History
Jaguar II was an evolutionary upgrade to Jaguar, developed in Atari's labs in Sunnyvale, California by a team led by John Mathieson, one of the designers of the original Atari Jaguar. It was intended to be software compatible with Jaguar, and was a superset of it. It used newer technology to speed up the Jaguar system, address short-comings in its architecture, and to make major improvements to the specification.
The project code name was "Midsummer", an arbitrary reference to A Midsummer Night's Dream; and the two main chips were named Oberon and Puck, references to characters in that play.
Development of the project started in January 1994, and working prototypes were running demos by March 1995. The Oberon graphics chip, which replaced Tom from Jaguar, was finished and was running in this prototype. Its companion chip, Puck, had not completed design by the time the project was cancelled in the summer of 1995 (the prototypes used Jerry chips).
The goals of the project were to substantially improve performance in the following areas:
- polygon rendering speed
- texture mapped polygons
- computational ability
- audio synthesis
Read more about this topic: Atari Jaguar II
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When the coherence of the parts of a stone, or even that composition of parts which renders it extended; when these familiar objects, I say, are so inexplicable, and contain circumstances so repugnant and contradictory; with what assurance can we decide concerning the origin of worlds, or trace their history from eternity to eternity?”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“What would we not give for some great poem to read now, which would be in harmony with the scenery,—for if men read aright, methinks they would never read anything but poems. No history nor philosophy can supply their place.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore beautiful, because it is alive, moving, reproductive; it is therefore useful, because it is symmetrical and fair. Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)