The Atari VCS Info Thread

[The Atari VCS Info Thread]

3 hours ago, ColecoJoe said:

You just described my setup. 

Needs more woodgrain.

[The Atari VCS Info Thread]

2 hours ago, Bill Loguidice said:

I'd be shocked if it ran a locked 60fps at even 720p with anything other than mostly unusable low graphic fidelity settings, but I guess we'll see once it's out in the wild.

30-50fps at 720p on the lowest setting seems to be the general consensus of what the Vega 3 is good for with Fortnite:

 

https://www.userbenchmark.com/PCGame/FPS-Estimates-Fortnite/3954/511366.0.0.0.0

 

A small number of people managed to get it up to 60, but I wouldn't be surprised if that was with the aid of a combination of overclocks, faster RAM, running at 540p, config hacks or just leaving the camera pointing skyward. 4K is going to be in single figures at any settings.

 

Those numbers are mostly based on the Athlon 200GE and the Ryzen 3 2200U rather than the 1606G but it's the same GPU and dual core CPUs of similar clocks, so I doubt there will be much difference.

 

 

 

[The Atari VCS Info Thread]

4 hours ago, Nathan Strum said:

Seems inevitable...

 

It would be quite hilarious if the VCS was to get snapped up as an off the shelf solution for the digital signage market.

 

That's already happened with the Shield TV to a certain extent. It's cheap, very easy to set up, and you can leave it running practically indefinitely.

 

I'm not sure how well the VCS will score on those things though.

[The Atari VCS Info Thread]

2 hours ago, zzip said:

But what they are planning to ship is a PC with probably Xbox-compatible controller.   Just in an Atari case.   Is that really misleading?  Or is it a fair representative of the product?   The real product here is the Atari VCS case, the controller cases and whatever interface they give it.    Everything else is based off existing designs.   As many point out, you could build a PC ITX system yourself with similar functionality.

 

I think the mistake people make here is assuming that Atari is inventing some new hardware product.   The product is the case, the brand, the product is nostalgia.   Any hardware engineering work that needs to be done will probably be done by AMD.  The rest is integration work.

Quite obviously, it's way more complicated than that. For starters, you couldn't even put a PC made out of existing parts in the first case they showed. The ports at the back didn't line up, there was no way you keep a 35W chip cool in it and it was always going to need a custom motherboard.

 

A bunch of us said so at the time on the other, now locked, topic. So, it came as no surprise when after a year of nothing much happening, they changed the case, the ports layout and the chip. Basically, nothing that they presented at the crowdfunding has survived.

 

That's why you need a prototype, and why Atari are a bunch of amateurs.

 

AMD will make sure the chip works with Windows and provide a reference board. That's pretty much it. By all accounts Intel are far more supportive when it comes to making custom PCs.
 

[The Atari VCS Info Thread]

 

9 hours ago, zzip said:

The whole point of crowdfunding is to raise money to bring your idea to life.

 

This product couldn't never exist in the traditional sense.   The media would look at it as a foolish attempt to compete with the big 3 and write it off completely.   Instead they went straight to the public with the concept and generated a lot of buzz.  Like it or not, this is how niche markets work in the 21st century. 

 

It's not like the old Atari started with working prototypes.   The ST barely worked and was extremely fragile when they showed it off at CES.   There was a lot of skepticism in the industry that the thing would ever make it to manufacturing.

Sure, crowdfunding is about raising money. However, there's still the expectation that it's a product that's going to be delivered and that the people behind it have the competence to do so.

 

I'm pretty sure that a device like the Spectrum Next couldn't exist in the traditional sense either - it was not so much aiming for a niche, but a crack in the wall with only around 3000 backers on Kickstarter - but that didn't stop them from building a working prototype before they went to crowdfunding. If you're working with off-the-shelf chips it should only cost a few thousand dollars too so you could go through several iterations of this before settling upon a design that's right for the job, at least if you know what you're doing. Atari obviously didn't know what they're doing and they're also cheapskates into the bargain.

 

Surely I don't need to point out he difference between the barely working prototype of the ST and a lump of plastic? The former nowadays might just have been good enough to satisfy Kickstarter's requirements but the latter was never going to. Atari went with Indiegogo precisely because they're the Wild West of crowdfunding and allow you to take money for pretty much anything at the glint-in-the-eye stage.

