New Atari Console that Ataribox?

[Agillig]

1 hour ago, DragonGrafx-16 said:

They are going to be SOL when no one buys the VCS at retail stores and they get blown out at 1/4th of their price on clearance... lol

I think they're SOL no matter what.   I was a devoted Sega fanboy throughout the 90's.  I consider myself an expert in recognizing SOL hardware producers who can't figure out what kind of product they want to make.

Edited March 2, 2020 by Agillig

[+frankodragon]

6 hours ago, frankodragon said:

 

 

 

 

Around 0:20 you can hear someone yelling an f-bomb.

When I think about it now, maybe that was Stefan swearing, if he actually was there.

[Tavi]

4 hours ago, Agillig said:

I think they've pretty much given up on having exclusive games.   They're probably going to go full bore "PC for your tv" at this point.   

 

Honestly, if you made me president of Atari and told me to salvage this turd, that's what I would do.   They don't have big IP's of their own to draw mainstream audiences.  AAA Third party developers aren't going to develop exclusives for a system that has 11,000 users.  

 

What's ironic, is that we've been complaining that Atari hasn't let anyone play the VCS. This weekend they did that, and that may have been a fatal mistake. 

 

As a reminder, the Atari VCS prototype can't even play Pong.

 

Pong, for crying out loud!

This Atari Box project has been a comedy of errors right from the initial Kickstarter that Atari had to pull the plug on and still continuing right up until now, years later.

What I still feel is perhaps one of their biggest ones is the lack of any exclusives. Like you said they are too small to get the attention of the big developers, I suspect Atari would consider themselves fortunate to even be considered for a few quick and easy ports from them. There is just no money in it.

Granted Ouya had tried this and failed, but perhaps the Atari name might have helped them there to attract some gullible indie developers. As so many people have pointed out, without any exclusives everything the Atari Box does can be done by other existing equipment, and often for cheaper.

Their one 'Hail Mary' shot at getting any market notice would be to find the next 'Undertale' or 'Cuphead' and get it as a system exclusive. So that Atari seems to have no interest in supporting developers is a little surprising.

Even more shocking as going by Wyatt's and Fergal's experience with Atari, I suspect Atari would pull a stunt like Blizzard just did with Warcraft Reforged and write up a contract so everything developed belonged to them alone.

But as this entire Atari Box project could be written up as a 'How to Fail Spectacularly in Every Possible way' guide; I guess I should not be that shocked?

[JeffVav]

4 hours ago, TankedThomas said:

I got Atari Vault from the Fanatical bundle the other day, but it's a good thing I wanted the other three games because wow, what a crappy, half-assed compilation.

 

Sad to hear that. Do you want to elaborate on how it was crappy and half-assed? (Not being sarcastic here. Genuinely want to learn where we fell short. I'm going to assume it's not just the lack of Activision etc. games which are missing for hopefully-obvious reasons.)

[8Bitjunkie]

[TankedThomas]

9 hours ago, JeffVav said:

 

Sad to hear that. Do you want to elaborate on how it was crappy and half-assed? (Not being sarcastic here. Genuinely want to learn where we fell short. I'm going to assume it's not just the lack of Activision etc. games which are missing for hopefully-obvious reasons.)

Honestly, some of it is just the game selection. I realise licensing costs money but Activision games are kind of important for the 2600. Maybe some of the Epyx games, even. 

I was hoping there'd at least be Battlezone (not that I don't have two copies already, but still).

 

It just feels like half the library (probably an exaggeration, to be fair) was sports games or duplicates of the arcade games (and, at least in most cases, the arcade version will typically be the better game to play). Lots of other filler-type games too, such as Blackjack. I like Blackjack, and I probably played that one the most on Atari Vault, to be honest, but I could play Blackjack on just about anything. 

 

I'm also a bit surprised that there are no 5200 nor 7800 games, and I didn't find Spacewar in the arcade section which seems kind of important at least history-wise. After all, it's called Atari Vault, not 2600 Vault. 

 

I was disappointed by the lack of emulator options - very few filters (mostly just scanlines on or off), including a lack of options for the background, and the list of resolutions really should have been a drop-down list (preferably with ratios included) instead of just scrolling through a whole bunch of them. 

