Atari Jaguar

The Atari Jaguar and the Atari Lynx were the last two Atari systems to be developed, not by Atari but by outside contractors; Atari did not want any direct involvement in hardware production. In 1990, Martin Brennan and John Mathieson said that not only could they make a console far superior to the Sega Genesis or the Super NES but be cost efficient at the same time. Atari immediately agreed and the system was released in 1993 for $250 under a $500 million manufacturing deal with IBM.

Initially the system sold well, but because of poor games it was eventually considered a failure. The system was quite difficult to program for, as the hardware had a large number of bugs, including one in the memory controller that kept some of its processors from being able to execute code from the system RAM [1] (http://slashdot.org/articles/00/03/02/1430232.shtml#1225535) [2] (http://slashdot.org/articles/00/03/02/1430232.shtml#1225584). The final nail in its coffin was the release of both the Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn. In a last ditch effort, Atari tried to play down these two consoles by claiming the Jaguar was the only 64-bit system. Their effort was in vain, and production of the Jaguar stopped after the sale of Atari to JT Storage.

Specs

CPUs:	"Tom" (the video processor) - 32/64 bit graphics processor at 26.59Mhz, 64 bit object processor, 64 bit blitter, 64 bit DRAM controller "Jerry" (the audio processor) - 32 bit DSP at 26.6Mhz Motorola 68000 at 13.295Mhz
RAM:	2MB
Storage:	Cartridge - up to 6MB

External Links

• http://dmoz.org/Games/Video_Games/Console_Platforms/Atari/Jaguar_64/