Episode: 3732
Title: HPR3732: My experience owning an Atari Jaguar
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3732/hpr3732.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 04:46:17

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,732 for Tuesday the 22nd of November 2022.
Today's show is entitled, My Experience Owning in Atari Jaguar.
It is hosted by Mode 7 and is about 33 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, I talk about my experience with the Atari Jaguar, Jaguar CD.
Nihau, hello, Hacker Public Radio.
This is Mode 7.
Recording a really quick show, I'm going to talk a little bit about the Atari Jaguar.
I really want to do a technical episode, I'm going to need some preparation and reference
material for that, so I'm not going to do that right now, but I'm driving and I thought
that because the queue is low, there's a call for shows and I've been so informed that
I officially owe Ken Fallon an episode.
I'm going to go ahead and do a quick one, something I can talk about without reference
and a lot of preparation is my experience with the Atari Jaguar and it's a game system
that I've owned since about 1996 or 1987.
You may or may not know very much about it, if you're not in the video games at all, you
may not think about it, if you're in any kind of retro games or you were in the games
during the 90s, you probably know something about it.
There's a lot of reference to it on YouTube in different scenarios where people are talking
about how bad it has definitely been the joke of a lot of people and then it makes a lot
of those, I don't think you see them as much anymore, but for a while everybody was doing
top 10 worst this, top 10 worst that in video games.
Top 10 worst lists often time included Atari Jaguar stuff, I don't know why, but I've been
to talk about my experience with the system, it was a good experience, I generally like
the system quite a bit, I still have my system and I've got the box, I bought it new, I've
got the Jaguar CD unit that goes with it and I've got one controller, it's the original
controller that came with the system, I've got a composite cable so instead of using
the RF converter it's using composite video, not the most amazing picture in the world
but not that bad, so yeah I'm just going to kind of go into some of the things I enjoy
about it or like about it, some things I dislike about it and maybe a few things off to
the side here and there, so it's a bit of a ramble, I'm good at rambling, so let's start
off with the system, the hardware, what comes in the box, it came with a pack in game
called CyberMorph, it's a cartridge based system, so this is a cartridge game and because
it is a cartridge game it does have limited storage capacity, the system has capability
for audio quality, excuse me, CD quality audio, however with limited storage you don't
always get that sort of audio, usually they are using the storage space for actual game
play and graphics and so on, so sounds, capabilities are there but cartridge limitations exist,
so let me start, I'll talk about the controller for a minute, the controller is a point
of much controversy, many people have complained that the controller is uncomfortable and they
also complain about the layout of the controller in terms of the buttons that are available,
I have personally never had a problem with the controller being uncomfortable and I've
played that system from the time I was a teenager onto now, so for me it's not a problem,
I will always enjoy using the controller and I never even thought about whether it was
comfortable or uncomfortable, so it was kind of just like a transparent interface to
manipulating what was going on on the screen, I never even thought twice about it until
I heard somebody complain about how bad the controller was, I was a little confused
but whatever to each their own, the layout is not much different from a mega drive controller
or Sega Genesis and so it's got three face buttons, it's got a directional pad and it's
got a start button but it also has an option button so it does have what I would think would
be equivalent to like a select button on some of the older Nintendo systems, and then
of course the big controversial addition to that controller was the number pad which
is basically like a full number keypad beneath the rest of the controller like underneath it,
it's fully accessible with your thumbs either thumb, I don't really ever have a problem
using it, I think it's cool, a lot of ways it's very functional, a lot of the games would
actually include a plastic overlay to put on the number pad, what it would do is it would
map different functions in the game to a number, so in Doom for example the weapons were
each mapped to a number, it has its uses, I think it's not a bad design, it's not necessarily
something every system should have a dobs, obviously it's limited as well but I didn't
think it was a problem, I really liked the controller, they did do a second version of the
controller called the Pro Controller and that had three additional face buttons as well
as shoulder buttons, this additional buttons on this Pro Controller were actually mapped
to the same functions as some of the number pad buttons, so if you didn't have a Pro Controller
you could actually access the same functions through the number pad, some games were designed
with the Pro Controller in mind and so I think it was definitely limited and I think it was
like just a few games, like fighting games or similar ones that combined, and so if you
didn't have a Pro Controller you could still play the game and not be losing any of those
button functions, kind of a cool idea though to maintain that backwards compatibility with
the older controller by just mapping it to those number buttons, I think that was smart.
