Originally Posted by
T2KFreeker
Just to get mt two cents in, the Jaguar was indeed a 64-Bit system. The problem though is that one of the chips it has is the 68000, same as the Genesis. Third party cheaped out alot and just ported over Genesis games that they made with more color, which is really sad as the system could handle far more than it did. The Jaguar still has plenty of great games available, and there are still some to come. I('d say go buy Battlesphere, but unless you have $500.00 + dollars sitting around, the reality of this happening is slim to none.
Yeah, this is what I was gonna say (except that the ports were mostly Amiga rather than Genesis actually). You can't really blame the developers, though, since there wasn't a proper SDK for the system; that sort of thing wasn't expected back then. The more complicated systems coming out--and the Jaguar was more complicated than probably any of the others--changed all that and dev kits full of libraries and other code became the norm, the Jag was just too early for that. So the fact is, most Jaguar games are essentially 16-bit, with the actual core of the architecture and the graphics system only being used for special effects and such.
The system was very definitely capable of doing much more graphically, it's a similar situation to the Saturn really except that at least the Saturn hardware got somewhat properly used by Sega and Capcom and such. I really think that if it had been properly developed on, the Jaguar could have rivaled the Saturn in graphics. We could have seen some really mind-blowing 2D stuff as well as some nicer 3D.
...word is bondage...