Why was the Atari Jaguar so Difficult to Develop on?

I was a Jag developer. The biggest problem is that the fastest resources are extremely hamstrung so you either write something slow on the 68000 and get the job done in time, or carefully craft small optimized GPU assembly routines like a demoscene coder, swap them in and out as needed, and take years to get it running properly. I remember we wrote all kinds of test benchmarks because it was impossible to know what the savings would really be without doing it both ways.

So Atari came with the phrase "do the math" ... how can I do the math with a flawed hardware? xD Great video.

The Jaguar: A console that was pushed out far too quickly. -The excellent hardware wasn't properly integrated and implemented - couple of tweaks could have made it more robust and powerful. -The support library's were somewhere between useless and non-existent - this made it a pig to develop for on stupidly short timelines. -Atari wasn't in a position to provide sufficient support or marketing - there was too much to do in too little time with insufficient money. It may have bombed anyway, but at least it could have gone down fighting.

It seems like the Jaguar was difficult to develop for for some of the same reasons as the Saturn. Tho Sega had more resources to develop its own games and create better tools

“Just throw in some null ops” that is some old school problem solving....lol

Sooooo, programming a game on an Atari Jaguar was equivalent to trying to eat a hot dog stuck in the spokes of a bicycle wheel whilst moving at 60 mph during an earthquake. 🤔

To quote scotty from star trek 3 "the more they overthink the plumbing the easier it is to stuff up the drain"

I absolutely have no idea what was presented here but sat on my couch, watching the whole video as if I knew what was being explained. 🤣🤣🤣 You a smart dude. Great video!!

That was really interesting! Loved how you explained how the Jaguar works and how objective you were in your commentary! Nicely done!

"So I decided to add it to the stack" ...I see what you did there.

Just stumbled on this, but holy damn is this ever in my wheelhouse of enjoyment! Good stuff man, very good stuff! One of the more easier subs I've ever had the delight of making!

"jagwire" eh, oh boy

I just finished watching your N64, PS3, and now this episode. Great series! After you do the Saturn which is another great choice, I would love a video on the 32X and developing with that while still having the Bottleneck of the Genesis and if you jad the Sega Cd as well, what could be possible with all 3. That woukd be pretty fascinating.

Sounds to me like the hardware and software development tools needed more time in the oven; as they were a bit under-baked. Probably Atari trying to rush the system out and save the company. I actually was one of the first people to own a Jag in ‘93… I had hopes Atari would reclaim their spot on top of the video game world… at that age, I totally bought into the 64-bit marketing stuff. Lol… hindsight!

Jaguar is one of my top 5 systems of all time. It's an interesting machine that has some great original games, some amazing ports and a vibrant homebrew scene. Thanks for taking the time to showcase this underappreciated segment of console gaming history

Your videos are absolutely incredible and I love how digestible they are! They get me interested further in CS through things I already love; good stuff!

That took some effort to make, thank you for that. I didn't closely follow every bit of information you you presented, but two things stood out: UART bug seems like a problem in comms between JAG and another external device (like modem or another Jaguar in some kind of network), not inter-chip communications. MC68K 32-bit issue from my understanding means that you just cannot trust some long word operations in two memory areas. Rest of the memory is fine, other '.l' assembly instructions seem fine, and non-long-word operations are fine (so you can use two move.w or four move.b instead of one move.l). Annoying, but not a deal-breaker. Again, thanks for the interesting vid.

I just bought my third jaguar. Only reason was alien vs predator. It cost $400 this time for a new one, the last one I bought before that was in the mid-90s at Walmart for $50.

Atari Jaguar was awesome

Cool video. The weird hybrid of two 64-bit processors, two 32-bit processors and one 16-bit processor still to this day makes it unclear if the system as a whole is 64-bit as Atari claimed it was.