Tuesday, June 03, 2008

Folks, I hate to tell everyone this but the Jaguar is nothing but the lame
old Atari ST architecture. It is driven by the 68000 and has the same lame
underlying coprocessor architecture with a slightly wider data bus. The
"64 bit RISC chips" that Atari brags about are nothing more than
slightly souped up versions of the CISC coprocessors in the ST. Because
the developers are under nondisclosure, we never hear about this. The sad
fact is that Raiden was ported from the Falcon with VERY FEW changes
in the code. Essentially it is the same game running on the same
architecture with the same coprocessor calls. And believe me IT SHOWS!
Cybermorph also clearly demonstrates a gross lack of processing capability.
Atari tossed in a fairly lame variant of Gouraud shading which is seen in the
slow and very boring Cybermorph game. Funny thing is that even with Gouraud
shading in hardware most of the polygons in CM are solid fill and the frame
rate still stinks with a clipped horizon and lots of rotation restrictions.
Tempest 2000? What the h*ll is impressive about this!? A simple little
bitmap of a geometric object that gets scaled and moved with some color
cycling (accomplished in a few lines of code by modifying the color palette).
I've written 6502 assembly for the Apple II that accomplishes the same
effects.

If Jaguar is not a hacked apart ST, then why did they include the LAME
68000 in there? Can you imagine if 3DO had put a 68000 in their machine
and Jag only had custom chips?! Jung & Co would rip 3DO to shreds day after
day and blame each and every instance of 3DO slowdown on its lame core
processor. Can you imagine if Raiden had been released on the 3DO? Or
Trevor McFur? Jaguar advocates would proclaim it a lame Genesis clone
that could only do side scrolling shooters. Mr Jung and his buddies would
state that Jaguar was the next generation and hence would not drop so
low as to port sorry old 1980's arcade games. As this is exactly the path
Atari took, however, they defend this garbageware!!

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