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Weird take; I wonder what an alternate universe where the Jaguar didn’t rival the Saturn in terms of difficulty to develop for would look like. I’m aware this

Weird take; I wonder what an alternate universe where the Jaguar didn’t rival the Saturn in terms of difficulty to develop for would look like. I’m aware this wouldn’t have solved the other issues - such as the desperate need for a ‘Killer App’, and - of course - the big Sonic/Mario problem of the time, which was a major draw into SEGA or Nintendo’s camp. The system - as is - is probably way more capable than what we were able to see from the software we got. I read that a ton of Jaguar games actually abused the sound chip (I think this was it?) - which was a Z80, or something similarly simple to develop for, and thusly some of the software was literally using maybe 20% of its potential. The previously-mentioned SEGA Saturn would often be similarly abused (though not nearly quite as bad as running most of your program code off the sound chip) where programmers would use only one of the core graphics chips or only of the SH2’s (or both…) which resulted, of course, in much; much poorer performance than the serious powerhouse the Saturn was during its lifetime. Many PlayStation/Saturn ports of the same side by side make this difference brutally obvious. (The Saturn DOOM port is, sadly; a notorious example. It was Carmack’s decision not to run it on the 2 VDP’s - to which he later acknowledged was a mistake.) The Saturn and Jaguar debacles really woke up the industry a lot to caring about developer needs - with documentation and follow through with developer support so poor that even at-the-time behemoth EA refused to support SEGA’s next console, the Dreamcast; in what would’ve been an unthinkable move 5 years before. EDIT: after making some corrections, I realized on editing I pulled all this info from memory; which honestly makes me one hell of a geek, lol…

MBCook 4y ago
For what it’s worth I also remember hearing that the Jaguar was incredibly buggy. If they had more time they probably could have corrected that so developers didn’t have to worry about it.
- drcode 4y ago
  The main problem my team had is that all 4 primary chips in the jaguar shared the same bus, so you'd write code for one chip, but then it would run at <50% the previous speed once it was "in production" with code running on the other chips
  - rocky1138 4y ago
    Ooh this is interesting! Which team was this? Care to share any more information on developing Jaguar games?
tenebrisalietum 4y ago
The Saturn was the one that had SH2 for a main CPU and a 68000 for a sound chip (the predecessor Genesis had a 68000 as main CPU and Z80 as a sound driver) Jaguar had two weird RISC chips (Tom and Jerry) meant to be used as DSPs, and one had a few more instructions for sound, and the other had something a teensy special for graphics. It had a 68000 that was meant to be used as a "manager" and "read the joysticks". To top it off you had the actual display chip (the "Object Processor") which was weird? flexible and programmable in some ways that almost seemed to me to hearken back to Atari's ANTIC chip in its 8-bit line. The 68000 was the only "normal" thing about that whole system.
- MBCook 4y ago
  History repeats itself a lot. I believe some of the early PS2 games were programmed in a similar manner. Devs had trouble getting their head around the Emotion Engine so they used the piece of the hardware they understood well: the older processor. And we know the same thing happened with the PS3. The SPUs were hard to use so many early games practically ignored them, the same way many Jaguar and Saturn games ignored the other processors as much as possible.
- toast0 4y ago
  > The Saturn was the one that had SH2 for a main CPU and a 68000 for a sound chip (the predecessor Genesis had a 68000 as main CPU and Z80 as a sound driver) The Saturn had two SH2s, but yeah. Note that the Genesis's predecessor had a Z80 as the main processor, and the Genesis has a peripheral activated mode to disable the 68k, and use the Z80 as the main processor to play most of the Master System library. The Dreamcast went to a single main CPU (SH4), but in a twist didn't use the previous hardware iteration as its sound chip. :) Of course, EA didn't skip the Dreamcast because it was hard to program, they skipped it because they wanted to be the exclusive sports game provider and Sega said no. (or that's the official story anyway)

MBCook 4y ago

For what it’s worth I also remember hearing that the Jaguar was incredibly buggy. If they had more time they probably could have corrected that so developers didn’t have to worry about it.

drcode 4y ago
The main problem my team had is that all 4 primary chips in the jaguar shared the same bus, so you'd write code for one chip, but then it would run at <50% the previous speed once it was "in production" with code running on the other chips
- rocky1138 4y ago
  Ooh this is interesting! Which team was this? Care to share any more information on developing Jaguar games?

tenebrisalietum 4y ago

The Saturn was the one that had SH2 for a main CPU and a 68000 for a sound chip (the predecessor Genesis had a 68000 as main CPU and Z80 as a sound driver) Jaguar had two weird RISC chips (Tom and Jerry) meant to be used as DSPs, and one had a few more instructions for sound, and the other had something a teensy special for graphics. It had a 68000 that was meant to be used as a "manager" and "read the joysticks". To top it off you had the actual display chip (the "Object Processor") which was weird? flexible and programmable in some ways that almost seemed to me to hearken back to Atari's ANTIC chip in its 8-bit line. The 68000 was the only "normal" thing about that whole system.

MBCook 4y ago
History repeats itself a lot. I believe some of the early PS2 games were programmed in a similar manner. Devs had trouble getting their head around the Emotion Engine so they used the piece of the hardware they understood well: the older processor. And we know the same thing happened with the PS3. The SPUs were hard to use so many early games practically ignored them, the same way many Jaguar and Saturn games ignored the other processors as much as possible.
toast0 4y ago
> The Saturn was the one that had SH2 for a main CPU and a 68000 for a sound chip (the predecessor Genesis had a 68000 as main CPU and Z80 as a sound driver) The Saturn had two SH2s, but yeah. Note that the Genesis's predecessor had a Z80 as the main processor, and the Genesis has a peripheral activated mode to disable the 68k, and use the Z80 as the main processor to play most of the Master System library. The Dreamcast went to a single main CPU (SH4), but in a twist didn't use the previous hardware iteration as its sound chip. :) Of course, EA didn't skip the Dreamcast because it was hard to program, they skipped it because they wanted to be the exclusive sports game provider and Sega said no. (or that's the official story anyway)