 

28 minutes ago, Stephen said:

I wonder if the not-VCS comes out, and people have no games to play on it, what will the conversation circle to?

Um... what's the best game on AntStream? 🤣🤣🤣

[The Atari VCS Info Thread]

14 hours ago, zzip said:

Product development is a messy process.  Requirements are in flux, corners are cut, deadlines are missed,  end result is often not what was originally specced.   But typically this all happened behind closed doors, and the consumer is none the wiser until the tell-all interviews/books/documentaries years later.

 

The crowdfunding process puts all that front-and-center.  People who've never worked on a product development cycle see things to get outraged about.   I've been through such cycles.  I'm not going to judge them on the process, I'm going to judge them on the end result, assuming it ships.   Anything else is meaningless internet drama.

Sure, product development can be messy, but there's no requirement to launch a crowdfunding campaign when all you've got to show is a few lumps of plastic and some mocked-up footage.

 

Rather, most people serious about making hardware would construct a working prototype first - using their own money and behind closed doors like you say - and the fact that Atari didn't do this is what shows them to be a bunch of chancers.

 

As such, it's entirely down to their mismanagement that we've had such a good view of its underbelly and even then one of the most common complaints is that they rarely put out substantive updates about the true status of the project which is why it's still a matter of guesswork as to whether they'll be able to ship or not in a few weeks.

[The Atari VCS Info Thread]

19 hours ago, Chopsus said:

FAtari has seriously screwed the pooch when it comes to their marketing and launch window.

 

Fred Cheesnuts: when would be the absolute worst time to release the VCS non-console

 

Anyone with a brain: at the same time as PS5 and XBox X Series!

That's what you get for repeatedly delaying something that was originally envisioned to come out in 2018.

Anyway, not to worry. They'll probably just delay it again and avoid the clash that way. 😀

[The Atari VCS Info Thread]

9 hours ago, zzip said:

From the announcement, it was always a Linux-based console that would be open and you could use it as a PC if you chose.

It was always confirmed to be Linux-based but not an open system. Rather, if you wanted to install your own software, you always had to go into 'sandbox' mode and bring your own OS.

 

It was certainly not explained how this was going to be implemented - by adding additional storage and having the option to boot from it - until Rob Wyatt joined the project, and a prototype not consisting of a solid lump of plastic was being worked on. I'm not sure if his explanation would still hold now that he's left it even if Atari haven't said anything else to contradict it.

 

Also, if Atari have have ever shown it booting into Linux under Sandbox mode, it's passed me by.

[The Atari VCS Info Thread]

2 hours ago, LoonyLucas said:

From what I've seen, it can play indie games, it can have an operating system installed and allow me to use it as a pc for me to access my steam library and emulators.  That's cool to me and that's why I backed it.

What have you seen?

So far as I can tell everything they've shown us has been mock-ups or a PC running Windows.

 

 

[The Atari VCS Info Thread]

Ah, there's nothing I've love more for Atari to get the thing out and to be able to buy them internationally and flip for the Australian retail price at a huge profit.

Alas,  I'd suspect that there are probably going to be issues on both the supply and demand sides of that. I.e. Yet another unannounced delay seems more than likely, and there probably aren't too many people wanting to pay $100 more than the price of a Series X for one.

[The Atari VCS Info Thread]

Yeah, it's not like they haven't just ghosted past deadlines before.

 

I'd think that anyone likely to be disappointed by an after-the-fact announcement of a delay has probably already lost it with Atari by now anyway, so there's not really any incentive for them to change.

[The Atari VCS Info Thread]

9 hours ago, zzip said:

Well I don't have a 4,  I hear they are much faster.   I have a 2 that was meant to be an emulation box, but it just sits there idly most of the time because it never really fufilled it's promise.   It barely runs stella at full speed.

 

Well it's not 1999 anymore.   I haven't seen Linux struggle with ACPI in years.   So I would hope that the VCS can handle this properly.   But these are the reasons I want to wait and see before buying.

 

mine has a keyboard attached and lan cable because it tends to not initialize the wifi dongle properly.   Also game controller attached via USB because I don't have a bt dongle at the moment  +  power and HDMI.    If all these things came out the back, it would be great, but now they stick out of 3 sides making it an awkward device. to place in a media center and have it look clean.    VCS should be better at this.