 

Using only the keyboard, I couldn't find a way to scroll backwards between the three menu sections (I was expecting something such as Shift+Tab), but I could go forwards with Tab. 

 

Being able to bring up manuals during games would have been nice, and I honestly found the game options often more confusing than playing with the switches on the 2600 (I realise this won't be a problem for everyone, but I couldn't really get my head around it, especially for Adventure). 

 

Pong has acceleration on keyboard controls which is just awful, and you can't adjust the mouse sensitivity as far as I can tell. 

 

Finally, the achievements seem bizarre - obviously for such old games, they're ultimately just a novelty, but some range from difficult (then again, I suck at games, so don't mind me) to buggy (the Yars' Revenge one wouldn't unlock for me), but most importantly, only cover some games. I was surprised that something like Adventure didn't have any achievements but, if I remember correctly, Air-Sea Battle does. 

 

Don't get me wrong though - the emulation is solid overall, and it is certainly a way to play a bunch of old Atari games on modern hardware (even if the game selection is rather mediocre even compared to some of the Flashbacks).

 

Though I have my criticisms, I don't think the development team did a horrible job, and I assume there's more than one of you on the boards, so I want to make it clear that my criticisms are not meant to be an attack on you nor your work, but aside from being highly critical of most things anyway (even with things I love, I'm always looking for ways to improve them), I just found it lacking overall, especially in game selection (which is, I assume, on Atari and not the dev team) and generally as Atari's big ticket item (or more accurately, the only item) for the VCS. 

 

Anyway, I'll shut up for now, but since I ended up with a developer responding, I thought I should give you a fair and honest reply. 

 

And to reiterate what I've probably made clear by now: I don't think (most of) the people working for Atari are bad people (i.e. the contractors). I just think the guys at the top are bad people (especially Fred) - the state of modern Atari truly saddens me. 

 

 

[JeffVav]

4 minutes ago, TankedThomas said:

Honestly, some of it is just the game selection. I realise licensing costs money but Activision games are kind of important for the 2600. Maybe some of the Epyx games, even. 

I was hoping there'd at least be Battlezone (not that I don't have two copies already, but still).

 

It just feels like half the library (probably an exaggeration, to be fair) was sports games or duplicates of the arcade games (and, at least in most cases, the arcade version will typically be the better game to play). Lots of other filler-type games too, such as Blackjack. I like Blackjack, and I probably played that one the most on Atari Vault, to be honest, but I could play Blackjack on just about anything. 

 

Thanks for the reply.  I think the common misunderstanding is that many assume Atari Vault is a collection of games for "the" Atari (i.e. Atari 2600 console), not games from Atari.  The initial release contains just about every Atari-owned arcade game from Lunar Lander forward (excluding I, Robot, and the two GCC games, Food Fight and Quantum) plus Pong, and every released Atari 2600 game that Atari still owned.  They weren't put in as filler, but rather they had us put in everything they had rights to.  It confuses things further when boxes that actually had the Atari name on them (as opposed to third-party games like Activision) were the well-known (for good or bad reasons) titles that were actually once-licensed games they'll never get again: Space Invaders, Pac-Man, E.T., Superman, ...

 

Atari Flashback is not the same product.  That is a compilation of game for "the" Atari (2600).  Consumer licensing is a little different.  If you approach, say, Activision to licence their games for a platform that they also make games for (PC, console, mobile), they'll probably say no, in case they want to do something in that space.  But they don't sell hardware at Walmart, so if you want to licence their games for a Flashback-style box, you talk to a different department and the powers-that-be see no conflict of interest with their internal teams to take your cheque, and so that happens.  That's why Flashback can have games the PC and console releases can't.

 

So, if you're looking for Atari 2600 games rather than Atari's games, I can definitely see how people would find Flashback appealing.

 

We'd love to have the true compendium of our youth as much as you, and we harass our clients on our collective behalf on this as much as possible, but business realities limit how far they can go. (One of my former contacts who will remain nameless got quite tired of me saying "too bad you don't own Battlezone anymore".)

 

15 minutes ago, TankedThomas said:

I'm also a bit surprised that there are no 5200 nor 7800 games, and I didn't find Spacewar in the arcade section which seems kind of important at least history-wise. After all, it's called Atari Vault, not 2600 Vault. 

