x=usr(1536)

My gut feeling is that pre-sales of 10K systems may be doable, but that a more realistically-achievable number at the close of the campaign is probably in the 8-8.5K range. What's interesting is the average pledge size. A couple of days ago, when the campaign opened for business, I came up with a number around the $265 mark for the average. It's sitting at $259.06 right now, which is approximately a 3% drop. It's not enough to be statistically-significant (yet), but it does point to most people going for roughly the same packages as on day 1. My expectation is that this number will drop as people decide to risk $30 on a controller vs. $300 on a system. How far it will drop, I have no idea - but I'd say that day 7 will be the real benchmark for expectations for the rest of the campaign. Having said that, a small burst of activity in the last 2-3 days will probably occur as a few fencesitters come out of the woodwork and jump in at the last minute. Either way, I can't see this generating enough in sales to be a going concern past about mid-2020. There just won't be enough units sold to sustain the ecosystem needed to support it financially in the long term, at which point there are going to be a few thousand expensive-but-pretty Linux boxes running on almost 5-year-old hardware out there. Still not seeing the value proposition.

Noted for future reference: three days in, the Indiegogo campaign appears to be on the trailing edge of early adopter uptake. Currently sitting at $2,315,963 USD raised by 8940 backers.

I was curious about that as well. My guess is that it has largely been sustaining operations, including curation of the IP and whatever hardware development has taken place. Once the crowdfunding campaign is over, though, Atari has no income (except for possible VC injections) until the unit ships. They're basically going to have to float for a year while getting this thing developed and into the market on whatever comes in through the end of June. It'll be interesting to watch how that goes.

As I'm looking at the numbers right now, they're at $2,224,535 in pledges from 8547 backers. For the sake of argument, let's concentrate on the number of backers as being more relevant than the amount raised. Note: extremely generous mathematical allowances are about to be made. Please read all calculations below as being rather... Convenient, but not necessarily totally removed from reality. 8500 backers is enough to commit to a production run of 10,000 devices. Given the device that they're looking to build, this likely fits with minimum order requirements that suppliers would require in order to make production runs of their individual components worthwhile. Now, leaning towards convenience: let's assume that every one of those 10,000 devices sell at $300 apiece. That's $3 million in sales, which, frankly, is anything but impressive. The net on that $3 million in sales would probably be somewhere in the region of $750,000 to $1 million, assuming an excellent margin. That's not enough to sustain a hardware company into its next development cycle. Butbutbut... What about all that money that was raised during the Indiegogo funding? Good question. Answer: that money was probably sunk into development (or so one hopes) and ongoing expenses prior to release. Either way, it's not very much to address either one with. Even if sales of the AtariVCSbox doubled, they've still got no more than $1.5 to $2 million in the bank. My very rough estimate is that they'd need to sell a minimum of 150,000 consoles to be viable as a going concern for at least 12 to 18 months, standing on their own two feet, and not completely - note the use of the word 'completely' - relying on outside investment. However, they'd also need to make some very clever decisions from both the hardware and software standpoints to pull that one off, and I'm not sure that AtariVCSboxCorp, Inc. has the required shrewdness to make that happen. Granted, they could pull a rabbit out of the online cryptocurrency gambling hat, but I'm not positive that they have the ability to do that in any sort of significant way. It could be their killer app, but from what we've seen so far it doesn't appear as though the necessary competencies are there to make it happen. Having, as an employee, lived through this sort of thing with a company that did actually produce its own hardware and software for 11 years before it finally shut down, I'm just not seeing how this can be sustainable at either the scale it's happening at now or that it's likely to achieve in the future.

Speaking of AtariVCSboxCorp, Inc. stock, let's see how that's doing, shall we? Clearly, yesterday's product announcement has left a trail of freshly-minted gajillionaires in its wake. That's smart investing!

