Matt_B

There are exceptions. I lost my original set of Wing Commander 3 discs to rot, for one example. Mind you, these things are rare and it's not exactly hard to source backup copies of these things.

There's still room on page 1000 for a few more. And yeah, I know about the hidden posts, but come on. If we're to count them, we'd also have to give credence to Atari's claims of hidden working prototypes and a pre-production run of a hundred units.

I considered arbitrarily delaying Christmas for three months, just to give Atari a fair shake. 😀

It's that time of year when I've got something nice to say about Atari. This year it's that Tempest 4000 is 70% off in the Steam sale until 3 Jan. Merry Christmas one and all.

At the very least, there are some of us who like Atari kit from the 1970s and 1990s too. 😀

Mindlink would probably require the use of brain functions that some of the more erm... enthusiastic backers don't seem to be exhibiting in abundance. 😀

Maybe they meant "years, not months"?

Everything at E3 should be assumed to be running on a souped up PC under the bench unless demonstrated otherwise. Even then, you should be looking for suspicious cords.

I'd think that everyone would be too busy falling over laughing to bother cloning the thing. Still, if someone does make decent knock-off cases, so you can roll your own Hacktari, I'd have one.

With a 35 watt part too! Sure, you can passive cool anything with a big enough heat sink but there's not exactly room for one of those in a slimline case that would only give a few millimetres of headroom. Given that the redesign has a 12-25 watt chip, heat pipes, a fan, and must be nearly twice the height inside the case, I'm guessing that it was a learning experience for someone at least.

For the next trick, try naming your top ten Atari published games from the past six years. Can you even get to three without including re-releases? We're somehow expected to believe that this thing is going to have exclusive games. On that track record, it ain't going to happen.

To be fair, most TVs for the past decade have come with a USB port you can get 5-10 watts out of, which is more than enough for your average mini console. This thing is going to need a bit more than that though, so faulty laptop PSUs rescued from a skip outside the factory seems the way to go.

I reckon they'll go for one of those cheap laptop replacement PSUs that fizzes for a bit before frying whatever it's plugged into. You can't get something that secures the OS more than that.

The only gameplay footage we're likely to see soon is two people hitting a tennis ball back and forth with empty cases.

It's slightly better than Steam's royalty rate of 70%. However, I suspect most devs will still take the market of 90 million over 10 thousand. 88% is parity with the Epic store, although Epic also cover the royalties for UE with that. Atari are probably just wishlisting here though. This requires considerable back end infrastructure and development, and they haven't even shown us a rigged demo yet.

Its also worth asking what are they getting for this 'bleeding edge' tech other than a low power SOC that would get its arse kicked in any benchmark you care to mention by a $50 off-the-shelf GPU from a couple of years back?

Atari presumably aren't worried about the competition because their plan is to palm the VCAss off onto someone else as soon as it comes out, assuming it ever comes out. If they're unable to do so, the plan B would be to drop it like a ton of bricks and stick to their core businesses of t-shirts and lawsuits.

My prediction is for Atari to declare that they've always been at war with EastSega. 😀

As ever though, there's nothing collectable about fresh air, and that's all the backers have after 18 months of waiting.

Backers can take heart in the fact that they are probably just proofs, being passed off as the production versions, like everything else has been so far. The real cases probably won't get made until we're well into next year, assuming they can ever make working boards to go in them.

Yeah, even if it's a turd in a box, collectors might still want something purely on account of its rarity. Personally, I still like the case even after the redesign. If it ever comes out I'd probably pick one up either to hack and install some useful software on, or to totally gut and put a single-board computer in that I can do that with. However, when the best case scenario for this thing is that it could be the hacked Xbox or Raspberry Pi of the 2020s, I'm still wondering why they're even bothering.

Well, you might get close friends calling each other cunts as a term of endearment but it's still more usually used for someone that you find contemptible. It's not a "wow! did you actually say that?" word like it is in parts of the US though.

I'm inclined to be a bit suspicious of the project's finances. Sure, it shouldn't have cost a lot to develop - there has been more impressive crowdfunded hardware made on a few hundred thousand - but when Atari don't have the in-house skills to do anything more technical than flush a toilet, they're going to be contracting everything out to people who are probably charging them a fortune.

It's funny how all these things that prevent them from giving the exact date now didn't stop them from setting hard deadlines twice previously, including once before they'd even started work on the prototype. 🤥

Atari. Lawsuits like never before.