Atari Jaguar

The Atari Jaguar is a console developed by Atari. It was released in 1993.

It featured 64-bit graphical accelerators, making it technically the only console of its competitors (the Saturn and the PlayStation) as it was proudly advertised as. However, this was just the graphical accelerators, the GPU itself was 32-bit and the CPU was only 16-bit, leading to some controversy. The console itself was capable of 3D polygonal graphics, but the quality of the titles that utilized them were more comparable to the SNES's SuperFX chip than the Saturn's and PlayStation's graphical fidelity.

The Jaguar was a commercial failure, selling less 150,000 units than and having only 50 cartridge games in its library. This would mark Atari's last major home console release, relegating themselves to producing plug and play TV games.

On May 14, 1999, Hasbro Interactive announced that it had released all patents to the Jaguar, declaring it an open platform, opening it up for homebrew developers to make their own software for it.

Emulation for the Jaguar is not that mature yet, there will be many instances of incompatible games.

The Atari Jaguar also received a CD add-on later in its life, with a total of twelve official games released using it. Currently, no emulators on Batocera support running Jaguar CD-ROMs.

This system scrapes metadata for the “jaguar” group and loads the atarijaguar set from the currently selected theme, if available.

Quick reference

BIOS

No Atari Jaguar emulator in Batocera needs a BIOS file to run.

ROMs

Place your Atari Jaguar ROMs in /userdata/roms/jaguar.

Saves

When performing an in-game save, the Virtual Jaguar core creates both a Cartridge EEPROM save file and a CD-ROM EEPROM save file, regardless of the game type.

Emulators

RetroArch

RetroArch (formerly SSNES), is a ubiquitous frontend that can run multiple “cores”, which are essentially the emulators themselves. The most common cores use the libretro API, so that's why cores run in RetroArch in Batocera are referred to as “libretro: (core name)”. RetroArch aims to unify the feature set of all libretro cores and offer a universal, familiar interface independent of platform.

RetroArch configuration

RetroArch offers a Quick Menu accessed by pressing [HOTKEY] + South button (B SNES) which can be used to alter various things like RetroArch and core options, and controller mapping. Most RetroArch related settings can be altered from Batocera's EmulationStation.

Standardized features available to all libretro cores: jaguar.videomode, jaguar.ratio, jaguar.smooth, jaguar.shaders, jaguar.pixel_perfect, jaguar.decoration, jaguar.game_translation

ES setting name batocera.conf_key Description ⇒ ES option key_value
Settings that apply to all cores of this emulator
GRAPHICS API jaguar.gfxbackend Choose which graphics API library to use. Vulkan is better, when supported.
⇒ OpenGL opengl, Vulkan vulkan.
AUDIO LATENCY jaguar.audio_latency In milliseconds. Can reduce crackling/cutting out.
⇒ 256 256, 192 192, 128 128, 64 64, 32 32, 16 16, 8 8.
THREADED VIDEO jaguar.video_threaded Improves performance at the cost of latency and more video stuttering.
⇒ On true, Off false.

libretro: virtualjaguar

Virtual Jaguar is an Atari Jaguar emulator. You can check its compatibility near the bottom of their webpage. This is the libretro port of it.

libretro: virtualjaguar configuration
ES setting name batocera.conf_key Description ⇒ ES option key_value
Settings that apply to all systems this core supports
FAST BLITTER (LESS COMPATIBLE) global.usefastblitter For weak machines. Some games will not work with this.
⇒ Off disabled, On enabled.
SHOW BIOS BOOTLOGO global.bios_vj Off is safer, On for specific games.
⇒ Show enabled, Skip disabled.
DOOM RES HACK global.doom_res_hack Enable for Doom to run at its correct resolution.
⇒ Off disabled, On enabled.

Controls

Here are the default Atari Jaguar's controls shown on a Batocera RetroPad:

Troubleshooting

Further troubleshooting

For further troubleshooting, refer to the generic support pages.

  • systems/jaguar.txt
  • Last modified: 13 months ago
  • by atari