Let me start off saying I've never owned a Jaguar since i was too young at the time to buy one myself and now that i am, the prices on ebay are quite out of my range to get one. That being said, I've always been a fan of this machine since I played one years ago.
Now my first question relates to the graphical power of the jaguar.The jaguar seems, on paper, squarely positioned as a system between being slightly more powerful than the 3do and less powerful than the Saturn. In practice however, this seems to be rarely achieved by games. In which i mean the 3do has many examples of looking much better than the Jaguar. As a hobbyist programmer i am curious as what the cause of this is. I have heard the jaguar was "Difficult to program for" several times but my main question is why is it difficult to program for? I realize that multi processors were rare at the time, but i'm still surprised given that one of the five jaguar processors could theoretically had twice the processing power than 3dos single main cpu. Now that we are more used to multi-core processors today, would it have been possible to achieve the awe inspiring graphics that Atari was hyping for when marketing it as 64bit? Or am i looking at this incorrectly?
My second question is more of a hypothetical, given hindsight is 20/20, what changes, do you believe, should Atari have made to the jaguar to make it more successful (given the fact that Wikipedia says it sold less than 250k units)? I mean, for me, i think initially making it CD capable instead of an add-on would have helped because first and foremost addons never sell, would have had been able to cash in a little on the FMV craze. Or were there so many issues that few changes could not have helped?
I realize these questions have been asked before, i just haven't seen an in-depth reason for the graphics one in particular. (If someone could link to something that covers this i'd be happy too)