1023 replies to this topic

[Gunstar]

spacecadet, on Fri Jan 4, 2008 4:00 PM, said:

mos6507, on Fri Jan 4, 2008 2:43 AM, said:

I think it would still have made sense to keep it cart-based because as you recall the early CD systems including the PS1 had very bad load-times and used the CD a lot for "FMV shovelware" and streamed digital audio.

Problem is that "FMV shovelware" sold a lot of PS1's. CD's were a new medium and people wanted to see things done with them that couldn't be done with carts. Quality didn't matter initially.

Quote

Really, a great polygonal 3D game doesn't need a CD that much. If it did offer CDs, it should have also offered a cart port like the Saturn.

Saturn cart port is not used for games.

Quote

The thing is, the only reason the Jag sold at all was its timing. It came out earlier than the other systems. So it was kind of damned if you do, damned if you don't.

I agree that if Atari had waited as some have suggested, they just would have been toast even earlier. *Unless*, as one or two people have said, they took the additional time to redesign the system almost from the ground up, including the addition of a CD-ROM and a different processor.

One thing nobody seems to have mentioned yet (or maybe you can count the Sega comments) is that they really should have partnered with some Japanese developers. They should have recognized by 1993 that Japanese games were hot; it's not like the NES, SNES and Genesis hadn't already taken the world by storm. They should have seen that Atari's own games didn't have the cachet that they once did, that their first-party development wasn't what it once was and that what people wanted was all coming out of Japan.

At that time, before Sony and Sega went and locked everybody up, Atari should have been aggressively courting Konami, Namco, Capcom, Squaresoft (they were in Nintendo's camp back then, but Sony managed to pull them away so I don't see why Atari couldn't have beat them to it), Bandai, and maybe one or two others. They should have locked up several exclusives from these companies for launch. Arcade games were still system-sellers back then - remember how Ridge Racer and Battle Arena Toshinden sold PlayStations initially?

The biggest problem with the Jag was clearly the game selection, and everything that had to be done to remedy that should have been... whether that means more overtures on the biz dev side or redesigning the hardware so developers could better take advantage of it more easily.

I agree too, in as much as the software is concerned; even with the hardware as-is though, with it's 68K and memory short-comings. The fact was that even if Atari waited as I said, that the Jaguar software "floods" only came out during the holidays for it's two years ('94-95) and in between barely trickled. They need a LOT more software development and needed companies like you've mentioned most definately, and lots more american and european developers too. My answer was strictly based on the premise of what would I have done differently at the beginning in '93. In the meantime I would have been working on the deals you speak of.

Edited by Gunstar, Fri Jan 4, 2008 10:42 AM.

[kroogur]

#1 Christmas release

#2 Pack in Game Gex

#3 All the afore mentioned hardware upgrades are solid and would have helped.

#4 I realize getting licenses was tough for Atari but some must haves they should have pursued strongly WWF Wrestling titles, Better Doom, Street Fighter Remix(bring back some of the guys from the very first game and introduce a true storyline mode ie: combine rpg elements with seemingly random fights along the way that will become more clear as the story progresses and have a standard vs mode too. Better sports titles: George Foremans boxing legends take the finest boxers from the past and offer a create a boxer mode. A baseball game on par with Ken Griffey from the SNES, Madden would have rocked on the Jag. An arcade classic cart, a cart with multiple puzzle games.

#5 The CD should have come the next year packed with a demo disc and a copy of GEX Unlimited also the Lynx should have been redesigned as it was a tremendous beast(not a very portable system) to slide into a docking station on the CD unit that would not only allow Lnxy play through the main system but thanks to the modem built into the CD unit it could download games to the built in storage in the new lynx (think sega channel in reverse)

[Atari5200]

when it comes down to the promo/marketing/developing of the system, i don't think changing anything would have helped. I think the hardware period would have had to be changed. Regardless of how it would be marketed and promoted, it was still a system that was barely producing games of the quality of 16-bit competition. Which I believe is the main thing. How can you have something marketed at 64-bit, which is 4x more powerful than 16-bit by kindergarten math, which most people would be using, and yet it can barely perform better than the 16-bit machines of the era, and could never perform to the level of the Neo-geo period.