A lot of things Atari did with the Jaguar were very creative and intelligent, one of the
things that I remember very first that just, I mean I was younger and it probably wasn't
as big of a deal as it seemed to be but like there's no reset button on the console and so if
you want to reset your game you just push two buttons on the controller simultaneously
and it was the asterisks and the pound sign, you push those simultaneously and it does
a soft reset on your game, and I thought that was so smart because how many times do you
back in the day have to get about your chair or whatever you're sitting on, walk over
to the console and push the reset button, and in this case you don't have to do that,
so that was kind of a cool innovative feature that Atari did.
They had two controller ports on the system itself, on the back end of the controller there
was an AV output and then there was, there was like a serial communications port I think
it was and it communicated directly to one of the co-processors in the Jaguar, it was
the DSP, the sound processor, so that was typically designed to be used for like communications,
so the modem, it wasn't a modem, it was like a Jaguar LAN adapter kind of thing, it
would allow you to link two Jaguars together and communicate, do me utilize it but it was
so buggy I don't think it was really that playable, I did have one of those little communication
adapters and a friend of mine actually did too but we could never get doomed to link
on but I don't know if we're doing something wrong or what the story was but we just couldn't
get it to work and I might even have been using like the wrong kind of cable but so anyway
that's on the back side and then of course there's the cartridge port, now you can kind
of see on the shell of the Jaguar and you want to look at the image, I'm not going to
do any show notes on this but you can look at the images of the Jaguar and you can kind
of see it's got like a little cut out on the top where what eventually was sold was
a CD add on and that's what it would sit right on top of that cut out and it would connect
into the cartridge line, it had a pass through cartridge so that if you bought the CD
unit you could still play your original cartridges and by plugging them into the CD unit and
then of course if you wanted to play a CD game you just pop a disk in there and turn
on so it was pretty cool in that sense that it didn't live in your functionality by putting
the CD add on on top of the system so the cartridge based games they were usually like you know
one mag two mag four mag games I think they went up to six mag cartridges but Atari was kind
of in control dictating that to some of the developers based on like cost of manufacturing and they
didn't always have six the in fact the smaller storage was always preferred by Atari because you
can make more money that way not have the charge as much for the cartridge but they were still able
to put some pretty impressive games on the system without going into too many of the technical
details just to kind of overview of it it was designed to do both 3D and 2D games 3D was
you know it was capable of 3D but it actually was much more it was much better and two dimensional
games really if you compare it to like the mega drive with this super Nintendo it was it was just
light years ahead it can do things those two systems couldn't do they did they didn't have some
capabilities to do some of the stuff the Jaguar did but oftentimes they had to have like add on
chips on the cartridge so rather than just being able to do it with the chips that they came in
the system they would put stuff like the Super FX chip or you know other helper chips into the
cartridge to do those types of effects but the Jaguar could do it on its own no additional chips
scaling and rotation and all sorts of cool things that would modify tiles or sprites and so
it could do a lot of neat stuff 2D was still very much a core part of gaming at the time but 3D
is where everybody was kind of looking at you know everybody was really excited for 3D games so
the unfortunate thing is they didn't lean heavily enough on the Jaguar's 2D capabilities and make
really impressive 2D games as much as they could have they tried too hard to put 3D games in the
market that worked really games so much as tech demos in a lot of cases but but anyway so the
Jaguar just briefly it does have five processors housed within three different chips and one of
the processors is the Motorola 68000 it was a very common processor at the time it was pretty cheap
to me to include it in the system so that was one of the decisions or one of the factors that played
into the decision included system the other reason cited is that the the folks in Atari wanted to
include something that was familiar to the developers of video games so the Mega Drive actually the
core processor was 68000 so the thought on that was well people can move over from doing game
development on systems like the Mega Drive and they're already going to know one of the processors
because the the real problem was that they were worried that assisting with five processors and
the majority of which were custom chips that were not you know you can just go buy off the shelf
and put them in your console they were they had to be programmed in assembly and they were afraid
that developers wouldn't be able to do it or wouldn't be it wouldn't be a quick enough thing for them
to learn to start producing games real fast so they thought will include the 68000 in there they
can go ahead and learn and learn the system using that and then as they get more comfortable with
the system hopefully they'll start using the custom risk chips a little bit better that really didn't
work that well they didn't really have that many developers to begin with and the people that
stuck around kind of did eventually learn to use the other chips but the motorola chip really
