The Atari VCS Controversies Thread

[leech]

7 hours ago, Shaggy the Atarian said:

Yeah...that was my point. You made it sound like "PC" itself was nothing more than a fixed platform, that one can say VCS = the rest of PC gaming, when it certainly is not  I love how you make these silly blanket statements making such comparisons, then act like it's not what you meant. 

VCS is PC Gaming (or can be, yeah you can even hook in a keyboard and mouse if that's your thing.  I spend 10-12 hours a day working on a keyboard and mouse, I have tended more and more toward games I can play on controllers as a result.) 

 

7 hours ago, Shaggy the Atarian said:

We agree then - frame rates make a gameplay difference on a lot of games, particularly 3D ones. Controls do as well, which has some to do with software capabilities. Yes, Atari is pushing out as many 2D platformers as they can, although I don't seem to recall in any of their pre-launch hype that it was intended as the home for your 2D platformers. They're the ones who clearly stated "GAME, STREAM & CONNECT LIKE NEVER BEFORE" and now they're pivoting to it being "something different in the console wars" as Artz acts like you can't already stream with far better and lower priced platforms out there.

 

Are really old arcade games & 2D platformers better with joysticks/gamepads? Yep. Is that what most gamers are out there looking for right now? Nope. Everything popular at the moment, not from 1981, works better with kb/m.

 

As for 3rd person games, I just barely finished playing through the 2014 Tomb Raider on PC. In the action sequences, the precision of the mouse was very welcome and I was able to get plenty of headshots that I never would have managed using a thumbstick. 

Frame rates matter... to a point yes.  For the most part as long as minimum frames don't dip really low in parts you need them to, games can be perfectly playable.  No one ever expected the VCS to be playing Cyberpunk 2077 AT ALL, let alone in some almost PS4 level of game play.  They both suck, yes, but they both suck about on equal parts playing it.  So that was a surprise to me and everyone else.

 

As I said above, I actually prefer playing with a controller these days as I spend most of my time typing / mousing on things at work, and quite frankly my brain / fingers need a break occasionally and that is what video games are for. 

 

7 hours ago, Shaggy the Atarian said:

Per the latest interviews, Michael Artz keeps hyping streaming up, while acting like PC mode makes it so that people will actually do office work on the thing, hence you should buy it over a PS5. I guess he has to try and make it seem like there's some magical value there.

Ha, I honestly don't know why you couldn't do office work.  It's not like the thing has anymore reason to buy it over a PS5.  Why not try to give it some value to parents.  Hell, remember back in the Atari 400/800 days where Atari tried marketing hard that it was a serious computer for serious tasks?  They had to do that because they wanted a different image for their computers than they did for the 2600.  Same with the ST during the Tramiel times.    But yeah hook up a keyboard and mouse to it, boot off a USB drive or install an internal one.  Either way you can use it as a full blown computer.  Will it be rendering the next blockbuster CGI movie?  no.  Apparently people would use PS3s for strange tasks too.  Not that I think the VCS is as cool s a PS3's Cell processors...

 

7 hours ago, Shaggy the Atarian said:

Thank Rob Wyatt, who Atari didn't want to pay for his work and ideas, which was to basically try out the Steam Machine model and hope that the logo would drag it over the grand finish line of shipping out to IGG backers, something they didn't do with the Gameband.

Pretty sure that wasn't his idea.  His idea was to create some sort of hypervisor type sandbox, and the system doesn't even have VT / IOMMU stuff turned on in the bios by default.  So I'm fairly certain whatever ideas he brought to the table, they'd scrapped.

 

PC-Mode to me didn't even do anything but reboot the system.  Though maybe it sets the USB Port to default boot, as I had some weird experience with that sometimes working.

7 hours ago, Shaggy the Atarian said:

As for building a better spec PC, there are a lot of great options out there that one can find after a few minute search. CPUWIZ has also pointed out some mini-PCs that are better specwise in this and the taco thread. Have you looked at the R1606G+Vega 3 compared to anything else? It's a fly fart in the wind compared to the many options out there that you can build or buy. Not to mention that the latest Xbox & PS are priced the same or better and are vastly more powerful. Big whoop, you can't use them to run your Steam client, even though they mimic a lot of the same games through their stores (last gen you could even print documents from your XB1). Again, you guys & Artz keep acting like PC mode is the greatest innovation in console history when really:

 If you want to join in my cause of building a better VCS and have suggestions on a SBC (I'm not even going to try to shoot for a 300 dollar project, as that would be unrealistic on a small scale / build it yourself thing).  This is more of a 'could we as a community build our own Pro System based loosely around the goals of the VCS (modern hardware stuffed inside a good looking case, with a Linux based operating system (we can use GamerOS or something else if we get some designers for that).  Let's put our money where our mouths are and see what we, as a community, can do better?

