Atari Panther

Hardware Specs

Motorola 68000 running at 16Mhz (compared to Mega Drive's 8 and SNES's 12
32k of fast static Ram
64k of ROM
8k reserved solely for sound
29bit (Eh?) DSP (Digital Signal Processor with various filters etc
25 Seperate voices each with independant volume
Main resolution of 320 by 200 (non interlaced)
32 colours per line from a pallette of 262,144 colours giving 7,860 on screen at any one time (very impressive for the day!)
32bit Graphic processor running at 32Mhz
2,000 sprites on screen at any one time!

(This information came from Zero Magazine (Issue 21, Dennis Publishing))

History?

The Atari Panther was scheduled to be launched in 1991 at the same time as the SNES. Technically it whips the poor SNES's bottom and it is a real shame that Atari didn't release it. If they had it would have quite likely done nasty things to Nintendo and Sega's profits and Atari would surely have been the dominant force in the sixteen bit console world again.. well er possibly, though I'm sure Atari would have still messed it up.

Instead Atari decided they would abandon its release and carry on Jaguar development (which was apparently moving at a heck of a pace). They released the Jag instead, which although it was technically years ahead of the competition, in retrospect looks as though it was poorly timed.

Two known games were written for it, Crescent Galaxy and Raiden, both of which were subsequently converted to the Jaguar upon the Panther's demise.

Oh Atari!, if you'd released the Panther, you might still be with us.