New Atari Console that Ataribox?

[+frankodragon]

Atari SA is spending most of its time lollygagging around with nearly 3 million coming up with lots of hot air when it comes to interviews. I just want to see Fred's legs shift when he's talking but they have him speaking at a table.

[Hwlngmad]

I, for one, was pretty stoked for the Atari Jaguar. However, for one reason or another, I never did get one. In hindsight, considering the lack of games on it, it was a smart move. I could have gone with a PS1 as I played and liked the games on it, but never did get one of those either. However, I now have a fat PS3 with full (emulated) backwards compatibility, so I guess I am covered in the end

[Atari PAC-MAN Fan]

I'm just waiting patiently until they cancel the project.

 

It shouldn't take too long considering how Atari SA is looking on the inside right now.

[Pink]

 

 

i dont think nintendo shot themselves in the foot with carts. They think outside the box. Just look at switch cards. Its doing great right now. The zero load times and durabilty of the cart media makes the n64 a great system to collect for. The ps1 load times were awful, though it improved somewhat with ps2s faster drive and ps1 b/c.

 

 

 

All good points, but there's a world of difference between what makes a system desirable 20 years later, to collectors, and what makes it appealing at its prime. Nintendo lost a lot of confidence with carts because of the limited storage compared to CDs (objective fact) and the fact that the public saw CDs as good and carts as bad (subjective bias). Even at the time, I was a fan of carts over CDs, but the wind was definitely blowing the other way at the time.

 

In hindsight, Nintendo probably would have been better off going with discs, not for any technical reason, but because they lost so much credibility by not doing that. As for the switch, I think it's a different era now... no one media has the allure of being "the best".

 

From a collectability, I love cartridges too over discs. Big thing is durability, the cartridges don't break, same with the consoles too. Just look at the 2600, they're 35-40 years old and they work perfectly. Unless you smash it with a hammer, or pour water or some sort of liquid in it, they're going to last another 35-40 years. Don't think i've ever heard of a Nintendo 64 malfunctioning, unless someone intentionally ruined it. Unlike the PlayStation which were susceptible to disk read errors a few months after you bought it and had overheating problems.

 

And you can't compare now with the Switch to back in the mid 90s. Things are completely different then now. Godslabrat already summed it up perfectly.

 

Gosh, I really don't know ... I love how tidy and economical Mario 64 and Zelda Ocarina of Time are. Could you imagine if they were stuffed up with silly cutscenes like disc games? The weird controller and fast (if expensive, and limited) cartridges made N64 feel very different from PSOne and Saturn. I like it when Nintendo is the oddball doing its own thing in interesting ways.

 

Many people would say not getting Square and Final Fantasy VII was the end of their good relationships with third parties. I think that's overstated -- mainly because I think FF7 is overrated -- but I'm sure if you add up enough stuff like that, Psygnosis, Crystal Dynamics, and other big dogs who went CD-only, it's easy to sympathize with the argument.

 

This is still That Ataribox thread, right? How come no one is bitching about the absence of physical media on it, like they do with every other thread where discs and cartridges are mentioned? Are they holding out hope that Tempest 4000 will come out on a limited edition wooden cartridge or something? After all, "Rob Wyatt never said it wouldn't happen!"

Whether or not it's "overrated" doesn't matter. It came out early in the PlayStation's life and it was the first of it's kind. Much like Super Mario 64. Full fledged 3D games were brand new & and mind blowing and unfathomable. Donkey Kong Country 3 on SNES came out roughly 6 months before the N64 and Super Mario 64 did. In 6 months you went from a 2d Side scroller to a full blown, fully fledged 3D game. Same thing with Toy Story in 1995. The first CGI movie. Before it, nobody had seen anything like it. It was mind blowing and unthinkable. In Siskel & Ebert's review, they didn't really review it, they just spent the whole time gushing how amazing the CGI looks. Show that review to a 12 year old who wasn't there at the time when the movie came out and they'll be thinking "Why the hell are they talking so much about how good the animation is? It looks the same as any other computer animated movie for crying out loud"

 

FF7 sold 2 million copies in Japan in it's first 3 days, and a lot of retailers in the US were breaking the street date for it to keep up demand. People were buying PlayStation's just go get the game. A lot of people, especially kids, they don't have parents that are willing to buy them multiple consoles. Some of them may of potentially got a N64 if FF7 would of been a multiplatform game for both consoles, but they didn't have the choice because it couldn't fit on a N64 cartridge. It kickstarted the PlayStation and gave Sony a massive boost near the beginning of the PlayStation's life cycle.

