/vr/ - Retro Games

>>5474262
>>5474262

I would guess not. Certainly Hitachi would have had quality C-compilers for their CPUs as they were already on their second generation of SuperH chips. The Jaguar's C-compiler was trash, evidently, and most competent developers probably had to create their own.

Though I really admire the Jaguar's unified bus design (and think Sega should have implemented something similar for the Saturn, but with alterations), developers would have constantly been bandwidth-starved and would have to design and program around that limitation. The Saturn had a multi-bus design that would have alleviated the issue.

Atari also released the system with notable hardware bugs that limited the system's performance which developers had to work around or just accept. The Jaguar hardware developers probably needed one more year to work on a major revision of their GPU and sound chips. As far as I understand, Atari was running against the clock and needed to expedite the launch of their system to drum up investor support and to combat the release of the 3DO and probably hoped the bugs weren't as serious as they ended up being.

I was always under the assumption that programming for the Saturn wasn't hard in and of itself, but only became so when trying to tie all the hardware components together to push the system further than it was designed for to meet the quality of its better-designed competition.