildly different visual changes among every single version, a lot for reasons purely out of taste), but that type of polish was atypical of the Jaguar software scene during its commercial run sadly.

 

[Redneckerz]

Skyhammer shows what a Jag can do. Too bad it was past its commercial prime at that point.

 

[cireza]

The trouble is the original Sega Genesis version of Mortal Kombat is 971 kbs. But the Sega CD version of Mortal Kombat is 56MB. That's 61 times the file size. I'm pretty sure the game doesn't take 61 times longer to load.

I'm pretty sure if you put that original 971kb game on a CD it would load just as fast.

This is not how it works. First of all, MK is 2 MB on MegaDrive, not 971 KB which makes absolutely no sense.

Secondly, since the game loads instantly on MD, it does take more than 61 times longer to load on SEGA CD. Actually it would probably be thousands more time.

Finally the space used on SEGA CD is for the additional content such as the intro video. The core game, without the video, is probably not much bigger than MD. There are a few more animations, richer backgrounds, artworks and better sound effect. Everything that could not fit on the 2 MB of the MD game.

 

[Eddie-Griffin]

Atari's biggest problem in those days was a complete lack of focus. Sam Tramiel, bless his heart, seemed to have the attention span of a hummingbird. First we have the Panther, which is 16-bit, then 32-bit, then scrapped in favor of the 64-bit (ahem) Jaguar. Then we have the Jaguar CD which looks like a giant toilet and dilutes precious software resources. Then we have the Jaguar VR helmet which is never released--although two or three are known to exist to day, fully completed, and one Jaguar fan has even posted videos and photos of it in action. Needless to say, I am jealous. But it dilutes things even further and jacks the price even higher. Then there is talk of a "Jaguar 2." Meanwhile, Atari was burning through countless machines: Lynx, STe, TT, Portfolio, Stacy, Falcon. It must have been hell for software developers and retailers, most of whom were already burnt out from years of abuse from the Tramiels.

You really have to have a certain mindset to love this company. You just have to appreciate the chaos, the surrealism, the absurdity. I swear this company had the strangest ideas for videogames. Ed Wood couldn't do any better--Todd's Adventures in Slime World, Ninja Golf, Midnight Mutants Starring "Grandpa" Al Lewis, Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy, White Men Can't Jump (I swear I am not making that one up), Attack of the Mutant Penguins. Good? Bad? Atari Jaguar exists in a realm where such words have no meaning.

These events you listed relate to what I brought up before about people kind of getting their information on the happening from tabloid level gossip. Not trying to knock you since you are basically repeating the same thoughts and info that many others have.

The problem is that none of what you said mattered because none of what you said is the problem. The premise behind responses like yours assume the Jaguar was starting to look relevant and due to some complaints about games being old ports, or having technical issues, or not releasing enough games were what let to the lack of sales later on and the consoles eventual failure.

The problem is that was never the case in why it failed, not that it didn't make things worse, but those weren't what the cause of failure was.

When you can only sell and produce 52k of your defining title and couldn't produce half the 500,000 consoles that were supposed ship in 1994 (this chart is from 1995) then it doesn't matter how many bad games you have the console was never going to succeed, each console could have came with Crash Bandicoot and Mario 64 packed in and it still would have failed for the same reaosn.

A lot more people are starting to realize this is the issue. Many of the other problems you list were inconsequential at the time because the console was already dead so what software released for it didn't matter. Imagine if the Nintendo 64 could only ship 50k consoles in 1996 and 100k in 1997, the N64 would already be an inevitable failure.

White Men Can't Jump (I swear I am not making that one up),

This game is actually a licensed titled based on the movie of the same name starring Westly Snipers and Woody Harrelson. But I don't think either of the two are in the game or represented in the game.

 

[buenoblue]

This is not how it works. First of all, MK is 2 MB on MegaDrive, not 971 KB which makes absolutely no sense.

Secondly, since the game loads instantly on MD, it does take more than 61 times longer to load on SEGA CD. Actually it would probably be thousands more time.

