Gameband updates

[+Stephen]

I'm guessing everyone saw that Gameband was cancelled and no one is getting a refund?

 

 

Won't be too long and the same will happen with the VCS. Oh well, try to warn people and get banned for trolling. So now just sit back and laugh at them.

[Keatah]

It *IS* fun to sit back an laugh at those kickstarters. Most tech sites and "investors" think they are pre-order and all that.

 

Heh modern-day atari doesn't know what it's doing and doesn't care about making fun.

 

Vintage 1978 Atari gave us new games on a monthly basis, and then some!

Edited December 2, 2018 by Keatah

[AnakiMana]

 

No surprise at all. Did anyone ever expect it to turn out differently ? Time for another kickstarter from Atari SA for the money grab to steal money from stupid people. Kickstarter / Indiegogo and Crowdfund in general should be outlawed as nothing successful ever has come. The most successful projects may actually ship something but always end up as commercial failures after the Crowdfunding.

Atari SA didn't do a Kickstarter, wasn't working on the Gameband (right?) -that was FMTwo Games. And they got their Atari license revoked for, I'm assuming, good reasons.

 

The updates are looking pretty good on the new VCS. They just confirmed the new joysticks are definitely getting the paddle action on the joystick stick.

 

There's been two updates in less than a month's time: https://medium.com/@atarivcs

[phoenixdownita]

@AnakiMana

it's hard to take what you say at face value given in your own avatar it appears the lady is doing a facepalm .... just saying.

[AnakiMana]

@AnakiMana

it's hard to take what you say at face value given in your own avatar it appears the lady is doing a facepalm .... just saying.

Hahaha, that was my wife when we 1st started dating. Didn't want her picture taken, but it's the first one I know of of us. That was about 18 years ago! And I don't get facepalms from her, but "the look" has been practiced very regularly!

[JBerel]

There's been two updates in less than a month's time

 

[AnakiMana]

 

How is a progress update not an update? I ask my staff for updates on projects all the time.

[Flojomojo]

How is a progress update not an update? I ask my staff for updates on projects all the time.

It's because they have shown no progress, and in many respects, appear to have slid backwards from what they have implied previously.

 

If you think that's looking pretty good, your standards must be lower than ours.

[AnakiMana]

It's because they have shown no progress, and in many respects, appear to have slid backwards from what they have implied previously.

 

If you think that's looking pretty good, your standards must be lower than ours.

I don't understand what you mean by showing no progress. Did you not read their Nov 22nd post, or their others?

 

I don't think I have low standards. But neither am I predisposed or prejudiced against current-Atari. I'm pretty close to being neutral, which probably makes me seem like an extremist to some of you! (what is this, politics?)

 

The Atari VCS is one of Atari's four company divisions, along side Atari Games, Atari Casino, and Atari Partners. It's not a 3rd party group of venture capitalists licensing Atari's name and game rights, like the Gameband was.

Edited December 21, 2018 by AnakiMana

[Flojomojo]

I've been following them very closely. They're a brand custodian with no in-house technical talent. Look at what they've actually done over the past few years, not just their website. The "Atari VCS" has a lot in common with GameBand.

 

What exactly excited you about Rob Wyatt's update of November 22nd?

[AnakiMana]

They certainly HAVE been merely a brand custodian, but Chesnais has been wanting to do more than that for a long time. With the unexpected interest in the new VCS project, they got serious, ditched Feargal, made it into an entire company division, invested in Wyatt and I'm sure a team for him, and discuss it repeatedly in their reporting to "The Atari Group" (investors/shareholders) https://www.atari-investisseurs.fr/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/CP-2018-12-20-Resultats-semestriels-VLAST_EN.pdf. Wyatt discusses in detail many of the technical aspects and shares about where they're at. I liked the details on progress on the Atari OS, such as this bit (more in the actual article):

[video clip shown of video output from prototype/reference system, motherboard shown]

Audio is working via alsa, graphics is working with vulkan and Open GL, we have a full screen graphics app.

The Atari OS is enumerating and identifying USB devices on either USB2 or USB3 ports. It will identify any USB device and libusb can talk to all of them from user mode so things like custom/game specific usb devices are possible in a very standard way. For standard devices we have a few class drivers built in for things like HID, Mass Storage, UVC/camera etc. I am not planning on supporting every known USB device as there is no point and we don’t support kernel modules. It whatever we support plus whatever developers write for libusb.