[Gorf]

Sauron, on Wed Jan 2, 2008 11:25 PM, said:

Waiting a full year to release the console would've been the best option. That would've given them time to polish up the launch games and have more available (especially AvP), fix the stupid hardware bugs, beef up their developer support, and maybe even do some cross-promotions with the Lynx (and still fully support it). They still would've beaten everyone but 3DO to the punch for the "next gen" systems while being able to build a full nation-wide promotional campaign with more and better games available for the launch.

Brilliant! Essentially what I've said for years. There is so much more that could have been done.

I think fixing the hardware issues alone would have been enough. These bugs are what is keeping
a lot our games from completioin as it takes forever to hand code some of these things. The assembler
and the compiler should have handled this.




WEll...i'll repost something I answered similar to this in another thread.

My list of what I would have done differently

Quote

a ) Fix painful to deal with hardware bugs like the broken ability to run code from main without altering the code by hand
to do it in a stable fashion.

b ) A blitter command cache so the GPU could simply po another command to the buffer and go back to preparing another
poly line while the blitter draws(which can be done now but with a lot of trouble).

c ) The OPL and graphics memory would be a seperate bus using one of the megabytes of the 2 megs of ram.

d ) The 68k would be a 68030 and would have a nice small cache to allow it to run OFF THE BUS

e ) I PROPERLY WORKING UART!!!!....how do you release a console with out testing such an important piece. They could'nt have!

f ) The tools would be worth a damn. Give them to ANYONE who wanted them.

g ) TRULY appreciate the devolpers and pay them what they need to make the games Atari needed at the time.

h ) 12 games at launch...6 classic titles updated 6 new titles


1 ) Asteroids 3D
2 ) BattleZone 2000 Networked! (Not HoverStrike and I love the game..it could have been a nice sequel.)
3 ) Centipede 3D(not that POS they released a few years back...yikes!)..more like the one they actually started on.
4 ) Warlords 3D(networked with FPS camera views and of course classic and plus versions)
5 ) T2k(except get Minter an arcade Tempest... BEFORE he started coding it ( oh, and alot less LSD or bovines))
6 ) Dactly Joust


1 ) BattleSphere
2 ) Iron Soldier(NETWORKED for goodness sake! Sheesh!)
3 ) Cybermorph
4 ) I-War (remember this is bug free much more efficient hardware now)
5 ) Doom
6 ) Wolf3D


I think this would have been a smoking debut for the Jaguar. Instead, outside of CyberMoprh
we got 3 other mediocre titles and waited forever for the next title.

[A_Gorilla]

Im surprised no one besides me mention replacing the POS first controller when the awesome Pro-controller as the standard controller, you guys actually LIKE that thing???

[supercat]

downix, on Thu Jan 3, 2008 8:54 AM, said:

2) substitute a 68020 for the 68000. The 68000 was useless for anything but just looking at, compared to the other chips. The 68020, as demonstrated in CoJag units, would have given an extra hand without suffering the rest of the design.

If the bus interface had included even a single line (8 bytes) of caching, I think that would have allowed the 68000's bus load to have been reduced by more than 50% at very little cost. By my understanding, even if code doesn't access any data memory, each instruction fetched will hog the bus for two (or is it four) cycles. With a properly-designed bus interface, the bus loading could have been reduced to one cycle every four instructions. Data fetches and stores would still hog the bus somewhat unless a one or two more lines of caching were included for those; the silicon required for those would be small compared with the amount of custom silicon used for other purposes, but the performance gain would not be as significant as that from including the 8-byte data cache.