Finally the space used on SEGA CD is for the additional content such as the intro video. The core game, without the video, is probably not much bigger than MD. There are a few more animations, richer backgrounds, artworks and better sound effect. Everything that could not fit on the 2 MB of the MD game.

Yeah you probably know more than me but it's an interesting thought. And like I said I can't find any hard data on the read speeds. Do you think a cart from that era would load games just as quick if the capacity was the same as a CD?

 

[Eddie-Griffin]

The hardware was badly designed from what I've read, with the 68000 crippling the system since it relied on a 16bit databus which slowed everything down when it was used. Whist not as capable as the PlayStation, it should have been able to handle the early PS1 titles.

I touched on this in an earlier psot that the 69k can hog cycles and drop performance by up to 80% when it's used.

However, I disagree with early PS1 titles, even the rushed Ridge Racer isn't possible because the environment has too many detailed polygons on one screen and that's before getting into the texture mapping. That's something the 3Do could do (in fact the PS1 had several ports) but I can't see the jaguar doing such a thing.

If the best case of a jaguar running a texture mapped game is Sky Hammer than early PS1 is not possible imo.

This would have made the console even more expensive. With all the things included I don't see how it would have ever dropped to 99$.

How would making the Sega CD a stand alone console make the GENESIS more expensive? The point I was making was the Genesis would continue to be cheap while the Sega CD was the premium consoles, that would make it more appealing to buyers as an option and it wouldn't be restricted because of the Genesis aging hardware. The Sega CD would be close to $99 when the Saturn comes out and would replace the Genesis as the cheap option. That's better than spending unnecessary funds to create new hardware and forcing it to be an expansion which actually made it harder for Sega to drop the price on it quickly.

Huh? Only the original US d-pad was rightly criticized. The standard one is perhaps the GOAT of d-pads.

This is a uS centric thread so you are correct about which one I was referring to.

Skyhammer shows what a Jag can do. Too bad it was past its commercial prime at that point.

And the poor Jaguar is screaming in agony running that game, but yes that is the peak complete 3D game for the Jaguar and the only thing I've seen better is that Flying Dragon demo for an unreleased game that ran at 4fps.

However, we sill don't know how far it can go in 2D. I wish homebrewers would work on that instead of chasing the magic power theory.

Didn't the Jaguar have a hardware register bug which limited the amount of actual RAM that could be addressed? Combining that with the already small size of carts compared to CDs, and how the Jaguar CD had its own hardware design failures (they used the audio CD standard instead of the CD-ROM one for more space, but that made consistently reading data much more finicky plus the disc drive itself would mess up the discs), I don't think we'd of gotten much more in the way of showstopping 2D games from that system over the course of the generation unless the design shortcomings were addressed with a Jaguar 2.

The Jaguar did have great blitter functionality. However I think another issue that would've held back 2D on Jaguar looking as good as the best 2D on the Neo-Geo or Sega Saturn is the level of developer talent Atari had compared to SNK and Sega. The art direction for some of the games you listed like Kasumi Ninja are just straight-up garish in a few ways, there's not a lot at an artistic level that melds to provide a thematic consistency, and IMO any game's visual prowess is a strong mix of technical and artistic traits.

There are some 2D Jaguar games which avoid that issue like Super Burnout, the rally game and of course Rayman (which has an extremely interesting history with its ports, considering some of the wildly different visual changes among every single version, a lot for reasons purely out of taste), but that type of polish was atypical of the Jaguar software scene during its commercial run sadly.

It was atypical because of the demands for developers to add stuff to games they didn't need to add. The games you brought up that didn't have such problems were designed for the Jaguars strengths, I'm sure Atari would have loved to tell the Super Burnout devs to add texture mapped polygonal buildings on the side of the road for no reason if they could.

but the development toll issues you bring up were mostly a problem with 3D games not 2D. The tools that were actually documented for developers were lent best to 2D and flat shaded polygons in some cases, though much of that was undocumented. The reason why we didn't see more 2D advancement was because Atari was shunning many 2D games and telling developers it had contact with to screw what they were doing and add this and that because we have to do something about that damn 3DO and Playstation. There was one time (allegedly) that Atari was told by a developer if they know how that adding some of their vain requests to a game would drop performance and playability by 15%, and they responded "well actually it's more around 25% but we don't care:, and based on developer interviews about how Atari acted, I find these stories believable.