Audio is working… I think the application side of ALSA is way too complicated, we might need to create ‘atari audio library’ which uses the same kernel side backend but a much simpler front end. Alsa has crazy configuration options which mean nothing to us, we have fixed hardware and only one output. If we do something custom keeping it looking like ALSA will help upstream code. Keeping standard is good but only where it makes sense.

Graphics support is still flakey and annoying. Mostly because it kills the screen, so you can’t see what you’re typing. I built a new kernel with remote TTY over serial USB, so you can type on another system and not need the local display. It helps but I really need to fix the graphics.

Right now we are still using the ‘standard-ish’ bios on the reference hardware. From when this hands over control to the OS loader I can load the entire OS and a simple 3D ‘front end’ app in about a second and a half, although the real speed depends on USB enumeration. I said above that we don’t support kernel modules, right now we do because it’s convenient for development.

 

[AnakiMana]

That PDF I linked is an 8-page report dated today (December 20, 2018) called "Results of the first half of 2018-2019" and it's an interesting read.

 

! Also interesting is that you can backspace that URL for the PDF and browse their FTP site, finding other cool stuff! I'll just let you explore.

 

Edit: but here's a much bigger look into Atari, a 139 page report: https://www.atari-investisseurs.fr/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DDR-2018-VDEF-N-visa_EN_FINAL2.pdf

 

There's no mention of anything related to FMTwo, Gameband, watch, Feargal (by name) but I found this (page 30):

 

Main Disputes to which the Group is Party

 

Dispute between a Former Employee and the Company

 

During a previous financial year, a significant dispute arose between the Company and a former employee of the Group who claimed to have co-authored one of the Group’s main franchises. The plaintiff is seeking monetary and non-monetary damages arising from the allegedly illegal distribution by the Group of games based on this universe. The lawsuit is for approximately €17 million. At this stage of the proceedings, the Company categorically denies the plaintiff’s status of author and/or coauthor, and considers the latter’s claims as unfounded on the merits and on their amount. The respective submissions of the parties have been lodged with the competent courts. On September 8, 2016, the Court of First Instance of Lyon rendered a provisional judgment refusing certain requests and ordering an expert opinion on certain aspects of the case. The expert’s assignment was cut short as the plaintiff did not pay the advance on costs requested by it. The plaintiff has since increased his claims to €25 million and the procedure is still ongoing.

Edited December 21, 2018 by AnakiMana

[youxia]

they got serious

 

Well, that's one way of looking at it. The other one is that they simply jumped on the retro gaming device nostalgia-powered bandwagon with nothing but a vague specs and some mock ups, just like every other opportunist these days. Will they deliver "something"? Sure, why not, it ain't rocket science. Does anybody really need such "something", when you can put an Atari sticker on your laptop and pretty much achieve the same result? Seems a bunch of Atari fans who lack analytical abilities and probably some scalpers do indeed, hence the funding, but for anybody else, I doubt it very much.

 

Therefore my prognosis is that they will eventually release it, putz around for a while, perhaps peddling Atari Casino and some of these ridiculous blockchain pipe-dreams etc through it, and then quietly back off and let the Atari Ecosystem wither and die. So for next Xmas when it's discounted to something like 30% original price, it may just make for a fun mini-PC.

[Keatah]

I don't recall (or am happily oblivious to) this amount of BS and politics and blabbering when the real VCS was conceived of, designed, developed, and marketed. It just kinda happened.

[Keatah]

Does anybody really need such "something", when you can put an Atari sticker on your laptop and pretty much achieve the same result?

 

I do that at all my bi-annual tech parties we host. A simple small NUC or Brix + emulator + sticker = more Atari than anything made by present-day atari. Playing the original Star Raiders or Defender or other 8-bit games from the era is a real hit.

 

And if they want they can get that same hardware to roll their own at like Amazon. No need to fart around with kickstarters!

[AnakiMana]

I don't recall (or am happily oblivious to) this amount of BS and politics and blabbering when the real VCS was conceived of, designed, developed, and marketed. It just kinda happened.

You mean it wasn't on social media in 1975?

[Keatah]

That's right. It wasn't reported on Television, Radio, Newspapers, or schoolyard word-of-mouth.

