oldie Console Question

[Heathen]

Anyone know what happened to the guys who designed the chipset in the Atari Jaguar Console? Additionally were any specs ever released on the aborted Jaguar 2 chipset?

 

[Tahir2]

I believe the Jaguar 2 chipset was merely a speed bump on the Tom and Jerry processors, going from around 27MHz to about 50MHz. I remember an interview with Sam Tramiel in Edge regarding the Jaguar 2. He wasn't specific on anything else. But there is more information available (see below)

There was also a revision to the console using 35nm technology (cutting edge at the time) and its code name was 'Tornado' as a tongue-in-cheek jester as the Jaguar was named after the cat but the Tornado was named after the RAF plane - its predecessor being the Jaguar. Jaguar was manufactured by IBM, it seems at all levels, in a $500 million deal Atari struck with the company.

The Jaguar team I believe had a hand in designing in the Nuon chipset for DVD players but I am not entirely sure on this.

I know that the team that designed the Atari Lynx was the same team that designed the 3DO.

The Jaguar 2 is also sometimes referred to as the all in one CDROM cartridge machine as well.

More information from here:
http://www.digiserve.com/eescape/showpage.phtml?page=a2

Jaguar 2 details:

Q. What's the "Jaguar II"?

A. There's been a little confusion with this topic, since at least two
separate machines have been called a "Jaguar II." The first was to have
been an integrated Jaguar/Jaguar CD-ROM unit. That project has since been
cancelled, making the point moot.

The other Jaguar II was Atari's next video-game console. Though a final
design was never reached, initial prototypes were assembled, yielding the
following information:

* Main chipset (codename "Midsummer") developed by Motorola.
* Fully backwards compatable with the existing Jaguar. Would have been
able to play all Jaguar games and use all Jaguar peripherals.
* Uses new "Oberon" and "Puck" chips. "Oberon" was the next generation of
the Jaguar's "Tom" chip, and "Puck" (also identified as "Thesus") was
a redesigned "Jerry".
* "Oberon" was so large that it required a dedicated cooling fan, powered
by a separate power supply. It's uncertain if this inefficiency was
simply due to the unfinished nature of the chip or not.
* Processing speed "two to four times faster than the Sony PlayStation."
* Full C/C++ development package available.

The following is one set of proposed specifications for the Jaguar II:

Size: 10.5" x 12" x 3.5"
Controls: Power on/off
Display: Resolution up to 1600 x 600 pixels (50 Hz/interlace)
32-bit "Extended True Color" display with 16,777,216
colors simultaneously (additional 8 bits of supplimental
graphics data support possible)
Multiple-resolution, multiple-color depth objects
(monochrome, 2-bit, 4-bit, 8-bit, 16-bit, 24-bit) can be
used simultaneously
Ports: Cartridge slot/expansion port (64 bits)
RF video output
Video edge connector (video/audio output)
(supports NTSC and PAL; provides S-Video, Composite, RGB
outputs, accessible by optional add-on connector)
Four controller ports
Digital Signal Processor port (includes high-speed
synchronous serial input/output)
Controllers: Eight-directional joypad
Size 5" x 4.5" x 1.5", cord 7 feet
Six fire buttons (A, B, C, D, E, F)
Pause and Option buttons
12-key keypad (accepts game-specific overlays)

The Jaguar 2 has seven processors, which are contained in three chips.
Two of the chips are proprietary designs, nicknamed "Tom" and "Jerry".
The third chip is a standard Motorola 68EC020 used as a coprocessor.
Tom and Jerry are built using an 0.3 micron silicon process. With
proper programming, all seven processors can run in parallel.

- "Tom"
- 1,250,000 transistors, 292 pins
- Graphics Processing Unit (processor #1)
- 64-bit RISC architecture (64/128 register processor)
- 64 registers of 128 bits wide (shadow-buffering)
- Has access to all 2 x 64 bits of the system bus
- Can read 128 bits of data in one instruction
- Rated at 127.902 MIPS (million instructions per second)
- Runs at 63.951 MHz
- 2 x 32K bytes of zero wait-state internal SRAM (matrix)
- Performs a wide range of high-speed graphic effects
- Programmable
- Object processor (processor #2)
- 64-bit RISC architecture
- Programmable processor that can act as a variety of different video
architectures, such as a sprite engine, a pixel-mapped display, a
character-mapped system, and others.
- Blitter (processor #3)
- 64 bits read and write at the same time (multibuffering)
- 8K read buffer (fifo)
- 8K write buffer (lifo)
- Performs high-speed logical operations
- Hardware support for Z-buffering and Gouraud shading
- Texture Mapping Engine (processor #4)
- 64-bit RISC
- 64 bits
- Programmable risc processor
- 256K "texture-work" RAM of zero wait-state internal CACHE
- capable of doing about 900,000 texture-mapped polyons; without
textures, up to 2,500,000 polyons are possible.
- realtime Gouraud and Phong shading
- J/MPEG "COMBI" Chip (processor #5)
- 64 bits
- not programmable
- 8K own data rom (with sinus) table
- 128K CACHE (fifo)
- realtime J/MPEG decompression via CACHE (fifo)
- DRAM memory controller
- 4 x 64 bits
- Accesses the DRAM directly