But in the end all these decisions were only there just to say they could do it, none of it was done to improve sales because they never had the money to take advantage if sales did improve. Sam's Atari was known for acting like they were better than everyone.

The most interesting thing about that era is the abundance of different propositions from all those consoles. Almost nobody seemed to have a clear grasp of the market, yet everyone seemed to see promise in it. Yet you can see nobody really got why Nintendo was successful and Sega managed to compete with them for a few years, and nobody seemed to have a solid vision of the future.

You can makes this case by just looking at the consoles that released then.

3DO, PlayStation, Pippin, Commodore CD32, the "New" Compact Disc Interactive Multimedia entertainment player (even though it's mostly the same hardware as it was in 1990), Early Sega Saturn, NEC PC-FX, Neo Geo CD, Fujitsu FMV towns, Home Capcom CPS, Bandia FMV system, Tandy VIS, cancelled Play Station, Atari Jaguar, Nintendo Satellaview BS-X, Laser Active, most had no idea what would work in the future.

3DO and Sony were the only ones that seemed to have gotten it right, and Sega joined in by force. Nintendo had the benefit of delaying their console a year. Technically, so did Apple but Apple just thought a MAC based console would sell just based on the fact it had MAC games. Remember this is pre-Ipod Apple where experts were thinking that the company would go under in a few years.

Yeah you probably know more than me but it's an interesting thought. And like I said I can't find any hard data on the read speeds. Do you think a cart from that era would load games just as quick if the capacity was the same as a CD?

That would depend on not just the drive speed, but the quality of the CD drive.

I've seen budget 4X drives in the past lost the same CD slower or have reading problems than a premium 4X drive, both in mint condition.

 

[RAIDEN1]

The Atari Jaguar was what the CD32 was for Commodore....a bungled console with not much thought given to what is under the hood and couldn't go toe-to-toe with the competition..

 

[cireza]

Yeah you probably know more than me but it's an interesting thought. And like I said I can't find any hard data on the read speeds. Do you think a cart from that era would load games just as quick if the capacity was the same as a CD?

The MegaDrive natively sees 4 MB at most, then you have to rely on mappers and bank switching, which is pretty much instant. I suppose you could go pretty far with this, and don't know the limit in terms of ROM size.

But in my opinion, if you are doing a MegaDrive game bigger than 4 MB, then you are not developing on the right console. Cartridge consoles were never meant to push gigantic ROMs.

 

[cireza]

The Sega CD would be close to $99 when the Saturn

It wouldn't, especially if it was a stand alone console with all the MegaDrive hardware added on top. The SEGA CD alone embeds much more expensive components than the MD. MD could eventually drop to 99$, but a combo MD + SEGA CD ? Would have never happened.

 

[Futaleufu]

No it didn't, that would mean in 1990. Riding Hero, Legend of Joe, and Magician Lord where great compared to Mega Drive and SNES but not the Jaguar.

In 1990 you had Nam 1975, it looks better than any Jaguar game from 1993. In 1993 you had Samurai Shodown, Fatal Fury Special and 3 Count Bout that look better than any Jaguar game.

 

[Lucifers Beard]

I loved this console. I remember my dad buying one and it was the first place I ever played Doom. Amazing experience back when I was a nipper. I also absolutely adored Alien vs Predator on that thing and Iron Soldier! Classics

 

[Eddie-Griffin]

The Atari Jaguar was what the CD32 was for Commodore....a bungled console with not much thought given to what is under the hood and couldn't go toe-to-toe with the competition..

This is a bad example because the CD32 didn't have enough money either, and most people are still confused why Commodore released the console knowing they would run out of money making it. So higher sales would have mean bankruptcy anyway. So you can't really blame the console not being competitive when the consoles was already dead, the Jaguar was also a console that was already dead. People keep assuming failed consoles ailed because of the competition or the games were not generating excitement, when in the Jaguars case they were when it was announced, and did for a few games like Alien Vs Predator, but as I shown in with the Jaguar software chart earlier, the problem was Atari couldn't produce any cartridges in high number.

