Oh god!

Edit: Author did a great job. Fun piece to read.

On rec.games.video.advocacy, this topic, and a ton of discussion related to 3DO, and the upcoming SONY Playstation, was epic!

Counting "bittedness" every single way possible was done with fanboys and naysayers going on about it non stop! Lots of old school gems to be found in those archives.

Another highlight was Jeff Minter posting his dev experiences related to TEMPEST 2000. Atari: You are running it backwards! The 68k was for general management.

Minter: Just watch the game fly!

In response to how a TEMPEST game is a crime without a spinner control, details were posted about how to wire the VCS (2600) Indy 500 driving controllers to play the game with a proper spinner.

Paddles are potentiometers basically. They do not spin all the way around and can deliver anywhere from a few bits of position info fast, to over 8 bits more slowly. PONG, BREAKOUT, KABOOM all are examples.

Spinners are optical encoders and do spin all the way around and will typically generate grey code step and direction. TEMPEST, Blasteroids are examples, as is the Indy 500 game for the VCS.

Sidebar: That indy 500 game has bang on driving controls. Low latency, crazy fast driving fun.

The driving controllers were very coarse, offering either 8 or 16 distinct, encoded positions per rotation, and the TEMPEST game had more, I believe.

So, people put lead fishing weights into the knob, or pieces of steel to make it spin like the arcade and everyone was pretty happy. Atari had no plans to offer a proper controller for the game.

There was considerable discussion on how Minter sorted out the crappy game pad too.

So much good chatter, along with a fair amount of noise was flying right under the radar. Fun time to be console gaming and online.

The Jaguar has a 64 bit data path in it, and the author does a great job breaking it all down.

Minter did not help marketing matters any by driving the machine with the 68k. Lol, NOT 64 bit!

Like Minter cared either. He was making a bang up game, and putting the 68k in the lead really delivered the goods.

I'll stop there. Fun times.

I do have one of these Jaguar machines in storage. Kept it for T2K and the excellent "Aliens vs Predator" game Rampage studio crammed onto a cartridge.

Today, that title is very dated, slow, hard to play, but at the time was an exemplary experience!

But I kept the machine because of how they did the game mechanics and overall flow. Was distinctive. And a lot of fun.

What they did was more like a simulation and everything needed to complete the game was in game, leaving the player considerable agency to both discover how and get it done. And the game could be played from three different points of view. Alien, Human, Predator.

That title really deserves a remake, Jaguar style, not the "on rails" way offered on pretty much every other platform. The way it presents to the player needs very little introduction and learning on the job made for a very compelling, immersive experience.

TL;DR: I do not care about the 64 bit machine definition. I do care more about how the machine performs and what the programmer and do, and how they get to, or can see those things.