- "Jerry"
- 900,000 transistors, 196 pins
- Digital Signal Processor (processor #6)
- 32 bits (32-bit registers)
- Rated at 53.3 MIPS (million instructions per second)
- Runs at 53.3 MHz
- Same RISC core as the Graphics Processing Unit
- Not limited to sound generation
- 96K bytes of zero wait-state internal SRAM
- CD-quality sound (16-bit stereo 50KHz)
- Number of sound channels limited by software (minimum 16)
- Two DACs (stereo) convert digital data to analog sound signals
- Full stereo capabilities
- Wavetable synthesis, FM synthesis, FM Sample synthesis, and AM
synthesis
- A clock control block, incorporating timers, and a UART

- Motorola 68EC020 (processor #7)
- Runs at 26.590MHz
- Perfect 68000 emulation
- General purpose control processor

Communication is performed with a high speed 64-bit data bus, rated at 2400
megabits/second. The 68000 is only able to access 16 bits of this bus at a
time. The Jaguar 2 contains eight megabytes (64 megabits) of fast
page-mode DRAM, in eight chips with 1024 K each.

Photos of the Jaguar II prototype motherboard are available at
http://www.atari-history.com/videogames/jaguar/jag2.html

The claim that it was reportedly 2-4 times more powerful than the Playstaion were probably an exxageration and would put it closer to the Dreamcast level beating even the N64 in terms of raw horsepower.

Edit: this page states that 900k texture mapped polygons were possible, and the biggest addition to the Tom update was probably the Texture Mapping Engine.

 

[Clashman]

There's some good photos of a prototype here:

http://jagcube.atari.org/jaguartwo.html

 

[Qroach]

Cool info!

 

[Heathen]

Cheers for that, now does anyone here actually have any expereince with the machine (the original that is, from a programer's perspective)? Very curious about what sort of machine it was and what sort of capabilities it had.

 

[Megadrive1988]

The claim that it was reportedly 2-4 times more powerful than the Playstaion were probably an exxageration and would put it closer to the Dreamcast level beating even the N64 in terms of raw horsepower.

2-4 times more powerful than the Playstation would have been 3DO M2 level, yes that would have beat Nintendo64, but not come anywhere near the Dreamcast.

Edit: this page states that 900k texture mapped polygons were possible, and the biggest addition to the Tom update was probably the Texture Mapping Engine

if 900k texture mapped polygons were possible, it would have edged out the M2 which could do 700k texture mapped polygons. but Dreamcast can do 4~5 million, so Jaguar 2 would have been roughly 1/5th to 1/6th as powerful as Dreamcast.

 

[Megadrive1988]

there was some confusion over Jaguar 2. there were actually two different Jaguar 2's.

At first Jaguar 2 was going to be a combined Jaguar and Jaguar CD.

Jaguar 3 would be the next generation Jaguar with a new chipset and more memory.


Jaguar 2 (Jag 1 + CD-ROM) I believe became the JagDuo.


Jaguar 3 was renamed Midsummer, thus was the real Jaguar 2.


http://www.myatari.net/issues/apr2001/jag_faq3.htm

Q: What's the "Jaguar II"?


A: There's been a little confusion with this topic, since at least two separate machines have been called a "Jaguar II". The first was to have been an integrated Jaguar/Jaguar CD-ROM unit. That project has since been cancelled, making the point moot.