 

The fact it suffered backlash years later, just like every successful thing does (movie, game, tv show, etc.) and it became trendy to call it overrated (a perfect example is the movie Titanic) that has nothing to do with it.

 

I think Halo is overrated. I'm not going to deny the massive, positive influence it had on the Xbox and i'm not going to deny it was a huge (and probably one of the only) selling points that made people want to buy an Xbox at the time.

 

Same thing with Tetris and the Gameboy, and Wii Sports and the Wii. Those games simply sold tons of consoles, people were literally buying the console to just to get that specific game.

Same thing with the PlayStation 2 doubling as a DVD player. At the time, it was the cheapest DVD player on the market and it came out at the time DVD players were becoming common household items and were becoming "affordable" enough for the average joe to be able to buy (IIRC you had to buy some insanely expensive remote to navigate the DVD menus for the DVD player on the Xbox, whereas the PS2 you could just use the controller to navigate)

 

People that didn't give two craps about video games were buying a PS2 just to watch DVDs.

 

Edited July 20, 2018 by Pink

[RugglesTx]

 

 

flash storage is the way of the future. You can fit more data on a micro sd card than a 5 inch triple layer uhd bluray, with faster data transfer and virtually zero seek time. Compare to the mid 90s when the cd held 650mb and the largest n64 carts were 64mb.

The small carts the Nintendo Switch uses are pretty cool. Better than any CD based format IMO.

 

Of course they would be crazy easy to lose...kinda look like really small PC Engine game media.

[youxia]

Ok, if we're getting the "Halo/FF7 = overrated" posts, it's a sure sign that some fresh VCS news are needed badly.

[Pink]

Ok, if we're getting the "Halo/FF7 = overrated" posts, it's a sure sign that some fresh VCS news are needed badly.

It's my birthday next week, sadly

 

I feel old (And i'll only be 26) Someone want to make me a cake?

 

I had something like this in mind....

 

 

Edited July 20, 2018 by Pink

[+Nathan Strum]

It's my birthday next week, sadly

 

I feel old (And i'll only be 26) Someone want to make me a cake?

 

You're not allowed to feel old until you're at least 40.

[Flojomojo]

You're not allowed to feel old until you're at least 40.

 

Proof here. No cake for anyone, you're all too thick from eating all the tacos.

[Pink]

 

Proof here. No cake for anyone, you're all too thick from eating all the tacos.

Cool, I learned something today! It's all good, you should see the comments I get when people find out I love Project Runway haha Everything usually pales in comparison to that.

[MrBeefy]

Ok, if we're getting the "Halo/FF7 = overrated" posts, it's a sure sign that some fresh VCS news are needed badly.

I did really like FF7. I think it is considered the best by some due to it being the first 3D. Story wise it isn't as strong as the SNES era FF2 or FF3 (US). FF2 had the better story but FF3 looked slightly better.

 

Overrated? Yes but it was still a good game. I do probably need to play it again. :/

[+frankodragon]

I know somebody on these forums who doesn't deserve cake or tacos. Or anything else other than air and water for that matter.

[RugglesTx]

Im calling dibs on posting number 12,000 post on this thread. If Im not around when it is time yall have to hold off posting till i get a chance to ring up 12,000.

 

New guy rights and all...

[carlsson]

I love Project Runway

 

Perhaps Ataribox LLC needs to employ Tim Gunn to oversee their progress:

 

[cybercylon]

Thanks for the list. I am not going to be too inclusive of everything. How did I forget the Dreamcade Replay? Well... it was getting late....

 

You're missing a ton of things that didn't grab as much media attention (not your fault, that's just the nature of fads like this). Gamestick and Ouya were early, but there were many many other things like them. Your most notable omission is Dreamcade Replay - One Console To Rule Them All, which depending who you talk to, was courted/harassed by Atari. I think the Dreamcade product is a lot more worthy and interesting than AtariBox.

 

Here are some hardware projects that I personally backed:

 

Tingbot: Make Raspberry Pi More Fun! a cute case and development environment to make clock radios and stuff out of a Pi. Can also use it as a tiny arcade machine.

Arduboy - Card Sized Gaming arduino and OLED screen on a credit card sized case, with game controls

CHIP -- the World's First Nine Dollar Computer tiny handheld Linux, also supports PICO8 "fantasy console"

Grippity: World's First Transparent Tablet unsuccessful

GameStick: The Most Portable TV Games Console Ever Created I canceled this one, but it came out, albeit slow and underpowered

GameKid a Pi-Boy, funded successfully, but they didn't build it so backers were refunded

 

I gave away or sold off all of these, but I kept my OUYA because it's cute and I have bunches of emulators on it, even though I don't use it. Some of the pitches for these are very well done, and nearly all of them have the "create your own awesome!" tone about them ... "open" is another way of saying "bring or make your own software."