You're welcome! There are other things we could criticise about the AtariVCSbox, too. Feel free to suggest one, or perhaps I could pick one for you. Suggested topics include penny stocks, the continuing absence of a functional prototype, or the rather inconvenient need to still build and ship both the hardware and software. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Replying to this comment since things have changed fairly significantly in MAME as regards laserdisc dumping over the past month, and how it's planned to be carried out moving forward. The entire thread announcing the change is here, but the summary version is this: a hardware solution capable of capturing the VBI data from a laserdisc has been developed by a group working on preservation of the BBC's Domesday Project laserdiscs, and that hardware is also suitable for preservation of arcade game laserdiscs. Existing laserdisc captures will be replaced over time by dumps from the new hardware. This is necessary both from an emulation and preservation accuracy standpoint: some games relied on data stored in the VBI that's not present in current captures, and since the current captures lack that data they're basically incomplete. More info: BBC Domesday and the Domesday86 Project An introduction to the 1986 BBC Domesday project Laserdisc Decoding Guide

From the campaign page: "100+ CLASSIC ATARI GAMES PRE-LOADED ON EVERY VCS & THERE IS SO MUCH MORE "Atari Vault includes more than 100 all-time classics in their original arcade and/or 2600 formats and is ready to play as soon as you connect your TV." So, it comes with some emulators and ROMs on-board. OK. That's neat, I guess. Funding's sitting at $1.84 million right now. That's not a lot (or enough) to build and market this thing on, and I seem to recall that $5 million was the number being bandied about a while back by AtariVCSboxCorp, Inc. as being needed to do so. Even that seems slim, so it'll be interesting to see where the money sits at the end of the campaign.

What I think we're seeing is the rush for the early adopter packages along with some interest in the controllers. The rest may just be oar-in-the-water backers looking to contribute at a lower level and/or simply have access to backer-only progress updates. What will be interesting to watch is where funding sits at the close of the campaign. My memory may be off on this, but I seem to recall Atari SA mentioning that they were aiming for $5 million in order to reach production. $1.7 million is quite a bit short of that, but it's only the first day.

I'll admit that I still like the overall design, but the way in which the case is assembled just doesn't really matter to me. If this were a car, I would care about the chassis, suspension, steering, and general packaging of those items. But this is a piece of consumer electronics. It's a static object. How it all fits together doesn't really matter because it's designed to sit on a shelf and not really be interacted with except through its controllers, which are wireless and some distance away from the actual item. As long as the case can let out enough heat that it won't fry itself while running, the method of assembly is pretty much irrelevant.

If you're willing to bump up to the $10 model, Zero Ws are widely available. Having had both, I'd recommend the W - on-board WiFi means that you don't have to clog up the one USB port with a hub just to get it networked.

So... One drop or knock off of the shelf and it breaks into 300 pieces? I get that it's likely to be more sturdy than that (or so one would hope), but the whole thing basically snaps together like a model car kit - or a RasPi, or a cellphone. Nothing really new there other than that they discovered how to put gaps between the pieces. Incidentally, that should provide for awesome nonexistent resistance to spills. Which reminds me: was this meant to be the big surprise at the reveal that we were all to await with bated breath?

There was something else you could do with AT&T (and certain other North American calling cards): make calls between countries in Europe or elsewhere by dialling a specific type of international operator but have the billing go to the North American card. The name for that type of operator escapes me, but it was possible to call from, say, Dublin to London (or Paris, or West Berlin, or elsewhere) and have it billed to an AT&T or other calling card issued by a North American telco. I can only imagine how ungodly expensive the cost per minute would have been, but we weren't really terribly concerned with that. Probably more than calls to INMARSAT, if I had to guess, and depending on which region of the world a particular ship would have been located in, that was usually the most expensive call you could make per the local telephone directories' rates. Either way, it was fantastic for BBSing even if you were lucky to sustain a 300 baud connection over some of those calls. My overwhelming memory of this: line noise. International circuits were horrible for that, and even ones within the country could be appalling depending on where you were calling and when. Getting calling card numbers wasn't terribly difficult. We used to call loop numbers in the US for free - they didn't complete the call, so no billing occurred on our end. People sitting on conferences there were surprisingly willing to hand them out; we didn't really worry about whether or not they were with telco security or law enforcement because, well, we were three to six thousand miles away from them and under 18. Good luck with that extradition request. There was one conference where AT&T security came on the line, threatened everyone with all sorts of horrible penalties and deprivations of liberty, then realised that not one person on the conference had anything even remotely approaching an American accent. Their responses to our taunts as we pointed out that they were utterly powerless to do anything were absolutely hysterical - we couldn't stop completely cracking up at them while quoting lines from Robocop and The Terminator. They finally got fed up enough with us that they rang off in a giant huff. Those were fun times, and this has been a great thread to read through.

