New Atari Console that Ataribox?

[toiletunes]

[+frankodragon]

They better hope those apps are placeholders because many aren't interested in such things as Deadbox.  But if those are the real apps, then here's a screen of "brands" that'll fit right in:

 

[roots.genoa]

7 hours ago, 5x7 said:

(Ship missing due to flicker)

Well, it's called "Asteroid", not "Asteroid and a ship"!

[TankedThomas]

(Oh, the Atati thing was a joke, now I feel really dumb).

[Mikebloke]

1 hour ago, TankedThomas said:

(Oh, the Atati thing was a joke, now I feel really dumb).

To make it worse I think there is an 'Atali' actually at CES with a booth. 

 

The thing that makes me laugh the most is they've gone to the trouble of going to CES (can we confirm it's actually a hotel near CES or is it just a random hotel somewhere else?), gone to the trouble of showing it on a screen in a box, gone to the trouble of showing off the ui when it turns on. 

 

But still hasn't shown a game working on it. There was clearly an opportunity to finally prove all the nay sayers wrong and load up a game, even if all it did was open up Stella emulator. Instead all we see is a menu system most of us could have coded ourselves in less than a week.

 

As far as I'm concerned there is still no proof the ataribox / atari vcs actually exists, it remains an atari brick. 

 

[Woulfe]

White space again ?

 

You think they'd know by now NOT to make it so easy for us...

 

 

 

P.S. That or it's BREAKOUT 2 : ELECTRIC BOOGALOO

 

Edited January 9, 2020 by Woulfe

[Flojomojo]

6 hours ago, Paul Slocum said:

It's still maybe a little early for articles to be written and published for smaller stuff like the Atari VCS, although I don't know how Atari can be at CES promoting a new product without finding one interesting/related thing to post to social media today.  At this point I bet Atari is really struggling to find tech writers who are likely to write positively about the Atari VCS.  I wouldn't be surprised if they were networking around today trying to find the right kind of naive person to write favorably about it.

"Atari at CES" is like the rooster at dawn who takes credit for the sunrise. They're just tagging along and hoping some of the cachet of this large (if outdated) conference sticks to them and lends them some credibility. 
 

Last year "at E3" (more like "near E3" or "concurrent with E3"), Dan Ackerman of CNET posted a faint praise article about ATARI VCS. It included a video with unimpressive gameplay visuals like Borderlands 2 at a low frame rate, and 2600 Ms Pac-Man, either of which can run on any old thing. They soon revised the video for unknown reasons to remove the gameplay, making the a story little more than a press release for Atari SA. 

 

If Atari SA and the faceless "team" had something to show, they have the same means as before to do so. "Keep an eye on social!" they said (replacing "stay tuned!") but it seems they shot their wad on Tuesday night with the bubble wrap and empty boot menu. 
 

CES is a trade-only event, not open to the general public. The "Atari" invitation-only, closed-door, presumably tightly controlled viewing is for the benefit of the people reading the slides which said they'd be there. Those are the real audience, the board people paying the Atari principals. They've posted an update saying they were there (or thereabouts) and will continue to imply that's enough. 
 

I don't think it's "trolling" or excessively negative to point out how lacking in substance their progress updates have been. 

[MrBeefy]

They stole a board and put it in the box!!!

 

I think Atari is showing a demo of Moon Patrol...

 

[PlaysWithWolves]

Everything Atari posts should be considered "for illustration purposes only".  Everything.

 

 

Just as we suspected.  They liked that answer so much that they copy-pasted it at least three times on Facebook.

 

35 minutes ago, Flojomojo said:

If Atari SA and the faceless "team" had something to show, they have the same means as before to do so. "Keep an eye on social!" they said (replacing "stay tuned!") but it seems they shot their wad on Tuesday night with the bubble wrap and empty boot menu. 

 

A whole Medium.com post!

After all the teasing and Crystal Ghost Easter eggs, yesterday's silence felt deafening. It made me wonder if CES caught up with them and threatened pulling their other licensed product displays. ?

 

A man can dream.

 

Speaking of "Crystal Ghost", anyone else remember a very hyped, spectrally-named console which was to download Atari games from their propriatary game service?

 

[JBerel]

 

So, deliberate incompetence rather than regular ol' fashion incompetence. Think of it as simply little suggestions that we don't have a frickin clue what the hell we're doing.

[Paul Slocum]

1 hour ago, Flojomojo said:

They're just tagging along and hoping some of the cachet of this large (if outdated) conference sticks to them and lends them some credibility. 

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.

[Flojomojo]

I don't think they're doing anything to appease their paying customers (past, present or future). The CES event was in one of their semi-internal update documents.
 

Pretending that going to meetings = work is an old trick. 

[Zor]

Their vocal supporters on the IGG page are pretending that it was always about releasing a pc and not about games.

So they'll get that (I mean a BYO OS & Storage PC), say they're happy, Atari will call it a success and resume with their low cost business model of paying a handful of employees to milk old licences.

There'll be a few 10 lines articulets in the press because nobody cares, it will never make it to physical retail stores and that'll be the end of it.

 

3 years of drama for that, and I thought "The Irishman" was too long

[Paul Slocum]

I'm definitely interested to see It's Hairy shows some games.

 

  (dictated but not read)

[Lodmot]

1 hour ago, Zor said:

Their vocal supporters on the IGG page are pretending that it was always about releasing a pc and not about games.