 

I've tried RetroPie and some others.  If I was only running console emulators, those might be good enough.   But I'm emulating various computer models like Amiga, Atari ST, Atari 8-bit which require specialized disk image management that I built into my front-end that other front-ends don't handle so well.  I know compiling isn't strictly necessary, but there are a few emulators I do customize.

 

Product design is messy.  Requirements are constantly in flux.  Most of the time this happens behind closed doors.  Atari VCS was more public than most.    As I said, I will judge it on the results, not on the internet drama. 

 

Well it's Linux/x86-64 for a start.   I should be able to tar up my emulator set-up from my PC and drop it on the VCS and have it work (install a few libs if needed).   As I said the Pi's been a much bigger effort for me and the results haven't been good.

 

The Pi 3 and 4 have built-in WiFi and Bluetooth so no dongles are needed and you're not going to have the same sort of driver issues. That pretty much negates the need to plug anything into the Ethernet and USB ports once you have it set up.

 

I'm surprised you'd have problems running Stella on a Pi 2, as it works just fine on mine. I've only ever used the default install on RetroPie though, so there may be config settings that you have to change to get the performance up. The Pi 2 does have some performance issues with more demanding 16-bit emulators and needs frame skipping to handle anything beyond that but it's always done a pretty good job with all the 8-bit systems I've thrown at it.

 

I've also had no issues with Amiga and ST emulation on RetroPie either, although I do keep my games collection as a set of floppy images rather than going for emulated hard-drive installs. Disk changes need some menu navigation, but that's about it.

 

You might not have had many problems with Linux on x86 PCs of late, but I can assure that they're not entirely free of problems. Support tends to be good with most desktop chipsets, and laptops from the big brands, but custom-built small production run PCs can still be an utter pain. For instance, I had a good go at trying to get it running on my GPD Win and... yeah... not only did the ACPI not pick up but the screen was rotated round 90 degrees, the WiFi didn't work and the only thing the USB ports were good for was charging. Apparently the Win 2 works much better though, so there's probably an element of luck of the draw with these things.

 

[The Atari VCS Info Thread]

2 hours ago, zzip said:

I've got a pair of Pi's, I have lots of issues with them.   No power management, require tons of fiddling, cables coming out of 3 or 4 sides depending on the model,   very slow, can't run lots of my emulators at proper speed, and I have to recompile all my stuff to work on it which is time consuming.   Nvidia shield's aren't all that cheap either,  at least no for the good models.   They are also Android-based, not PC based.

 

I've got an extensive emulator + game set up on my PC that I've spent years getting it to the state it's in.   I would like a simple device attached to my TV that I could transfer it all too without lots of fiddling.   The Atari VCS might meet this need.   But I have to wait and see.

I was mainly talking about why the Pi managed to find a niche in an otherwise Mac/PC dominated computer market, and it's mostly about it being very much cheaper than the existing options. Being physically small and having low power consumption helps too, but it didn't just dribble out after a succession of missed deadlines into a market crowded with similar products flaunting a vintage case and logo as its only selling points.

 

I'm genuinely curious as to what are you trying to emulate that the Pi is too slow for? Except for the original model and its derivatives like the Zero, they're pretty decent and easily make a better emulation box than other commonly used devices such as an Ouya, a hacked Xbox/Vita/Wii or almost all the handhelds in the sub $200 range. There are PS1, Saturn, N64 and Dreamcast emulators that can run games at full speed on a Pi 4 and ready made distros (RetroPie, Lakka, etc.) with RetroArch and a bunch of cores that you can just slap on an SD card and be up and running with in minutes. Compiling your own isn't necessary unless there are things in the source that you want to change.

 

I don't think you should necessarily count on the VCS to do any better at power management unless you put Windows on it. Linux is not totally guaranteed to be able to access ACPI features even if the hardware has them and that might well include the VCS because it's based on a chipset that's still pretty new. A Pi 4 at idle consumes power comparable to a PC in sleep mode anyway so always-on is an option, or you can pay $20 extra for a remote control with shutdown and power-off features if it's still a total deal breaker for you.

 

Do you really think the Pi requires too much cabling? The ones I use as media/emulation boxes have precisely two cables both on the same side; one for the power and one for the HDMI, with everything else over WiFi and Bluetooth. I'm pretty sure the VCS won't do any better. It's nice to have things like USB, Ethernet and the audio jack for tinkering purposes but it's not like you're going to use them when the device is set up.

 

The Pi isn't the be all and end all of emulation boxes by any means but it does set the bar above which you can legitimately ask what you're paying extra for. I don't see the VCS bringing too much extra to the party, and probably nothing at all unless you're going to put an SSD in it and install Windows, in which case building your own won't require much more effort and would give you better results for the money.

 

2 hours ago, zzip said:

I don't think anyone is going to go and manufacture a device without an idea of how many they can actually sell.

If Atari knew what they were doing, I don't think they'd be making the VCS at all, and a good look through the history of the device ought to confirm that they don't know what they're doing.

 

As it stands, they know that they can sell 11,000 crowdfunded units plus whatever preorders they had, but I honestly don't think they should be counting on much more than that.

 

Still, as others have said, I won't complain about overproduction if it drives the price of second hand units through the floor as that's the only way I can see myself picking one up.

 

[The Atari VCS Info Thread]

9 hours ago, zzip said:

Superfans AND Supercritics.  (Supercritics who call it a complete failure because it obviously won't compete against the big 3)

 

I wonder what kind of sales numbers Atari is projecting for it?

I don't think Atari had to compete against the big three, although that's not stopped them making numerous such comparisons in their marketing over the years inviting others to do so in kind. Rather, I'd think they'd have to look for a niche that would allow them to co-exist with the big three and I don't think they've got one.

Certainly, when you look at the sort of niche devices that have been at least moderately successful of late, they're things like the Linux/Android/Windows gaming handhelds like the Dingoo, Nvidia Shield and GPD Win, the sub-$100 plug-n-play retro consoles in which I'd include the Flashbacks, the even cheaper single-board PCs like the Raspberry Pi, FPGA devices like Spectrum Next and MiSTer, and cartridge-compatible retro-consoles like the RetroN series. Success isn't necessarily always measured by sales, but I'd think that you have to be offering something substantial that people can't just already get from a PC or games console at around the same price.

 

Not repeatedly delaying it while also hiding the details of its development behind a veil of secrecy probably helps too.

 

You're also giving Atari more credit than they deserve if you think they're going to be engaged in actual sales forecasting. I'd think that the 11,000 or so crowdfunded orders plus whatever extra they can glean from listing it on various online stores - which presumably won't be that many given the bad publicity, lack of unique features and high price - will be pretty much the extent of their manufacturing run.

[The Atari VCS Info Thread]

I wouldn't knock the Series S - or the One S for that matter - for casual/retro gaming. Although it's obviously AAA focused, there are loads of cheap and simple casual games, local multiplayer options, retro compilations and media/streaming apps in the Microsoft Store. The Switch maybe gets a better selection, but not by that much; you've really got to want Nintendo's own games and/or the ability to pick it up and take it with you before it starts to look a clear winner.

 

For anyone who thinks that Flashback Classics, Antstream and Plex are selling points for the VCS, the Series S will do them all too.

 

I do most of my retro/casual gaming on the PC anyway. The Switch is for AAA on the go. 😀

[The Atari VCS Info Thread]

 

2 hours ago, AlecRob said:

I’m not old or a brand loyalist. I’m just a young dude that thinks atari stuff has a cool aesthetic. 

 

i was born in 1995.  I have pretty much zero atari nostalgia.
 

how many times do i have to bring up that the 7800, Lynx, ST, and Jaguar weren’t even designed by the original atari engineers/team in sunnyvale, california.  Oh and the now-obscure Atari IBM PC compatible series of hardware, that the new VCS could be considered a descendent of... also not designed by the OG atari.  You pretty much have to get a heavy sixer, pong machine, atari 400/800 and other really early devices if you want ORIGINAL ORIGINAL atari. 

 I find the “not atari” argument to be really flimsy because of that.  People using that argument must hate the Lynx!! 
 

“Wah waahhh it’s an EPYX console!! Burn it at the stake!”    
 

atari ST was designed by an ex commodore employee.  Amiga was designed by an ex atari employee!  FFS

 

 

if you buy an intellectual property, it belongs to you.  atari, SA bought atari.  For l intents and purposes, they have every right to do business under that name.  They are a real company, they own it fair and square.
 

Imagine if sega announced a new console and sega fans bitched about it like atari fans today are bitching about the VCS. That would be unthinkable!  Sega fans have been asking for a console for years, and i have no doubt they would snatch up whatever they put out without a second thought...even if it was a console-shaped PC like the VCS.     

 

Obviously you're not old, but you are pretty much the definition of a brand loyalist if you'd think of getting something because it's got the right badge on it rather than whether what's inside is any good or not.

 

Believe it or not, but I didn't buy every single piece of Atari (or Sega) hardware despite growing up during their heyday. Rather, machines like the original VCS, the 8-bit home computers and also the ST (because 'real Atari' or not, the Tramiels at least knew something about computers) were worth having because they were impressive hardware at launch; it's not like you could go to their competitors for something much cheaper and with better software and games like you can nowadays. Some of the other Atari hardware wasn't so great though, and that tended to sell very poorly in comparison, so I obviously wasn't the only one who saw them that way. I've no great dislike for the Lynx either, other than the ferocious rate at which it consumes batteries. Epyx made great games throughout the 80s, so what's not to like about them designing a handheld?

 

If there was someone with that kind of pedigree behind the design of the (new) VCS, or it was offering similarly good hardware for the money, I'd probably be a bit more enthusiastic about it. However, it's the brainchild of a guy whose best bit of tech on his resume is a Minecraft wristband, who had to sue Atari to get paid, and it's low-end off-the-shelf technology at an overinflated price.

 

Sure, it's their brand and they can do what they want with it, but we don't have to like it.

 

47 minutes ago, IntelliMission said:

There are 2 huge problems with that theory, though:

 

1) The Amico doens't have "backers". It has investors, and Tommy is using some of his personal fortune too. There's no way this thing is not going to get launched.

 

2) The Amico doesn't compete with any Xbox, even if it the Xbox costs $300. Only a handful of potential Amico buyers that also are harcore gamers (most of them are retro gamers, casual and non gamers instead) will get an Xbox Series S instead of an Amico due to the Xbox "price bomb".

 

I think you've got me wrong there. I was responding to Bill's post and trying to contrive an, albeit unlikely, scenario in which the VCS ends up selling more and that's about the only way I can see it happen.

 

As he concluded, if both machines hit the market at around the same time it's hard not to see the Amico selling more seeing as it's the one that's actually going to get some exclusive games.

[The Atari VCS Info Thread]

7 hours ago, Bill Loguidice said:

That's an interesting take. Based on what we've heard, the Amico has already handily outsold (out pre-sold to be more accurate) the VCS so the assumption would be that the VCS would somehow get a big sales boost post release. From what, though? At least with Amico, they'll have a pretty large launch window line-up to goose some more sales.

An easy to envisage scenario is that the Amico backers take stock of the market they'll be launching into after Microsoft dropped that bombshell, and decide to pull the plug on the hardware. The preorders get cancelled, the games get ported over to existing systems, and not too much money goes down the drain.

 

Atari could then score a Pyrrhic victory by eventually dribbling out enough units to fulfill the crowdfunding. They can then cancel the other preorders and who cares about porting the games because they never made any.

 

That sounds plausible enough to me at least, although I'm sure reality can come up with something even more ridiculous.

 

9 hours ago, Stephen said:

The logo means absolutely nothing.  Just because I stick a Dodge Challenger and HEMI logo on a piece of shit Kia Rio, it doesn't make the car a Dodge.

Yeah, they're like one of those Chinese car companies that bought a defunct marque from twenty years ago so they can sell to befuddled old brand loyalists.

[The Atari VCS Info Thread]

Price aside, I'd think that the Series S holds another serious advantage in that Microsoft are almost certainly going to hit their street date with it.

[The Atari VCS Info Thread]

Atari have been very cagey about the OS on the VCS so far. It's certainly going to be Linux based, but whether they'll give you root access to install your own applications or get at the bootloader to put a custom OS on there remains an unanswered question. All that's really guaranteed so far (at much as anything ever is with this project) is that you'll be able to boot it into another OS if you put an additional SSD in there. Linux is far from guaranteed to be an easy install either and it usually takes a bit of of work to get all the drivers ironed out on new hardware, and I wouldn't be expecting Atari to do more than the bare minimum to get their own OS working. Windows, on the other hand, is going to work because AMD are obliged to support it.

