New Atari Console that Ataribox?

[Shaggy the Atarian]

8 minutes ago, Paul Slocum said:

Your forgot Asteroids Outpost

Hehe, I almost mentioned it, but I thought it was canned. Still, you'd think something new & Asteroids related would make for a great system exclusive, but if you need that, looks like you'll only find it on the Amico...

[TankedThomas]

On 3/3/2020 at 8:05 AM, JeffVav said:

 

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".)

 

 

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.)

 

 

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.)

 

 

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.

 

 

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.

I appreciate your lengthy response. I won't hijack the thread with another massive reply but it seems I did indeed miss a few options (and I wasn't aware there was DLC - I honestly never noticed it on the store page). And the Adventure achievement. Whoops!

 

I admit I'm still not entirely sold on Atari Vault (even though I bought it) but, as you pointed out, Flashback licensing is obviously a whole different beast. Still, they feel like competing products, at least to some extent. 

 

Anyway, I just wanted to close out by saying that, especially after reading through all your other replies here, it's clear to me that you and the rest of the dev team really care about these games and making sure your work is impeccable, and I admire that love and dedication. If nothing else, as I said previously, the emulation seems spot-on to me. 

I do wish we could give more money to the developers and less to people like ol' Fred though, but I suppose that's just business. 

 

Oh, and I'm glad I'm not the only one who wanted Battlezone. 

19 hours ago, Agillig said:

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. 

To be fair, Rocket League will run well on a figurative toaster. I'd say it's a somewhat deceptive demonstration for showing off the power of hardware. Some of the games that NVIDIA and AMD shill with their GPUs tend to be much better candidates for showing off the performance. 

19 hours ago, Zor said:

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 ?)

It's entirely possible the hardware isn't tuned well. The Ryzen Embedded chips appear to be a bit problematic. But nobody can say for sure. All I know is that Atari Vault ran flawless for me on Linux and my GPU was barely being taxed, so the VCS hardware should theoretically run it effortlessly too. 

16 hours ago, lingyi said:

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!

Does it count that I was thinking about them whilst writing that long post yesterday...?

[+Spriggy]

41 minutes ago, Shaggy the Atarian said:

Does this mean that we need to start calling the VCS the "Shatbox" now? Or Dreckbox?

 

 

[Shaggy the Atarian]

12 minutes ago, Spriggy said:

 

Preload that sucker with every bit of TV & film that Shatner's ever done, and:

 

Instead of Antstream, it could be called the "Shatstream!"

 

(Certainly would be more appealing than what Atari's offering so far)

Edited March 3, 2020 by Shaggy the Atarian

[TankedThomas]

Star Trek memes almost make me forget about Atari conning everyone. 

 

Though I'm not sure they can erase the awful memories of what has been done to that poor franchise as of late, unfortunately. 

 

Maybe they're taking a page out of Atari's playbook. 

"THE GOOD GUYS ARE NOW THE BAD GUYS! WE SUBVERTED YOUR EXPECTATIONS!" 

[Shaggy the Atarian]

1 minute ago, TankedThomas said:

Star Trek memes almost make me forget about Atari conning everyone. 

 

Though I'm not sure they can erase the awful memories of what has been done to that poor franchise as of late, unfortunately. 

 

Maybe they're taking a page out of Atari's playbook. 

"THE GOOD GUYS ARE NOW THE BAD GUYS! WE SUBVERTED YOUR EXPECTATIONS!" 

You rang?

 

[roots.genoa]

2 hours ago, ColecoJoe said:

WRONG!!!

 

I'm starting to think Brandon Harris is actually Google-translating his posts from another language.

[+frankodragon]

1 hour ago, Spriggy said:

 

"...I really don't like it...clean the Shatbox...clean the Shatbox..."?

[JasperAK]

15 hours ago, TankedThomas said:

Star Trek memes almost make me forget about Atari conning everyone. 

 

Though I'm not sure they can erase the awful memories of what has been done to that poor franchise as of late, unfortunately. 

 

Maybe they're taking a page out of Atari's playbook. 

"THE GOOD GUYS ARE NOW THE BAD GUYS! WE SUBVERTED YOUR EXPECTATIONS!" 

[Flojomojo]

On 6/16/2018 at 4:34 AM, PlaysWithWolves said:

Remember the Postal museum's warning signs of fraud that Flojomojo posted?

Emphasis, mine:

 

 

 

"You got the bomb-diggety [Collector's Edition] that will be super-valuable one day!"

 

 

This is from 89 weeks ago (not 20 months ago!). I feel it's important not to get too worked up about "special editions" of things that don't exist yet. Why do people keep falling for the same scams, over and over again? If our brains were computers, there would be a code update to patch this exploitable flaw in our firmware. 

[+Spriggy]

35 minutes ago, Flojomojo said:

On 6/16/2018 at 4:34 PM, PlaysWithWolves said:

Remember the Postal museum's warning signs of fraud that Flojomojo posted?

Emphasis, mine:

 

 

 

"You got the bomb-diggety [Collector's Edition] that will be super-valuable one day!"

 

 

 

 

"Ok thanks for the quick response.  Now I am glade I jump on board early."   I bet he regrets boarding that shambling corpse of a boat that once was Atari!

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Shaggy the Atarian]

24 minutes ago, Spriggy said:

 

"Ok thanks for the quick response.  Now I am glade I jump on board early."   I bet he regrets boarding that shambling corpse of a boat that once was Atari!

