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The Atari Jaguar and the Atari Lynx were the last two Atari systems to be developed, not by Atari but by outside contractors; Atari did not want any direct involvement in hardware production. In 1990, Flare2 (a company formed by Martin Brennan and John Mathieson with Atari funding) said that not only could they make a console far superior to the Sega Genesis or the Super NES but be cost efficient at the same time. Atari immediately agreed and the system was released in 1993 for $250 under a $500 million manufacturing deal with IBM.

Initially the system sold well, but because of poor games it was eventually considered a failure. The system was quite difficult to program for, as the hardware had a large number of bugs, including one in the memory controller that kept some of its processors from being able to execute code from the system RAM . The final nail in its coffin was the release of both the Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn. In a last ditch effort, Atari tried to play down these two consoles by claiming the Jaguar was the only 64-bit system. Their effort was in vain, and production of the Jaguar stopped after Atari purchased JT Storage in a reverse takeover.

Several peripherals were announced, such as a voice modem and VR headset. But the only peripherals released were the drive and the JagLink, a simple two-console networking device.

Specs

External Links

• http://dmoz.org/Games/Video_Games/Console_Platforms/Atari/Jaguar_64/
• Jaguar FAQ: http://www.digiserve.com/eescape/showpage.phtml?page=a2