It wouldn't, especially if it was a stand alone console with all the MegaDrive hardware added on top.

It wouldn't have the Mega Drive hardware that's the part you aren't getting.

The Sega CD system 2 was $199 in 1994, and one of the reasons why the CD was costly is because they had to add a lof of pointless hardware so it could work with the Mega Drive if you look at the background of the tech inside. It's the same reason why the PCE CD was costly and why NEC put out the stand alone CD/Hucard consoles, and even a CD-only console which all allowed them to drop the price lower. The Sega CD being tied to the MD is exactly why it had so many issues with it's games, they should have just made stand alone hardware from the start.

Also it had a 1X drive which was dirt cheap in 1994. it would ahve been closed, even the PC CD add on was cheaper than the Sega CD add on because of how expensive it was to produced tying it to the MD.

In 1993 you had Samurai Shodown, Fatal Fury Special and 3 Count Bout that look better than any Jaguar game.

No they don't. and the Jaguar can handle all those games, even 3DO had Sham Sho and the only compromise it had is 30fps, although the fps is said to be higher if you force 3DO to use 240p mode instead of 480i, and that console is much worse at 2D than the Jaguar on average. 3DO Gex runs at 30fps, SSFIIX runs at 60fps but is missing parallax in several stages. I don't even know what Sailor Moon runs at, 20? 15fps? Same with Yu Yi Hakusho.

Neo Geo wasn't much of a scaling machine either, to try and push that you need expensive carts with internal enhancements, and those wouldn't come until later and even then the Neo Geo could not handle something like Super Burnout, or most of the gifs in the OP.

The Neo Geo hardware seems to be close to the Sega Outrun arcade board in 1985.

The Neo Geo can't scale sprites to larger size, nor can it do it fast enough, it can't rotate although that's not necessarily needed, and while it can shrink sprites down in size (not scaling) but there are limitation to that, it can't scale sprites upward. It also had limits in how detailed the sprites can be, it's main advantage was large roms which can be used to store effects, prerendered sprites, and animation, Even very compressed FMV. That's the only advantage it has over the Jaguar.

A game like mark of the wolves isn't actually technically impressive. It LOOKS good due tot he artstyle and what you can cram into a large Neo Geo ROM, but it's not showcasing 2D capabilities for the next generation, it's still the same hardware with the same limitations as it had in 1990 outside what bit could be improved by adding stuff to the oversized carts. This is actually what the main problem was with some of the latter ports on consoles at the time until the Dreamcast, not that the Neo Geo had 2D power that was ahead of t's time for 10 years, the Neo-geo was outdated in 1993.

All the stuff you seen on the system that made people impressed at what it can do are not showing you any improved or advanced 2D techniques, it's the same 2D you saw with Blues Journey (lol) and Fatal Fury 1, but now you can make Mark of the wolves look much better, add your cutscenes, and push more animations. All extremely expensive stuff that doesn't have anything to do with better 2D technology, nothing.

The only case of Neo Geo trying to scale anything (which it really can't do) is Riding Hero, which isn't particularly impressive.

Every generation of Neo Geo game just looks better and adds more to the same games that you saw the previous generation, but doesn't actually add anything new in 2D capability. I think bias due to repeated tarring of the Jaguar through misinformation makes it hard for people to except it was better hardware for 2D than it. Half the games in the OP use mostly the 68K and not much else with Ataris more powerful chip set. The only thing the Neo Geo has over the Jaguar hardware wise is the oversized carts, an advantage that can make the Saturn also have to scale down some animations, but it's not because the Saturn isn't "strong enough" to handle the Neo Geos outdated 2D capabilities which have nothing to do with packing a bunch of sprites to ROM.

 

[cinnamonandgravy]

another reminder this was the controller:

 

[SpiceRacz]

I can't speak to any of the technical stuff, but I did own two Jaguars and didn't care for it at all. I hadn't seen one in person, ever, and ended up finding one at a yard sale and Goodwill within 2 months of each other. Between owning one and emulation, I've played most of the library. It's a really unimpressive console with a handful of good games.

