Bill Loguidice

No, they're doing additional testing and will post new versions soon.

This link doesn't work?: https://firmwareupdate.atgames.net/registration

For those interested, National Owners Day 2021 (NOD 2021) is now live (9AM PT to 9PM PT): https://www.atgames.us/ The summary: National Owners Day 2021 (NOD 2021) is all about Staying Connected. Join us on Facebook on our official page (https://www.facebook.com/AtGamesGaming) and the Legends Arcade Family website (https://arcades.atgames.net/) for our second annual owners day from 9AM to 9PM PT on Sunday, February 14, 2021, for new product reveals, amazing prizes, great deals and sales from third party sponsors GameStop and Buy Stuff Store, great deals and sales on the AtGames E-Store, and lots more fun and surprises!

If the market is receptive again in a few years, I'm sure we can get back into inexpensive plug and plays rather quickly. Right now, it's geared to more premium home arcade items.

OS-wise, I prefer the path of least resistance these days, and that's Windows. It's pretty much guaranteed that 99% of everything will be targeted to it. I don't mind using other OS's for specific purposes, but not as a daily driver. Same thing with mobile. I have plenty of Android devices, but my main phone is an iPhone and I still prefer an iPad to my Android tablets. My days of championing "alternative" platforms (knowing full well that Android doesn't meet that designation in the same way) ended with my Amiga 500. With that in mind, I would think for a weaker hardware base like the VCS and the fact that you wouldn't likely be using it as a daily driver for gaming, productivity, or pretty much anything else, I would think it would make a fine target for a Linux OS. It's pretty much the definition of alternative platform, so it's open season. I don't expect Atari to support it for much longer, or at least in any significant way, so the community supporting it is key. Of course, with so few systems out there and no realistic path to selling much more, I wonder how far even the community will bother going at this point. Nevertheless, it should be interesting to see what happens with it one way or the other.

Yes, the arcade stuff is the future for now.

It's not in stores at the moment, just direct from AtGames.

The Core is in the hands of regular people.

It's for sale: https://www.atgames.us/. Additional controller profiles will be enabled soon. https://arcades.atgames.net/ We have a big owners event on the website and official Facebook page this Sunday for those interested. $20,000 worth of prizes and giveaways, sales, new product reveals, etc.

Great to hear. The heavy visual filtering really bugs me, but it's probably one of those things like incorrect aspect ratios that bothers some people and not others.

Being better how?

Yes, the Switch collection with 150 games is a pretty tough value to beat. The only mainstream product I'm aware of that has at least a few licensed Atari 8-bit titles is the Antstream service. I'm not sure if they still have the offer on, but they had free 1 year subscriptions for a while.

It's terrible in my opinion. The visuals are blurry and my main action button is not terribly responsive.

Atari doesn't have enough 8-bit computer licenses left still to create a compelling enough compilation on its own. It's mostly the same games you see on the Atari 2600, 5200, and arcade sides, which are of course in many cases the same or better. You pretty much saw what they have in the Atari Flashback Classics series, and you'll note that in volume 3 it had to be supplemented with some third party stuff to make the count. They could likely do a 7800, 8-bit, and Lynx collection, as that should get them close to enough titles to make it reasonably viable, but whether that's a mass market product or not is a different story all together. I'd argue it's not and best left to niche products like the Evercade cartridges that don't need big numbers to break even.

I built mine over a period of two days and posted a short video: I also posted some images of the process as it was happening on social media: https://twitter.com/billloguidice/media A few initial observations. The quality of the materials is very good, and of course the upgraded Sanwa joysticks and buttons are excellent. The screen quality is pretty nice and the speakers are very good. The control panel height when on the stand is unusually high, higher than even full-size cabinets. It's actually comfortable for an average adult (I'm just over 5'9"), but I wonder if small kids, even on a high bar stool, might have some problems. The UI is pretty generic and the proprietary store is sparse for now. The software is definitely behind the hardware, but there's definitely some good potential. It's the best built machine of all the 3/4 scale machines, and the biggest, but it's also the most expensive post-Kickstarter. In fact, it's even more expensive than some full-size machines.