created a lot of technical problems for the system that that's something I'll probably talk
more about when I get my next episode about the technical details of the Jaguar
so by some say the system did have a lot of ports that came on came on the scene that were just
ports of Mega Drive games or you know Omega games or stuff like that they were graphically
as impressive as you wanted to see coming from a system that claimed it was next gen 64 bit it
did have capabilities that exceeded what you would see on the Super Nintendo and Genesis
a lot of times they just were utilized so kind of a shame but they did have a lot of games that
utilized it they did have a lot of games that pushed the system to you know doing 3D stuff
and that was really cool and it also had the capability to do pretty close to photo realistic
graphics in game so whereas games on other systems may have been free rendered they usually
had their color palette limited down or something else to make it work on the system whereas the
Jaguar could actually handle pretty much what was rendered so if they were going to do something
like that it looked pretty good let's see a good game I would use as an example for that system
would be Tempest 2000 is a really really good game it's originally an Atari game it was an Atari
arcade game that had a vector display had vector graphics and the idea behind the game was that you
were sitting atop like a web or tunnel and monsters were coming into you from the other end of
that tunnel and you had to shoot them before they reach you and so as Atari was always good at
simple to learn hard to master and so this game really fit that the update was done by Jeff
Mincher of Lawsoffs and he did a fantastic job moving this game forward into what at the
time was current generation game systems and really utilizing some of the capabilities of the Jaguar
it used polygon render you know fully rendered polygons and things like that in real time
and it ran pretty smooth by today's standards it's definitely not smooth but at the time when
we were all used to saying really choppy 3d really limited choppy 3d with that this was a game that
really showcased running 3d graphics and it was a lot of fun to play it really kept the spirit
of the original but extended it with additional monsters and challenges so I really enjoyed that
game back when I first got it in the 90s but I played today I really still enjoyed it and there
are different iterations of that game that have come along I think Tempest 4000 has been released
on like PlayStation xbox which maybe steam I'm not sure but so if you're interested in kind of
seeing what Tempest is you know you could check those out I'm not sure how close they really
kept it to the Tempest 2000 gameplay I'm not played any of myself but the Jaguar version was
really fun it did get ported to the Saturn in PlayStation but with different results so
obviously different strengths and weaknesses of those systems and so you got just kind of a
different experience but for somebody who's a fan of the Jaguar who owns the Jaguar and played
that game originally on the Jaguar I don't really think there's you just really don't replace
that experience with the ones on the other two systems it's just not the same so that's a
fantastic game if you get a chance to play a Jaguar that's one you really want to play
another game that actually two games I will say are worth checking out Wolfstein 3D was the first
time I ever played Wolfstein was on the Jaguar and I think at least in my experience it's my
favorite version but I think it's probably one of the better movie versions from the time
that they had up to the resolution of the graphics the frame rate was just blinding fast
and the Jaguar handled the Wolfstein engine extremely well no problems with it and it got a lot
of praise from the guys in hit software and how he did the Wolfstein and of course that led to
the development of Doom being ported to the Jaguar and that was a little bit tougher to do
doing this more complex and at the time if for reference you had to have a pretty high-end
computer at the time to play Doom if you did not have a high enough computer high-end but
that computer you were going to play it really easily wasn't going to run very well the Jaguar
ran that game pretty well didn't have the in-game music it wasn't really a limitation of the
system as much as just I don't think it was a feature they got finished before they shipped but
John Carmack worked on that game himself and still said you know the Jaguar is a pretty good
system he did have some suggestions that would have helped the Jaguar probably handle three
graphics better but overall he really like it seems like he really liked the system based on his
comments and he actually a little side note he actually referenced the Jaguar when he was
talking about the complexities of programming games for the PlayStation 3 with the multiple
cell the multiple process or course and stuff he was kind of talking about some of the same
technical problems he'd run into when you deal with the multiple processor system and how he
had run into a Jaguar and I know that was really cool that he would like correlate those two together
PlayStation 3 and the Atari Jaguar saying how ahead of its time the Jaguar was trying to do
things that only years and years later the PlayStation was trying to do with the PlayStation 3 so
I probably should find those articles those would be good to reference in a show probably the
technical show when I talk more about the chips so back on main discussion here the experience I
had with the system so Tempest 2000 was my favorite game I think a couple of my other favorites
beyond to do in Wolfenstein would be Iron Soldier and Alien vs Predator. Alien vs Predator was
the game everybody knew of aside from maybe Tempest 2000 but definitely Alien vs Predator because
