The Atari VCS Controversies Thread

[Bill Loguidice]

1 hour ago, Stephen said:

I wonder if the not-VCS comes out, and people have no games to play on it, what will the conversation circle to?

How it's the best emulation and media box and put-any-OS-I-want-on-it box ever? I'm sure there will even be talking points about how it's better than the new Xbox and PlayStation because they can put what they want on there and you can't do that with those. If they're so emotionally invested in something like this, they'll surely find a way to justify the hell out of whatever gets released considering all of the defensiveness up to this point for so little shown.

[TACODON]

50 minutes ago, joeatari1 said:

 

Not that hard.  I found it in today's birthdays on the forums home page.  Happy birthday by the way.

More proof they come around here despite claiming otherwise. 

[+Stephen]

1 hour ago, TACODON said:

Hard to say but they figured out today is my birthday. They do good research. 

Happy b-day.  I had two tacos and a mexican pizza (Taco Bell combo #8 - before they kill off the mexican pizza) in your honour.

[TACODON]

Ya know. I never was big on the Mexican Pizza but I will miss the Frito Burrito. 

[MrBeefy]

5 hours ago, TACODON said:

This isn't the only comment section going in circles. The IGG comments are just the same circle. When you got nothing to talk about, all you can do is keep saying the same thing.

This is how the tacos came about.

4 hours ago, Stephen said:

I wonder if the not-VCS comes out, and people have no games to play on it, what will the conversation circle to?

How to install an OS, and then how to install emulators.

3 hours ago, TACODON said:

Hard to say but they figured out today is my birthday. They do good research. 

Happy Birthday! 

Edited September 23, 2020 by MrBeefy

[zzip]

12 hours ago, Matt_B said:

Sure, crowdfunding is about raising money. However, there's still the expectation that it's a product that's going to be delivered and that the people behind it have the competence to do so.

Crowdfunding is always a risk.  Nobody backing it should expect otherwise.  That's why I didn't crowdfund this or anything else.

 

12 hours ago, Matt_B said:

Surely I don't need to point out he difference between the barely working prototype of the ST and a lump of plastic? The former nowadays might just have been good enough to satisfy Kickstarter's requirements but the latter was never going to. Atari went with Indiegogo precisely because they're the Wild West of crowdfunding and allow you to take money for pretty much anything at the glint-in-the-eye stage.

The ST was a custom design, using an OS that people hadn't seen before.  So yes they needed a working prototype to prove the thing was real.   Atari VCS is an integrated AMD APU running Linux in a custom case and maybe customized interface.  Any prototype would be indistinguishable from a PC.  And they did show footage of the thing running way back when.   But was it running on a Atari VCS or a PC?  What really is the difference?   They aren't reinventing the wheel here.  We know the tech they say they are using works for the purpose they want to use it.   They don't need to prove that.   What they need to prove is they can get the thing through manufacturing.

[JaqenHghar]

3 hours ago, zzip said:

The ST was a custom design, using an OS that people hadn't seen before.  So yes they needed a working prototype to prove the thing was real.   Atari VCS is an integrated AMD APU running Linux in a custom case and maybe customized interface.  Any prototype would be indistinguishable from a PC.  And they did show footage of the thing running way back when.   But was it running on a Atari VCS or a PC?  What really is the difference?   They aren't reinventing the wheel here.  We know the tech they say they are using works for the purpose they want to use it.   They don't need to prove that.   What they need to prove is they can get the thing through manufacturing.

By that line of reasoning I'm also a hypothetical unconsole manufacturer. I also have a great novel in my head I've been meaning to write.

[OCAT]

^ And this is the catch.

Mike Kennedy, had he gotten all of that money with the fake SNES in the Jag shell would have rushed out to find anyone "sound familiar" to make up a REAL prototype lickety split, and after that he would claim that it was always that prototype in the shell, because prototypes change multiple times before a finished product.

No difference here with Atari. "Whatever it takes" seem to be the mantra/mission statement. The end to the means... The lies and fake prototypes are the means to get the money to make a system, or sell off the company... I dont even know what the goal was here anymore. The line had blurred so much it has become a Yin Yang symbol, one scam eating into the other (Allegedly)

Edited September 23, 2020 by OCAT

[+Stephen]

21 minutes ago, JaqenHghar said:

By that line of reasoning I'm also a hypothetical unconsole manufacturer. I also have a great novel in my head I've been meaning to write.

No - first you have to bilk people out of 3 million dollars on a crowd funding platform.  Not to raise money mind you, just to "gauge interest" and "build a community".  Remember those two lies?

[Shaggy the Atarian]

22 hours ago, JaqenHghar said:

It goes beyond product development uncertainties. Correct me if I'm wrong but didn't Atari claim they were about to ship in something like Dec 2018 but then cancel with a few weeks to go to "tweak" the product to "make it even better"?

 

That's a great point to remember. It's easy to forget with all the lies and delays. It also goes to the fake launch that was going to happen last December for the backers. If Atari really had 9-11,000 units ready to go for backers in Dec of last year, then everything should have begun the manufacturing process months before any virus popped up on the scene.

17 hours ago, TACODON said:

Hard to say but they figured out today is my birthday. They do good research. 

Happy (belated) birthday!

4 hours ago, zzip said:

  But was it running on a Atari VCS or a PC?  What really is the difference?   They aren't reinventing the wheel here.  We know the tech they say they are using works for the purpose they want to use it.   They don't need to prove that.   What they need to prove is they can get the thing through manufacturing.

IIRC, it was shown that they were using a PC and painted Xbox controllers. They definitely had no hardware made by Fergal Mac, and even through Rob Wyatt there was nothing until about the time he quit over not getting paid. Still, they lied to get consumers to send them money, as they didn't note in the presentation that it wasn't an actual VCS. There are laws about misleading advertising out there, but maybe they got a pass because they just say they're in France. 

 

As for the run around here, yeah, that comes out of a lack of things to talk about. If this were a real system made by a competent company, I imagine it would have been released in 2018 as promised and we might be talking about some unique games and/or remakes that have been on the system already. Or games that we'd like to see on it. But that's a conversation only happening in one of the alternate universes out there.

Edited September 23, 2020 by Shaggy the Atarian

[zzip]

1 minute ago, Shaggy the Atarian said:

IIRC, it was shown that they were using a PC and painted Xbox controllers. They definitely had no hardware made by Fergal Mac, and even through Rob Wyatt there was nothing until about the time he quit over not getting paid. Still, they lied to get consumers to send them money, as they didn't note in the presentation that it wasn't an actual VCS. There are laws about misleading advertising out there, but maybe they got a pass because they just say they're in France.

But what they are planning to ship is a PC with probably Xbox-compatible controller.   Just in an Atari case.   Is that really misleading?  Or is it a fair representative of the product?   The real product here is the Atari VCS case, the controller cases and whatever interface they give it.    Everything else is based off existing designs.   As many point out, you could build a PC ITX system yourself with similar functionality.

 

I think the mistake people make here is assuming that Atari is inventing some new hardware product.   The product is the case, the brand, the product is nostalgia.   Any hardware engineering work that needs to be done will probably be done by AMD.  The rest is integration work.

[JaqenHghar]

4 minutes ago, zzip said:

But what they are planning to ship is a PC with probably Xbox-compatible controller.   Just in an Atari case.   Is that really misleading?  Or is it a fair representative of the product?   The real product here is the Atari VCS case, the controller cases and whatever interface they give it.    Everything else is based off existing designs.   As many point out, you could build a PC ITX system yourself with similar functionality.

 

I think the mistake people make here is assuming that Atari is inventing some new hardware product.   The product is the case, the brand, the product is nostalgia.   Any hardware engineering work that needs to be done will probably be done by AMD.  The rest is integration work.

No mistake here, but you seem to be presenting simultaneously opposite arguments in their defense. On one side: novel development is not a straight line, so you have to forgive them for missing deadlines. On the other: this isn't novel development, so there's no need to show progress. So is it novel development or not?

 

Anyway the product is ultimately in the end supposed to be a physical thing, not just an ephemeral idea of nostalgia. Nostalgia is what got people to put down money for the physical thing. Since then Atari has multiple times over the span of years claimed they have finished this "no brainer" physical thing and it's ready to ship, and then another year ticks by. Do you not see that this is the problem? When deception keeps happening people start to get more insistent on needing to see evidence. This expectation for evidence didn't start in a vacuum.

 

If you had a kid who continued to not brush their teeth yet tell you they did, you'd start wanting to see some proof next time they claimed it, right? Same idea.

 

BTW Infogrames lack of track record with physical hardware is relevant insofar as it reinforces doubts already seeded by their "fake it 'til you make it" practices. It's not to say a company without a hardware track record is automatically untrustworthy.

[Bill Loguidice]

16 minutes ago, zzip said:

But what they are planning to ship is a PC with probably Xbox-compatible controller.   Just in an Atari case.   Is that really misleading?  Or is it a fair representative of the product?   The real product here is the Atari VCS case, the controller cases and whatever interface they give it.    Everything else is based off existing designs.   As many point out, you could build a PC ITX system yourself with similar functionality.

 

I think the mistake people make here is assuming that Atari is inventing some new hardware product.   The product is the case, the brand, the product is nostalgia.   Any hardware engineering work that needs to be done will probably be done by AMD.  The rest is integration work.

This is all true. Being Atari, they can use the original styling for the console shell and the one joystick controller, as well as have the Atari branding and any Atari-published (and owned) games for free. Otherwise, there's not much more they can really bring to the table other than the relative cache of the brand.

[+Stephen]

31 minutes ago, zzip said:

But what they are planning to ship is a PC with probably Xbox-compatible controller.   Just in an Atari case.   Is that really misleading?  Or is it a fair representative of the product?   The real product here is the Atari VCS case, the controller cases and whatever interface they give it.    Everything else is based off existing designs.   As many point out, you could build a PC ITX system yourself with similar functionality.

 

I think the mistake people make here is assuming that Atari is inventing some new hardware product.   The product is the case, the brand, the product is nostalgia.   Any hardware engineering work that needs to be done will probably be done by AMD.  The rest is integration work.

So if all they are offering is a case, why did that take $3 million dollars and 3 years and they still have nothing shipped?  Surely it can't take 3 years to design a plastic case?

[Bill Loguidice]

2 minutes ago, Stephen said:

So if all they are offering is a case, why did that take $3 million dollars and 3 years and they still have nothing shipped?  Surely it can't take 3 years to design a plastic case?

That's not necessarily a huge amount of money for salaries and tooling and production, nor is the time period for a small staff to work on things. It surely could have been done for cheaper and in less time, but that would have likely meant that the company would have to have been primarily focused on this product rather than just treat it like a sideline. I guess in that sense the results are reflective of the actual investment/interest by the company itself and why this is NOT going to be a platform of any note despite the fondest wishes of a certain segment of backers.

[zzip]

18 minutes ago, JaqenHghar said:

No mistake here, but you seem to be presenting simultaneously opposite arguments in their defense. On one side: novel development is not a straight line, so you have to forgive them for missing deadlines. On the other: this isn't novel development, so there's no need to show progress. So is it novel development or not?

I'm not a backer.  As I said if it ships, and does what it says and isn't a disaster, I may buy one.  I'm 50/50 on whether they will succeed.   But I don't see anything in the development process that would stop me from buying one if they do succeed.   A lot of people were 100% against this thing from day one, on an Atari board, which I don't understand.

 

19 minutes ago, Bill Loguidice said:

This is all true. Being Atari, they can use the original styling for the console shell and the one joystick controller, as well as have the Atari branding and any Atari-published (and owned) games for free. Otherwise, there's not much more they can really bring to the table other than the relative cache of the brand.

Exactly.   If they went the Amico route with some proprietary system that depended on Atari to release games for it..  who would want that?  Atari has lost many of their good IPs, and they keep releasing new Rollercoaster Tycoon games that get generally poor reviews.   GoG/Steam have a large selection of Linux games that could run on the promised Atari VCS spec if Atari failed to deliver a single title.

[Bill Loguidice]

3 minutes ago, zzip said:

Exactly.   If they went the Amico route with some proprietary system that depended on Atari to release games for it..  who would want that?  Atari has lost many of their good IPs, and they keep releasing new Rollercoaster Tycoon games that get generally poor reviews.   GoG/Steam have a large selection of Linux games that could run on the promised Atari VCS spec if Atari failed to deliver a single title.

I think that's the main disconnect, though, right? What does this do that you can't do a million other ways? I'm certainly not saying they should have went the proprietary Amico route - they would/could never make the necessary investments - but there's also nothing unique about the product. I think that's what's most disappointing to most detractors. There's no real reason for this to exist. Atari being able to use their IP to skin something is not really compelling to most people. Along the same lines, note the reaction to the unveiling of the original design of the joystick. THAT excited people because it was something intriguing and reasonably unique. Now, whether the joystick we get comes close to that original vision is debatable - signs point to it losing most of the interesting features touted - but that's the perfect example of why the rest of the VCS unveiling/product plan has been a dud thus far. If ALL it is a compact Linux box that can play a subset of Steam games, that's not going to be appealing to very many people. If it was that AND something else, like Amico-style original games, well, they *might* have goosed some more interest.

[JaqenHghar]

16 minutes ago, zzip said:

I'm not a backer.  As I said if it ships, and does what it says and isn't a disaster, I may buy one.  I'm 50/50 on whether they will succeed.   But I don't see anything in the development process that would stop me from buying one if they do succeed.   A lot of people were 100% against this thing from day one, on an Atari board, which I don't understand.

So would it be accurate then to say that you don't care if they miss deadlines or show progress or indeed ship at all because you don't have a dog in this fight? That's a perfectly valid position.

 

Though it's not clear then why you would bother making excuses for them. Look at it this way: you say you've done product development. As it stands now (not if/when they ship), would you hire this team given their track record? (I'm guessing the answer would probably be depends on what they've managed to learn over the course of the project. But even then they do seem to be slow learners.)

 

I can't speak for people being against it from day 1, since I wasn't one of them. I'm still not against the concept. But if you want some insight into the minds of those who do care, I guess the reason I care is that it's sad that they are tarnishing the name with their apparent incompetence. I'm not indignant. I don't own the brand. It's just sad. Like seeing the disheveled mugshot in the news of a fondly-remembered childhood idol you haven't really thought about in 20 years. I know "old" Atari wasn't perfect, but (a) rose-tinted glasses on the rearview mirror and (b) if they were so deceptive back then, I managed to be blissfully unaware of it. If your product is nostalgia, it would be nice not to squander the good will it accumulated.

Edited September 23, 2020 by JaqenHghar
typo

[zzip]

13 minutes ago, Bill Loguidice said:

I think that's the main disconnect, though, right? What does this do that you can't do a million other ways? I'm certainly not saying they should have went the proprietary Amico route - they would/could never make the necessary investments - but there's also nothing unique about the product. I think that's what's most disappointing to most detractors. There's no real reason for this to exist. Atari being able to use their IP to skin something is not really compelling to most people. Along the same lines, note the reaction to the unveiling of the original design of the joystick. THAT excited people because it was something intriguing and reasonably unique. Now, whether the joystick we get comes close to that original vision is debatable - signs point to it losing most of the interesting features touted - but that's the perfect example of why the rest of the VCS unveiling/product plan has been a dud thus far. If ALL it is a compact Linux box that can play a subset of Steam games, that's not going to be appealing to very many people. If it was that AND something else, like Amico-style original games, well, they *might* have goosed some more interest.

It was always going to be niche.   Yes you could build a mini-itx PC with similar capabilities for a similar cost or a little less in a generic case.   But there's something appealing about having an Atari-branded one.   And twenty years from now, which is going to be more valuable to collectors?  Probably not the generic one!

 

But I'm also having trouble understanding what people would want this thing to do instead?   If it was proprietary, it would probably suck.  The best feature of this Atari system is it doesn't have to depend on Atari for games!  ?