[phuzaxeman]

why release the jag (yet) when a lynx III would have saved the atari video game market? if atari released a smaller, long lasting rechargable color atari lynx, with more 3rd party support, it would have taken the video game market that the inferior game boy dominated. portables (even today) were becoming the trend toward the late 80's and into the 90's.

during that time of supporting the lynx, the jag could have been improved on a hardware, software, and marketing level. street fighter II and Mk were a must on the system and atari didn't get those (save us from those horrible fighters). don't believe a big title isn't important? why does everyone love nba jam on the jag?

it was innovation that made atari who it was and they stopped doing that and lost it somehow. how many dang atari remakes do we really want to see?

atari (squashed grape) is what miyagi told daniel son not too do, "if you karate so-so (in the middle) *squish* you get squashed like grape"

[downix]

supercat, on Sat Jan 5, 2008 1:29 AM, said:

downix, on Thu Jan 3, 2008 8:54 AM, said:

2) substitute a 68020 for the 68000. The 68000 was useless for anything but just looking at, compared to the other chips. The 68020, as demonstrated in CoJag units, would have given an extra hand without suffering the rest of the design.

If the bus interface had included even a single line (8 bytes) of caching, I think that would have allowed the 68000's bus load to have been reduced by more than 50% at very little cost. By my understanding, even if code doesn't access any data memory, each instruction fetched will hog the bus for two (or is it four) cycles. With a properly-designed bus interface, the bus loading could have been reduced to one cycle every four instructions. Data fetches and stores would still hog the bus somewhat unless a one or two more lines of caching were included for those; the silicon required for those would be small compared with the amount of custom silicon used for other purposes, but the performance gain would not be as significant as that from including the 8-byte data cache.

IIRC the 68000 did not support external caching in the way you're proposing. You still could do it, but you'd have to create the cache control logic inside one of the chips, and while the cache itself wouldn't be large, the controller for it would push the Jag's design out of the ASIC's it was using and into the next size up, increasing the cost dramatically.

Of course one of the beauties of the m68k is that you *can* add external functions to the chip such as this. Sun made an external MMU for their series of machines for instance.

[downix]

One more idea, use the CoJag setup for the ultimate promotional tool. In October 1994, ship 3 dozen units across the nation, each one loaded with... Tempest 2000.

When Jag ships, ship it with Tempest 2000, "the arcade hit comes home"

Also start hitting up game development houses, with the promise that they could develop a single game that could easily be ported to both platforms, giving you a leg up on Sony who brought theirs out the following year.

[Agent X]

1993, huh?

Several people mentioned it already, but (knowing what we now know in retrospect) delaying the system another 6-12 would have been the best thing to do. They could have used that time to fix a few nasty bugs and perhaps beef up the hardware a bit (particularly the main processor).

Also, by delaying the launch to 1994, there would have been more and better games at the outset. The system launched with Cybermorph and Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy, followed by Raiden and Evolution: Dino Dudes a month later.

Cybermorph was a great game in my book, but a couple more months of development might've given them time to add in-game music and improve the frame rate.

Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy didn't fare too well. There's potential for a good game at the core, but it's just so...unfinished. If it had more time to cook in the oven, then it could've had in-game music, vastly better sound effects (most of the sound effects that exist in that game are poor; the lack of in-game music makes the low quality of the sound effects that much more apparent), and they could've refined the gameplay (tweaking weapon selection, for instance).

There were 10 games released for Jaguar in its first full year on the market. That's right, only 10. That was simply deplorable. I say this as someone who bought the system at launch and had to endure gaps of 2-3 months without a new game release. The poor release schedule during the first year disheartened a lot of early adopters (as well as fence-sitters watching to see how Jaguar and 3DO would fare over the long run), and probably did more to sink the Jaguar than any bad magazine reviews or "16-bit-looking games" ever did. Jaguar should've have 10 games on Day One, not Year One.

