Matt_B

Yet another fantastic partnership with a service you can run on a Raspberry Pi. Atari are totally killing it. 😄

Vectors might be a bit harder to create than bitmaps but I don't think they limit your graphical style much. The main advantage of them is that they scale well, regardless of the underlying resolution, so you won't get something that starts to look blocky and jagged on a larger display like raster graphics get when you zoom in past a point. Compare the look of, say, Hollow Knight versus Dead Cells on a 4K display. Mind you, a lot of people are just going for the pixelated look as an artistic choice these days.

Yeah, I can run Wind Waker on my phone without too much trouble and it's not exactly a high end one. The problem is rather spending the tens of millions of dollars it'd take to make a game of that calibre, and figuring out how to recoup it regardless of how you price it.

I'd think that comparing the Amico to the Switch and the VCS is pointless for different reasons. The Switch is a massively successful machine that the Amico can't even hope to grasp the coattails of. They'll walk away happy if they get a hundredth of its sales and a tenth would be beyond their wildest dreams. On the other hand, the VCS has just been a rolling dumpster fire of lawsuits, faked footage and delays. You don't have to be particularly optimistic for the Amico to see it as considerably more worthy.

It's worth bearing in mind that the typical $150 laptop is typically built out of mostly obsolescent parts by a manufacturer who has since moved their cutting edge and profitable models onto newer technologies, and can offset their nominal value against the costs of continuing to warehouse them. It takes incredibly efficient practices where practically nothing goes to waste to turn a marginal profit at such prices, and Atari couldn't even hope to compete with them. I doubt they're even making that much of a profit at $390 with the way they do business.

Presumably, they're still living in the dreamland where it's a useful product with just the built in Linux-based OS. Increasing the size of the eMMC just so you can put Windows on it without recourse to an external drive would be a dead giveaway.

There's damning with faint praise and then there's comparisons with the VCS. 😀

Yeah, don't you know how terrible the eShop is? There's absolutely no way you'd be able to find a curated selection of games for under $10 on it... https://www.nintendo.com/games/switch/nintendo-switch-games-9-99-and-under/

Sorry to break it to you, but the only way Roger Moore is crossing that finish line is when continental drift takes Monaco cemetery over it.

I've a feeling that the only "hard core" this VCS is ever likely to see is the rubble that goes in to the landfill on top of it.

You can apparently use phones as controllers for some games. Download an app, sync over Bluetooth, job done. The same is true of the Switch, for what it's worth, but phones make for pretty poor controllers in most games. Maybe the Amico will fare better.

Fair enough. Still better value than the 'All-In' bundle though. 😀

ChromeOS can literally run on a Raspberry Pi out of the box. The VCS is going to need an external drive for it, that'll probably cost you more than a Raspberry Pi. Bargain. 😀

Au contraire, enjoy these babies:

I'm used to Australian prices and it still seems eye-gougingly expensive to me. Let's face it. You could buy an XBox One S and a Switch right now and still have around $20 left towards a PS4 for the price of the 'All-In' bundle. I'd think 'Taken-In' would be a better name for it. 😀

Action 52 was apparently developed in the space of three months, and it shows. Still, they got the thing to market. Three years and counting for Atari, and they'd still appear to be nowhere near that.

You could, but it's not like it'd open up any radical new gameplay possibilities. The main advantage of CD media at the time was the ability to store a large amount of pre-rendered video and audio tracks and even back in the day it was possible, if a bit complex technically, to deliver these on the N64 if your publisher was prepared to pay for a large enough cartridge. Few were, although here's a good article about how Resident Evil 2 was ported over: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2018-retro-why-resident-evil-2-n64-is-one-of-the-most-ambitious-ports-of-all-time

Every morning I start the day with a large glass of haterade with a dish of hater tots on the side. 😀 Seriously, I don't hate the modern day Atari. I just see them as what they are; a supplier of badges for other people who make actual products. Some of those products are good - Vault, Tempest 4000, Rollercoaster Tycoon Classic - while others like the Flashback are still OK for what you're paying. Most are absolute dreck though and the Ataribox/VCS has always seemed destined for that category. It's been like watching a slow motion car crash for the past three years. I'd still hope that the backers eventually get something but it's almost certainly not going to be great. As for the Amico, it's not something that interests me in the slightest. I believe they'll still let people cancel their preorders for a full refund though.

I get the feeling that the last thing Atari want right now is for someone who hasn't signed an NDA to get their hands on the hardware.

There are two versions of Windows 10 that you can run on the Pi and only one of them (Windows 10 Internet of Things) is free. That's the version that only lets you run universal apps, so no Steam, no browser other than Edge, and everything runs in a performance-crippling sandbox. It's fun for a couple of days, but even if you don't hate Microsoft it'll have you back to running Linux soon enough. The other version, Windows 10 on ARM - which will run Win32 applications via emulation - isn't free, isn't officially supported, and doesn't entirely work. That a cheap single-board computer can even run a hacked preview build is impressive though, considering where we were only a few years back. None of this would matter to Atari since they've got an x86 CPU. They'd just have to give Microsoft some money, and I think we've already established how little they like paying for things.

On that $139 PC you'll also be getting a ton of bundled crapware and that's basically what's paying for your Windows license. I doubt Microsoft would care much if Atari wanted to do the same. The idea that they are in any way competitors would probably prompt fits of laughter and snorts of derision. Atari presumably just want to take the money for the crapware (i.e. premium subscription services) while using a free OS. That might actually be a smart move were it not for the level of comic ineptness elsewhere.

I suppose it clears up what Atari meant when they said they were giving the 96 units to developers. They meant property developers, not the people who make games. 😀

RetroArch is the dominant platform. You've just already got a huge selection of hardware to run it on.

That $17 gets you a real wood veneer too. 🤣

The irony is that if Atari had actually built the machine they said they were going to build three years ago and delivered it on time, it'd probably already be deader than the Ouya by now. All of us who wanted one would have been able to pick it up for $50 on eBay and customize it into the media/emulation/gaming machine we wanted but knew they'd never be able to put together by themselves. Either that or there'd be some cheaper and better Chinese clone now like all those knockoffs of the GCW Zero that sprung up in the past couple of years. But no, their rank incompetence and shady practices keep them continuing to fail to deliver and there's still that set of coat tails for the dreamers to cling to.