it was based on well-known films and it was a 3D game it wasn't polygonal but it did have
it was like doom it was kind of a break-ass engine so it was everybody was waiting for it it had very
almost photorealist in color space so it looked really good it didn't run as good as
everyone had hoped but for the time it was acceptable and it was a very fun game and I don't know
that it I'm not sure the game like quite holds up to what people expect out of games today I
think it's pretty easy to play it for a little while go on board I think I'm going to go play
something else but if you do give it the time and you really kind of get into the game it is a
fun game on its own for what it is it's not terrible it's it's got a lot of exploration and
things like that and it can be slow but I think they were trying to do that to set the
kind of the game a little bit of atmosphere and stuff like that so but when it was released it
was ahead of its time and nothing else on the market really could do that right then I think it
was released slightly before the PlayStation and Saturn came out so it was showcase game
to the Jaguar and I always remember people would if when they found out I had a Jaguar they
would have asked if I had Alien vs Predator because everybody wanted to try it and nobody had a
Jaguar so so there were a number of good games like that those were some of the I think the
gems of the system there were a lot of games that weren't bad games but they just in my opinion
if you had a Jaguar you could get them so they had more games to play if you didn't have a
Jaguar they were going to convince you to run out by all because they were available on other
systems and the Jaguar just wasn't bringing much to the table in terms of adding extra features
to those games so they were just kind of ports again it did have the Motorola 68000 and that did
it did lend itself well to people porting games or some of the other popular computer systems at
the time so the the other thing about the Jaguar I do have the CD add on and it still works
and there are a handful of games that were released for that I think 13 games released for the
Jaguar CD not a lot of good ones in my opinion if you bought the CD unit you got five bundle discs
I want to say there was a demo of the game missed there was Tempest's audio soundtrack which included
techno music for Tempest there were like a number of tracks that they couldn't put on the game
cartridge and actually worth mentioning is that they did have two techno tracks on the Tempest
cartridge that would play when you were playing the game and it matches the sound they're the
game played very very well very very cool soundtrack let's see there was a game called Blue Lightning
which was kind of like afterburner but like more photo realistic graphics and they were I would say
like I guess you'd compare it to other super scalar games like Sega used to do in the arcade so
wasn't wasn't really that fun of a game to be honest it was kind of a cool tech demo
and then there was a game called VidGrid which would have a bunch of music videos I remember Metallica
and SoundGarden and Guns and Roses a few others I can call they had music videos on there so you
it would split the music video up into a grid and mix up all the pieces like one of those sliding
puzzles and then you had to put the pieces back in order while the music video was playing and the
goal was to do that before the music video finished and you could get to the point where you did
pretty well with a little bit of practice some videos were easier than others but then of course
the fun of it was to see how fast you could do it and just keep beating your score and then see the
other game that came along with that would have been now that might have been all the packing
games with the CD game but of the CD games I think my favorite game was Game of Hover Strike and it
was fully 3D it had texture mapping it had you know had lighting effects which were actually
really cool the Jaguars strengths were not in texture mapping or lighting effects so it was
kind of cool to see that come along especially that was around the time the PlayStation was gaining
traction and to see something like you know kind of nearing what some of the early PlayStation games
looked like on the Jaguar CD was pretty neat and for anybody who wanted Jaguars one of those games
you could pull out show your friends just to say see you know my system can do this too but Game
play wise I thought it was a very fun game a lot of people didn't like it so the premise is that
you're piloting a hovercraft tank and so you're not your your hovercraft obviously isn't making any
contact around there's no friction all there set with the ground so you're gonna kind of glide
whatever direction you're moving and you have to do something to kind of stop yourself or move
yourself the other direction and that physics mechanic a lot of people didn't like I thought it
was fun I thought it was fantastic because no other games I've been doing that so I thought it
was a fun experience and it was definitely good playing so I finished that game and I really enjoyed
it they did do a cartridge version of it and I think the cartridge version was released first the
cartridge version was not well-liked to have a lot of kind of game play flaws from my understanding
the game play flaws that everybody did like were fixed in the CD version and so you know I didn't
experience those complaints everybody else must have and I couldn't CD version there were a lot
of really bad CD games they tried to do a part of primal rage and I really don't know what went wrong
with that port if it was just an inexperienced dev team I don't really know what happened but
it wasn't very good the sprites were like half the size of the arcade sprites it looked better than
the 16-bit systems but it wasn't really what you would have expected from the Jaguar but I would
