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
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