[+Stephen]

1 hour ago, leech said:

This is more of a 'could we as a community build our own Pro System based loosely around the goals of the VCS (modern hardware stuffed inside a good looking case, with a Linux based operating system (we can use GamerOS or something else if we get some designers for that).  Let's put our money where our mouths are and see what we, as a community, can do better?

Pretty funny then, that every time someone suggest doing something worthwhile with the VCS, the immediate answer is "use it as a PC, i.e., install Windows".  I know though - maybe 2021 will be the year of Linux on the desktop.

[+x=usr(1536)]

37 minutes ago, Stephen said:

Pretty funny then, that every time someone suggest doing something worthwhile with the VCS, the immediate answer is "use it as a PC, i.e., install Windows".  I know though - maybe 2021 will be the year of Linux on the desktop.

 

Wait - the year of the Linux desktop was 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 never mind.

[leech]

6 hours ago, x=usr(1536) said:

 

Wait - the year of the Linux desktop was 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 never mind.

Since I have been using Linux as a desktop since 1997...

Edited February 14, 2021 by leech

[leech]

7 hours ago, Stephen said:

Pretty funny then, that every time someone suggest doing something worthwhile with the VCS, the immediate answer is "use it as a PC, i.e., install Windows".  I know though - maybe 2021 will be the year of Linux on the desktop.

Ha, I won't even suggest installing Windows on a normal system.  I hate the thing.  Unless you plan on only gaming.  Only reason I really keep it around.  Wine has gotten so good it will literally run things Windows 10 no longer supports (for example anything with SafeDisc protection)

[+x=usr(1536)]

6 hours ago, leech said:

Since I have been using Linux as a desktop since 1997...

1994 here, though I did move off of it around 2007.

[leech]

56 minutes ago, x=usr(1536) said:

1994 here, though I did move off of it around 2007.

The early days where a net install took days, and most distributions you had to compile XFree86.  I saw a video where someone was whining how hard an old version of Debian was to install.  Debian has always been easy, as long as you knew what hardware you had in your system. 

But at least the installer improved.  FreeBSD's installer hasn't improved much in many moons.

[Bill Loguidice]

OS-wise, I prefer the path of least resistance these days, and that's Windows. It's pretty much guaranteed that 99% of everything will be targeted to it. I don't mind using other OS's for specific purposes, but not as a daily driver. Same thing with mobile. I have plenty of Android devices, but my main phone is an iPhone and I still prefer an iPad to my Android tablets. My days of championing "alternative" platforms (knowing full well that Android doesn't meet that designation in the same way) ended with my Amiga 500.

With that in mind, I would think for a weaker hardware base like the VCS and the fact that you wouldn't likely be using it as a daily driver for gaming, productivity, or pretty much anything else, I would think it would make a fine target for a Linux OS. It's pretty much the definition of alternative platform, so it's open season. I don't expect Atari to support it for much longer, or at least in any significant way, so the community supporting it is key. Of course, with so few systems out there and no realistic path to selling much more, I wonder how far even the community will bother going at this point. Nevertheless, it should be interesting to see what happens with it one way or the other.

[+x=usr(1536)]

1 hour ago, leech said:

The early days where a net install took days, and most distributions you had to compile XFree86.  I saw a video where someone was whining how hard an old version of Debian was to install.  Debian has always been easy, as long as you knew what hardware you had in your system. 

But at least the installer improved.  FreeBSD's installer hasn't improved much in many moons.

Yeah, I started out with Yggdrasil then moved over to Slackware, so can definitely identify with starting from re-rolling the kernel and building from there from source.  In all honesty I am more of an fBSD guy (used to hand-build firewalls / UTMs based on it), so Slack was a good fit for me; it's still the most BSD-ish of Linux distros IMHO.

