Matt_B

Yes, I stream in 4K. Technically it's 'up to 4K' as you get what Netflix, etc. give you - and that's rarely going to be better than Bluray - but I've got the bandwidth and unlimited data, so why not? The TV and router are mounted on opposite sides of the same wall, so I could slip a cable through if need be, but the WiFi is good enough at 5GHz so I've yet to bother.

Hate? Naah, it's just tough love. 😀 Here are my takes: 1 - It's not really any more an Atari product than the Flashback. Nobody at Atari knows how to create hardware and software, so it's all farmed out to external consultants. The basic idea came from a guy who had to sue them to get paid and the funding came from backers who've been left waiting for 18 months past the delivery date. All Atari brought was their brand, plus a heck of a lot of delays and confusion. 2 - CX-40 Joysticks can be used with most modern systems for appropriate games with an adapter. 3 - Ditto for Xbox 1 controllers. 4 - Or you could buy a PC that lets you do this for considerably less. I hear HP laptops start at $169 these days. 5 - $3 in the recent Steam sale. Just saying. 6 - As if that dual core CPU isn't already going to get overly taxed attempting to play modern games. 7 - Par for the course these days. Even Switch games on cartridge tend to get a day one patch without which they're barely playable. 8 - Basically, nothing your phone couldn't do. 9 - Only after you've installed your own OS. 10 - There are USB ports you could use to access external media, once you install your own OS of course. 11 - Yeah, but you can't put your own OS on the internal storage, at least not until someone hacks it. 12 - There is one exclusive VCS game. I.e. getting Atari to finally ship the thing. 13 - Don't think you get root access, so you'd probably need to install your own OS to play anything not from Atari's Store. Well, at least until it's hacked. 14 - They're going to be gathering dust anyway after three months, so I guess the $200 paperweight edition make some kind of sense that way. 15 - I think they only claimed you could install an emulator if you put your own OS on it. Might as well just cut out the middleman, put stock Ubuntu on it and unlock the bootloader... 16 - Even potato PCs can do 4K Netflix these days. This would have to be real bad if it couldn't.

The original design of the case was nicer. They just had the problem that you couldn't fit anything inside it. Basically, they made a paperweight and tried to sell it as a console. 😀

You could improve its paperweight/doorwedge functionality by taking the board out and filling it with something solid and heavy. Just like they did with their first 'prototype,' I suppose.

Of course he wants to do more with cryptocurrency. When you can make it for free and sell it for real money, that totally dovetails with his business model. 😀

The Lynx was a cutting edge platform for its time though. No handheld even came close to what it could do until the, much bulkier, Sega Nomad came out several years later. The GameBoy was generally a better machine to have on account of its vast games library, small size and really good battery life, but the Lynx certainly held a niche. The Jaguar too was at least a vaguely competitive platform for a year or so until the PlayStation came out. You can look back at games like Tempest 2000 and Rayman as classics for their time even if the machine was always doomed to be a commercial failure. The VCS just looks over a generation behind machines that it's selling at more or less the same price as. $389 for it versus $299 for a Series S or $399 for a PS5 Digital - not that any of them are in stock at the moment - is just no contest.

It'll be more like Cyberpunk 1977.

Is there really much doubt? It's got the specs of a $200 laptop and we already know how well they perform. About the only way it could surprise us is if it's somehow even worse than that. Perhaps there's some bottleneck in the architecture somewhere that'll make it even slower than expected? Maybe they've stuffed up the cooling and it throttles? Maybe the power supplies are too fragile and you can't leave it on for any length of time without them overheating? When they've had an eighteen month overrun just to get the thing made, there's probably not been too much of that time dedicated to making sure that the engineering is rock solid, so I'd guess that anything is possible.

To be fair, you're not going to watch much Netflix without an internet connection.

Well, at least you will until someone hacks it. If even the likes of Nintendo and Sony can't keep their consoles secure, it'd be something of a turn up if Atari could.