 

Space War was a 1962 computer game that wasn't made by Atari.  Do you mean Computer Space?  I don't think the current Atari has the rights to it.

 

For Atari 5200, guess you don't have the DLC then.

 

So, roughly speaking, Atari Vault is the PC version of Atari's Greatest Hits on iPhone, which was Atari Greatest Hits on Nintendo DS.  That lineage comes from two volumes of 50 games that became a 100-game app.  At the time the DS titles were made, it wasn't thought financially viable to make a third cart with the 70s games, 5200, or 7800 games.  (DS carts are expensive.)  Ironically, the thought was seeing multiple versions of Asteroids (arcade, 2600, 5200, 7800) would be seen as filler, and the average person wouldn't even know about the 5200 or 7800, because they weren't a part of pop culture the way the 2600 was.  By the time the console Atari Flashback Classics and PC Atari Vault was made, a demand for these games became evident, so that led to Atari Flashback Classics Volume 3 and the Atari Vault DLC, which included most of Atari's games from the 70s, and every Atari 5200 game Atari released (and many they didn't).  You can see that they held nothing back they owned on the Atari 2600 side in the earlier releases, since every Atari 2600 game in the DLC/Volume 3 is a prototype.  (Even the original 100 had to resort to putting the Stunt Cycle prototype in to replace Battlezone when it was sold.)  I imagine if the DLC did sufficiently well, one could expect them commission another compilation drawing from, say, 7800, Lynx, maybe Jaguar?  (Thing is, Jaguar emulation is a comparatively huge investment, so confidence would have to be high for anyone to sensibly consider it.)

 

29 minutes ago, TankedThomas said:

I was disappointed by the lack of emulator options - very few filters (mostly just scanlines on or off), including a lack of options for the background, and the list of resolutions really should have been a drop-down list (preferably with ratios included) instead of just scrolling through a whole bunch of them. 

 

Using only the keyboard, I couldn't find a way to scroll backwards between the three menu sections (I was expecting something such as Shift+Tab), but I could go forwards with Tab. 

 

Being able to bring up manuals during games would have been nice, and I honestly found the game options often more confusing than playing with the switches on the 2600 (I realise this won't be a problem for everyone, but I couldn't really get my head around it, especially for Adventure).

 

Fair enough.  We appreciate the feedback.  On the menus vs. switches, one of the big criticisms of the earlier releases was from people who were experiencing the Atari 2600 for the first time, so the game select menus were there to make it a bit more accessible to them.  They can of course be disabled in the options so you can use the switches instead.  (I prefer the switches too.)

 

31 minutes ago, TankedThomas said:

Pong has acceleration on keyboard controls which is just awful, and you can't adjust the mouse sensitivity as far as I can tell. 

 

You can adjust the sensitivity for the mouse.  Pong (and many of the paddle/spinner/trackball games) have two operating modes for the mouse in Atari Vault: "Follow Mouse" and "Paddle".  In "Follow Mouse" mode, your paddle moves to wherever your mouse cursor is, so the sensitivity in that case isn't adjustable (except to the extent you can adjust your desktop mouse sensitivity).  The thought was that people might enjoy using the travel they're used to for their desktop, relying on muscle memory.  You can see the same control scheme more obviously in Centipede, where the shooter is limited to how fast it can go, so you can actually see it chase the mouse pointer if you move fast enough.

 

The "Paddle" mode is probably what you're looking for.  In that mode, there's an independent sensitivity setting.  To switch modes, go into Options > Controls, click the Mouse icon, then click the box which says "Follow Mouse".  It'll toggle to "Paddle".  

 

We put a tonne of control options (and other options) in there to try to satisfy all tastes, but the defaults tend to be for the casual user.  (The design directive behind Vault was to make the games more accessible, but we wanted to keep the familiar options for hardcore retrogamers, which led to there being so many options.)  It'd probably benefit from a manual, if people still made or read manuals.

 

38 minutes ago, TankedThomas said:

Finally, the achievements seem bizarre - obviously for such old games, they're ultimately just a novelty, but some range from difficult (then again, I suck at games, so don't mind me) to buggy (the Yars' Revenge one wouldn't unlock for me), but most importantly, only cover some games. I was surprised that something like Adventure didn't have any achievements but, if I remember correctly, Air-Sea Battle does. 

