The 64-bit feature was Jaguar’s big selling point. Except, it really wasn’t 64-bit. Oh sure, the math kind of added up, but in reality not so much. Atari claimed the Jaguar, like its animal namesake, ran circles around the competition because it had a proprietary 64-bit RISC processor — the first of its kind. Additionally, it boasted that it ran 16 million colors in 24-bit color graphics, bang out shaded 3D polygons “manipulated in a ‘real’ world in real-time” (whatever that means), and had real-time texture mapping.
The reality was that it ran five processors mounted on three chips. The “manager” was the hybrid 16-bit/32-bit Motorola 68000, which was, in fact, a 32-bit processor but only used a 24-bit address and 16-bit data lines. The two other chips (both 32-bit) had different jobs. “Tom” was the GPU, object processor, and blitter (among other things). “Jerry” handled digital signal processing and 16-bit CD-quality stereo sound.
Atari’s 64-bit kludge aside, the game was bereft of a powerhouse library or original must-have games, and many were just poorly done ports of other games. Thus the graphics jump Atari promised wasn’t really there. Even a CD add-on peripheral (released two full years after its initial launch) and the promise of a VR headset (which never came to fruition) couldn’t bolster sales. Ultimately, nothing about the console made consumers feel like they had to “Get bit by Jaguar,” a genuinely ironic marketing slogan.
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