Albert

The way you worded it above made it sound like it was no longer being produced by using the past tense: Sure, "pretty limited" compared to the mainstream consoles from Sony and Microsoft, but you need to start somewhere. ..Al

What makes you think they aren't still being produced? ..Al

I will investigate. ..Al

Right now it's a one-man operation, but as mentioned above, the plan is to hire someone once we're moved and things settle down a bit. And Atari is helping in areas where there's overlap between what I do and what they do (mostly business-related stuff, but they are going to help with social media (which I simply do not have time to do now), they hired someone who is doing the bulk of the work with the store migration to Shopify, and other tasks). And, I wish I was just making CDs/DVDs/Blu-Rays versus physical cartridges. Those are infinitely easier all around. But they also aren't nearly as cool as cartridges and all the fun printed materials for games published in the AtariAge Store. It will get better, the Last Chance games are beating me down right now, but I will be victorious in the end, and shipping times will greatly improve. ..Al

I'm sure some people are frustrated, but it has taken this long to ship pre-order games before. I'm not saying that's a great thing, mind you, but while it sometimes takes a long time to get orders out, everyone has always gotten what they paid for. I just looked through my emails, and I haven't seen a single email from you since you placed your order. I also checked my PMs, and same thing there, I don't see any PMs from you regarding this. It's possible you sent me something and I didn't see it, perhaps using another email address or via some other way. I also searched for the order number and the only email I see referencing it is the original order email. If you think I am showing contempt for customers, you obviously do not know me very well. I spend an incredible amount of my time building games for orders. I'm currently doing virtually everything myself, which includes building games and shipping them out to customers. And even when I am buried in orders, I won't take shortcuts to sacrifice quality in production of the games, nor will I take shortcuts in taking care to package games to make sure they arrive safely. Yes, I can do better in sending out more updates, and I definitely need to send one out regarding pre-orders, and I will do that this week. And, yes, in the future I intend to hire someone to help with physical production and shipping (see below). That's unlikely to change, however, I am working on making the following improvements to the store, so this time next year I should be able to get 95% of orders out within a week. 1. Move to Flash-based boards for most 2600, 7800, and Jaguar games. The Lynx boards we have are already flash-based, so no need to do anything there. Basically, these flash boards will arrive completely assembled, and all I have to do to use them is plug them into a fixture and program the game onto them. Versus what I typically have to do now: Program EPROM Program PLD (for a large percentage of 2600 and 7800 games) Populate boards (with anywhere from 2-4 chips, one or more caps and resistors, and sometimes other parts) Solder boards (which sometimes takes multiple steps, as some boards have parts on BOTH sides, and you can only work on one side at a time) Assemble boards into shells The goal is to have these boards already assembled into blank cartridge shells, so the above tasks will be replaced by this simple step: Plug cartridge into fixture and program That's it! This alone will save an enormous amount of time. We are going to put our 2600 Aria board into mass production soon, which will suffice for most bankswitching schemes and cover 90% of the 2600 games sold in the store. Most of the remaining 2600 games use our more advanced Melody board, which we will also manufacture in larger quantities than we do now. We've developed several new 7800 flash boards that I'm actively testing, and I will soon have a Jaguar flash board to test. Longer term we'll do flash boards for the 5200 and Atari 8-bit computers as well. 2. I'm having boxes, manuals, and labels printed for slower selling games, so I don't have to spend time printing these materials myself. This is normally a time consuming step when working on large batches of orders. Two weeks ago I submitted a large manual order for 18 different games, which includes several manuals I've never had professionally printed before. These arrived on Friday. I will continue doing this over time. 3. We're currently working on moving the AtariAge Store to Shopify. Once this is complete, I will have access to MUCH better reporting options, which will, again, save me significant time when I'm working on orders. The current store is greatly lacking in this department. When I begin work on a new batch of orders, I have to manually go through all the pending orders and put the games I need to build into a spreadsheet (including important details such as whether a game is NTSC or PAL, if an optional box is included, etc.) With the new store, I'll be able to generate this detailed report trivially. Additionally, I'll also be able to more easily see when a customer has several outstanding orders, so I can be sure to ship them together, which also saves time (rather than shipping, say, three orders separately). 4. I will be moving soon, and one of the goals with this move will be to setup a more formal AtariAge production facility, either on-site or in commercial space nearby. Once this is in place, I will be able to hire someone to assist with production and shipping, which will be a big step in making sure the vast majority of orders go out within days, instead of weeks or months. 5. I'm going to find and buy bubble wrap bags that perfectly fit boxed games. Right now, I'm using 1' x 2' sections of bubble wrap that I then wrap around boxed games and assemble using scotch tape. This may seem like a trivial thing, but it's very time consuming when you're shipping hundreds of boxed games at a time, so this will be a big time saver when shipping. 6. We're also working on brand new 2600/7800 shells, and I received the first CAD drawings recently, we've made some changes, and I'll have prototypes soon. These shells will not have the problematic moving dust cover pieces or spring, and they will firmly hold the circuit boards in place so there's no play or wobble with them (which can cause issues where a game isn't always easy to insert into a system). Right now, the 7800 shells I'm using are not the greatest, so I'm very much looking forward to having our own shells that don't have the compromises I often see with third-party shells. The new shells will also not have those big holes in the corner that 7800 shells often have. These are the shells I will be able to use with the flash boards mentioned above so I can have hundreds (if not thousands) of carts ready at any given time that I can simply flash program, test, label, and ship games as orders arrive. 7. Finally, we're looking into making plastic inserts for boxes, rather than the cardboard ones I'm using now. These will better hold the game cartridge in place, and will also better protect the box from deformation. And, in terms of efficiency, these are much faster to use, as I won't have to fold eight flaps for every boxed game that I assemble. You've made two previous large orders and received those fine. I've shipped many thousands of orders over the years. Why would I start scamming people now? If that's what I wanted to do, I'm sure there's much easier ways to about it. What has greatly slowed me down with the pre-order games is that I am still working on getting Last Chance games built and shipped. I am making good progress on that front, but it's very time consuming as I sold more games in that sale in a month than I normally sell in a year. And I thought I would be done with those by the end of 2023, but obviously that didn't happen. I'm also working on shipping regular orders as well. Having said that, I will start shipping pre-order games in a week (not this upcoming week, but after that). So, your order (and others' orders) will ship soon. ..Al

I know that, of course, but what I mean is Atari is not adding the AtariAge mailing list to their own. I made the decision to send that one email out. ..Al

Yes, this was an email accidentally sent out by the new AtariAge Store we are working on. You can safely ignore it. ..Al

That's a garbage website. https://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.scamdoc.com ...Al

Because people like being able to go back to the store to review their order history and be able to place new orders without having to enter all their information again. Credit card information is not stored in the store, though. ..Al

That was done just once for the holidays, and it was an email sent from AtariAge, not Atari (they do not have the AtariAge mailing list). I was surprised to see that happened as well when I woke up this morning. ..Al

This email was accidentally sent out from the store upgrade we're currently working on, it's safe to ignore it. Take care, ..Al

Yeah, most people aren't as homophobic as you, fortunately. If you don't like the game, because homosexuality is being "forced" upon you, go play something else so we don't have to listen to you whining about it. Thanks, ..Al

Better get your party favors ready! ..Al

Good, glad to hear that. ..Al

This was definitely a caching issue from an incident a few weeks ago where the forum was temporarily redirecting to that install page mentioned above. ..Al