BTW, much of this is based on 20/20 hindsight. I think the Jaguar was rushed to market because of the 3DO system. As 3DO's release grew closer, it was increasingly being treated as a darling by the gaming media, and anointed as "the next big thing" for video games. Atari surely wanted to stave off any opportunity for 3DO to gain traction, so they released Jaguar as a pre-emptive strike. The fear was that if 3DO had the holiday 1993 market to itself, it would establish a foothold, and Jaguar wouldn't have a prayer a year later.

The thing is, 3DO suffered from enough catastrophic blunders of its own, mostly for different reasons than the Jaguar. Even if there was no Jaguar to compete with for the first year, I don't think 3DO would've done significantly better than it actually did with the Jaguar on the shelves alongside it. By and large, it still would've met the same fate, and about the same time.

Jaguar in late 1994 would have probably kicked butt. For one thing, it would have the spotlight all to itself, rather than having to share that spotlight with 3DO. (Yeah, there's that 32X thing also. Whatever.) For another thing, it would've had the 10 "Year One" games all at once as launch titles. It would've made a much better first impression. Could you imagine barrelling out of the starting gate with Tempest 2000, Wolfenstein 3D, Alien vs. Predator, and Doom in your lineup?

That's my answer. I'd have observed the 3DO launch in October, see that it wasn't going anywhere anyway, then let everyone know that the real "next-generation" would begin in 1994.

[Pete5125]

I have to agree on the 3D0 equation had little to do w/ anything for Atari few of the 3D0 customers willing to pay $700 at launch for the 3D0 realy cared for Atari....I do remeber a friend of mine bying it, everything look at sounded much better than anything on my Sega/SegaCD....(something I could rarely say for the Jaf in the early days) but every game had a terible lag time unless it was made by EA sports/Crystal Dynamics.

Atari had to market itself as a 64 Bit/32 Bit machine because that is what everyone cared about...more power under the hood....Atari Jaguar's biggest mystake if we can't change the machine is that they did not persue the big 2-D fighters (Mortal Kombat, Samuri Showdown, Street Fighter2, Primal Rage, Pit Fighter, etc.), Sports, or racing games.

If Atari would of released 5 arcade fighters and 5 big name sports games, came out at the $200 price point including a fighter w/ an Arcade controler then their destiny would of changed at that instant and gave them the lead way they needed to take on Sega and Sony 3 years later and with their new focuss of sports/fighters released the Jag CD w/ a new Mortal Kombat 3 pack in then the market would be sealed...3-D games only caught on because of the push from Sony and Jag CD could match what Sega was putting out on the Saturn.
[/quote]

[supercat]

downix, on Sat Jan 5, 2008 7:18 AM, said:

IIRC the 68000 did not support external caching in the way you're proposing. You still could do it, but you'd have to create the cache control logic inside one of the chips, and while the cache itself wouldn't be large, the controller for it would push the Jag's design out of the ASIC's it was using and into the next size up, increasing the cost dramatically.

How was the 68000 physically interfaced to the memory on the Jag? The 68000 has 16 data pins, while the Jaguar memory bus is 64 bits. I would think there must have been some sort of chip with the 64 memory-bus pins and the 16 Motorola pins. Which chip would that have been?

A one-line cache wouldn't have been completely trivial, but shouldn't have been terribly complicated. If the architecture of the interface chip was CPLD-based, depending upon what else the chip was doing, it would probably have required another 40-100 macrocells (24 macrocells to latch the address, a few macrocells to build up an address comparator, and 64 macrocells to latch the data if there weren't already 64 macrocells allocated to handling the big data bus.

Even if a full 64-bit cache would have been two expensive, a 32-bit one would have helped quite a bit. For that matter, even a 16-bit latch so that the 68000 would only steal one memory bus cycle for each operation would have been a pretty big help.

[ZylonBane]

downix, on Sat Jan 5, 2008 3:30 PM, said:

One more idea, use the CoJag setup for the ultimate promotional tool. In October 1994, ship 3 dozen units across the nation, each one loaded with... Tempest 2000.