 

Many times games and consoles would actually appear in store for real before we got news of them. And when they did start to advertise on television, actual release was a short month away. And they were on-time.

[JBerel]

Standby for another update from Infotarigrams in 2019.

 

 

[Flojomojo]

They certainly HAVE been merely a brand custodian, but Chesnais has been wanting to do more than that for a long time. With the unexpected interest in the new VCS project, they got serious, ditched Feargal, made it into an entire company division, invested in Wyatt and I'm sure a team for him, and discuss it repeatedly in their reporting to "The Atari Group" (investors/shareholders) https://www.atari-investisseurs.fr/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/CP-2018-12-20-Resultats-semestriels-VLAST_EN.pdf. Wyatt discusses in detail many of the technical aspects and shares about where they're at. I liked the details on progress on the Atari OS, such as this bit (more in the actual article):

That's an interesting perspective. Here's another, starting with the Nov 22 "update." Page forward and backward for some more opinions.

 

Are you a backer, or do you work for them?

[Flojomojo]

There's no mention of anything related to FMTwo, Gameband, watch, Feargal (by name) but I found this (page 30):

That's not Feargal, that's the Alone in the Dark dispute.

 

I would not expect the spinoff companies to have detailed descriptions of their activities in the Atari SA financial report. Given all its shady behavior, the company would probably be better off going private, but then it would lose access to other peoples' money, which is its raison d'être.

[JBerel]

How is a progress update not an update? I ask my staff for updates on projects all the time.

What kind of staff do you possibly have that you do not understand the concept of a bullshit update full of double talk, excuses, and flim flam. My crew is constantly trying to pass off nothing as a project status update. I've been known to do it myself from time to time when the direction from above is the usual ill conceived, politically motivated, busy work nonsense with no real intention of seeking resolution, just the effort to claim something is being given top priority. Sounds like typical business dysfunction just like the clowns at Infotarigrams. You won't make it as a supervisor if you can't sniff out bullshit from both above and below.

Edited December 21, 2018 by JBerel

[AnakiMana]

What kind of staff do you possibly have that you do not understand the concept of a bullshit update full of double talk, excuses, and flim flam. My crew is constantly trying to pass off nothing as a project status update. I've been known to do it myself from time to time when the direction from above is the usual ill conceived, politically motivated, busy work nonsense with no real intention of seeking resolution, just the effort to claim something is being given top priority. Sounds like typical business dysfunction just like the clowns at Infotarigrams. You won't make it as a supervisor if you can't sniff out bullshit from both above and below.

Sounds like your crew sucks. I'm co-owner of a small managed IT company. I oversee projects where my technicians are either on site, working remotely or in the shop. My crew knocks things out and moves on to the next project with no BS. I'm in touch with them and the client before and after and jump in myself sometimes. Maybe I'm lucky, maybe I'm just better at this kind of thing than you. The way you come across here, so jaded and cynical, I'm guessing why your crew disrespect you. Good luck with that!

[AnakiMana]

That's not Feargal, that's the Alone in the Dark dispute.

 

I would not expect the spinoff companies to have detailed descriptions of their activities in the Atari SA financial report. Given all its shady behavior, the company would probably be better off going private, but then it would lose access to other peoples' money, which is its raison d'être.

Ah, ok.

 

What makes you think Gameband's company (FMTwo) is a spinoff company of Atari SA? I'm trying to prove it but nothing I've found even indicates it. Seems like another super small company that got licensing from Atari, mismanaged horribly (unlike most of the other licensees Atari has) and got it revoked. I'm trying to figure out if people are blaming Atari simply because they hate Atari SA.

[AnakiMana]

That's an interesting perspective. Here's another, starting with the Nov 22 "update." Page forward and backward for some more opinions.

 

Are you a backer, or do you work for them?

What, so optimists must work for Atari? Or, they're mentally lacking or scalpers or have lower standards than you. These assertions of yours are ridiculous.

[JBerel]

I'm glad those rose can colored glasses are working for you. Your naïveté is going to bite you in the ass, and your small business will suffer as a result. You'll remember what I tried to tell you then. If you ever get to the point of servicing enterprise businesses over home PCs and small offices, you'll learn that what people present as truth Is often far from it. A lot of unscrupulous businesses are going to eat you for breakfast, if you get big enough that they take your calls.