 

Agreed on fBSD's installer.  In a way it's nice that it's remained consistent throughout the decades, but there are improvements that could be made.  And it's still more of a pain in the ass (though it has become easier over the years) to get a desktop up and running on BSD than on its Linux counterparts.

 

Debian's pretty much the distro of choice these days - we've got something like 11 RasPis here running Raspbian Raspberry OS (stupid, stupid choice of things to rename Raspbian to), so it's the predominant one.  The PBX is CentOS-based largely because I went with a pre-built VM on that one.

[82-T/A]

15 hours ago, Stephen said:

Pretty funny then, that every time someone suggest doing something worthwhile with the VCS, the immediate answer is "use it as a PC, i.e., install Windows".  I know though - maybe 2021 will be the year of Linux on the desktop.

I really like the VCS... for exactly what it is. I want more games for it... but I'm happy to wait. I'm going to go on it today and buy a couple of new ones that I heard were now available... so I'll check it out. 

 

I have no reason to use it as a desktop... doesn't really make sense to me. I have two brand new Intel Compute Sticks in the box that someone gave me. They both have Ubuntu 14.04 LTS... and I haven't even hooked one of them up yet.

 

 

15 hours ago, x=usr(1536) said:

 

Wait - the year of the Linux desktop was 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 never mind.

 

Lol... yeah. I mean, it's the base OS for Apple, and of course every Android device, and of course, pretty much every single busy-box (modem / router, computer-controlled appliance, etc.)... but I know what you're saying, "desktop." 

 

I've programmed in Linux before (using Kylix, which is a Delphi / Visual Pascal variant), and it was fun, but for me personally it doesn't make a lot of sense. Unless you're hacking someone, which most of the GOOD tools are developed for, it just doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It has low overhead, and I think I would like it. But at 42, I just don't have time for that kind of stuff. 

 

I have been meaning to set up a Linux machine and just get used to using it... but I just haven't gotten around to it.

[leech]

50 minutes ago, x=usr(1536) said:

Debian's pretty much the distro of choice these days - we've got something like 11 RasPis here running Raspbian Raspberry OS (stupid, stupid choice of things to rename Raspbian to), so it's the predominant one.  The PBX is CentOS-based largely because I went with a pre-built VM on that one.

Man, I'm so glad i don't have to manage a company's PBX anymore.  It was fine except that they were cheap and wanted everything for free, and then had some really strange, non-standard thoughts on what a PBX should do (like custom do not disturb messages).  Being CentOS 5 based made it even more terrible, as it still was on old grub that didn't support GPT...

 

But yeah I fell in love with Debian all those years ago, and every time I distro hop, I get annoyed by something and go back to Debian.  Pop_OS is probably the best I've seen so far outside of Debian though.  System76 seem to actually listen to their users, and take Ubuntu and make it good.

[leech]

38 minutes ago, 82-T/A said:

Lol... yeah. I mean, it's the base OS for Apple, and of course every Android device, and of course, pretty much every single busy-box (modem / router, computer-controlled appliance, etc.)... but I know what you're saying, "desktop." 

 

I've programmed in Linux before (using Kylix, which is a Delphi / Visual Pascal variant), and it was fun, but for me personally it doesn't make a lot of sense. Unless you're hacking someone, which most of the GOOD tools are developed for, it just doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It has low overhead, and I think I would like it. But at 42, I just don't have time for that kind of stuff. 

 

I have been meaning to set up a Linux machine and just get used to using it... but I just haven't gotten around to it.

Apple's OS is based on NeXT, but is basically a MACH kernel, with a BSD userland.  They're also very anti-GPL (specifically v3) which is why newer macOS versions default to zsh instead of bash.  Much like browsers, i feel it wrong for a company to keep pestering you to log into a cloud account on a local OS, so macOS bugs me on a few levels.  Also was fun when their server died that makes every App call home.  Made applications take 10 to 15 minutes to start... 

[82-T/A]

3 minutes ago, leech said:

Apple's OS is based on NeXT, but is basically a MACH kernel, with a BSD userland.  They're also very anti-GPL (specifically v3) which is why newer macOS versions default to zsh instead of bash.  Much like browsers, i feel it wrong for a company to keep pestering you to log into a cloud account on a local OS, so macOS bugs me on a few levels.  Also was fun when their server died that makes every App call home.  Made applications take 10 to 15 minutes to start... 