 

 

 

 

 

 

"You got the bomb-diggety raft! It'll be super valuable one day!"

 

Seriously, who says "bomb diggety" un-ironically anymore? Seemed like it was hot in the vernacular for as long as fidget spinners were a thing.

[+Spriggy]

[Mockduck]

Keep up the great work, fools, in proving again and again your own obliviousness to your idiocy. You are nearing Reddit-levels of dumbassery. Up next - 4Chan!

[ColecoJoe]

7 minutes ago, Mockduck said:

Keep up the great work, fools, in proving again and again your own obliviousness to your idiocy. You are nearing Reddit-levels of dumbassery. Up next - 4Chan!

Can you repost this in the form of a funny meme? 

[Bill Loguidice]

13 minutes ago, Mockduck said:

Keep up the great work, fools, in proving again and again your own obliviousness to your idiocy. You are nearing Reddit-levels of dumbassery. Up next - 4Chan!

There's no winning for the VCS at this point, so what's the difference? There's really nothing productive to speak about. When it eventually comes out it will be a pale version of the already remarkably vague original vision. It likely won't even rate a footnote in most historical accounts of consoles/computers/set top boxes.

[Shaggy the Atarian]

23 minutes ago, Mockduck said:

Keep up the great work, fools, in proving again and again your own obliviousness to your idiocy. You are nearing Reddit-levels of dumbassery. Up next - 4Chan!

 

You are more than free to make a logical argument for the VCS, although so far it seems to be above the pay grade for the shills.

[+Spriggy]

17 minutes ago, Mockduck said:

Keep up the great work, fools, in proving again and again your own obliviousness to your idiocy. You are nearing Reddit-levels of dumbassery. Up next - 4Chan!

 

Lighten up Duck.  If you can't understand the ideals and premise behind the threads content and it's entwined Atari self inflicted harmless memes, funny or not-so-funny alike, then maybe have a look in the mirror when using the word oblivious. ?

 

[+Spriggy]

 ?

 

 

 

[TwoShedsWilson]

32 minutes ago, Bill Loguidice said:

There's no winning for the VCS at this point, so what's the difference? There's really nothing productive to speak about. When it eventually comes out it will be a pale version of the already remarkably vague original vision. It likely won't even rate a footnote in most historical accounts of consoles/computers/set top boxes.

I think it will serve as a fine example of how not to do a console launch right along with the Ouya, 3DO, and Virtual Boy.

[Tickled_Pink]

3 hours ago, Flojomojo said:

This is from 89 weeks ago (not 20 months ago!). I feel it's important not to get too worked up about "special editions" of things that don't exist yet. Why do people keep falling for the same scams, over and over again? If our brains were computers, there would be a code update to patch this exploitable flaw in our firmware. 

People are stupid. Atari played on it. Atari won. Game Over.

The scam isn't the VCS as such. The scam is how Atari were able to convince people who knew nothing about computers that this was somehow going to blow their socks off. That guy on FB a couple of months back who clearly thought he'd be able to run Battlefield V @60fps in 4K made me understand why much of the world is in the state it's currently in.

[+frankodragon]

[Flojomojo]

49 minutes ago, TwoShedsWilson said:

I think it will serve as a fine example of how not to do a console launch right along with the Ouya, 3DO, and Virtual Boy.

Those all launched on time, under budget, with a stable of exclusive games, and were supported by the manufacturer for a while. I can think of bad examples of console launches, but they won't be things that most people have heard of. The 3 you cite are like NES or PlayStation compared to what is (not) happening here. 
 

But yeah, it's a story to tell! And a bad example for sure. Something that no one would want to repeat. 

[Shaggy the Atarian]

30 minutes ago, Flojomojo said:

Those all launched on time, under budget, with a stable of exclusive games, and were supported by the manufacturer for a while. I can think of bad examples of console launches, but they won't be things that most people have heard of. The 3 you cite are like NES or PlayStation compared to what is (not) happening here. 
 

But yeah, it's a story to tell! And a bad example for sure. Something that no one would want to repeat. 

The NUON is one that comes to mind for truly bad launches. VM Labs didn't bother to issue a press release, hold any event or even say anything on their website as to the availability of the system. A Samsung N2000 listing just magically showed up on CDW one day and I was the first person in the NUON community to get one. 

 

Then it only came with Ballistic & a demo disc, so I had to wait another 7 months for the first games to arrive. They were exclusive and all, and I could at least use the thing as a DVD player, but the NUON as a game console was as dead as a door nail 11 months after "launch." The whole time, they seemed afraid to make it seem like a game console, because they wanted to attract the wider market of DVD viewers and the coveted casuals (despite that, they had super hardcore games on it like Freefall 3050 and Tempest 3k). While they announced a bunch of casual games, like board games, those never materialized, and many promises fell flat (both on the games as well as interactive DVD features). I almost wonder if an VML brass has been hanging around Atari HQ lately... 

Edited March 4, 2020 by Shaggy the Atarian
typo fix

[Flojomojo]

They had a whole *two* Nuon-enhanced DVDs, too. But at least they weren't annoyingly aggressive in the lead-up to launch. 
 

Except for the big "project X" logo stomping on a bloodied Mario hat. Maybe there's a curse on companies that make stupid claims about their strengths relative to Nintendo. 
 

I've got a Samsung unit, Tempest 3000, Freefall, and a controller that I really need to sell off before it stops working!