 

[Futaleufu]

No they don't. and the Jaguar can handle all those games, even 3DO had Sham Sho and the only compromise it had is 30fps, although the fps is said to be higher if you force 3DO to use 240p mode instead of 480i, and that console is much worse at 2D than the Jaguar on average. 3DO Gex runs at 30fps, SSFIIX runs at 60fps but is missing parallax in several stages. I don't even know what Sailor Moon runs at, 20? 15fps? Same with Yu Yi Hakusho.

The 3DO port of Samurai Shodown is missing a lot of animation frames, not enough RAM for all the animation data and the sound is noticeably muffled. Even the PS1 ports of the first 2 Samurai games suffer from muffled audio. At the time Neo Geo was doing things that no other console could because they didn't have the hardware resources to run NG games properly. Even the NG CD by 1997 couldn't have 1:1 ports because 7 MB of RAM were not enough anymore.

And the whole "it's just a lot of MB in roms" wasn't trivial at all, in 2D games nobody was putting as much resources in development as SNK. By 1995 SNK was releasing games that wouldnt fit the CPS2 rom size limit and by the time they released Garou that game had more data than 32 bit Street Fighter 3 Third Strike despite having less characters.

Could Jaguar have an arcade accurate port of Samurai Shodown 1? Maybe. Could Atari release a 17 MB cartridge in 1994? Zero chances.

 

[Daniel Thomas MacInnes]

another reminder this was the controller:

It really must be said: the Atari Jaguar joypad isn’t that bad. Weird? Out of left field? Puzzling? Absolutely. But it was comfortable and worked very well. I’ve dealt with far worse.

 

[Ozzie666]

According to this thread and the Jaguar support force (who knew) the NEO GEO is now crap 2D because it uses big ROM sizes and added nothing new in the 2D space?. But the Jaguar is supposedly this holy grail of 2D abilities in 1993 and brought something new to the table? Are we really comparing the Jaguar hardware to 2D arcade boards like NEO GEO, CPS2, Midway Units and whatever Taito system was in play?

If you compare 1993 home consoles maybe?, but even modern games made on Genesis with huge carts seem pretty impressive today and just show how far those systems can be pushed. But wait, adding bigger ROMS is not good and brings nothing new to the table. The 3D0 certainly gave 2D a fair crack but was held back by CD media and RAM limitations. Hey guess what, so was and would the Jaguar be held back too. I don't recall the Jaguar doing much in the vein of Samurai Showdown or Street Fighter 2, both very nice looking ports for CD media games.

Ray Man is nice and might be the best 2D the Jaguar system can do, or did. All those Amiga cast offs surely don't help at all. But Ray Man looked good on everything.

I'm not buying it.

 

[TheDreadLord]

It really must be said: the Atari Jaguar joypad isn’t that bad. Weird? Out of left field? Puzzling? Absolutely. But it was comfortable and worked very well. I’ve dealt with far worse.

The Jag pro controller is actually pretty good as well. It must also be highlighted that some games do support rotary control but this requires modding a controller and adding a knob to it. It seems that Atari was planning to launch something like this but they were a bit short on money and had to prioritize where to invest.

 

[cartman414]

The Atari Jaguar was what the CD32 was for Commodore....a bungled console with not much thought given to what is under the hood and couldn't go toe-to-toe with the competition..

The CD32 could have been profitable (if marginally so) had it not been for Commodore getting struck down by that patent troll. (And also for their execs not being greedy meatheads.)

 

[Agent X]

The Jaguar did have great blitter functionality. However I think another issue that would've held back 2D on Jaguar looking as good as the best 2D on the Neo-Geo or Sega Saturn is the level of developer talent Atari had compared to SNK and Sega. The art direction for some of the games you listed like Kasumi Ninja are just straight-up garish in a few ways, there's not a lot at an artistic level that melds to provide a thematic consistency, and IMO any game's visual prowess is a strong mix of technical and artistic traits.

This is a good summary of one of the biggest obstacles that plagued the Jaguar's commercial life.

