Matt_B

I'll give Intellivision credit for not resorting to e-begging for pre-orders in order to fund its development. Well, at least they haven't done so yet. I can't think of much else going for it though, and in particular I'd think that the controllers were the last thing worth revisiting from the original.

Yeah, it's currently an off-the-shelf dev board for an already obsolescent chip, that's about five times too large to fit into the case that they previously showed us, not that it would have worked anyway since there's no ventilation and the ports are all in the wrong places to fit onto a motherboard without some very oddball risers. I won't deny all possibility of them delivering something that works eventually but, as PCs go, it seems certain to be a rather underwhelming one. They're going to have to turn in a sterling effort on the system software front - of which we've yet to see anything more than rigged demos - to make anything of it.

From what I can gather, they don't really own Rollercoaster Tycoon either. Chris Sawyer, the original series creator, still owns it and Atari publish the games under a licensing agreement.

If you want a PC-based TV device already on the market that'd score most of the same positives as the VSC, and at a mere tenth of the price to boot, there's also the Raspberry Pi. I've got three of them, a Roku, a Switch and a Windows HTPC. I gave up on the idea of having one device that could do it all ages ago, and Atari seem unlikely to change that.

I like the way they slipped that one in there. It's almost as though it's starting to dawn on them that making a games console isn't such a great idea when they're a publisher who can barely muster one worthwhile new release every couple of years.

120 days in most cases, apparently. I'm somewhat spun out that it appears that Paypal are the ones who give you the most time. That said, I'd still have the least confidence in their ability to reverse a payment.

You've also got 180 days to raise a dispute with Paypal if you paid that way. I'd suggest doing it early though, because their customer service isn't great.

Here's another:

The key difference is that CIG are good at raising money. They could probably string people along indefinitely with Star Citizen without going broke, where there's only so far Atari can get with $3 million.

You could probably find a Flashback 8 for around $30 if you shop around too. Not that that's going to be much better than a box of trinkets to many people either.

Nice box, shame about what's in it. That could be their new marketing tagline.

Yeah, but when you're not taking any money for them you've got that luxury. Besides, I work from the perspective that a game is only finished when you've run out of memory, booze or both.

Yeah, a CDi Mini makes no sense at all, and surely the idea would get canned as soon as it reached someone at Philips with a functioning brain and a knowledge of the system's history. They barely managed to shift a million units and it has next to no memorable games, certainly when you're looking at exclusive ones that are memorable for the right reasons. Not that the VCS makes any sense either, with the Flashback 8 already covering the nostalgia market for the 2600, but with Atari having taken the money it's actually in their interest to deliver something eventually.

A lecturer once told me that the only thing super about supercomputers is the price. Mind you, even that's not really true any more. You can make a supercomputer out of anything that can be networked. People have even made Raspberry Pi based supercomputers for the price of a high-end desktop. So yeah, you probably could make one out of the Atari VCS. It'd have to exist first, of course, and I doubt there'd be any use for it, but yeah.

You need to refresh the cache on your web browser. This is what the sandwich looks like now.

When quizzed about these things at the time, Atari did point to their fine print where it said "for illustrative purposes only." I can only guess that the people who didn't back out at that point don't know what a red flag is.

Perhaps they just mean that anyone can hook up a CD drive to a Raspberry Pi and run ripping software and emulators on it?

I'd have thought that the overriding theme of this discussion so far is that showing a few rigged demos and taking pre-orders is a long way from "happening."

I don't think Atari will be suing anyone based on that patent as it's not in their name. Rather, Push-Run Holdings - the company behind the Polymega - owns it, so they'd be the ones to do so. Still, creating a patent for a vapourware games console and trolling anyone who actually manages to bring the concept to market sounds like it has potential. Still who in their right mind is going to knock-off the idea behind the Polymega?

Do you honestly think they can deliver this thing early? They're still working with dev boards, the case is going to need a re-design to work with whatever production board they can come up with, and we've not even seen a glimpse of the system software yet. Even the best crowdfunded hardware projects tend to run a few months late. For the bad ones it can be years late or never.

Yeah, it's not exactly a secret that Google make almost all their money through serving advertising and even their products that don't directly do that still tend to accumulate useful metadata to help target adverts more effectively. Other companies, Microsoft included, do similar things but nowhere near to the same extent.

Can I point out that it's practically always a Burroughs B205 in the background? Hollywood might not have had a clue when it came to what computers did or how they worked back in the 60s, but they sure knew a good set of blinkenlights when they saw one.

Personally, I'd say that all those Rollercoaster Tycoon spinoffs are forgiven because of the one that turned out all well. Mind you, you wouldn't exactly need the benefit of hindsight to figure out that it'd be the one that Chris Sawyer was directly involved in which was most likely to hit the mark.

That was last year. We now know that the "custom solution" is the Bristol Ridge A10-9630P. The dev boards are doubtless very similar though, because AMD wouldn't want to re-invent the wheel every time they put a new chip out.

That picture of them gathered around the monitor made me think of this: