famicommander

Going by the order numbers they use which seem to just count up sequentially, they've only sold roughly ~43,000 total units of VCS software since launch. So that tells me the majority of VCS owners have bought zero games. Either people are just playing the included Vault or they haven't used their VCS at all.

San Andreas was the beginning of the end. Far too much empty, worthless space on the map. Sims-style stat management was a bad and annoying addition as well. Besides the soundtrack and the ability to swim San Andreas didn't really add anything good to the franchise.

How about wide Linux releases? There are a ton of games on the VCS store (including most of the Recharged games) that don't actually have native Linux versions for sale on GOG or Steam. Since the VCS is indeed just running Linux and they're already selling Windows (and in some cases Mac) versions it would seem a trivial matter to sell generic Linux versions on the major storefronts.

Meh, I'm pretty much done with this series anyway. GTA IV is one of the worst games of all time and GTA V is a boring, sprawling mess. Vice City and Chinatown Wars were the high points of the franchise.

I can already imagine the reviews "the sound is off, the emulation is slow, the controllers randomly come desynched, and it doesn't save your high scores but other than that, 10/10!"

Hopefully it doesn't have the same horrible emulation as the crappy handheld and crappy tabletop arcade unit.

Who was in charge when they first partnered with AtGames? It doesn't get any lower than putting your brand on an AtGames product. They could sell boxes with springloaded boxing gloves that just punch you in the face when they open and that would be better than an AtGames product.

I grew up on Windows 95 so I never really had any experience with classic PC platforms. I have an Atari XEGS but I only plug carts into it, I never got a tape drive or floppy drive or any way to play those games. And I've never tried to run any software on it that wasn't a game. I've never even seen an Amiga, Commodore, Atari ST, etc. They just weren't a factor in any fashion when I was a kid. I grew up with all the Atari, Nintendo, and SEGA consoles in the house. By the time I was old enough to start looking backwards all those PC platforms just seemed like far more of a hassle than playing games on my consoles, handhelds, or contemporary Windows (or, these days, Linux) PCs.

It doesn't. If you put your logo on AtGames products then people will expect AtGames quality from other products with your logo on them. That's just how it works.

All I have to go on is the last decade worth of AtGames and MyArcade products, so...yes?

But that's not even relevant to the conversation. You interjected with a non-sequitur. The concern, which came about from a statement from an Atari exec who mentioned future hardware iterations of the 2600+ unprompted, was that Atari would simply keep iterating on hardware. That concern was supported by their recent association with AtGames and their current association with MyArcade. Releasing a sea of sub-par, marginally different yearly hardware iterations is the bread and butter of AtGames and MyArcade. So my concern was "they release too many devices, they should release fewer and stand by them" And your response is, "part of standing behind products is updating them." But that wasn't disputed anywhere. Of course updating devices is standing by them. My post was more or less a plea for them to do exactly that. But what about the combination of recent AtGames devices, upcoming MyArcade devices, and the Atari exec talking about future iterations of a device that is barely available for preorder suggests we should believe the plan is to stand behind this product with long term improvements via software updates?

But that's literally what the device is. And it doesn't do it as well as devices released 40 years ago. So what's the point? If your argument is that people should just buy Atari 50 or one of the Atari collections on Evercade or simply download Stella on their PC or Steamdeck I'd probably be inclined to agree with you. But they're going through the effort of releasing a device that takes cartridges in 2023, so they might as well do it right. The kind of people who still have a stack of carts in 2023 are the kind of people who care that the compatibility isn't up to par. They sought out the enthusiast audience and then recoiled at enthusiast expectations.

But you responded to a post that quoted an Atari exec talking about future iterations to the hardware, not updates. And you trimmed out the part of the post where their association with AtGames and MyArcade products in the present and recent past casts doubt on their inclination to fix things with updates rather than just releasing more and more hardware iterations.

Selling them an entirely new device next year is not exactly what I would call offering an update, especially when you're already talking about the new device before the current one is even out. Atari has to prove they're not just going to do the same crap that AtGames put us through for a decade.

