Was the Atari Jaguar really 64-bit? - Games and Deep Thoughts collide

[Diabeetus]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Jaguar

The Atari Jaguar is a console that, throughout it's run, claimed to be a 64-bit console. The first of it's kind, in fact. Quite a bold claim, but it was a claim they stood by until the bitter end.

Did the cat have the claws it claimed to have, though? Watch a few of these clips, I'll let you be the judge:

So, as you can imagine, consumers were quite skeptical over the idea that this was the first 64-bit console. The Angry Video Game Nerd's review of the console (which is where you probably first heard of it) dedicated a part of it's first half on speculating whether Atari was lying or not:

So, is the Atari Jaguar actually 64-bit? Or is this all a load of horse shit?

Spoiler: Muh opinion

It probably is 64-bit on a technical scale, but it was just that the geniuses who developed the games couldn't make a product that made use of it's capabilities. The technology was most likely new for it's era, so most people couldn't figure out how to use it and make it do shit that looked 64-bit. I could be wrong, but I'm just calling how I see it.

 

[PT 404]

2x32 bit processors does not equal 64 bits, even if the memory data channel was that wide.

We were robbed of the Atari Panther.

 

[Diabeetus]

We were robbed of the Atari Panther.

Wasn't that entirely Atari's fault for being incompetent and stuff?

 

[Commander Keen]

There was someone a long time ago who broke into the console and said it was 64-bit, but the technology hadn’t caught up so the games weren’t.

 

[sasazuka]

I don't really have an opinion about the 32-bit vs. 64-bit claim, but, for a "3D" polygon-fill game released on a home console in 1994, Checkered Flag looks pretty nice. It can at least hold its own against the Sega Genesis port of Virtua Racing which was really only possible on a 16-bit console because Sega included a processor in the cartridge itself.

I know these untextured polygon graphics would look a bit rudimentary after the release of the Saturn and especially the Playstation the following year, but, purely from a 1994 perspective, they would still have seemed quite impressive for a home console unless you expected home consoles to have graphics on par with the arcade version of Daytona USA, which was a bit unrealistic an expectation as the first console that could have done the arcade version of Daytona USA justice without the severe graphical downgrades seen in the Saturn version was the Dreamcast and that was still 4 years off in Japan and 5 years away everywhere else.

 

[BeanBidan]

Wasn't that entirely Atari's fault for being incompetent and stuff?

Atari has always been full of incompetence which is why they single handedly put the Gaming market into the red before Nintendo saved it.

 

[Káiser Futura]

Atari has always been full of incompetence which is why they single handedly put the Gaming market into the red before Nintendo saved it.

Nintendo didn't save the gaming market in general. At best, it saved the home console market.

 

[Diabeetus]

Nintendo didn't save the gaming market in general. At best, it saved the home console market.

They did something. I do think that Nintendo fans blow their impact way out of proportion.

 

[BeanBidan]

Nintendo didn't save the gaming market in general. At best, it saved the home console market.

Yea, you're right about that, I should of reiterated myself.

 

[Super Collie]

The Jaguar was "64-bit" but with an asterisk next to it because as @Princess Tinkle Panties said two on-board 32-bit processors "add up" to 64. Hence, "DO THE MATH".

But technologically speaking that doesn't mean literal 64-bit. That's just two 32-bit processors working together. A lot of the hardware of the Jaguar was apparently very troublesome to design for, especially in regards to getting said processors to work simultaneously. For a lot of developers it was just simpler to design their games around utilizing one of the processors because it required far less coding and joining of things together in order to have a game running. Most of the titles released for the console were not using it to its full potential, which is kind of a shame.

 

[Nazi vegeta]

The Jaguar was "64-bit" but with an asterisk next to it because as @Princess Tinkle Panties said two on-board 32-bit processors "add up" to 64. Hence, "DO THE MATH".

