The Saturn was the one that had SH2 for a main CPU and a 68000 for a sound chip (the predecessor Genesis had a 68000 as main CPU and Z80 as a sound driver)
Jaguar had two weird RISC chips (Tom and Jerry) meant to be used as DSPs, and one had a few more instructions for sound, and the other had something a teensy special for graphics. It had a 68000 that was meant to be used as a "manager" and "read the joysticks". To top it off you had the actual display chip (the "Object Processor") which was weird? flexible and programmable in some ways that almost seemed to me to hearken back to Atari's ANTIC chip in its 8-bit line.
The 68000 was the only "normal" thing about that whole system.
> The Saturn was the one that had SH2 for a main CPU and a 68000 for a sound chip (the predecessor Genesis had a 68000 as main CPU and Z80 as a sound driver)
The Saturn had two SH2s, but yeah. Note that the Genesis's predecessor had a Z80 as the main processor, and the Genesis has a peripheral activated mode to disable the 68k, and use the Z80 as the main processor to play most of the Master System library. The Dreamcast went to a single main CPU (SH4), but in a twist didn't use the previous hardware iteration as its sound chip. :)
Of course, EA didn't skip the Dreamcast because it was hard to program, they skipped it because they wanted to be the exclusive sports game provider and Sega said no. (or that's the official story anyway)
I believe some of the early PS2 games were programmed in a similar manner. Devs had trouble getting their head around the Emotion Engine so they used the piece of the hardware they understood well: the older processor.
And we know the same thing happened with the PS3. The SPUs were hard to use so many early games practically ignored them, the same way many Jaguar and Saturn games ignored the other processors as much as possible.
Jaguar had two weird RISC chips (Tom and Jerry) meant to be used as DSPs, and one had a few more instructions for sound, and the other had something a teensy special for graphics. It had a 68000 that was meant to be used as a "manager" and "read the joysticks". To top it off you had the actual display chip (the "Object Processor") which was weird? flexible and programmable in some ways that almost seemed to me to hearken back to Atari's ANTIC chip in its 8-bit line.
The 68000 was the only "normal" thing about that whole system.