Again, there are some 7800 light gun games that work with joysticks (Crossbow and Alien Brigade) and some that only work with the lightgun. The problem is that all of them are marked as tested and working, when we know that's literally not possible. The ones that are light gun only (Barnyard, Sentinel, Meltdown) literally cannot function on an HDMI device. And no, we shouldn't just be happy these things are getting made. It's 2023. If the company wants to call itself "Atari" it shouldn't be too much to ask that it has the same compatibility with 2600 games as a 1977 Sunnyvale Sixer or even a 7800. We expect shoddy garbage from AtGames or Hyperkin or MyArcade but if Atari wants to market this as a real Atari device that comes with real Atari scrutiny.

It doesn't inspire confidence that they were in bed with AtGames as recently as last year and this year they're putting out MyArcade devices. Now they're already talking about future 2600+ iterations? How about just releasing a small number of quality products and standing behind them?

It's not even out yet and you're already talking about future iterations. Smells pretty AtGamesy. Makes me fear we'll be here in 5 years talking about how hopefully next year we can get basic features in the 2600+ v6.0.

If some of the untested carts do indeed work fine then it was a really big unforced error to even release the compatibility list when they did. Get all your ducks in a row before you start showing off the product and asking people to preorder. Have the answers to these sort of questions before they're even asked, because you should know going in that compatibility is going to be the first question on everyone's mind. That's the sort of thing that would go a long way towards alleviating fears we have another Hyperkin Retron, AtGames Flashback, or MyArcade on our hands.

What about the games they claim are tested working which they couldn't possibly have actually tested? The light gun-only 7800 games (not the ones that can use a joystick, the ones that only use the gun) are marked as working despite the fact that there aren't any HDMI displays that are compatible with a 7800 light gun. To me that calls into question the entire list. Are there other games marked tested that technically emulate correctly but can't be played due to the hardware limitations? Are all possible difficulty and b/w switch variations accounted for?

It came out the year after Bug!, the same year as Super Mario 64, Bug Too!, and Crash Bandicoot in the US, and the same year as Crash Bandicoot 2 and Croc in Europe. It was not a reasonably decent title for its time. It was a disaster then and it's a disaster now.

I'd still like some accountability from AtariAge itself about how all this went down. Many of the threads are still hidden and Tommy was essentially given his own pet staff and allowed to use AtariAge to further his scam for years. I was never more proud to be a member of this community than when we collectively destroyed Mike Kennedy's Chameleon nonsense. Conversely, I was never more ashamed to be a member than when everyone drank Tommy's Kool-Aid. I still think the community deserves a full explanation, a full apology, and a return of every Amico-related thread to public viewability.

I didn't say everyone has a CRT, I said there's a high chance of overlap between the two groups. I specified that the system should absolutely have HDMI and that should be the default. Just put an analog output on it too, and let people who want to use it buy Atari-branded cables to do so. Then everybody is happy and there is the added benefit of increased compatibility with the mentioned lightgun games.

I didn't mention Alien Brigade. Barnyard Blaster, Meltdown, and Sentinel do not work with a joystick. They require a lightgun to play. All three are marked as tested working on the Atari 2600+ compatibility list.

Whether the games themselves are good or bad is not the issue. The issue is they claimed they tested some games as working that literally cannot work on an HDMI display. They need to update their compatibility list to make clear that those games are unplayable.

The lack of analog video output really is a bad oversight. The light gun-only 7800 games are listed as tested working, but that cannot possibly be true because those games aren't going to work on an HDMI display. You need an analog CRT display for old school light gun technology to work. Further, if the target market is people who have a stack of old Atari carts lying around, chances are a high percentage of those people have a CRT or an analog capture device or a scaler of some kind. We've got PVMs and Atari and Commodore monitors, or Trinitron TVs, or OSSCs, etc. Obviously it costs more to have both analog and digital audio and video, but they could mitigate the cost by selling cables. Use one breakout port for analog video and audio and then sell Atari-branded composite, s-video, component, scart, and/or VGA cables. Cables are almost all markup; I worked at a computer store for over a decade and the main way we made money was by selling printers/TVs/laptops/desktops/game consoles below cost and then attaching video/audio/data cables to them. Store cost on a 50 dollar cable was like a buck, if that. Put the video port on the console and make people buy whatever analog cable they need separately, since most people will probably opt for HDMI.