 

LOL, so true. This is totally frustrating to me too. Windows does this too with Windows 10 Home edition. I expect a point in time where, if you don't buy a specific version or the Professional version, we'll be forced to create a Microsoft Cloud account. I have no need for putting all my stuff in the cloud.

 

We all know the reason for this. All of these cloud providers continually scan the content we submit and build intelligence off it for the purpose of advertising and data mining analytics. Facebook, Google, Microsoft are all building their own "intelligence agencies" of sorts. Which in itself is dangerous... but in the most simple terms... sometimes I just like using my computer independently. 

 

[+x=usr(1536)]

1 hour ago, 82-T/A said:

I've programmed in Linux before (using Kylix, which is a Delphi / Visual Pascal variant), and it was fun, but for me personally it doesn't make a lot of sense. Unless you're hacking someone, which most of the GOOD tools are developed for, it just doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It has low overhead, and I think I would like it. But at 42, I just don't have time for that kind of stuff.

 

What ultimately pushed me away from Linux as a desktop was interoperability.  Things had reached a point where I needed 100% compatibility with Office, and OpenOffice (as it still was at the time) just wasn't cutting it in that regard: my clients were using Microsoft Office, and spending a couple of hours correcting document compatibility issues on top of the six or eight hours it might take me to write an assessment for them just wasn't feasible.

 

That was what finally pushed me over to OS X full-time: it has all the *nix tools I know and love, but can also run a real copy of Office.

 

1 hour ago, leech said:

Man, I'm so glad i don't have to manage a company's PBX anymore.  It was fine except that they were cheap and wanted everything for free, and then had some really strange, non-standard thoughts on what a PBX should do (like custom do not disturb messages).  Being CentOS 5 based made it even more terrible, as it still was on old grub that didn't support GPT...

 

That's suprisingly similar to my PBX experiences at three different employers.  Trying to explain to the owner of the company that just because he knew someone whose company had integrated theirs with Exchange didn't mean that ours could do that (or that it's not necessarily a good idea in either case) was an exercise in futility.  Yes, you really will have to scrap the whole thing and start over if you want that feature, and yes, I am going to contract consultants to handle it because anytime you touch the phones beyond setting up or tearing down an extension Bad Things Happen.

 

We're just running straight FreePBX at the house.  Yeah, it's CentOS-based, which I don't particularly care for, but the amount of system interaction outside of the GUI is pretty minimal, so I can suck it up for that.  We've got semi-crappy cell coverage here, so having a backup landline (even if it is a Google Voice number) is kinda necessary.

[+x=usr(1536)]

1 hour ago, 82-T/A said:

We all know the reason for this. All of these cloud providers continually scan the content we submit and build intelligence off it for the purpose of advertising and data mining analytics. Facebook, Google, Microsoft are all building their own "intelligence agencies" of sorts. Which in itself is dangerous... but in the most simple terms... sometimes I just like using my computer independently.

Don't forget CAPTCHA.  That's been a great way to crowdsource AI training for cases where the AI is having difficulty identifying certain types of objects and / or features.  And best of all, it's pretty much free (if involuntary) labour for whoever's running the CAPTCHA service!

[leech]

13 minutes ago, x=usr(1536) said:

What ultimately pushed me away from Linux as a desktop was interoperability.  Things had reached a point where I needed 100% compatibility with Office, and OpenOffice (as it still was at the time) just wasn't cutting it in that regard: my clients were using Microsoft Office, and spending a couple of hours correcting document compatibility issues on top of the six or eight hours it might take me to write an assessment for them just wasn't feasible.

 

That was what finally pushed me over to OS X full-time: it has all the *nix tools I know and love, but can also run a real copy of Office.

These days most companies have switched to o365, so it'll run anywhere anyhow.  I still prefer LibreOffice, as they don't make it all colorful.  Too distracting for me for doing actual work with it.

15 minutes ago, x=usr(1536) said:

That's suprisingly similar to my PBX experiences at three different employers.  Trying to explain to the owner of the company that just because he knew someone whose company had integrated theirs with Exchange didn't mean that ours could do that (or that it's not necessarily a good idea in either case) was an exercise in futility.  Yes, you really will have to scrap the whole thing and start over if you want that feature, and yes, I am going to contract consultants to handle it because anytime you touch the phones beyond setting up or tearing down an extension Bad Things Happen.

 

We're just running straight FreePBX at the house.  Yeah, it's CentOS-based, which I don't particularly care for, but the amount of system interaction outside of the GUI is pretty minimal, so I can suck it up for that.  We've got semi-crappy cell coverage here, so having a backup landline (even if it is a Google Voice number) is kinda necessary.

They were too cheap to actually use Exchange, but that's fine I ran their email server as well.  Kind of lets me put tons of valuable skills on my resume   I was using PBX In A Flash back then.  Funny thing is, I even integrated the phone system with a chat server, so people could see when they were on a call, etc.  But they were so short-sighted they didn't want a chat server.. claiming that one manager would always be chatting instead of getting work done because his team would be constantly asking him questions... well considering instead they'd queue at his door to talk to him in person... Ah, a company that was started 40 years ago... and still acted like they did back then...

[Matt_B]

Windows gets you the biggest range of (both AAA and indie) games, the best 4K streaming support and a bunch of closed source emulators that are the best, if not only, options for certain systems. Realistically, it's the OS of choice for a living room PC if you want it to do those things.

 

So far as Linux as a desktop OS goes, its biggest win in recent years has to be the Raspberry Pi. That's 35 million users who are (mostly) running an actual Linux distro, not Android, iOS or some other very distant relative.

 

 

 

[+x=usr(1536)]

10 minutes ago, leech said:

These days most companies have switched to o365, so it'll run anywhere anyhow.  I still prefer LibreOffice, as they don't make it all colorful.  Too distracting for me for doing actual work with it.

True, and options were a lot more limited back in 2007 or so.  That said, I really did like StarOffice and the earlier OpenOffice incarnations. OOo went through some real rough patches after Sun dropped it, though, which was a shame.

 

It was also a shame about what happened to Sun (and SGI), but that's a whole other ball of wax waiting for its own thread.

14 minutes ago, leech said:

I was using PBX In A Flash back then.

Which, to be fair, has a nice featureset.  It just needs less Ward Mundy.

 

I ran PIAF - briefly - on a RasPi here before switching over to RasPBX.  Mundy's 'it's a feature, not a bug' attitude was what caused that migration: all of his little tweaks and add-ons made the system really f***ing annoying to have to admin, and most were pointless in a setting where the PBX is firewalled.  Well, when you start actively blocking traffic on a network that was explicitly set to be ignored, that's not a feature in my book.

[leech]

1 minute ago, x=usr(1536) said:

Which, to be fair, has a nice featureset.  It just needs less Ward Mundy.

 

I ran PIAF - briefly - on a RasPi here before switching over to RasPBX.  Mundy's 'it's a feature, not a bug' attitude was what caused that migration: all of his little tweaks and add-ons made the system really f***ing annoying to have to admin, and most were pointless in a setting where the PBX is firewalled.  Well, when you start actively blocking traffic on a network that was explicitly set to be ignored, that's not a feature in my book.

Ha, yeah when I first started being an admin for Asterisk, FreePBX wasn't even a thing.  Then my next computer job, it was in an early state and didn't have it's own thing.  I also had the lucky chance at that job to learn that IRQ conflicts are still a thing when the hardware you use is just an ISA board moved to a PCI and then PCIe setup... Basically we were having randomly dropped calls here and there.  Straight from Digium's mouth, their cards don't work well when the IRQ is shared with something with high I/O, like RAID and NICs... that was a great bit of 'well crap, time to rebuild this system on a not HP system...'

 

6 minutes ago, Matt_B said:

Windows gets you the biggest range of (both AAA and indie) games, the best 4K streaming support and a bunch of closed source emulators that are the best, if not only, options for certain systems. Realistically, it's the OS of choice for a living room PC if you want it to do those things.

 

So far as Linux as a desktop OS goes, its biggest win in recent years has to be the Raspberry Pi. That's 35 million users who are (mostly) running an actual Linux distro, not Android, iOS or some other very distant relative.

Thanks to Steam and Proton, most games work out of the box on Linux now.  AAA games usually are supported as 'official' through Valve as being supported by Proton.  Indie games usually have native releases.  Sure there are some here and there that don't work or aren't released.  But I have so many games at this point, I won't miss some here and there.  Main reason I keep windows around is for Elite: Dangerous.  This is mainly because I use the scripts people made for the Thrustmaster Warthog to make it even more awesome.  That and nvidia doesn't support Async reprojection for VR yet.  Though I play Half-Life: Alyx (natively) under Linux in VR on my Index. 