The other Jaguar II was Atari's next video-game console. Though a final design was never reached, initial prototypes were assembled, yielding the following information:

Main chipset (codename "Midsummer") developed by Motorola.
Fully backwards compatible with the existing Jaguar. Would have been able to play all Jaguar games and use all Jaguar peripherals.
Uses new "Oberon" and "Puck" chips. "Oberon" was the next generation of the Jaguar's "Tom" chip, and "Puck" (also identified as "Thesus") was a redesigned "Jerry".
"Oberon" was so large that it required a dedicated cooling fan, powered by a separate power supply. It's uncertain if this inefficiency was simply due to the unfinished nature of the chip or not.
Processing speed "two to four times faster than the Sony PlayStation."
Full C/C++ development package available.

So 'Midsummer' is the chipset that was 2-4 times as powerful as the Playstation, more powerful than the N64, and in my opinion, comparable to the M2, if not slightly more powerful. while I have no idea how good or not the Jaguar 2 performed compared to M2, the specs seem similar in terms of polygon pushing power.

Midsummer used new chips called Oberon and Puck. I'm not sure if this is the same as Tom II and Jerry II but Midsummer was the complete chipset, Oberon and Puck were individual chips.

I've read that some of the designers of the original Jaguar and Midsummer went on to design Project X at VMlabs, which became the Nuon.



Going all the way back to 1988, the Konix MultiSystem (aka Slipstream)
a 16-Bit system designed in the UK, is basicly the ancester of the Jaguar.
(and perhap the Panther also though I'm not sure) because the Flare One company / project / chipset was the Konix MultiSystem. the Flare 2 was the sucessor project (or company) which got sold to Atari and become the Jaguar.

The 16/32-Bit Atari Panther might have had a completely seperate heritage from the Flare (Konix MultiSystem) and Flare II (Jaguar) as it was developed in parallel to the Jaguar. EDIT: actually I think I got off-course in what I remember. the Panther was the predessesor to Jaguar but Jaguar was a totally different technology. Jaguar was the sucessor to Panther in that it followed Panther, but Panther was not an early verison of Jaguar. whatever the case, Flare One (Konix MultiSystem), Panther,
and Flare 2 (Jaguar) probably share some lineage but I'm not sure how related Panther is to Jaguar. I guess Panther you could say is Flare 1.5, heh.

To put it into perspective, the Panther would have fought the Genesis & SNES but Panther was more powerful by 2~3 times in graphics, especially scaling & rotation. EGM said Panthers audio chip was less than that of the SNES though. and Panther of course, never got released.

Jaguar was far more powerful than Panther. it was comparable to 3DO, maybe a bit better, but less than Saturn-PS1-N64.

Jaguar 2 (Midsummer) would have beaten Playstation1 and Nintendo64, most likely being comparable to the M2 as I said that was my opinion, however Jaguar 2 would not have touched the Dreamcast.

The Project X / Nuon seems like a huge step backwards from the texture mapping & polygon-accelerated Jaguar 2 / Midsummer. The Nuon had no built in 3D hardware. everything was done in software by a very powerful CPU with alot of MIPS. but the end result with Nuon is 3D that is only comparable to Playstation1 or N64, not the M2 or Jag 2 / Midsummer.


I'd have liked to see a fight between M2 and Midsummer

 

[Tahir2]

Panther was the predecessor to the Jaguar. It was developed before the Jag, and was a 32bit system designed around the same principles of the Jag.

All the info is in the link I provided which to be honest is pretty darn complete. Me = impressed.

 

[Megadrive1988]

More on Jaguar 2 aka Midsummer:

(includes a block diagram on Midsummer)

http://www.atari-explorer.com/jaguar-2.html

Jaguar 2 was Atari's next video-game console. In development from 1992 to the end of 1995, the Jaguar 2 was codenamed "Midsummer", and as the Atari Technical Reference Manual (TRM) explains:

“More strange than true. I never may believe
These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.â€
Act V. Scene 1.


"Midsummer is based around a pair of custom chips, called Oberon and Puck, which are primarily intended to be the heart of a mega high-performance computer for games and leisure. Oberon and Puck replace Tom and Jerry from the original Jaguar system. Oberon is the King of the fairies and Puck is Robin Goodfellow, his side-kick, from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream†by William Shakespeare."

According to the TRM "Midsummer is an evolutionary development of Jaguar to give significant performance gains for 3D games. It offers greatly improved performance for a small increase in system cost. It is intended to be software compatible with Jaguar and so will run the existing library of games. The following areas of the system have substantially improved performance:
· polygon rendering speed
· texture mapped polygons
· computational ability
· audio synthesis

Midsummer is intended to be easy to program in a high-level language. It has an additional RISC processor, the RCPU, with an instruction cache to improve the performance of C programs."