 

There is an Adventure achievement.  It's called Stealthy:

 

 

There are 100 games in the base package, so the original 12 were limited to the more popular games, generally speaking.  The DLC added 50 more-obscure games but another 12 new achievements, which is why half of them seem to be for obscure games.  So, because of the DLC, half the achievements are from the top 12% of the Atari catalogue and the other half are from 24% of the "bottom third" of the catalogue, so to speak, which probably explains the odd mix.

 

Re: Yars' Revenge, the Swirl has to be in-flight to unlock the achievement.

 

Response to the achievements has definitely been mixed.  The thought behind them was that old-school gamers expect a proper challenge.   So, yes, there's a mixture of easy and ridiculous in there.  Not everyone was thrilled with our choices.

 

Anyway, again, thanks for your feedback.  We do care a lot about these games.  In fact, about 1/3 of the content comes from my own collection, and checked against my original family heavy-sixer purchased Christmas of 1977 (via Cuttlecart in the case of games where I don't have the original carts on hand).  Being a compilation of titles from a specific era that we have released on various platforms for decades now(!), it's hard to bring something new to it each time.  There's only so many times you can listen to Nolan tell the hot tub story and view pictures of plush Centipedes.  (In that vein, the DS releases had an Atari 400 emulator and Army Battlezone, if you're lucky enough to have them.  The online multiplayer was one of our primary new contributions to Atari Vault/Atari Flashback Classics round.)  So if there's any way we can still push it further and bring more value to people interested in getting it for their latest platforms, we're eager to learn.  We're not just out here looking for praise, we very much value criticism, too.   That's why I asked.

[Bill Loguidice]

1 hour ago, TankedThomas said:

Honestly, some of it is just the game selection. I realise licensing costs money but Activision games are kind of important for the 2600. Maybe some of the Epyx games, even. 

I was hoping there'd at least be Battlezone (not that I don't have two copies already, but still).

 

 

In my opinion, the actual implementation is at least as good as any other product of this type, and the game selection, 100 games, is nothing to sneeze at. All that was promised was an "Atari Vault," not an "Atari and Third Party Games Vault". As for Battlezone, that hasn't been an Atari property for some time now.

If you're looking for Atari 5200 and some third party stuff, it's included in Atari Flashback Classics Volume 3 (Xbox One, PS4) and Atari Flashback Classics Switch, the latter of which combines all three volumes for a total of 150 games. Unfortunately, there was no such sequel on the PC side.

As you imply, it all comes down to licensing costs, and those can either be cost-prohibitive or literally unavailable. Just because one company wants to include something doesn't mean another company will actually let it be licensed. A good example is EA, which literally disbanded its classics licensing division several years back. And Activision, if not to the same levels as EA, is quite choosy with who and where they license their old stuff, and of course, there's the issue of not all of it still being in their actual possession. So again, to be completely fair to products like these, it missing particular games you may want may simply be impractical. It's not like these don't clearly advertise what's actually on them.

 

[Shaggy the Atarian]

On 3/1/2020 at 9:29 AM, ColecoJoe said:

 

As we like to say on the interwebs:

 

I attend various tradeshows every year, and unless a vendor is actively blocking photos, no one who comes across a new product like this just passes by such an opportunity. Especially Shill #1 for said product.

 

But, giving him the benefit of the doubt, he's still not presenting anything that will change minds, either way. It's red meat to the backers who are getting restless, with an attempt to polish a turd.

 

As for these gems: "Everything I saw looked clearer, better, faster..." and "There are people ready to produce systems, but a lack of parts..." 

 

 

Yeah, if you don't have parts, then you aren't "ready" to produce anything

 

As for his other comment elsewhere claiming that if you want the same hardware as the Atari VCS but it'll cost you "$600"...well, no one other than Atari is using that particular AMD chipset to make a game console. If you want a starter game PC for a similar price to the VCS right now, but without all of the bugs & broken promises, you can get a more powerful CybertronPC starter Linux gaming machine for $339 on Newegg.  

[The Historian]

I've got to say the best "Atari" game collection was the Activision Anthology on PS2.

[Agillig]

They posted a video of the system running Rocket League today.  The quality of the video isn't the greatest (as usual), but as best I could tell, the game was running smoothly.  Seems odd that it could run such a modern game that has pretty decent graphics, but they can't get vintage games to run correctly. 

