Atari Jaguar

The Atari Jaguar was not designed by Atari Corporation itself but by Flare Technology, a small British hardware design firm founded by Martin Brennan and John Mathieson. The duo had previously designed the unreleased Konix Multisystem and the Flare One computer, building a reputation for ambitious designs on tight budgets. Atari's co-founder and then-CEO Sam Tramiel contracted Flare to design two systems: the Jaguar (codenamed 'Panther' in early development before the name shifted) and a companion handheld called the Lynx II (which was never produced). Brennan and Mathieson designed the Tom and Jerry custom chips to be a leap beyond existing console technology. Tom was the core graphics engine: its 64-bit blitter could perform high-speed memory copies, fills, and transformations, while its GPU was a programmable RISC processor capable of executing custom rendering routines. Jerry handled DSP operations including sound synthesis and processing, also using a programmable RISC core. The philosophy was to provide flexible, programmable hardware rather than fixed-function graphics pipelines. However, this flexibility became a liability. Programming the Jaguar efficiently required developers to write custom rendering code for Tom's GPU, bypassing the Motorola 68000 entirely for performance-critical tasks. In practice, many developers ??particularly those unfamiliar with the hardware ??simply wrote their game logic on the 68000 and used Tom and Jerry only for basic operations, leaving the powerful custom chips heavily underutilized. Atari's documentation and development tools were widely criticized as inadequate, with incomplete manuals and buggy development kits compounding the difficulty. The decision to use the Motorola 68000 as the system's general-purpose CPU was a cost-saving measure that created an architectural bottleneck. The 68000 was a 1979-era processor running at 13.3 MHz. While it served adequately as a traffic controller for the custom chips, any developer who relied on it for game logic (as many did) would get performance comparable to a Genesis rather than a next-generation system. The optimal approach was to run everything on Tom's GPU and Jerry's DSP, but this required expertise that few studios had. Sam Tramiel's marketing strategy was straightforward: position the Jaguar as the most powerful console available and compete on specifications. The 'Do the Math' advertising campaign challenged consumers to compare the Jaguar's 64-bit architecture against the Genesis (16-bit) and SNES (16-bit). The campaign was clever but the product couldn't consistently deliver on the promise. When 3DO (launched the same year with stronger third-party support) and later PlayStation and Saturn arrived, the Jaguar's small library and inconsistent software quality became impossible to overlook. The homebrew community that emerged after the Jaguar's commercial death has been remarkably productive. With the console's hardware specifications publicly available, independent developers continue to produce new games that often demonstrate what the Jaguar was truly capable of when its custom hardware is properly utilized.