Paul Slocum

They've answered very specific questions about the setup, like somebody asked what the cable was coming out to the cabinet on Indiegogo and they responded that it was the power cord plugged into a power strip inside the cabinet. Then they stopped responding when I asked my question.

That's the area where they were doing Windows demos. But if they stuck another computer board in there for the demo, then the USB drives might just be for show. And it's now been over a week since they've been avoiding my question about the demo's computer board on Reddit. In their last Medium update, at the beginning they said Many of you have asked questions about exactly what was shared in meetings with partners, press, and retailers, but then they still used vague language and didn't answer my question there either.

Sure looks like those cables are just tucked into or under the case instead of being actually plugged into the board.

Atari's roadmap for the AtariVCS considers it to be a success to sell 250k units in the first 4 years. Even if they meet that extremely unlikely weasely worded goal, it's still not enough to sustain a game app store, especially when many people are just going to be using Windows. When you consider controllers, the AtariVCS costs more than any other console on the market. After also buying a Windows license and extra hard drive, it almost costs as much as two other consoles. Nobody's going to buy this thing. Microsoft spent $500 million just on marketing the XBox launch. Atari has no money to even begin to properly market this thing even if they did have a viable product.

It seemed like the right time to mention it because a few comments back that Brandon guy was talking enthusiastically about the possibility of gambling games on the AtariVCS, and in the comment right before mine somebody posted a link to the PDF report that confirms their Kenya plans.

It took me a while to process this. That's seriously fucked up. Putting aside the fact that this is cartoonishly evil, it also risks creating a massive PR disaster for the company. Imagine when somebody does another documentary like this and finds Atari logos on the machines that kids are playing!? I'd generally considered Atari SA to be much more inept than evil, but this is a new low.

They'd have surely posted the booth number and it would have been listed on the CES site if they really had a booth, although technically it's not outboarding if you literally just bring one journalist by your hotel room. There are lots of really tiny x86 boards these days like Atomic Pi, Upboard, various Odroid boards. And all of Atari's videos are about a minute, which isn't long enough to know if thermal performance is okay. I'd be reasonably satisfied if they just explicitly said what it's running on, but they don't seem to be willing to do that. They continue to delete things in their subreddit and answer questions elsewhere while ignoring my question about what the demos were actually running on.

I'm pretty sure that's just the public Kinsgston booth/room at CES. Some of the official booths are hotel rooms apparently: https://ces20.mapyourshow.com/8_0/exhibitor/exhibitor-details.cfm?ExhID=T0001412

To deliver in the next few months it seems like they'd have to have some kind of working custom AtariVCS board by now. There's a big difference between a board that can't be demonstrated at all and a board that just needs adjustments to improve thermals and meet electrical certification. I think most people initially thought it was the latter, including me. If they actually have an AtariVCS board that can at least boot and run the stuff they showed, then even though the project is still a mess because of the state of the software, backers will probably get something that at least runs Windows and Retropie. If they were running the demos on the Ryzen developer board for the processor that they're using and actually have their bootloaders and drivers working reasonably well, then they could still deliver but it may be a long way off. If they were running it off an Udoo or other PC, then the project may be doomed.

I didn't mean that they would necessarily install it seamlessly for CES, just good enough for a demonstration. In the videos we never saw the back, the cables could just be hanging out the back or attached with short extensions. But I've actually thought a lot about your question (why didn't they just partner with Udoo to make a board?) and I think it's that they wanted to say their board was designed by the guy who made the XBox to call attention away from the fact that it's just an x86 PC.

I do keep asking myself whether it's the worst publicity ever or if they really don't have anything, but I'm now leaning towards fake. PowerA seems to have distanced themselves from the project from what I've seen. The last time I can find that they tweeted about it was July 2018. Plus even if the AtariVCS fails, I could see the controllers still possibly being delivered. And I'm wondering how much of a real partnership that was with Kingston. I suspect that Atari just sought out whatever vendors they already had any loose connection to and then proposed Atari social media promotion in exchange for a little table space. Kingston is the perfect target because it makes a really boring booth a little more interesting.

I realized that probably the best way to fake it would just be to put a different board in the AtariVCS case, like an Udoo Bolt Ryzen board. Considering how ambiguous the wording of their CES Twitter posts CES Medium update is, and considering what they've done in the past like with Tempest 4000, it is completely plausible that they've put in another x86 board or crammed their Ryzen development board inside. You could also fake it with another computer and wireless HDMI extenders. Also, notice that when Atari is doing that demo video in the same room, there's a second cable going to the TV that's not in that photo. That Lunar Lander launch screen in the photo could be a JPEG shown off a USB stick plugged in the back of the TV for all we know ("Please Do Not Touch") Ultimately the best proof would have been to let journalists see it. They went to Vegas and set up a demo suite during an event that boasts 6000 members of the media, and only one journalist was interested in seeing and writing about a new Atari console!? Their NDA must be absurd and/or they're hiding so much that they literally just wanted one journalist to see it to minimize exposure. On Indiegogo and Reddit I asked Atari if it's the actual AtariVCS board driving these demos, and they've avoided answering. And while Atari is bad about answering questions, they usually do answer polite questions on their subreddit that look bad to not answer when they have an easy answer that looks good. Atari's answer should basically just be "yes" unless we've been misled. But yesterday Atari deleted an adjacent post on the subreddit and responded to question on Indiegogo without responding to mine. Maybe they're just being slow or unresponsive, but it doesn't look good to me. The last question on their subreddit they didn't directly answer was about whether they'd have an official booth on the CES floor.