[Zor]

Isn't it likely that the Atari vault games run exactly the same as on any other Linux pc, neither better (like one fan pretended) nor worse ( as another said) ?

The thing about the games not being adapted to modern cpu clocks sounded very weird, unless it was already a problem with the vault. 

They clearly have developed close to nothing, why the vault would be anything else, better or worse, than what already available ? 

( And maybe pong is just shit with a standard controller ?)

[DragonGrafx-16]

1 hour ago, The Historian said:

I've got to say the best "Atari" game collection was the Activision Anthology on PS2.

Mine was the Atari 80 Classics Games collection on PC... it even had an official Atari 2600 emulator! You could actually play any (well almost) 2600 game using it (you had to associate .bin files with the atari2600 emulator). Sure the sound of the arcade games was just wav files but it was still pretty damn good. It's way better than Atari Vault!

[JeffVav]

3 minutes ago, DragonGrafx-16 said:

Mine was the Atari 80 Classics Games collection on PC... it even had an official Atari 2600 emulator! You could actually play any (well almost) 2600 game using it (you had to associate .bin files with the atari2600 emulator). Sure the sound of the arcade games was just wav files but it was still pretty damn good. It's way better than Atari Vault!

 

Atari Vault uses the exact same emulators, and the same audio files.

[DragonGrafx-16]

Just now, JeffVav said:

 

Atari Vault uses the exact same emulators, and the same audio files.

Wow really? Then why does it run like shit on low end laptops? 80 Classic games could run on freakin Windows 98...

 

The arcade emulation it uses is 20 years old now... first used in the Atari Arcade Hits compilations (which is what actually got me into Atari back in 1999). 

 

It was great for it's day but it's sheer incompetence to still be using them on modern releases.

[JeffVav]

5 minutes ago, DragonGrafx-16 said:

Wow really? Then why does it run like shit on low end laptops? 80 Classic games could run on freakin Windows 98...

 

The arcade emulation it uses is 20 years old now... first used in the Atari Arcade Hits compilations (which is what actually got me into Atari back in 1999). 

 

It was great for it's day but it's sheer incompetence to still be using them on modern releases.

 

No, it's not the same emulation used in Atari Arcade Hits.  That was written in assembly.  But I really don't understand your "sheer incompetence" comment.  Hypothetically, if the emulation code works, why change it?

 

I'm actually confused about this comment.  On the one hand you don't want us to use 20-year-old code (not that we are), but you still want it run on 20-year-old operating systems (low-end laptops with Windows 98)?

 

Anyway, Atari Vault's UI is 3D and written in Unity.  That's the only reason it has higher system requirements.  It's nothing to do with the emulation.  It's going to perform as well as any Unity 3D program.

[DragonGrafx-16]

16 minutes ago, JeffVav said:

 

No, it's not the same emulation used in Atari Arcade Hits.  That was written in assembly.  But I really don't understand your "sheer incompetence" comment.  Hypothetically, if the emulation code works, why change it?

 

I'm actually confused about this comment.  On the one hand you don't want us to use 20-year-old code (not that we are), but you still want it run on 20-year-old operating systems (low-end laptops with Windows 98)?

 

Anyway, Atari Vault's UI is 3D and written in Unity.  That's the only reason it has higher system requirements.  It's nothing to do with the emulation.  It's going to perform as well as any Unity 3D program.

Emulation has improved since then... for one it uses synthesis for the audio rather than wav files... it would be like using Nesticle NES emulator VS any modern NES emulator. It is flawed! But the 80 Classic Games comp is still way better than Atari Vault!  I was saying 80 Classic Games runs great on Windows 98 cause it was released when that OS was still very popular. Obviously Atari Vault won't run on Windows 98... I was wondering why Atari Vault runs so bad on modern low end systems that are still superior to the best possible Window 98 PC if it's the same code! They should have at least had the option to disable the horrible menus and maybe it would not have been so bad. A stupid flashy 3D menu is not needed for some 2D Atari games. And I was able to get into games on a low end laptop that had Windows 8.1 on it they just ran much much worse and some games wouldn't even load! While the arcade games in the 80 Classic games menu was bugged in any OS higher than Windows XP each game could still be accessed externally and played.