Though a final design was never reached, initial prototypes were assembled and Beta development boards known as Cobweb were being shipped to developers from August 1995, yielding the following information... (The Cobweb board is a prototype development board for Midsummer which has the Oberon b-test ASIC from Midsummer and the Jerry ASIC from Jaguar One. This system is intended to allow some software development to start before the availability of Puck. The Oberon b-test ASIC is not the final production version of Oberon, and is both slower and buggier then the production silicon.)

Main chipset (codename "Midsummer") developed by Motorola.

Fully backwards compatible with the existing Jaguar. Would have been able to play all Jaguar games and use all Jaguar peripherals.

Uses new "Oberon" and "Puck" chips. "Oberon" was the next generation of the Jaguar's "Tom" chip, and "Puck" was a redesigned "Jerry" (Jerry II).

"Oberon" was so large that it required a dedicated cooling fan, powered by a separate power supply. It's uncertain if this inefficiency was simply due to the unfinished nature of the chip or not.

Processing speed "two to four times faster than the Sony PlayStation."

"Orbit" integrated CD chip for on-board CD-ROM player

Full C/C++ development package available.




Block diagram note: This diagram summarises the system architecture of Midsummer. It does not show the peripheral connections, or the 68000, which is still present only for compatibility reasons and to boot the system on this bus. The RCPU, GPU and DSP are all based on the same Jaguar RISC architecture. All three processors are 32-bit RISC, executing close to one instruction per clock cycle. They are tuned for graphics and audio
processing; and offer single cycle multiply operations as well as normal RISC functions.


The RCPU is new for Midsummer, and has been specifically tuned for running C code. It is intended to act as the CPU of the system, and is the geometry engine for 3D graphics.


· 32-bit RISC processor
· 4K bytes of 2-way set-associative cache
· 1K bytes fast local data RAM
· cache line fill operations at the full 64-bit bus rate (133 MB/s)
· extended precision (16 x 32) single cycle multiplier, and fast divider
· 64-bit DMA engine to and from system DRAM at full bus rate

We don't really know how far Jaguar 2 was to completion. It is apparent however that some key developers were provided with Cobweb developer boards and hardware reference material (at least to revision 6 of the TRM). The Atari Museum has been able to power-up a Cobweb board which was fully functional, and it ran existing games which at least proves it was fully backward compatible. If any specific Cobweb/Midsummer code was written or developer demonstrations completed, we just don't know at this time. If you have any further information about the Jaguar 2, please contact AEX.

All in all, while the Jaguar 2 / Midsummer obviously existed, I have to through some doubt on how well it actually performed. I believe in the M2 more than the Midsummer since M2 was actually completed, shown at many trade shows, demo'd and had games built for it. many of which never came out because the machine was cancelled as a console, however, M2 survived and ended up in several arcade machines as well as some industrial platforms, and perhaps even some DVD players.

You can actually play with M2 and some games for it, if you buy the industrial platform, its software or, if you find an M2-based arcade game like Polystars or Battle Tryst.

M2 arcade games:
http://www.system16.com/konami/hrdw_m2.html


Now, perhaps Jaguar 2 / Midsummer made it into some arcade games, does anyone know? I know Jaguar 1 and perhaps faster varients of Jaguar 1 were used in some arcade games (Midway/Williams ?) but I don't know if any Jaguar 2 / Midsummer arcade games exist.

 

[Clashman]

Now, perhaps Jaguar 2 / Midsummer made it into some arcade games, does anyone know? I know Jaguar 1 and perhaps faster varients of Jaguar 1 were used in some arcade games (Midway/Williams ?) but I don't know if any Jaguar 2 / Midsummer arcade games exist.

From the FAQ it sounds as though the Jag II never got beyond the prototype phase before Atari quit the Hardware business and was bought out.

 

[Reznor007]

In the arcades there were 2 Jaguar variants. The 1st was almost a standard Jaguar, using the 68EC020, with an added IDE controller for a hard drive, used in Area51 and Vicious Circle(prototype).

The 2nd version replaced the 68EC020 with an R3000 and also had the IDE controller, used in Maximum Force.

There was also an upgrade kit available for both Area51 and Max Force that turned it into the Area51/Max Force double game. This version ran on both models of the hardware, using different boot/program ROM chips but the same hard drive.

EDIT-I don't know of any newer Atari designed hardware that was used. Newer games after Area51 from Atari(at the time owned by Midway) used the Midway designed R5000+3dfx boards(Seattle, Flagstaff, Vegas).