Pretty much; very few homebrew groups out there have been able to do much with the hardware except to complete previously unreleased games.
However, there’re a lot of Atari ST ports coming from AtariAge, and a good half-dozen homebrew titles of variant quality being sold on physical cartridges (and CDs for that vanishingly small demographic) each year. YMMV.
Yeah, partly that. Here is a quote from John Carmack on the Jaguar hardware design:
Skilled programmer Steven Scavone, key member of 3D Stooges which released Gorf, still develops for Jaguar. Comparing it to systems he’s worked on, Scavone elaborated on tech-specs, also explaining in laymen’s terms. “It should be coded in as much assembler as possible. This machine flies when fuelled by assembler. The RISCs in proper concert with the 68k will do some absolutely amazing graphics. The Jaguar could [utterly] crush any 2D system. It’s a lot easier to program 2D for than the PSX or N64. You can thank the Tramiels for it being ‘underpowered’. The chips were not complete and had bugs. The designers, who weren’t experts in silicon design, missed fundamentals. Just one more register and [it could have run without stalling all the time]! If they [had fixed this], the Jag would have blown away the PSX. Later 3D titles like Battlesphere proved that systems at the time were no match for it.
Another problem was that the Jaguar included a Motorola 68000, the same processor in the Sega Genesis. Why was that an issue? A lot of developers would simply implement their games against that CPU because it was well documented without utilizing the Tom/Jerry CPUs. That led to a lot of the Jag's library looking no better, and even worse than its 16-bit competition. That made the Jag look like a joke to gamers since it was being touted as a 64-bit machine. Not many consoles got as much abuse from the gaming community in the States as the Jag back in the day.
Though with the failures of the 32X, Virtual Boy, and 3DO (and later the Saturn), everyone was getting 3D wrong until Sony showed up to the party. And all of those consoles failed partly because of poor hardware design. So maybe Atari can be cut some slack here.
I dont have much love for Atari and the Jaguar from false advertising about it being a 64 bit machine to its flawed hardware.
Yes the Saturn did have a flaw in the implementation in how the dual processor were tacked together at last minute but there were many factors that affected the way things turned out for the Saturn.
Some are:
1) The surprise launch when Sega started to panicked about the PSX which caught everyone off guard and not in a good way
2) Not very many titles at lunch.
3) Retailers angry about the surprise lunch and system allocation and some vowed never to carry Saturn period(which they really never carried).
4) A terrible first generation development kit which was huge clunky, ineffective and expensive(something like 50K).
This lead to a lot of devs having to write their own tools. The PSX dev kits were apparently amazing in comparison.
It didn't help that the system used quads and not polygons.
Of course Sega had massive experience in the Arcade with 3D title using quads but that was on powerful expensive hardware.
5) Gamers were burnt by the SegaCD and 32X addon which Sega dropped support for in no time.
6)$400 price tag
Despite this Saturn was not a true failure. In Japan it sold very well. The Dreamcast however can be categorized as a true failure despite Sega getting just about everything right with the system. It was just too late. They didnt have the cash to keep the system going and fight the Sony hype machine.
I dont have much love for Atari and the Jaguar from false advertising about it being a 64 bit machine to its flawed hardware.
Atari was just riding the wave of the bit wars, there was plenty of false advertising on all sides. Because bits were unfortunately the only spec that consumers were aware of.
4) A terrible first generation development kit which was huge clunky, ineffective and expensive(something like 50K). This lead to a lot of devs having to write their own tools. The PSX dev kits were apparently amazing in comparison. It didn't help that the system used quads and not polygons. Of course Sega had massive experience in the Arcade with 3D title using quads but that was on powerful expensive hardware
The early Saturn dev manuals show a lot of their examples using straight up assembly code for the VDPs. PSX dev kits were well documented with examples in C. Eventually the Saturn documentation was improved and included more examples in C, but it was far, far too late by then. Only devs at Sega knew how to get the most out of the system.
The reason why the Saturn was based on quads is because it was 2D hardware repurposed for 3D rendering. VDP1 is responsible for performing affine transformations on sprites to distort them to support the geometry of a mesh. VDP1 being designed for 2D games is especially evident since it does not support transparencies with sprites in the background; any sprites behind a transparent one will not render. It is not noticeable in 2D games, but it would be noticeable in 3D games; you would end up with entire surfaces not rendering.
The VDP2 chip was added later during the system's design to address the architecture's poor 3D support. It was capable of drawing infinite planes, and also fully supported transparencies.
5) Gamers were burnt by the SegaCD and 32X addon which Sega dropped support for in no time.
Yep. Only in hindsight was the Saturn surprise launch was a terrible idea. While it was happening, it did not seem to go terribly. It was really the 32X and SegaCD that soured consumer sentiment towards Sega and sealed their doom.
Despite this Saturn was not a true failure. In Japan it sold very well.
Saturn games and hardware are easy to find in Akhihabara. The system was a huge commercial failure for Sega overall though.
Dreamcast did everything right, and it had the best hardware design of any system when taking into consideration the time it was released. Sega was in a no-win scenario, but at least they went out with a bang with one of the best consoles ever made.