[racerx]

46 minutes ago, zzip said:

Exactly.   If they went the Amico route with some proprietary system that depended on Atari to release games for it..  who would want that? 

 

That's what most people would've wanted, I'd imagine, because that would've given it a reason to actually exist. "Reimagined classics" was a big part of the original pitch, and I don't think stuff like the free-to-play-on-mobile Missile Command Recharged or the nearly 3-year-old-on-everything-else T4K is what people had in mind.

 

What significant games other than Battlezone have they sold?  The bigger issue is that lots of games people want are actually third party games, and Chesnais would've had to track down rights and pay licensing fees.

 

So, yeah. It's taken them three years plus to crap out a gimped pc in a nostalgic case that brings nothing to the table that 95% of consumers can't already do with what they already own. Even at the uncompetitive pricing, they can't be making much on hardware, and the new focus on the "sandbox" aspect means they won't make much on the software side either. I can't think of a better case in recent times of a DOA product.

 

It's no wonder they've had to dip further into the sleaze with the crypto aspect. There's only so many possible ways to try and eke low effort profits...

[+x=usr(1536)]

48 minutes ago, racerx said:

It's no wonder they've had to dip further into the sleaze with the crypto aspect.

Nutaricoin: the first cryptocurrency created specifically for use at the parent company's hotel chain for hourly room rentals.

Edited September 23, 2020 by x=usr(1536)

[Matt_B]

2 hours ago, zzip said:

But what they are planning to ship is a PC with probably Xbox-compatible controller.   Just in an Atari case.   Is that really misleading?  Or is it a fair representative of the product?   The real product here is the Atari VCS case, the controller cases and whatever interface they give it.    Everything else is based off existing designs.   As many point out, you could build a PC ITX system yourself with similar functionality.

 

I think the mistake people make here is assuming that Atari is inventing some new hardware product.   The product is the case, the brand, the product is nostalgia.   Any hardware engineering work that needs to be done will probably be done by AMD.  The rest is integration work.

Quite obviously, it's way more complicated than that. For starters, you couldn't even put a PC made out of existing parts in the first case they showed. The ports at the back didn't line up, there was no way you keep a 35W chip cool in it and it was always going to need a custom motherboard.

 

A bunch of us said so at the time on the other, now locked, topic. So, it came as no surprise when after a year of nothing much happening, they changed the case, the ports layout and the chip. Basically, nothing that they presented at the crowdfunding has survived.

 

That's why you need a prototype, and why Atari are a bunch of amateurs.

 

AMD will make sure the chip works with Windows and provide a reference board. That's pretty much it. By all accounts Intel are far more supportive when it comes to making custom PCs.
 

[Chopsus]

The FAtari Intern went on a delete spree over in IGG this morning... the sad thing is the the Paint Chip Eaters have been flinging dung for days, but a little pushback from their targets and suddenly action gets taken.

 

French Atari are so obsessed with controlling their fake narrative that they no longer update backers ... simply delete comments.

Edited September 23, 2020 by Chopsus
Sentence construction

[+Nathan Strum]

3 hours ago, racerx said:

What significant games other than Battlezone have they sold?

Math Gran Prix.

 

Atari blew its big chance to make it the edutainfomational™ equivalent of the Gran Turismo franchise. Online multiplayer tournaments. eSports gambling. Cryptocurrency in-app purchases. Classic licensed cars like the Yugo, Pinto, Edsel and The Dale. Track layouts like abandoned strip mall parking lots, abandoned Atari-themed hotel parking lots, abandoned Atari headquarter parking lots, the Alamogordo landfill, and drive-thru Taco stands.

 

I'm totally sure they could've pulled it off, too.

 

They already had the driving controllers.

 

[The Historian]

While it has been deleted from Twitter and reddit, it does look like Atari is reaching out to some Devs to secure or at least allow them to place their games on the Atari VCS.

 

https://snew.notabug.io/r/AtariVCS/comments/iy8bc0/from_atari_to_atari_how_the_company_changed_my/

 

 

The game looks good and I hope that they are successful, whether or not it arrives on the VCS.

Edited September 24, 2020 by The Historian
Accidentally a word