From a technical perspective, the Jaguar hardware could have easily been home to the finest 2D games of the day. Atari simply didn't have the resources to attract the top-tier developers. They kind of "settled" for mostly lower-tier developers who couldn't or wouldn't develop for Nintendo and Sega. There were a few scrappy upstarts that occasionally pulled off a miracle (the legendary Jaguar version of NBA Jam Tournament Edition being a good example), but most of these (including Atari's own in-house crew) just couldn't pull it off.

Let's look at a game like Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy. As one of the Jaguar's earliest games, it shows off great potential, with lots of large, high-color prerendered sprites bouncing around the screen. In that regard, it's certainly above the Genesis, SNES, or even NeoGeo. (This game will be on the Atari 50 compilation later this year, if you want to see for yourself.) Unfortunately, while some sprites and backgrounds look great, the presentation as a whole lacks cohesion. It gets worse, because the sound package is awful--there is absolutely no music during gameplay, very little music elsewhere (which sounds like it was sampled from a cheap two-channel toy keyboard), and very weak sound effects. The gameplay seemed focused on throwing 10 different weapons at your disposal, apparently because they felt obligated to make full use of the numeric keypad.

Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy feels more like an "interactive demo" of the system's graphical capabilities, rather than a gripping and engaging space shooter. The visual design appears to have been heavily inspired by the 1989 Lynx launch title Gates of Zendocon, but that's where the similarities end. Gates of Zendocon was a significantly better game, and is still very enjoyable even today.

Kasumi Ninja is another good example, which has already been discussed in this thread. Some portions of the graphics do look very nice, matching or exceeding the best 2D fighting games of the time with its high color palette and good use of parallax scrolling. But the art direction just wasn't there, and the fighting engine was crude and simplistic. The 3D character selection sequence seemed to be tossed in randomly just to give it some element of "3D-ness" to differentiate it from other fighting games, but it looks tacky now. The developer of this game (Hand Made Software) made several very cool Lynx games prior to Kasumi Ninja, so they did have some talent, but this game wasn't a good look for them.

Blue Lightning was OK, but the Lynx version (which came out six years earlier) was a much better game overall. (I'm sensing a pattern here.) At least this one did have a rockin' soundtrack, though!

I don't want to sound like I'm knocking the Jaguar, because it really did have some excellent games. We could see that even from the first post by Eddie-Griffin . There was certainly lot of missed potential, but I'm happy to celebrate some of its games that do hold up to this day.

 

[nkarafo]

This is wrong. A 4 MB game would not load instantly on SEGA CD for example. A lot of games are enhanced MD ports, they probably aren't that much bigger, they still have loading times. Mortal Kombat is an example. You get loadings for Shang Tsung morphs as well. This remains true for all following games on 32 bits systems with discs.

I think the tiny RAM and the CD latency was the issue here.

At 1x speed (150kb) it would take less than 10 seconds to load the whole game (MK1 Genesis is 1MB) into RAM without the music (assuming the loading was serial from start to finish, without the drive moving to random places). But because the RAM is so tiny (it has what, a few KBs?) It means the CD needs to be accessed way too often to load small bits at the time.

But it's not the read speed that makes the loading terrible, i think it's mostly the latency. Most of that time is probably the drive trying to get to the correct place. Since the game is a VS fighter, it doesn't know which fighter you will choose next. So the data of the fighters and their animations, sounds, etc, are basically in random places in the disk. Therefore, you will have to wait for the drive to find them and then load them.

The tiny RAM and CD drive latency is what caused the Shang Tsung pauses. Theoretically, if the RAM was big enough (MK 1 is a 1MB game, so let's say 1+MB or RAM) it would load the whole game at boot and no additional loading times would be needed.

 

[nkarafo]

Neo Geo wasn't much of a scaling machine either, to try and push that you need expensive carts with internal enhancements, and those wouldn't come until later and even then the Neo Geo could not handle something like Super Burnout, or most of the gifs in the OP.

The Neo Geo hardware seems to be close to the Sega Outrun arcade board in 1985.