No votes for the PSP or PS Vita? Given the parallels to the Nintendo Switch, I'd argue that they count almost more as consoles than handhelds. Granted, there are some significant differences there, but the lines get blurry when the similarities are compared. (And no, this isn't flag-waving from the Sony camp - we have both a PS3 and a Switch )

"How annoying is the alarm buzzer when the 'turn off the alarm' switch is broken? Let's have a hipster find out at 3am."

As someone who owns both, I can safely say that the Odyssey2 is far, far preferable to the other.

Hmm, so it was. Thankfully, my lack of expectations of AtariVCSboxCorp, Inc. makes avoiding disappointment with their complete and utter joke of a company really easy.

Well, there's a second part to this that I just don't understand: There's nothing special going on here. Every component listed is off-the-shelf, except for the case and controllers - and even that's debatable in relation to one of the controllers. So how the hell can it take this long to not have a working prototype? The only answer I can come up with to that is that they have no funding (which means no staff) to actually build it. This reinforces my belief that the company truly is nothing more than a brand licensor - and, if they do get what they're looking for on Indiegogo in terms of funding, will probably outsource all hardware and software development to <insert cheapest bidder here>. That's assuming that they don't completely mismanage the process, burn through all the capital, and leave a partially-finished mess sitting there waiting for that difficult email to write to come along and put an end to the whole sorry saga. I don't believe that they'd be so outright criminal as to just cut and run with the Indiegogo funds, but I can see them being so incompetent as to (rather predictably) sink this through ineptitude once it does hit actual development. Pardon me if there's no surprised expression on my face at the moment.

Shamelessly stealing this from Reddit by way of this post over in the other That Ataribox thread. Specs on the AtariVCSbox have apparently made it to the Indiegogo app. Assuming that they're at all accurate, the only description that fits is 'underwhelming'. Couple of things: I'd like to see a teardown of one of these (if they're ever actually made) and a BOM with costing generated, but my off-the-cuff guess as to the cost of manufacture of one of these is probably in the $60-75 range in quantity (though I'll admit that I don't know at what manufacturing run size that price could be achievable), with a $299 MSRP. AtariVCSboxCorp, Inc., you're not Apple. Don't even try it. Wood is listed as one of the components. Somehow, I suspect that the 'wood' is actually going to be some sort of petrochemical product. And yeah, they've said all along that it's going to be roughly hardware-equivalent to a low-end laptop, and they've certainly stuck to their word. Trying to find out if there's a reference platform out there that's close to the leaked spec (which would suggest using an off-the-shelf board design, which would also be about the smartest thing they could do in this regard), but am not having a lot of luck. Either way, specs ≠ hardware on retail shelves (or in distribution centres). They still have to fund and build it, which is one hurdle they haven't yet addressed. Also, I don't see a taco replicator listed in there, so I'm still not a potential customer.

Nicely done!

That was completely uncalled for, and an apology would be in order. Don't like how development's going? Start your own port. But keep the snarky demands to yourself.

I've driven one as well, and this is a pretty accurate description of what they're like. I also got to drive it in the rain, which is not recommended unless you enjoy being very wet. Even with the rain cover pictured below (and yes, that really was Sinclair's answer to driving one in the rain), I rather unsurprisingly got soaked.

I, for one, am greatly looking forward to the first AtariVCSbox unboxing video. It should hit the usual streaming video sites c. 202never.

sociologist and I spoke over the phone earlier, and it was a fun call. The perspective that he's asking questions from is interesting, and has much more depth to it than the usual, "so what was it like to have one of these back in the day?" projects that crop up from time to time. Definitely looking forward to reading the published paper, and appreciate him taking the time to speak with me.

w1k: before you go away forever (again), could you inconvenience yourself long enough to post Chris' tapes back to him? He'd like to get them back before you disappear altogether this time.