sirocyl

i feel like a youtube series where i look at the technical specifications of old hardware and propose changes would be fun
the atari jaguar, for example, had ITS OWN INSTRUCTION SET ARCHITECTURE for the two coprocessors, separate from the one for the main processor!!, presumably because designing and building something in-house was cheaper than buying and/or licensing something else, but... FUCKING WHY. I'VE LITERALLY NEVER SEEN ANYTHING MORE DEVELOPER-HOSTILE IN MY LIFE. LMAO. (plus they were apparently notoriously buggy? i wouldn't know anything about that) to the less tech literate, imagine everything you've heard about the sega saturn being hard to program for... and multiply it by ten. a lot of games didn't even touch these chips!
so my proposed change is scrap the whole design, scrap the pivot back to video games (which was founded entirely on the "promise" of this design and making the rest up as they went along), maybe even scrap the falcon, and develop a new line of powerpc computers running unix (which they had a license for) and market it to amiga and mac users, in particular pointing out that the new power macs had to use the same emulation software for legacy software that would enable their computers to run legacy mac software, and did not have proper multitasking like them. either commodore (well, not so much commodore- all of their weird decisions in their last years came from desperate attempts to grab cash because they were flat broke) or atari could have easily done this and survived, probably surpassing and maybe eliminating apple, but they both ran into the same kinds of technological dead-ends for similar reasons and both bungled a pivot to video games in 1993 and both bit the dust in hilariously similar fashion.

like, this is straight-up, canto XX. beyond just 'cursed', this is total sorcery, disfigured and grotesque. wrought into a slithering heap of expensive ASICs and unconventional system design, while staring directly at the most sensible and cost-effective outcome (use a plain, cheap CD-ROM drive and connect it to the system bus!), Atari diverges greatly from the unilateral course of time, and proceeds instead to march backwards, ever deeper into the hell they've dug into with an entirely custom, software-controlled and software-decoding CD drive. the only thing that hasn't changed between a "CD-ROM" drive proper or a cheapass CD player, and the Jaguar CD, is the laser/transport mech itself, which is the cheapest part of a CD player by this point.