the antithesis

Now that I've had some time with it, I can say with certainty that the CXStick is indeed atrocious. Maine thing I've found is that squirreling away the extra hidden buttons means they're in locations where you can accidentally hit them. I tried Berzerk and kept hitting the click rim and exiting the game. That's... just where I put my hands, activating forty-year-old muscle memory. I am definitely going to seek an alternative or simply hack this so that functionality isn't in my way.

That would be a bit above my pay grade, unfortunately. Most I plan to do to this thing is tho make a functional keyboard on it. This will be difficult because the keyboard sticker is under a bezel that is glued into place and removing it risks breaking it or damaging the sticker. So I may not even do that much.

Okay, so mine arrived and I beeped out and confirmed most of what I said above. The upper unpopulated USB port connects to the ribbon cable and, therefore, the USB hub for the four ports. The lower unpopulated port by the lower left corner of the board appears to be free. So, if it's still connected, it should be usable. Internal storage or whatever. The pins for it are duplicated on the bottom edge of the PCB between the screw and the ribbon cable connector. The back USB is similarly duplicated on the pinouts just below it. I have not had time to test any of these this to see if they function as expected. Has anyone tried plugging a USB stick in one of the front jacks? I could be it'll only read a USB stick in the back? One thing I also wanted to check was the USB hub and if you could support more that four. Sadly, no. I found a datasheet for the FE1.1s chip on Adafruit, of all places, and it only supports four. One additional thing I notice is a tiny button in the lower right. It is not pressable when the case is on and it connects to the "UBOOT" pin on the header on the lower right edge. This header has the following pins: GND UBOOT RECOVER VCC-10 or VCC-IO I don't know what these things are, but I'm noting them here for those that do. So, there's a start for people who like to hack these things.

Also appears to be an unused USB connection on the main board. Aside from the the two unpopulated USB sockets, there are pinout headers in various locations, but each seems to be directly connected to a socket. The header directly below populated plug in the back appears to be directly connected. One of the unpopulated plugs on the side looks like it connects to the USB hub. Which leaves one unused. Have to wait until mine gets here to beep it out for sure.

So, I got one of the 128K Harlequin board which is a clone of the ZX Spectrum. My question is since it says the whole board only uses 5v, can I just replace the whole power circuit, which apparently knocks down the 9v center negative that comes in to 5v, with a micro USB plug an then use a cell charger like on my Raspberry Pi? Personally, I can't think of any reason why not. Closest problem I could find was the amperage, but the center negative PSU I've found supplies just under one amp, same as the 5v charger. I just don't know enough about electronics to be confident that this will work or that I'm not missing something that is blindingly obvious to someone competent.

I'm posting this because it's the main thing that still has my interest about this device. I like games and this thing plays games. But I do have one question: How? There are no controls in evidence on this thing, so how do you control the ship in Asteroids? It mentions motion and voice, which would be hideous. Imagine being on the bus waving your arm around shouting "Shoot!Shoot!Shoot!Shoot!" It's possible this is where the smartphone link comes in and you can play with virtual buttons on that screen while awkwardly trying to look at your wrist, but that isn't in evidence here. At the end of the day, this isn't a product that would interest me. Which is not to say I'm not interested in game watches. I used to have one back in the day. God, that was terrible. But I played the hell out of it. I'd been thinking before these smartwatches came out that the next evolution would be to bring back watches, but I was thinking more of pocket watches.I could see the hipster kids latching onto the style of a pocket watch and it just seems to make more sense to me as a functional device, since to can still swipe and tap the screen with the thumb of the hand that's holding it but you still have the other hand if you need it. It would make more sense as a gaming smartwatch if it had physical controls on the edge like a stopwatch. Imagine if under the thumb was a d-pad, A and B buttons on the side under the first and second fingers. I think this would work. But that's not what Gameband is offering. So, oh well.

That sounds like a good idea. There were thousands of those stupid things and there should be enough room for a Pi Zero, I would imagine.

Yeah. I was planning to revisit this thread once the full unveiling occurred because the shilling is painful to behold. I really don't understand this product. What is a smartwatch and why should I care? I don't even have a smartphone, personally. I may learn how to make one out of a Raspberry Pi someday... They really missed a trick by not making the Atari one black and woodgrain. In either case, it doesn't appear to be like the Minecraft one that was a glorified thumbstick. It's a full Smertwetch. Woo hoo.

So I got a tantilizing email today from Atari's newsletter. It had a picture of an Asteroids Deluxe cabinet with the words "Remember how you used to game?" After that, it reads Now, my first thought was that the Coleco Chameleon was back again, but after a bit of research, I don't think that's the case. I had never heard of this Gameband company, so I looked them up and found a Minecraft Gameband which is a glorified USB thumb drive you can wear on your wrist. To be fair, it is different tech than typical flash drives as, allegedly, you can play Minecraft directly from the Gameband, which would kill an ordinary flash drive. Even so, whoop-de-skip, I say. So this has me wondering what Atari is doing with this and if the reference to classic games means anything. We won't know until February and in February we will all be underwhelmed.

A handheld game system with removable controllers. That sounds vaguely familiar. Everything Nintendo has done in the last decade or so has been an update of something they did thirty years ago. The Wii was the Power Glove. the DS was the Game & Watch Multi Screen. I'm still waiting for the update of R.O.B. the Robot.

You can get AAA titles on Gamecube. Just take some nice poo, wait for it to start turning grey and then put it on top of your Gamecube. The problem here isn't Nintendo but with that so-called AAA market you mentioned where they went from males aged 16-30 being the people most likely to purchase a video game to being the only people likely to purchase a video game. This laser focused the market and eliminated a large percentage of the possible consumers out there. Have a vagina? Video games simply are not for you. Younger than twelve or older than 35? Video games are not for you. It's the same kind of focused marketing that brought us all those Fast and Furious movies. In a more robust market, Call of Duty would be a B title at best. This is what happened to Nintendo. A large electronic conglomerate that could give a fig about video games as an artistic medium or as a business and found out how to maximize their profit in a short-sighted move that shrank the audience so that what should have been a game with niche appeal became the biggest tent pole franchise.

Yep. I wonder if this means other Parker Bros games will be included...

Ah, intriguing... Were I to guess, I'd say Vanguard because of the tune ripped from the Flash Gordon soundtrack. Japan had different copyright laws in the 80's so they'd rip off stuff wherever. I'm trying to think of what games have music that would be likely to cause a problem. The 2600 wasn't known for it's musical abilities.

Oh god, I'd forgotten about that. I'm glad it failed because that looked so ugly and, honestly, who wanted this? It reminds me of Retro Atari Classics for the DS "3 graffiti legends tag 10 Atari classics" the box says. Why?!? How does one become a graffiti legend and why would anyone want Atari games with stupid graphics?

I am an American, but I think the ZX Spectrum is cool in theory. Haven't tried it in practice. I did watch the episode of the Ben Heck Show where he made a pocket version of the ZX and during the teardown found out some interesting technical aspects. I think the appeal is it was a cheap computer you would buy for your kids back in the day, so many Brits had one and are now nostalgic for it. So a new ZX machine is just capitalizing on that. No different from the Atari Flashback systems. Frankly, I find the output I have seen thus far rather appealing. I like the look of it better than, say... oh the Colecovision. I'll have to take a closer look someday.