When Jag ships, ship it with Tempest 2000, "the arcade hit comes home"

You do realize that Tempest 2000 is already based on an arcade game, yes?

[kevincal]

Atari most definitely should have waited until 1994 and used Tempest 2000 as a pack-in. And had Doom, AvP, Iron Soldier and the rest of the Jag games out ready at launch.

[mos6507]

Agent X, on Sat Jan 5, 2008 4:53 PM, said:

Jaguar in late 1994 would have probably kicked butt. For one thing, it would have the spotlight all to itself, rather than having to share that spotlight with 3DO.

The Dreamcast kicked ass when it first came out, but its dominance was extremely short-lived. The PS2 almost immediately overshadowed it when it debuted. (Kind of a shame because the Dreamcast was nearly as powerful, but the PS2 was backwards compatible and could play DVDs which was a big deal in those days.) That would have been the optimal fate for the Jaguar. It would have ruled the roost briefly before the PS1 arrived and then got wiped off the stage. The Jaguar architecture (like the Saturn and 3D0) was optimized for 2D at a time when gamers really wanted to move to polygons. There is no way the Jag would have had a viable competitor to Ridge Racer and Toshinden. An insanely optimized Jag equivalent of those games would have either run at a jerky 15fps with limited textures or 30fps without.

[Gorf]

supercat, on Sun Jan 6, 2008 12:34 AM, said:

downix, on Sat Jan 5, 2008 7:18 AM, said:

IIRC the 68000 did not support external caching in the way you're proposing. You still could do it, but you'd have to create the cache control logic inside one of the chips, and while the cache itself wouldn't be large, the controller for it would push the Jag's design out of the ASIC's it was using and into the next size up, increasing the cost dramatically.

How was the 68000 physically interfaced to the memory on the Jag? The 68000 has 16 data pins, while the Jaguar memory bus is 64 bits. I would think there must have been some sort of chip with the 64 memory-bus pins and the 16 Motorola pins. Which chip would that have been?

A one-line cache wouldn't have been completely trivial, but shouldn't have been terribly complicated. If the architecture of the interface chip was CPLD-based, depending upon what else the chip was doing, it would probably have required another 40-100 macrocells (24 macrocells to latch the address, a few macrocells to build up an address comparator, and 64 macrocells to latch the data if there weren't already 64 macrocells allocated to handling the big data bus.

Even if a full 64-bit cache would have been two expensive, a 32-bit one would have helped quite a bit. For that matter, even a 16-bit latch so that the 68000 would only steal one memory bus cycle for each operation would have been a pretty big help.

The 68k should have had its own bus for AI and game logic and 64k of ram.
Plenty of room for a nice complex AI engine.

OR...

No 68k at all or another RISC core with its own cache. Put another TOM instead of the 68k
except remove the blitter and opl and replace that silicon with nothing but cache.

This would be called the game logic processor(GLP). If It had a simple 16k cache
and the GPU power..the blitter OPL and GPU could have the main memory as priority
and the GLP would never choke the bus because it would only have to go outside
to main once in a while.

Edited by Gorf, Tue Jan 8, 2008 6:44 PM.

[Crazyace]

I think I'd be more realistic..

Keep all the hardware the same...

68k/2MB memory etc

integrate CD instead of cartridge.

Chase Capcom for StreetFighter, and Midway for Mortal Kombat

Aim for $200 dollar price - no game packed in..
sell games for $30 each

3D0 was too expensive - so chasing 2D arcade companies would be good

If possible - 4MB ram ( unlikely though )

Project manage games more...

Going for gpu only would be difficult to source ports from NeoGeo and Megadrive/MegaCD as well as Amiga1200 games
68020 would be too expensive at time - but I'd be tempted to put a cheap intel style cpu in ( The Cyrix 486SLC was around about that time... )

Fixed HW bugs

[downix]

Crazyace, on Wed Jan 9, 2008 2:10 PM, said:

I think I'd be more realistic..