 

Also, what model of Pi are you using, if you don't mind? The original was certainly very slow and of only marginal performance when it came to emulation or graphically intensive operations, but since they made the move to four cores they've been much snappier. The Pi 4 is generally considered about on a par with a Core 2 CPU from about a decade ago, so unless your idea of retro is newer than the Dreamcast and N64, it ought to be up to the task.

 

Rather than building emulators for the Pi individually, I'd suggest installing the RetroPie or Lakka distros that come with their own front ends, RetroArch and a bunch of cores for all the common systems; they'll all have been tested so all you'd have to do is supply BIOS ROMs and the games themselves to get up and running. Unless you're emulating something very obscure you shouldn't have too much trouble. RetroPie also has Kodi with the more recent builds so you don't have to reboot to use your Pi as a media box either.

 

Anyway, yeah, wait and see. There's usually just a lot of waiting with Atari these days and not much seeing.

[The Atari VCS Info Thread]

5 hours ago, zzip said:

Let me put it this way.   I have a nice PC,  I have a PS4.    I have a couple of Pi's,  I would like a retrogame box hooked up to a TV for casual play.   I find the Pi's to be too weak for what I want, I hate that they don't have proper power control.   I also have a bunch of money from last christmas I never got a chance to spend because of the pandemic.

 

Why not a VCS?  Sure I'm sure I could build a Mini-ITX PC on my own, but how much better can I do for the price?   You can easily spend $300 on a "mainstream" GPU, so it's not like you are going to build a killer gaming system for this price.   And there's something cool about having Atari branded hardware.

I'm not saying that the Pi is going to be a useful system for everyone. It's a very basic computer after all, so things like power control are left to users to implement if they really want it. A switch on the power supply does the job for me but there are fancier remote control solutions if that's what you want. You've certainly got a lot of scope for upgrading it before it starts to creep into the VCS price range though.

 

The point is rather that it can manage all the important features that the VCS is confirmed to ship with, i.e. Plex, AntStream and emulation of older Atari systems, at a fraction of the price. It'll also cover some other low hanging fruit that might later be added if Atari can ever get around to it, such as emulation of non-Atari systems up to the Playstation era, Netflix, Kodi and Steam Link. Or you can boot it in ChromeOS or Linux and use it as a desktop PC. Irrespective of the power of the underlying hardware, the Pi already does more for less than the VCS promises to do out of the box.

 

Rather to get more out of the VCS you are looking at having to mod it by adding an SSD and installing Windows, at which point it's worth considering what your other options are in the way of PC hardware. No, you're not going to get a killer gaming PC for $390, but you could at least build the bones of a system that can later be turned into one and will still outperform the VCS for now. That much ought to get you the aforementioned 3200G, a B450 motherboard, 16GB or RAM and a 240GB SSD. You won't get the case of your dreams and might have to settle for a couple of no-name (PowerA aren't exactly a high-end brand either) controllers but you've at least got the upgrade potential to add a decent graphics card and a better CPU at some point down the line to keep up with trends in PC gaming. The VCS will forever be gimped by the 1606G being soldered to the board though.

 

I won't deny that there's something cool about the case. However, once you consider how little the current owners of the brand have to do with previous Atari hardware and look into the three year rolling car-crash of its development so far, that aspect rather starts to lose its sheen too.

[The Atari VCS Info Thread]

8 hours ago, zzip said:

That GPU is rather weak, however my wife's PC has a GT 710, which is even worse,  and my daughter plays a bunch of games on it, and it holds up better than you'd expect.   Remember that was the original inspiration for the VCS, watching kids try to play things like Minecraft on a laptop.

 

For myself, I have a beefy gaming PC,  if I was to buy a VCS, it would be to use as a Raspberry Pi alternative in a retro-gaming box that I could just plug into a TV.  Pi's are very weak.   But this would be sufficient to play retro-games well into the early 2000s.

 

But I'm waiting to see how it turns out to before making that decision.

Any PC can play some games though. The point is to be getting something that's worth what you're paying for it.

 

The GT 710 is a low-budget card. It's all right paying a sub-$40 price for that level of performance when you can use it to give a new lease of life to an old potato PC.

 

Similarly, the Raspberry Pi is an entire computer for around $40. I've bought four of them over the years because I like tinkering.

 

Atari are asking $390 for the VCS with a couple of controllers. For that money you ought to be getting something capable of playing modern games at decent settings. You can, after all, buy a PS4 for less.

