I always wonder what the Jaguar would have been like if not crippled by buggy hardware. Probably still a failure but I bet the games would have ran better.
You know what's also funny? I've never heard anybody complaining about the Saturn being buggy.
It's legendarily hard to code for, but seems like it was at least pretty solid.
Even the Genesis was sort of "buggy." I think there was one particular design choice that crippled digital sound playback. Also the shadow/highlight functionality is kind of weird, not sure if "buggy" is the right word, but weird.
The best thing Atari could have done was release it at launch with the CD, that would have made it much cheaper for devs to launch a game - ROM order pricing would kill many devs. Bundling an SDK would have helped massively as well.
There are lots of quirks with the hardware which point to Atari interfering with the development - the 68K was never supposed to be there (and an 020 would have uncrippled the bus by allowing it to run at full speed, see the arcade board), not using the dual RAM buses, having an object processor (Flare majored on DSP and Blitter, the object processor looks like a 5200/7800/Amiga/Panther throwback mandated by Atari) necessitated having a 2-chip solution where 1-chip would have been faster to develop and better.
Having said that, the Jag VR looked amazing for the time.
You know what's also funny? I've never heard anybody complaining about the Saturn being buggy.
It's legendarily hard to code for, but seems like it was at least pretty solid.
Even the Genesis was sort of "buggy." I think there was one particular design choice that crippled digital sound playback. Also the shadow/highlight functionality is kind of weird, not sure if "buggy" is the right word, but weird.