Keep all the hardware the same...

68k/2MB memory etc

integrate CD instead of cartridge.

Chase Capcom for StreetFighter, and Midway for Mortal Kombat

Aim for $200 dollar price - no game packed in..
sell games for $30 each

3D0 was too expensive - so chasing 2D arcade companies would be good

If possible - 4MB ram ( unlikely though )

Project manage games more...

Going for gpu only would be difficult to source ports from NeoGeo and Megadrive/MegaCD as well as Amiga1200 games
68020 would be too expensive at time - but I'd be tempted to put a cheap intel style cpu in ( The Cyrix 486SLC was around about that time... )

Fixed HW bugs

Intel style CPU would never have worked. BE vs LE here. The logic to do the adaptation would add an extra $75 to the bottom line.

The 68000 in 1993 was $21, the 68020 in 1994 was $25, not a dramatic difference in price. Also, 2MB of RAM in 1993 cost $15, 4MB in '94 $8.

I still have my Digikey catalog collection

[Crazyace]

Bit 2 of memcon2 selected BE/LE mode you're right about CPU prices though ( but I think the hitachi 68k was way less than $21 dollars in 93 ) - a SLC would be way better than a 68020 - it had FP and a cache ( only 1k though )
Maybe IBM would have done a deal on their cheap 486s


I wouldn't want to delay the H/W launch at all...
Get onto the market for the Xmas 93 with more games on CD-rom
Then by Xmas 94 - drop the console price...

Aim to hit $150 dollars by the time PSX and Saturn arrive - with games.. ( rather than just dumping the H/W )
( At this point , with CD as standard EA may have moved titles from 3do to jaguar )

[Gorf]

Crazyace, on Wed Jan 9, 2008 2:10 PM, said:

I think I'd be more realistic..

I think I was very realistic.

Crazyace, on Wed Jan 9, 2008 2:10 PM, said:

Keep all the hardware the same...

The hardware is bugged and needs work.

Crazyace, on Wed Jan 9, 2008 2:10 PM, said:

Going for gpu only would be difficult to source ports from NeoGeo and Megadrive/MegaCD as well as Amiga1200 games
68020 would be too expensive at time - but I'd be tempted to put a cheap intel style cpu in ( The Cyrix 486SLC was around about that time... )

This is why I did not want a 68k. I want NEXT generation games. The 68k totally chokes the system.

[remowilliams]

Quote

Its 1993, you're in charge of the Jag, what do you do?

I'd have overnighted boxes of poo to all the developers. That would been better treatment than most received, and doubled as a more useful dev kit.

[Gorf]

Crazyace, on Wed Jan 9, 2008 3:42 PM, said:

Aim to hit $150 dollars by the time PSX and Saturn arrive - with games.. ( rather than just dumping the H/W )
( At this point , with CD as standard EA may have moved titles from 3do to jaguar )

No they would not have...they Jag is hard to code. the tools offered as remo has pointed
out, is a mean joke at best. They do not in anyway support this systems abilities where
they should have. The GCC for the RISC should have been bug free. It should have been
moer important thatn the GCC of the 68k and the 68k should haev been used for what it
is .......a boot manager.

Your strategy is not much at all different than Atari's which proved to fail. A few bug fixes
in the hardware is the first place.....there were many other areas they blew it with the Jag.

[Crazyace]

Gorf, on Wed Jan 9, 2008 11:20 PM, said:

Crazyace, on Wed Jan 9, 2008 3:42 PM, said:

Aim to hit $150 dollars by the time PSX and Saturn arrive - with games.. ( rather than just dumping the H/W )
( At this point , with CD as standard EA may have moved titles from 3do to jaguar )

No they would not have...they Jag is hard to code. the tools offered as remo has pointed
out, is a mean joke at best. They do not in anyway support this systems abilities where
they should have. The GCC for the RISC should have been bug free. It should have been
moer important thatn the GCC of the 68k and the 68k should haev been used for what it
is .......a boot manager.