So they'll get that (I mean a BYO OS & Storage PC), say they're happy, Atari will call it a success and resume with their low cost business model of paying a handful of employees to milk old licences.

There'll be a few 10 lines articulets in the press because nobody cares, it will never make it to physical retail stores and that'll be the end of it.

 

3 years of drama for that, and I thought "The Irishman" was too long

If anything, Atari should've just done a console-sized gaming PC from the start. The "Atari OS/Atari World" portion of the system literally has no point whatsoever. Lol.

[+Nathan Strum]

3 hours ago, PlaysWithWolves said:

Everything Atari posts should be considered "for illustration purposes only".  Everything.

 

Quote

Glad you pointed this out! A number of the icons consoles displayed are simply placeholders to indicate the software hardware is unfinished. Think of them as subtle callouts humiliating embarrassments to our team that they need some more work have no idea what they're doing. : )

Fixed that for 'em.

Edited January 9, 2020 by Nathan Strum
If I wanted an emoji, I would've used an emoji.

[PlaysWithWolves]

This video makes my head hurt and probably should be archived.  

-Jump cuts; the first one at 9-10 seconds.

-Completely skips the Atari OS UI.

-Windows 10.

-Loads Fortnite's main menu!

-Ends without gameplay.

 

+Am liking the mirror, though.

 

Enjoy:

 

 

[Lodmot]

46 minutes ago, PlaysWithWolves said:

This video makes my head hurt and probably should be archived.  

-Jump cuts; the first one at 9-10 seconds.

-Completely skips the Atari OS UI.

-Windows 10.

-Loads Fortnite's main menu!

-Ends without gameplay.

 

+Am liking the mirror, though.

 

Enjoy:

 

 

Hey, you know what though? Props to them showing an actual clear video with decent lighting, demonstrating the system booting up into an operating system of some kind. xD

 

EDIT: Wait a minute... what the fuck? What's up with the jump cut at the 9 second mark? 

2nd edit: Just realized you already pointed that out. LOL. Oopsie on my part. o u o

3rd edit: Question regarding the mirror-- can anyone see if our friendly mirror can tell us whether HDMI cable is in fact coming out of the Atari VCS and going up to the TV?

Edited January 9, 2020 by Lodmot

[jhd]

17 hours ago, PlaysWithWolves said:

I'm sure there are other things of interest, but one stuck out to me:

 

"September 2019 : Atari Interactive has concluded an agreement with Legalist, where the latter has agreed to pay 0.9 M€ to Atari Interactive in exchange for a share of future profits to be received by Atari in its ongoing copyright infringement lawsuits. This amount, which has been recognized as a financial debt, will be deducted from any potential proceeds of the lawsuits. Should the lawsuits be unsuccessful, the amount will not be recoverable from the Group under the terms of the agreement."

 

Financing a third-party lawsuit is called Champerty, and I was unaware that it was still allowed -- the practice is borderline-illegal in Canada (and certainly not something that a major company would publicly admit to doing.) Of course Atari Interactive is based in France, so the rules there are different. 

 

 

[Flojomojo]

23 minutes ago, jhd said:

Financing a third-party lawsuit is called Champerty, and I was unaware that it was still allowed -- the practice is borderline-illegal in Canada (and certainly not something that a major company would publicly admit to doing.) Of course Atari Interactive is based in France, so the rules there are different. 

I'm not a lawyer but a very quick search suggests to me that Third Party Legal Funding (TPLF) is alive and well in the United States. There's a white paper or two here. I agree that it seems slimy, because it seems like a way to exploit the public legal system for private gain. I also feel like that's the kind of thing that the US system ("money is speech, my friends") would tolerate.

 

This seems similar to something I've seen. Some consulting firms will perform software piracy audits at large organizations in exchange for a slice of the "true-up" costs. Say your firm bought 20,000 copies of Microsoft Office at $300 a seat but an audit found 24,961 copies in use. You owe Microsoft $1,488,300 to come into compliance, and the auditor's bounty comes out of there. Win-win for everyone except for the infringer. The software house pays nothing if nothing is found, and the auditor is incentivized to go after target-rich environments. 

 

I would think that the lawyers that "Atari" have put on this case have a streamlined, efficient process for nailing infringers in the most lucrative way. I wonder what this means for their previous representation, the firm that represented hiphop artists against Fortnite for using their dance moves? 

[Agillig]

For crying out loud, just answer the guy's question.   

 

[Flojomojo]

 

[RedWolfJC]

Shenanigans again, or legit?

 

Normally I would say there are reasonable explanations for this but I think Atari has squandered any benefit of the doubt.

(Pay no attention to the real computer hiding behind the cabinet door.)

 

 

 

[JaqenHghar]

49 minutes ago, jhd said:

Financing a third-party lawsuit is called Champerty, and I was unaware that it was still allowed -- the practice is borderline-illegal in Canada (and certainly not something that a major company would publicly admit to doing.) Of course Atari Interactive is based in France, so the rules there are different. 

Well, it is a French word.

 

This one took me by surprise. I know it probably shouldn't have. I know they're lawsuit happy but it feels like a new low for them in my eyes. You're selling shares of your lawsuits now? Even if your business model is based on lawsuits as revenue (bad enough) this act is basically selling part of your (slimey) golden goose for some quick cash. Were the lawsuits they had not moving fast enough to finance Fred's million euro compensation this year?

[+frankodragon]

Take a close look at the person sitting at the table behind the monitor.  It looks like he/she is actually controlling with a wireless keyboard/mouse.  The moving cord in front is just a ruse.