 

 

Logistics of manufacturing, packaging, and shipping is difficult, but yeah, they really should. It's just that AtariBox is so late, so undifferentiated, so bland. It's the boiled chicken breast and plain white rice version of a games console. It would never have gotten any traction if not for the brand, and if I were the god-emperor of Atari, I never would have greenlit the idea.

 

 

I didn't back GCW Zero, but I got a second hand one from Ebay. It was just OK, and it's been surpassed in price/performance by a zillion cheap Chinese game players. I don't have it anymore, and I had a pain in the ass experience selling it. I foolishly listed it as configured, and the dumb-dumb who bought it refused to read up on how to actually use it. I ended up refunding the money, and when I successfully resisted it, I erased it and set it to factory defaults, and I used ThinkGeek's language as a dumb-dumb screen:

 

 

Assuming AtariBox comes out, they might want to say something similar for would-be "hackers" who want to put Steam games in the "Any OS" container. It's likely to be more work than some will want to do, especially for a self-described game console.

 

Prediction: less hacking and development, more people leaving it in the box, hoping it will gain value, like this specimen:

 

Screen Shot 2018-07-20 at 10.06.19 AM.png

 

 

Whatever, Fred.

[Matt_B]

Now that Tempest 4000 is out, you can get something of the feel of the VCS by playing it on your PC or a suitable console and positioning a random piece of old Atari hardware next to the TV.

 

Any takers?

[Andromeda Stardust]

 

You're not allowed to feel old until you're at least 40.

 

nah. im 37, overweight, graying hair, but still growing on 24. i play 40 year old video games, listen to 90s hip hop, 80s pop, and classic rock, and i can ride my bicycle like theres no tommorrow. you're only as young as you feel...

[+frankodragon]

 

 

 

Taco_Birthday_Cake.JPG

I don't think you'd want red and black frosting though. They taste kind of bitter.

[Andromeda Stardust]

I don't think you'd want red and black frosting though. They taste kind of bitter.

 

where i come from, tacos are made from corn tortilla, ground beef, lettuce, and tomatoe. not sugar and frosting confection.

[RugglesTx]

 

 

where i come from, tacos are made from corn tortilla, ground beef, lettuce, and tomatoe. not sugar and frosting confection.

You bring up a important point

 

Corn or flour tortilla?

 

I am pro corn myself although I can suck down either.

[Lodmot]

Is it bad that i still actually want to support the VCS? Lol. xD I'm still working on that exclusive game for it that i wanted to make. My girlfriend might be doing some of the graphics for it too >u< Lol

Edited July 21, 2018 by Lodmot

[Pink]

Is it bad that i still actually want to support the VCS? Lol. xD I'm still working on that exclusive game for it that i wanted to make

Based on everything we know (and don't know) What do you think? Only you can make that decision. If you're still indecisive after everything that has happened (and that hasn't happened) Then I don't know what to say to you to sway you one way or the other.

 

It's like smoking cigarettes. Only you can decide whether to smoke or not. Based on everything we know about smoking and the dangers and the risks, if that hasn't swayed you to not do it, then i'm really not sure there is anything more I could do or say to persuade you to not smoke.

Edited July 21, 2018 by Pink

[Lodmot]

Based on everything we know (and don't know) What do you think? Only you can make that decision. If you're still indecisive after everything that has happened (and that hasn't happened) Then I don't know what to say to you to sway you one way or the other.

Well one of the big selling points for me as a developer is that they specifically mentioned support for Game Maker, which i use religiously for my projects. I dunno, part of me thinks it could still have great potential, but it needs a DRAMATIC amount of really good indie developers that make exclusive games just for that console alone to let it really stand out from the others..

Edited July 21, 2018 by Lodmot

[RugglesTx]

Is it bad that i still actually want to support the VCS? Lol. xD I'm still working on that exclusive game for it that i wanted to make. My girlfriend might be doing some of the graphics for it too >u< Lol

I am morally supporting it, I want the thing to be successful. Ill buy one if I like the final product. No shame is support more gaming options IMO.

[Shamus]

Is it bad that you want to support a non-existent console that, odds are, won't ever be coming out, and, even if it does, won't have a significant installed user base? The only person who can answer that question is you. Either way, I wish you well, and hope you realize that your exclusive-to-an-as-of-yet-piece-of-vaporware will be seen only by a tiny amount of people, if any. If that floats your boat, then rock on.