But technologically speaking that doesn't mean literal 64-bit. That's just two 32-bit processors working together. A lot of the hardware of the Jaguar was apparently very troublesome to design for, especially in regards to getting said processors to work simultaneously. For a lot of developers it was just simpler to design their games around utilizing one of the processors because it required far less coding and joining of things together in order to have a game running. Most of the titles released for the console were not using it to its full potential, which is kind of a shame.

so that's kind of what happened with the saturn, except we actually got some games that did use its juice.

 

[Diabeetus]

Most of the titles released for the console were not using it to its full potential, which is kind of a shame.

Though some of the games released for the ol' Jag were pretty cool. Tempest 2000 and the Doom port played well, and I personally like the absurdist, experimental energy of Attack of the Mutant Penguins. But that's just me, and I'm a faggot.

 

[Martys_not_smarty]

No, by the logic Atari used it's like saying you have ten 9mm bullets and that makes 90mm. The PC Engine/Turbografx was also in a similar conundrum, it was called the Turbografx 16 but only it's graphics processor was 16 bit the cpu was 8.

 

[XYZpdq]

iirc Neo-Geo offered some similar questionable math

 

[REGENDarySumanai]

No, by the logic Atari used it's like saying you have ten 9mm bullets and that makes 90mm. The PC Engine/Turbografx was also in a similar conundrum, it was called the Turbografx 16 but only it's graphics processor was 16 bit the cpu was 8.

iirc Neo-Geo offered some similar questionable math

But both of those had a plethora of amazing games. The Jaguar was basically a wet fart. Also, the Turbo's CPU was basically the same CPU in the NES, give or take.

 

[XYZpdq]

But both of those had a plethora of amazing games. The Jaguar was basically a wet fart. Also, the Turbo's CPU was basically the same CPU in the NES, give or take.

Oh yeah I'm not saying Neo-Geo and Jaguar are comparable at all, but yeah iirc the TG16 was basically a Famicom with a video card (not that there's anything wrong with that).

 

[Big moth tiddies]

Atari's bullshit excuse for its console being 64 bit is that two cpu's are spitting shit down a 64 bit pipeline. This might seem like a justification for their "64 bit" claim, but it isn't. Having a 64 bit bus doesn't make your console 64 bit.

What truly killed the jaguar is that it was a pain in the ass to work with, it had bugs out the ass, incomplete documentation sent to devs, and because devs didn't know how or didn't want to fool with their shitty slapdash two cpu solution, they used the motorola 68000 to do most of the shit, and since it was a 16/32 bit chip, it had roughly the same power as a genesis with a 32 bit gpu.

Essentially, Atari said, "use the 68000 to manage the two 32bit processors." and devs said "lol no." or "we don't know how to do that and you haven't told us how." (regarding the missing documentation.) We know this thanks to people who have dug into several jaguar games and looked at the code.

 

[Nobunaga]

They lied
But not like the industry has become any better, sony still tries to trick people into thinking the ps4 is capable of playing games in 60fps, microsoft still pretends the xbox isnt just a shitty pc and nintendo.....i dunno, pretend their new games have soul?

 

[Martys_not_smarty]

They lied
But not like the industry has become any better, sony still tries to trick people into thinking the ps4 is capable of playing games in 60fps, microsoft still pretends the xbox isnt just a shitty pc and nintendo.....i dunno, pretend their new games have soul?

Nintendo, or more to say the fanboys still cream their panties about how the gimmick machine that cost half as much as it's competitors with a pack in game sold more units when the 360 was in it's pre CoD glory and plagued with the red ring of death and the PS3 was still "599 US dollars", yeah it's like saying McDonalds is better because they sold more happy meals to Shake Shack and Five Guys' burgers.

 

[Joey Caruso]

Doesn't matter how many processors you have on the board, if you can only store 32-bit values in the registers then it's a fucking 32-bit system.

Also, the number of bits doesn't make nearly as much difference in a system's capabilities as the sheer amount of power behind the processors. It just so happened that as processors started getting better they started increasing the base size of the registers.