Your strategy is not much at all different than Atari's which proved to fail. A few bug fixes
in the hardware is the first place.....there were many other areas they blew it with the Jag.

Actually the jaguar was no harder to program for than any other console really. gcc being bug free was a software problem and it should have been fixed.
The biggest difference I suggest would be to make the jaguar a CD machine from day 1. That way discs could be mastered more cheaply than cartridges - Even with the HW in the same state a lot of good 2d games could have been produced ( rivalling NeoGeo CD at least )

Fixing the very few HW bugs would have opened up the GPU use ( and maybe saved money by not requiring external DACs for the audio )

[ovalbugmann]

Crazyace, on Wed Jan 9, 2008 4:59 PM, said:

Actually the jaguar was no harder to program for than any other console really. gcc being bug free was a software problem and it should have been fixed.
The biggest difference I suggest would be to make the jaguar a CD machine from day 1. That way discs could be mastered more cheaply than cartridges - Even with the HW in the same state a lot of good 2d games could have been produced ( rivalling NeoGeo CD at least )

Fixing the very few HW bugs would have opened up the GPU use ( and maybe saved money by not requiring external DACs for the audio )

OK, so the Jaguar is just as easy to program as the Dreamcast or "any other console?" I see,... I didn't didn't know that and it is the very first time I have heard anyone say that. Good to know, that makes me feel better in learning to program for the console, since it is my first coding experience, thanks.

Now,.. have you seen the Dreamcast homebrew community? It's unbelievable and simply stunning . It is without a doubt one of the largest homebrew communities in the world, it has everything you could possibly think of - and more. The Jaguars' ease of programming, as you suggest, does not reflect this trait, in the sheer number of homebrew accomplishments in it's library. There is a logical answer for this .....

I know there is one problem with running programs from the Jaguars' main RAM, that JagDevvers as well as Atari didn't know about back in the day which presented significant problems. Gorf have found a stable way to do this, increasing Jag potential.

I have wondered why oh why doesn't my Jaguar have the vast selections of software, emulators, apps, utilities, ports, video and audio players, games, conversions, tools, homebrews, etc., etc., etc. that the Dreamcast enjoys. Well, I asked a Jaguar developer who is also a well known Dreamcast developer about this disparity, and here are his thoughts as to why the Dreamcast has everything and the Jaguar not even 1/10 of what the DC has going for it:
.

.

.



====>I've been a Jag fan (since 1994) which is way before the DC came out. I know it's older and not as powerful as the Dreamcast, but the Jag has been an open system for at least as long as the DC and doesn't even have a 1/10 of all the games, programs, apps, utilities, ports, and different types of stuff to run like DreamCast has?

Harmless Lion:

Quote

The Dreamcast really was a beautiful machine to program - and the ease of getting software into it mixed with the power to run things well without substantially hard work is what has earned it such a collection of homebrew stuff. The Jaguar has a significantly higher bar, and while I've threatened to throw mine through a window a few times, it's been fun squeezing anything out of it. I will get Martian Attack to the state I intended, though it'll always be a bit of a minigame. Whether I do a second game for the Jag is a tougher thing to predict, time is not something I have the luxury of very much of. (But it'd be nice to do something cool.

[Crazyace]

Any other console at the time encompassed the SNES / Mega CD / 32X and PC software rasterisers..
and then Saturn of course

DC was a lot later - and it was easier in some ways as the hardware was more capable
Also there were a lot more DC's than Jaguar's sold....

Why are you comparing DC with Jaguar - it's a bit like complaining that there are no mp3 players for the Apple ][
For the DC I haven't seen a great deal of homebrew, just more people moving cross compiling linux apps