Wait, Fred was actually there, and this is all he tweeted while his company was revealing the first footage of their new game console? That makes sense. Constantly looking at the map to make sure he avoids Rob Wyatt's actual CES booth.

There were 4 videos and a few more images that I'm aware of but overall it is embarrassingly little. I assumed they'd post the best stuff the last day, but it was dead air. And I keep watching for news, but there's still only that one article. All the videos they posted are on their Twitter: https://twitter.com/theatari_vcs

From my limited research, the performance will be somewhat comparable to the Ryzen 2200U video below, which is about [email protected] and [email protected] Can anyone confirm that this is a good comparison? I think it's also possible that the performance is a little worse than this, which might be why Atari made it hard to determine the graphics settings in the video. Even if the performance is only slightly worse than this either due to hardware limitations or immature drivers, then people wanting to do PC gaming probably aren't going to be very happy.

I'm pretty certain that's not remotely possible. From the tests on similar Ryzen boards, at best it's [email protected] and [email protected], and nothing playable at 4k. The video they posted was shot at 25fps, and in that video the game was running without skipping frames, which ultimately doesn't mean much since you can't tell the resolution or graphics settings.

Also, where are the other articles? By the end of E3 there were a ton of articles, but this time only ONE article after a week of having a private showroom at CES!? Maybe more articles are coming, but based on E3, we already would have seen most of them. I couldn't even find a single social media post from anyone showing the AtariVCS floor models on that were supposed to be on the CES floor.

I actually did notice that ambiguous language when they first posted it, but I thought they had been more explicit on social media. However upon review, I notice that they are ambiguous in pretty much every post and comment on social media about what it's actually running on. Lol, okay so that's a little weird. I might try asking them to clarify since this could potentially be cleared up easily.

Lots of half-truths and deception, but this would be a full on lie about something pretty big, and it would probably have legal implications if they failed to deliver. If they're willing to fake footage of a "working" board, then why didn't they do it last year to appease people? If they're willing to straight up lie, then why don't they go ahead and list the Indiegogo project as "in production"? Plus when they were at E3, it seemed like they were being very careful with their language to avoid it being an explicit lie about what they showed in the private suite. Despite a lot of unsavory behavior, it seems there's a limit to how straight of a lie they're willing to tell. I don't see the Tempest 4000 footage shown early in the project as quite the same thing. It was a bit misleading, but it was also easy to imagine that it was just a mockup/advertisement at that point.

I figured that there was probably a power connector in the cabinet, and that's what Atari later explained on Indiegogo. Why would one expect a PC running Windows to be controlled by anything other than a keyboard and mouse, except when playing games? To me that's a key problem with their entire platform as a set top box, especially when they basically have no AtariOS games or streaming services. You're probably going to be switching between controllers and keyboard/mouse often with this thing. You may need a keyboard/mouse to use video streaming services since it will all be in-browser. If Atari wants to post something to social media they have to cut it to about 1 minute. It's probably just slow to boot, and they cut it so you could see each part of the boot process which makes sense. It also makes sense that they'd be bad at filming and using a video editor. Aren't the Atari controllers wireless? The USB cable is probably running to the keyboard and/or mouse. It all looks really clumsy and janky, but nothing here looks like deception to me. If they're faking it, I don't think it's possible to determine from these videos. I think we'll just have to wait and see what other journalists write (or don't write) after seeing the stuff to really get an idea of how legit and stable everything is. They also may be holding back a little more footage and/or gameplay to post on social media in the last few days of CES.

Me too. I don't trust "Atari", but I just don't really see them faking footage at this point despite everything they've done before, it seems like too much of liability. The cables in the videos don't really look incriminating to me, there other explanations for how they're arranged. It looks like they do have at least one working X86 board, but there are basically no notable games or streaming services, and their menu system and emulators so far appear to be in very primitive form. It's great that it looks like backers will actually get their PC that can run Windows and x86 Retropie. But with its price and without any games or streaming apps, it's primed to be one of the worst selling consoles of all time. Even failed consoles typically sell in the hundreds of thousands or millions. The price is crazy. With the 2 controllers, a Windows license, and a hard drive for Windows, aren't you looking at over $500?

That's why I said "mostly", but no mention of the delays/problems or even that the project was crowdfunded in the first place. The price of the Atari VCS compared to other consoles is absurd, so Atari is probably trying to get out in front of it by admitting it's expensive and spinning it as worthwhile because you can install Windows.

It mostly reads like Atari press release fluff to me, and it doesn't describe anything we haven't seen them post on Twitter. No talk of gameplay at all. Also the Fortnite video kinda seems set up so that you can't determine the graphics settings or resolution.

I'm definitely interested to see It's Hairy shows some games. (dictated but not read)

Based on what we've seen, I've been wondering if they actually just decided to go to CES at the last minute because backers started asking about it on Indiegogo and social media in the couple weeks before. I could see Atari thinking that people wouldn't notice if they didn't go to CES since they hadn't talked about it on Indiegogo -- but then realizing that not going would make them look terrible. A lot of people were asking, but Atari didn't actually confirm they were going until the day before it started. Nothing they've shown so far couldn't have been thrown together the week beforehand, and it doesn't appear that Monsieur Chesnais or anybody important is there.