 

And just because "the emulation code works" does not mean it is accurate at all... I'm gonna bring up Nesticle again... the code in that crusty old emulator 'works' but no way is it anything close to acting like a real NES.

Edited March 3, 2020 by DragonGrafx-16

[JeffVav]

Just now, DragonGrafx-16 said:

Emulation has improved since then... for one it uses synthesis for the audio rather than wav files... it would be like using Nesticle NES emulator VS any modern NES emulator. It is flawed! But the 80 Classic Games comp is still way better than Atari Vault!  I was saying 80 Classic Games runs great on Windows 98 cause it was released when that OS was still very popular. Obviously Atari Vault won't run on Windows 98... I was wondering why Atari Vault runs so bad on modern low end systems that are still superior to the best possible Window 98 PC! They should have at least had the option to disable the horrible menus and maybe it would not have been so bad. A stupid flashy 3D menu is not needed for some 2D Atari games. And I was able to get into games on a low end laptop that had Windows 8.1 on it they just ran much much worse and some games wouldn't even load! While the arcade games in the 80 Classic games menu was bugged in any OS higher than Windows XP each game could still be accessed externally and played.

 

And just because "the emulation code works" does not mean it is accurate at all... I'm gonna bring up Nesticle again... the code in that crusty old emulator 'works' but no way is it anything close to acting like a real NES.

 

To me "works" and "accurate" is synonymous.  If it's not accurate, it's not working.  If you can let me know what flaws you see in the emulation that need attention, we'd be grateful to look at it. 

 

Thing is, I wrote my first Atari 2600 emulator in 1993.  (We've been doing this since before Stella and before MAME.)  So I'd kinda hope we'd be able to get it stable in less than 27 years.

 

Anyway, to be clear, some of the samples are samples because they are sampled from analogue sound generating hardware.  Digital would not recreate it accurately.  e.g. thrust sound in Asteroids.  Runtime synthesis still hasn't caught up in the analogue hardware sphere.

 

The menus are what they are.  I'm happy you can still get use out of Atari 80-in-1.  I was proud of our work on that one at the time, too, but ironically a number of people said the menus sucked (or were at least very dated), which is probably a big motivator for why Vault went 3D.  There wasn't a lot of concern about making it work on low-end hardware when 80-in-1 was there still.  I guess you can't please everyone.

 

Incidentally, I did supply a patch on my website for 80-in-1 to fix the bugged menus... http://vavasour.ca/jeff/games.html#atari80  Yeah, the website is super-dated.  Sorry.

[DragonGrafx-16]

15 minutes ago, JeffVav said:

 

To me "works" and "accurate" is synonymous.  If it's not accurate, it's not working.  If you can let me know what flaws you see in the emulation that need attention, we'd be grateful to look at it. 

 

Thing is, I wrote my first Atari 2600 emulator in 1993.  (We've been doing this since before Stella and before MAME.)  So I'd kinda hope we'd be able to get it stable in less than 27 years.

 

Anyway, to be clear, some of the samples are samples because they are sampled from analogue sound generating hardware.  Digital would not recreate it accurately.  e.g. thrust sound in Asteroids.  Runtime synthesis still hasn't caught up in the analogue hardware sphere.

 

The menus are what they are.  I'm happy you can still get use out of Atari 80-in-1.  I was proud of our work on that one at the time, too, but ironically a number of people said the menus sucked (or were at least very dated), which is probably a big motivator for why Vault went 3D.  There wasn't a lot of concern about making it work on low-end hardware when 80-in-1 was there still.  I guess you can't please everyone.

 

Incidentally, I did supply a patch on my website for 80-in-1 to fix the bugged menus... http://vavasour.ca/jeff/games.html#atari80  Yeah, the website is super-dated.  Sorry.

You know I did not know I was speaking with a developer... anyway I just use MAME these days... so while I appreciate the link to a fix I don't need it. The only reason I bought Atari Vault was that it was on sale on Steam and I was not at home so only had access to my laptop. I did not have my 80 Classic games CD-rom with me so I wasn't about to buy a game I already owned and had believed to not work right. I was really disappointed in Atari Vault. I had almost bought the physical PC release but decided not to. It was in a CD jewel case even... so when I did buy it on Steam I thought it would run fine on my laptop as I assumed a budget title would run just fine on it but I was wrong. Even ignoring the issues I had with the menus some of the games would not load at all... and some would load the cabinet art but have no game loaded. The disappointment in the game did lead me to download MAME and some roms and it ran the games perfectly on the same laptop. 