 

How many people actually use the RPi as a desktop though, vs just slapping RetroPie on it?

[+x=usr(1536)]

21 minutes ago, leech said:

Ha, yeah when I first started being an admin for Asterisk, FreePBX wasn't even a thing.

Yeah, the first time I came across it it was just bare Asterisk.  Want to say that was 2003-ish.  The first packaged distro I can recall was Trixbox, probably around 2005 or 2006.

21 minutes ago, leech said:

How many people actually use the RPi as a desktop though, vs just slapping RetroPie on it?

My MacBook Pro recently had to be mailed in to Apple for service a few weeks ago, and the only spare machine in the house that was more or less ready-to-go was a RasPi 3B+.  Running it as a desktop machine was...  Painful, and this was with a fresh image of Raspbian Buster to boot.  I can live with things like integrated video and slow SD card access times, but the amount of memory is what really kills it.  More than a half-dozen tabs in Chromium and it was on its knees performance-wise.  It was abandoned in favour of just doing the phone-as-PC thing for a few days.  A 4B would undoubtedly be much improved, but as I'm holding out for the 4B+ to release before upgrading I have no practical experience with them.

 

My use cases for them are basically as small, portable servers.  There's a half-dozen Zero Ws running NUT for USB ups monitoring, and another 5 3Bs and 3B+es doing SDR, 3D Printer serving, serial console, etc.  It's not a platform I'd consider for emulation even though it's perfectly capable of it, at least for the types of games that I like to play.  But I have enough other ways to do it without needing to dedicate a RasPi to that function.

Edited February 14, 2021 by x=usr(1536)

[leech]

10 minutes ago, x=usr(1536) said:

My MacBook Pro recently had to be mailed in to Apple for service a few weeks ago, and the only spare machine in the house that was more or less ready-to-go was a RasPi 3B+.  Running it as a desktop machine was...  Painful, and this was with a fresh image of Raspbian Buster to boot.  I can live with things like integrated video and slow SD card access times, but the amount of memory is what really kills it.  More than a half-dozen tabs in Chromium and it was on its knees performance-wise.  It was abandoned in favour of just doing the phone-as-PC thing for a few days.  A 4B would undoubtedly be much improved, but as I'm holding out for the 4B+ to release before upgrading I have no practical experience with them.

 

My use cases for them are basically as small, portable servers.  There's a half-dozen Zero Ws running NUT for USB ups monitoring, and another 5 3Bs and 3B+es doing SDR, 3D Printer serving, serial console, etc.  It's not a platform I'd consider for emulation even though it's perfectly capable of it, at least for the types of games that I like to play.  But I have enough other ways to do it without needing to dedicate a RasPi to that function.

Performance on the RPi was terrible for desktop usage before the 4.  So I'm curious about the usage for that.  For sure things like NUT, or PiHole, etc.  They're perfect for things like that.  RetroPie is a pretty sweet setup, but you're still looking at at most PS1 emulation for the RPi4.  The Pi 400 seems to be a decent setup, but I think it'd do better with 8gb of ram, as you said, just doing a small amount of tabs will eat your ram like nothing else (remember when web pages were small?)

[Matt_B]

It might only be the Pi 4 that's taken it to the level of being fully usable for office/web tasks, but most users would still have installed a desktop OS for the limited set of features it offered. That's how it's been designed to be used, as opposed to something like an Arduino which is mostly designed for embedded use.

 

Even RetroPie is still a desktop OS, in it's got access to the desktop. Even if it's rarely used to the extent that a lot of people don't know that it's even there, it's actually quite handy because it saves you a reboot when you want to use your Pi for something else.

[Shaggy the Atarian]

On 2/13/2021 at 4:33 PM, leech said:

Frame rates matter... to a point yes.  For the most part as long as minimum frames don't dip really low in parts you need them to, games can be perfectly playable.  No one ever expected the VCS to be playing Cyberpunk 2077 AT ALL, let alone in some almost PS4 level of game play.  They both suck, yes, but they both suck about on equal parts playing it.  So that was a surprise to me and everyone else.