[The Atari VCS Info Thread]

6 hours ago, zzip said:

It was always said to be an AMD-based system running some Linux variant.  In fact it turned out to be a much more powerful PC than many of us speculated it would be in the early threads on the topic.

I'd hardly say it's much more powerful than first mooted.

 

Both the A10-9630P and the Ryzen 1606G are off-the-shelf chips, so have been widely benchmarked.

 

On the plus side, there's about a 50% improvement in CPU performance:

 

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/AMD-A10-9630P-vs-AMD-Ryzen-Embedded-R1606G/2857vs3659

 

However, the GPU is actually slightly weaker than the one on the A10:

 

https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/compare/Radeon-Vega-3-vs-Radeon-R5-A10-9630P-4C+6G/3926vs3785

 

On the whole, I get the impression that the Ryzen 1606G would be more at home in a smart fridge than a games PC.

[The Amico constructive critisism thread]

9 hours ago, mr_me said:

I also remember saying games like pacman and frogger are for girls.  Really, what they are is casual games.

You didn't see a Ms Defender or Ms Robotron in the arcades back then for a reason. 😄

 

Still, I'd agree that it's mostly about the casual/hardcore divide these days and flagging games as particularly for boys or girls is likely to get you severe pushback from some quarters.

[The Atari VCS Info Thread]

Does anyone think they're actually going to make the November release date?

 

Let's face it. They'd need to have made at least 10,000 of them, gone through QA, boxed them up, and packed the boxes into containers that are now on board ships, without any of it having been photographed or videoed and shared with us.

 

There's also the mystery about the '96' units that have been made, in that not even one of them has been seen plugged in and turned on yet. As such, the expectation is that they don't work. It might just be that they're missing a finished OS or have some easily ironed out glitches that they're rather not share, but it's hard to shake off the suspicion that there are more deep-seated issues still waiting to be resolved with them.

 

That's my main issue with the Plex announcement. If the project was clearly on track it'd just be an extra feather in their cap - that people could either take or leave depending upon interest - but against a backdrop of continuing delays, lawsuits and an unusual level of secrecy for a crowdfunded venture, it just serves to highlight the things that they aren't telling us about.

 

So, my recommendations to go with a Raspberry Pi or Windows PC over the VCS are more about pointing people in the direction of things that they can buy now, without waiting for a pack of unreliable shysters to get their act together. I'd love nothing better than to be proven wrong, and for them to hit that deadline. However, there are still more red flags than a communist party shindig about it.

[The Atari VCS Info Thread]

5 minutes ago, Tidus79001 said:

I can't run a full version on Windows, full version of Linux or Chrome OS and easily emulate any console I want.  I like the flexibility of all it will allow.  Raspberry Pi's are too narrow in function and under powered.

I'll give you some serious answers.

 

Atari seem to think Antstream, Plex and emulation of 2600 and Atari arcade games are their biggest selling points for the VCS, because they've not announced much else. You can do all of those on the Raspberry Pi right now; they're not hypothetical things that it might get in the future like Windows on ARM.

 

You can run full versions of Linux and ChromeOS on the Raspberry Pi too. You are currently limited to (free) Windows IOT, but when you factor in the extra costs of an additional SSD and licence, the VCS isn't exactly going to end up much like a cheap option for a Windows device. You can buy dedicated Windows nettops/HTPCs for around the $200 mark though, if that's really what you want.

 

In terms of emulation, the Raspberry Pi is generally good enough for anything up to the PlayStation, including all the consoles and computers Atari ever made. Dreamcast, Saturn and N64 emulation is a bit spotty but works well enough for a lot of games. That only leaves the PSP, DS, PS2, GameCube and Wii in terms of significant consoles that can be emulated well on a high-end PC but not the Pi. You will need an additional SSD to attempt to emulate any of those machines on the VCS though and the performance will not be as good as a decent Windows desktop, or even a mid-to-high laptop, because it's only got a low-power dual-core APU that's mainly designed for embedded applications.

 

Still, I get the advantages of being able to run Windows on an HTPC. I already use one that I first built in 2014 - to a fairly similar spec to the VCS although with much more storage - and it's still capable of doing a few things that the Raspberry Pi can't. However it's a much shorter list now than it was back then, and it wouldn't be much good for games any more if I hadn't been able to upgrade the graphics card. If flexibility is truly what you value, you're better off building your own.