The Neo Geo can't scale sprites to larger size, nor can it do it fast enough, it can't rotate although that's not necessarily needed, and while it can shrink sprites down in size (not scaling) but there are limitation to that, it can't scale sprites upward. It also had limits in how detailed the sprites can be, it's main advantage was large roms which can be used to store effects, prerendered sprites, and animation, Even very compressed FMV. That's the only advantage it has over the Jaguar.

A game like mark of the wolves isn't actually technically impressive. It LOOKS good due tot he artstyle and what you can cram into a large Neo Geo ROM, but it's not showcasing 2D capabilities for the next generation, it's still the same hardware with the same limitations as it had in 1990 outside what bit could be improved by adding stuff to the oversized carts. This is actually what the main problem was with some of the latter ports on consoles at the time until the Dreamcast, not that the Neo Geo had 2D power that was ahead of t's time for 10 years, the Neo-geo was outdated in 1993.

All the stuff you seen on the system that made people impressed at what it can do are not showing you any improved or advanced 2D techniques, it's the same 2D you saw with Blues Journey (lol) and Fatal Fury 1, but now you can make Mark of the wolves look much better, add your cutscenes, and push more animations. All extremely expensive stuff that doesn't have anything to do with better 2D technology, nothing.

The only case of Neo Geo trying to scale anything (which it really can't do) is Riding Hero, which isn't particularly impressive.

Every generation of Neo Geo game just looks better and adds more to the same games that you saw the previous generation, but doesn't actually add anything new in 2D capability. I think bias due to repeated tarring of the Jaguar through misinformation makes it hard for people to except it was better hardware for 2D than it. Half the games in the OP use mostly the 68K and not much else with Ataris more powerful chip set. The only thing the Neo Geo has over the Jaguar hardware wise is the oversized carts, an advantage that can make the Saturn also have to scale down some animations, but it's not because the Saturn isn't "strong enough" to handle the Neo Geos outdated 2D capabilities which have nothing to do with packing a bunch of sprites to ROM.

I agree that the Jaguar is a more powerful 2D hardware. It does scaling, has higher resolution and all that fluff. But that means nothing if you don't have enough space to store 2D assets. 2D graphics need space.

The reason why Neo-Geo games looked very impressive and managed to keep the system alive for so long was the big carts, sure. That was an important factor. They were able to store a ton of sprite animations and detailed backgrounds. Sure the Jaguar would be able to handle every Neo-Geo game probably. But they would never release such a huge cart on it. So they would have to cut most animations, make the sprites smaller, etc. So i don't see how the big carts aren't an important technical advantage for you.

Now Rayman is an interesting case. I think it looks better than any Neo Geo game, despite being on a tiny cart. But if you look at it more carefully, you will see how the game is optimized in such way. The biggest factor is the animations. In any other 2D game you need many different sprites to depict different animations. In most cases, the whole sprite needs to be redrawn in a different position for every frame, just like any cartoon. But Rayman skips that with it's "limbless" system. To animate a punch, Rayman only needs to throw his floating fist really fast. That's it. No extra animations are needed. Just the move the floating hand sprite really fast and maybe change it to depict a fist. All sprites in this game work like that and have very few actual frames of animation. That saves a lot of space to draw the impressive and detailed environments and everything else.

Let's look at a game like Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy.

This is a classic case of impressive graphics technically, but awful art direction.

The game is one of the ugliest i have ever seen. It literally has random clipart images attacking you at some point.

It looks so ugly and sounds so bad that it actually made me feel depressed. I was imagining myself being stuck with this game after paying real money for it and it made me feel bad. I don't remember many games having this effect on me.

 

[Chiggs]

The Jaguar is one of the worst consoles of all time, and if I’m not mistaken, the hardware had a fault that developers had to work around, which potentially led to some of the shittiness exhibited.

AVP was alright, though.

 

[alabtrosMyster]

Yeah this is what I found. I think that's access time. But I can't find actual read speed that the data can be transfered.
Like I said would I just wanna see a comparison of the same game at the same size on cart and CD and see the difference in load times.

This is interesting, but kind of moot, the CD on the Sega CD gives about 150KB/sec but its access time is in the hundreds of milliseconds (as opposed to nano seconds for the carts).