Edited March 3, 2020 by DragonGrafx-16

[lingyi]

Hey! What's will all the posts without any mention of tacos! TACOS! TACOS! TACOS! ?

 

I had Jack in the Box mini tacos today and I was pleasantly surprised that the were actually pretty good. They came with some kind of creamy dipping sauce, but were pretty tasty all by themselves. Helped that they were freshly made and steaming hot. Next time I'm buying some to bring home and use them instead of tortilla chips for my nachos!

[JeffVav]

10 minutes ago, DragonGrafx-16 said:

You know I did not know I was speaking with a developer... anyway I just use MAME these days... so while I appreciate the link to a fix I don't need it. The only reason I bought Atari Vault was that it was on sale on Steam and I was not at home so only had access to my laptop. I did not have my 80 Classic games CD-rom with me so I wasn't about to buy a game I already owned and had believed to not work right. I was really disappointed in Atari Vault. I had almost bought the physical PC release but decided not to. It was in a CD jewel case even... so when I did buy it on Steam I thought it would run fine on my laptop as I assumed a budget title would run just fine on it but I was wrong. Even ignoring the issues I had with the menus some of the games would not load at all... and some would load the cabinet art but have no game loaded. The disappointment in the game did lead me to download MAME and some roms and it ran the games perfectly on the same laptop. 

 

You do you.

 

Like I said upthread, we care a lot about these games, so compatibility issues aside (out of curiosity, did your laptop meet the system requirements stated on Steam?), I'm going to be alarmed when somebody says we did the games themselves incompetently.  You can hate the UI and system requirements, question the achievements, which games were in/out, etc.  Those decisions are a little more nebulous.  In some things we don't even have a say.  But the games, that's us, and we either got them right or wrong.  And we want to get them right.

 

We try to be vigilant in our attention to detail.  We get things right that MAME takes years to fix, if they fix it at all.  e.g. When we did the Atari Star Wars cabinet for Arcade1Up last year, there were three things we implemented correctly that MAME still does not do: vector defocus on the laser effects, programmatically-triggered reverb, and a vector overdrive effect that causes the entire screen to glow when you take a hit.  Ironically, people were criticising the last one for being "wrong" because so many people had only played the game on MAME, and so hadn't known about the screen-glow effect before (or didn't remember it).

 

BTW, I don't want to bore people getting too deep into the technical details, but this thread reminded me: even where we used .wav files for Pokey-generated sound, they weren't recordings.  It was actually done by offline synthesis. i.e. even 20 years ago, it was our computers emulating the sound hardware running the deterministic sequences and saving them out at the same quality as the playback buffer. We then meticulously reverse engineered the ROMs to make sure we found every variation, like distinguishing the two tempos of flea-fall sound in Centipede. Basically, our computers synthesised the audio so yours wouldn't have to. We didn't want to compromise. There'd be absolutely zero difference in the final experience between the two approaches, unless you cared about less files on your hard drive or depended on your CPU for warmth.  So that's why there's really nothing to change in 20 years in many of these emulators.

 

But we're not claiming to be perfect.  If you find something we missed, please do let me know.

[Keatah]

Anything to do with ataribox is shit, like TacoBell in a plastic baggie.

 

But not sure if that's as bad as atari themselve name dropping the current homebrew scene making new cartridges. It's not the box is going to be able to play them..

 

Edited March 3, 2020 by Keatah

[juansolo]

3 hours ago, lingyi said:

Hey! What's will all the posts without any mention of tacos! TACOS! TACOS! TACOS! ?

 

[carlsson]

By the way, I wonder if one could develop VCS games using Corona?

 

Corona is a cross-platform framework ideal for rapidly creating apps and games for mobile devices and desktop systems. That means you can create your project once and publish it to multiple types of devices, including Apple iPhone and iPad, Android phones and tablets, Amazon Fire, Mac Desktop, Windows Desktop, and even connected TVs such as Apple TV, Fire TV, and Android TV.

https://coronalabs.com/

[toneinblack]

2 hours ago, juansolo said:

I like beat saber and the 360 songs but that looks hard.