expect that if somebody were to go back and try to recreate that today with some extra time
in efforts and trying to apply what people have learned since the Jaguar has been released and kind
of fallen by the wayside I would bet they could probably recreate the arcade version
most likely at least pretty close so let's see one of the games I didn't talk about was
I didn't actually own early on but I've played recently was NBA Jam and if you were playing games
in the 90s you haven't heard of NBA Jam I don't know where you were but it was pretty popular
even if you didn't like basketball you could have a pretty good time with this game because it was
more of an arcade style game than a basketball simulation but it didn't release on just about
every platform you can imagine I think the game voice-aw release the game gear every other system
I could think of and the very fascinating thing about the Jaguar version is it was done by
high voltage software we kind of look into those guys they started doing development on the Jaguar
I think and since then they've done some interesting stuff it's also interesting stuff but they've
spoken around so anyway high voltage software did this port of NBA Jam and if you look at all the
different versions the Saturn PlayStation whatever you want the Jaguar version is the better version
it's got the better graphics it's got good sound it's just a better version and it's not just me
saying that I mean a lot of people who are giving an honest comparison agree like this is this
is a good version so definitely worth looking in that one if you get the chance to play Jaguar
Defender 2000 another game I didn't have back in the day but I have acquired recently and that's
really fun that's another Jeff Mentor game that one didn't get quite the positive attention that
Tim was 2000 got but in terms of being a good Defender game I quite enjoyed it the complaints I
bustle here that like this gameplay moves too fast you can't really see what's going on on the
screen about using the the anoramic viewpoint the top of the radar thing whatever it's called
if you've never played Defender you have no idea what I'm talking about if you've played Defender
you might have some clue of what I'm rambling about but anyway I thought it was a fun game I think
I've had a really good time playing the game and then there have been you know just to kind of
wrap things up there have been a number of homebrew games released for this system since its demise
and a very fascinating fact about the system is that Atari when they stopped manufacturing and they
left the games market they more or less just said anybody who wants to develop games from the
Jaguar can and they didn't want to basically they just said it's an open system anybody can do it
they didn't actually provide the encryption keys required to encrypt the games and make them run
on the system and I can't remember why that was apparently they were lost the disks were lost
or something but those were found and now everybody's got the encryption ever anybody could produce a
game that would run on the Jaguar so it's pretty cool there are a lot of really good games that
have been released for the Jaguar since then it's pretty ambitious titles one of the I would say one
of the areas where more modern productions are kind of not touching would be 3D doing 3D on the Jaguar
just doesn't see a lot of people want it a lot of developers don't want to do it it much rather
leverage the 2D power of the Jaguar and make games that run at a high frame rate or really nice
rather than produce like low polygon count no texture maps 3D games that people are going to dislike
and have a hard time playing so but there is an active Jaguar development community active
collectors community for a while they buy this stuff almost nothing online like an eBay and stuff
and you know in recent years kind of with the popularity of youtube videos talking about the Jaguar
those prices along with other collecting game collectors items have just gone out like crazy so
you know there's there's some money tied up in clutch with the Jaguar nowadays one of the best
things I think I've probably bought for the Jaguar would be the Jaguar game drag which allows you
to load roms onto it kind of like an agradrive or something like that for the N64 you can load games
onto an SD card or roms onto an SD card and just play them right off the SD card I find that to be so
so valuable because like a lot of those games just work that great but they're going through a lot of
money on eBay right now and I really have no interest in spending $60 on a game that
this mediocre at best just to try it out or just to complete a collection if it's a game I want to
you know play once in a while or something like that I can just put it on the game drive and it's
it's much better so anyway that's that's my Jaguar gaming experience and being a long time owner of
the Jaguar you know I can answer questions people have on it if they've never played it and sorry for
all the road noise it's very bad so you know I want to do this technical episode talking more
about the processors and how they were programmed and I'm not a developer on the Jaguar but I do want to
like I've read it the developer command level times because I think that it's so cool to read how
these machines work and I don't even understand them if they're on the something I can have a very
basic understanding of it but it's still to me it's very fascinating so I'm going to do an
episode talking very specifically about that kind of stuff but yet you know in the meantime if
anybody kind of has questions about the Jaguar related stuff I'd be happy to talk about it they're
definitely people who know more about it than I do but it's very fun system for me and I guess
that I'm going to sign off so Gigi thank you acropublic radio and Zijian goodbye
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