It's basically a bait and switch exercise. Whenever anyone calls it a console and how awful it is in comparison to other consoles, it's not a console. However, there's zero revenue to be extracted after you've sold a PC, so it's got to have its own locked-down OS with an online store and a bunch of subscription-based services. It's not really a PC either, at least it isn't until you add an external drive and install your own OS. They've then got the chutzpah to call it the "best of consoles and PC" when it's really more like the worst.

They must be serious if they're not going to put a number on it in terms of months, weeks or business days this time. 😀

The problem is, at base level, it's just a rather low-spec Linux PC with a user base of maybe 10,000 or so. Sure, the barrier to publishing on the VCS is low, but it's not like the barrier to getting a game on Steam is particularly high and that gets you a potential market of 90 million. Then there are all the other online stores: Microsoft, GoG, Origin, Epic, Uplay, Humble, Green Man. They've all got considerably bigger markets than the VCS is likely to have, and some of them will pay good money for exclusive deals too. Unless you're an obscure indie dev with no track record - who'd just get crowded out on Steam or any of the more established platforms - there's little incentive in putting your games on the VCS, and even less for making them exclusive.

I'd think that the IP Atari seem to be getting the most from of late is Cloak and Dagger. 😀

Yeah, it's not like there hasn't been a lot of discussion along the lines of: 1. The lack of value compared to current and next generation consoles, low-end laptops, existing mini PCs, etc. 2. The GPU is too weak for most modern games. Sure, you can play games designed to run on potato PCs at the lowest settings, such as Fortnite (at least if you stick Windows on an external drive and increase the RAM,) but it's going to be single digits for the truly demanding ones. 3. There are no exclusive games, and very few confirmed games at all beyond Atari Vault and Antstream. 4. How well will it hold up to heavy use? Can it handle running at full power for long without overheating and throttling? How robust are the controllers? Is the (presumably cheap and generic) external PSU up to the job? 5. How straightforward is installing your own copy of Linux to the sandbox going to be? Will it work straight away with off the shelf distros? Will Atari support approved distros or are you on your own? Shipping it isn't going to make those things go away. It's just going to bring them to the fore.

On the other hand, the more of a failure that it is, the more the units will be worth in the long run. The absolute worst thing that could happen for speculators is for Atari to run off a few hundred thousand of them that end up having to be sold off at a huge discount because nobody's biting at $400.

That's as opposed to the 'total rubes' count, which would be the number of people who ordered one. 😀

Adding an external drive and installing Windows on it isn't an emulator either.

Speaking of Tempest 4000, it's 75% off in the Steam sale. Vault, Rollercoaster Tycoon Classic and Missile Command are also discounted. That wraps up my summary of worthwhile Atari products for the year. 😀

Do the remote controls include an option to get it out of the warehouse and into a post office?

Yeah, the Switch never sold itself on raw power. It's barely OK as a TV console, even; the selling point is that you can pick it up, take it with you and keep playing your game. Also, with an install base of 60 million it's an attractive platform to make games for. The machines you probably should be comparing the VCS against, i.e. the next generation consoles in the same price bracket that just came out, would both absolutely beat it to a bloody pulp. Benchmarks might not be out yet, but when they're packing around twenty times more compute power it's a foregone conclusion. Except in a few contrived scenarios, e.g. games that bottleneck on a single CPU thread, the VCS probably couldn't even come close to the Xbox One and PS4.

Jani Penttinen has another video up: There's nothing earth-shattering in there but he's telling us more about this than Atari themselves are. Did they stop paying their PR people, or something? 😀

Yeah, you can't even call it a console exclusive. An un-console exclusive, maybe? 😀

Don't forget the woodgrain. 😀

The Vault DLC was added to Steam a year ago. You get the 5200 version of Star Raiders on it so it's worth five bucks, even if the rest is mostly filler.