So the carts are used as an extension of the system's RAM, this is why consoles need so little of it, they just point to the address of the tiles they need to display whenever they need one.

A system like the sega CD had 6mb of RAM, so it could store quite a bit of data for a 16-bit machine, which is why some games like Mortak Kombat have more animation and a few more details than the cart, the machine can.

Even better, look at what was made with the PCEngine CD Using the Arcade Card (a wopping 16mb or 2MB of RAM).

Back to the Jaguar, it would have been fun to see how it handled Neo Geo or similar arcade games of the time, especially with enough room to store them, Konami and others had pretty impressive 2D machines.

 

[Daniel Thomas MacInnes]

The Jag pro controller is actually pretty good as well. It must also be highlighted that some games do support rotary control but this requires modding a controller and adding a knob to it. It seems that Atari was planning to launch something like this but they were a bit short on money and had to prioritize where to invest.

Rest assured that once my Jaguar arrives, the first thing I will do is pack up one of the controllers and send it to an Ebay seller who can install the rotary dial. It's worth it just for Tempest 2000 (one of my all-time favorites), and it also works with the indie/homebrew title Rebooteroids. I'd love to see that rotary dial used for racing games, especially now that Atari ST games are being ported over (also, please port over Amiga games).

 

[Havoc2049]

Rest assured that once my Jaguar arrives, the first thing I will do is pack up one of the controllers and send it to an Ebay seller who can install the rotary dial. It's worth it just for Tempest 2000 (one of my all-time favorites), and it also works with the indie/homebrew title Rebooteroids. I'd love to see that rotary dial used for racing games, especially now that Atari ST games are being ported over (also, please port over Amiga games).

Check around, you may be able to get a really nice rotary controller for the Jag. Tempest 2000 plays great with the d-pad.

BTW, welcome to the club, sucker!
You done f!cked up, kid. j/k

 

[Daniel Thomas MacInnes]

Check around, you may be able to get a really nice rotary controller for the Jag. Tempest 2000 plays great with the d-pad.

BTW, welcome to the club, sucker!
You done f!cked up, kid. j/k

True story: I have a set of alphabet/number flash cards for my 2yo daughter, there are illustrations of animals on them. She pulled out the set of cards, dumped them into a plastic bucket, and which one is sitting on top, staring at me? The Jaguar, of course. The universe is sending me a message, either a thumbs-up or the razzies.

Oh, and last week, one of her toy cars that has a dead battery suddenly decided to start making noises all day long. Zoing! Ribbit! Did I mention the apartment lies across the street from a cemetery? Yeah.

 

[cireza]

I think the tiny RAM and the CD latency was the issue here.

At 1x speed (150kb) it would take less than 10 seconds to load the whole game (MK1 Genesis is 1MB) into RAM without the music (assuming the loading was serial from start to finish, without the drive moving to random places). But because the RAM is so tiny (it has what, a few KBs?) It means the CD needs to be accessed way too often to load small bits at the time.

But it's not the read speed that makes the loading terrible, i think it's mostly the latency. Most of that time is probably the drive trying to get to the correct place. Since the game is a VS fighter, it doesn't know which fighter you will choose next. So the data of the fighters and their animations, sounds, etc, are basically in random places in the disk. Therefore, you will have to wait for the drive to find them and then load them.

The tiny RAM and CD drive latency is what caused the Shang Tsung pauses. Theoretically, if the RAM was big enough (MK 1 is a 1MB game, so let's say 1+MB or RAM) it would load the whole game at boot and no additional loading times would be needed.

Since the game is actually so tiny on disc once you ignore the video, seek time (moving from one place to another on the disc) is very short as everything is stacked. Also the console knows where the data is, obviously. The console only loads between the battles, but it doesn't load anything once it is done. The first loading is longer since it loads both characters and background, but which each subsequent battle, the first character remains in RAM so only the next opponent and background have to be loaded.

The SEGA CD has 768 KB of RAM if I remember correctly. That's quite a lot for the time, but still not enough to load a 2 MB game intirely (MK1 is 2 MB, not one). However you can fit without issue two fighters, a background and other variables used to run the engine.