Sorry, CP not only needs a bunch of mods to even work, but it's practically slideshow quality on the VCS. The transitions between scenes on the original Myst are smoother than CP is. Not at all what one would call playable - the guy who did the mods even said so, stating that it ran worse on the VCS than on the PS4/XB1. On top of that, the same person has been unable to get other games working on it like Doom Eternal, so stuff like "I got it to work" isn't going to move units when the game isn't even playable and once again, you're better off with one of the other systems for modern games.

 

Quote

Ha, I honestly don't know why you couldn't do office work. 

You could but what's the point?? If that's what you really want it for, there are cheaper mini-PC options that will do office work just fine - or buy a laptop, which is what most people would do.

 

Quote

It's not like the thing has anymore reason to buy it over a PS5.  Why not try to give it some value to parents.  Hell, remember back in the Atari 400/800 days where Atari tried marketing hard that it was a serious computer for serious tasks?  They had to do that because they wanted a different image for their computers than they did for the 2600.  Same with the ST during the Tramiel times.    But yeah hook up a keyboard and mouse to it, boot off a USB drive or install an internal one.  Either way you can use it as a full blown computer.  Will it be rendering the next blockbuster CGI movie?  no.  Apparently people would use PS3s for strange tasks too.  Not that I think the VCS is as cool s a PS3's Cell processors...

It is really weird to me that anyone thinks that the VCS can be compared with the PS5. I get that Artz has to do that since he's competing in the same space, but it doesn't jive. Yes, the VCS should be considered a console, but it can't compete in any realistic way with the current generation of platforms, just because of the PC mode. Apart from the PS5 offering many more games, various exclusives, backwards compatibility with the PS4 (including multiplayer), far superior graphics and sound, and plays Blu-Ray discs if you opt for the more expensive version, it has all of this other stuff that you get thanks to it being supported by a competent company & team that has billions of dollars behind them. 

 

Yeah I remember the XEGS being marketed as a computer, as was the Famicom in Japan. Excepting the Famicom, every time a company tried the "It's also a PC!" route, it's a failure (although it's not fair to say that the Famicom/NES was a success because of that marketing line - it was purely down to the games, which is why they dropped that line pretty fast). Like I also mentioned, you could do certain office tasks with the PS4 and XB1. No one used them though and no one bought those systems because of those features.  I get that it's the only thing Atari has beyond nostalgia to try and sell this, but you're kidding yourself if you really think that this time it's going to work where it's failed 100 times in the past. 

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Pretty sure that wasn't his idea.  His idea was to create some sort of hypervisor type sandbox, and the system doesn't even have VT / IOMMU stuff turned on in the bios by default.  So I'm fairly certain whatever ideas he brought to the table, they'd scrapped.

 

PC-Mode to me didn't even do anything but reboot the system.  Though maybe it sets the USB Port to default boot, as I had some weird experience with that sometimes working.

It was Rob's idea and Atari thanked him by not paying him for his work, as was pointed out a few pages back. Funny that they're banking all of their success on what he did for it now, including bumping up the specs. When the VCS was first announced (under Feargal Mac) there was zero mention of it also working as a PC. PC mode was nothing more than a hail mary that Rob threw since he realized that Atari has very poor resources to make it a success, but like I've said too many times, that really doesn't move the needle with the general gaming populace that Atari would need to make this thing a success. It makes backers of it happy and gives you something to talk about while you wait for Atari to live up to other promises like T4k and Atari Jaguar games in the VCS store. Otherwise, what's Atari doing to make this a truly competitive system? Nothing, by the looks of it. 

 

Speaking of Rob, he wanted to do a lot more with it, but Atari kept backtracking on their promises and cutting things out, until they stopped paying him for the work he'd done - just like they did to Mac. I know the head of UNIS, a company that has partnered with Atari on two different products; He said that after they lost Rob, they tried to get them to finish the VCS and manufacture it, but they took a hard pass as they could see what was going on with it.  Such an ethical and upright company, no wonder they've made a hard play at operating casinos in extremely poor parts of the world!

[DemonAttack82]

Whenever I hear the "you can put Linux on it" talking point, my brain just shuts off

[leech]

3 minutes ago, DemonAttack82 said:

Whenever I hear the "you can put Linux on it" talking point, my brain just shuts off

You can put Linux on an N64 now.