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This is the Atari
Jaguar CD section. I have a small selection of Atari Jaguar CD Games, as well as Atari Jaguar CD Consoles. Click any of these links to take you to the appropriate
section.
The Atari Jaguar CD is
a CD-ROM peripheral for the Atari Jaguar game console.
Late in the life span of the company, Atari released this long-promised CD-ROM
unit. The device sat atop the Jaguar console, plugging into the cartridge slot,
the physical design of the system sometimes compared to a toilet. The drive had
its own cartridge slot to allow cartridge games to be played without removing
the CD drive. There was a separate "Memory Track" cartridge for storing saved
game position and high scores.
The Jaguar CD unit featured a double speed (2x) drive and built-in VLM (Virtual
Light Machine) software. The VLM, which provided a sophisticated video light
show when an audio CD was played in the machine, was as popular among buyers as
the games themselves. Packaged with the drive were two games (Blue Lightning and
Vid Grid), a music CD (Tempest 2000 soundtrack), and a Myst demo disc.
Jaguar CD games could include as much as 790MB of data, considerably more than
conventional CD-ROMs. The designers chose to ignore established CD-ROM formats
and instead created their own based on the audio CD format. While allowing for
dramatically more storage on the disc and foiling casual piracy, the format only
provided limited error correction.
The drive was manufactured for Atari by Phillips in the United States. The
initial shipment was 20,000 units. Comments from Atari a few weeks after the
unit was launched stated that the entire inventory had been sold, and that
another batch would be ordered. However, with the JT Storage reverse takeover
looming just a few months away, it is possible that those 20,000 drives were the
only units ever produced.
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