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The Atari VCS Controversies Thread


Mockduck

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Interesting news from a fan Facebook page today, where a preorderer stated the following: 

"I just got an Email from Atari saying the new shipments of Atari VCS’s just got cleared from port and are on their way to Atari, so hopefully I finally get mine."

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12 minutes ago, Mockduck said:

My definition of "hit" and yours are likely very far apart. My definition would be enough revenue to keep going to a core crowd of people who have a lot of fun with it for the next couple of years. We'll come away with it with a few years at least of great gaming memories on an awesome fun console/PC hybrid and a nice subsection of modern Atari history. Atari would come away with it with a lot more money and the foundation for further future success. Yours is probably rivaling Nintendo for money and audience, which I agree ain't happening. 

 

With all due respect, your definition of "hit" is very different from the standard, so different in fact as to make it meaningless (or at least very misleading). So would you consider the 7800 a hit? The Atari Portfolio? Turbografx 16? 3DO? Commodore CDTV? All of those brought in enough revenue to stay alive for a few years. I doubt most people would consider any of those (and certainly not all of them) hits.

 

By the way, I like your youtube series!

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51 minutes ago, 6502wrangler said:

 

With all due respect, your definition of "hit" is very different from the standard, so different in fact as to make it meaningless (or at least very misleading). So would you consider the 7800 a hit? The Atari Portfolio? Turbografx 16? 3DO? Commodore CDTV? All of those brought in enough revenue to stay alive for a few years. I doubt most people would consider any of those (and certainly not all of them) hits.

 

By the way, I like your youtube series!

Sure, don't care what others think. Not the CDTV, prob not the 7800 although I had two rando friends with them in southern Minnesota back in the day so couldn't be that bad. If Atari is able to up its revenue, position itself for new growth, sustain a good console for a few years, and all/most of us who are into it have a great time it's a hit vs. expectation when this thing started back in 2017. If I am on CSPAN being asked about whether it is a worldwide commercial success and hedge funds should invest into Atari my definition would need to be adjusted. 

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Back to something a bit more now: 

 

I noticed that the release date as listed in the VCS Store for Aery - Little Bird Adventure is not today, which is absolutely the day that it was released to the public. The date in the Details panel says 2021-03-17. Dunno what's up with that. Maybe it is when the game is uploaded to the catalog, and today is when they flipped the page to public. 

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On 3/23/2021 at 9:58 AM, Mockduck said:

My definition of "hit" and yours are likely very far apart. My definition would be enough revenue to keep going to a core crowd of people who have a lot of fun with it for the next couple of years. 

My definition of “hit” is the same as everyone else’s. I don’t change the definition of the word to suit my defensive stature when I’m called out on my b.s.  

 

That said, I think it’s reasonable to go back and change your sentence to “I think they have the potential for actual short-term sustainability regardless of what peeps here think,” yeah?

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1 hour ago, OverMuch said:

My definition of “hit” is the same as everyone else’s. I don’t change the definition of the word to suit my defensive stature when I’m called out on my b.s.  

 

That said, I think it’s reasonable to go back and change your sentence to “I think they have the potential for actual short-term sustainability regardless of what peeps here think,” yeah?

Let's be fair here, none of our definitions of a 'hit' matter.  It is if Atari thinks it is big enough of a 'hit' to continue developing it or not.  Without them putting in the effort to get it built / shipped and developers to release games for it, none of what we think about it really matters in the end.

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3 hours ago, leech said:

Let's be fair here, none of our definitions of a 'hit' matter.  It is if Atari thinks it is big enough of a 'hit' to continue developing it or not.  Without them putting in the effort to get it built / shipped and developers to release games for it, none of what we think about it really matters in the end.

I can't think of any criteria for being a "hit" that would apply to a system that never produced more than 20,000 units, and struggled to sell those units that it did produce.  We can argue about what we want vs. what Atari wants all day, but if the pure numbers we're dealing with are so low, the word "hit" just shouldn't be part of the conversation.

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2 hours ago, godslabrat said:

I can't think of any criteria for being a "hit" that would apply to a system that never produced more than 20,000 units, and struggled to sell those units that it did produce.  We can argue about what we want vs. what Atari wants all day, but if the pure numbers we're dealing with are so low, the word "hit" just shouldn't be part of the conversation.

I can think of one way - it's the ending of what the console really it.  SHIT.  See - it's a big hit, if you only consider the end!

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If 20,000 sales is a hit, I'd guess that the Ouya must have been an absolute monster because they sold ten times that many.

 

Mind you, you can sell 2000 units of something and turn a profit if you run a very tight ship. That's about what GPD manage with their crowdfunding most of the time and they seem to have a new product out every six months or so. When you take three years, most/all of your development work is done by expensive external consultants, and you've got several lawsuits to settle, that's another matter though. Even 20,000 sales could still leave Atari well short of the break even point.

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OMG arguing over the definition of "hit" with randos on the Internet is absolutely the dumbest thing I could be spending my time doing. I mean it more in the context of "cultural hit" than "worldwide retail success". The VCS is way better than most folks thought it would be, plain and simple, and it has more people into it than most here thought as well. Whether it ends up being 10,000 sold or 500,000 is interesting kind of but not really in informing whether Atari made a good console that hit with a core group of people who spent several years playing it and giving Atari money and Atari Gamebox LLC made enough money for a solid foundation of their business and enough to position them for future growth and everyone had a good time except for the unhappy people online who wouldn't like it anyway. Good enough? 

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9 minutes ago, Mockduck said:

OMG arguing over the definition of "hit" with randos on the Internet is absolutely the dumbest thing I could be spending my time doing

And yet you still do it.  That's dedication!

10 minutes ago, Mockduck said:

I mean it more in the context of "cultural hit" than "worldwide retail success".

It's neither.

10 minutes ago, Mockduck said:

The VCS is way better than most folks thought it would be, plain and simple, and it has more people into it than most here thought as well.

If people are easily-impressed by low-end AMD hardware, well, all I can say is good for them.  Not my money, not my purchasing decision.

10 minutes ago, Mockduck said:

Whether it ends up being 10,000 sold or 500,000 is interesting kind of but not really in informing whether Atari made a good console that hit with a core group of people who spent several years playing it and giving Atari money and Atari Gamebox LLC made enough money for a solid foundation of their business and enough to position them for future growth and everyone had a good time except for the unhappy people online who wouldn't like it anyway. Good enough?

Lol.

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51 minutes ago, Mockduck said:
53 minutes ago, x=usr(1536) said:

And yet you still do it.  That's dedication!

Trust me, I know. I held out for about a day. It's a me problem. 

No worries man - I can't resist coming back to throw some jabs here too.  It's a compulsion and I cannot explain it.

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"Cultural hit" and "way better than most folks thought it would be" definitely need some clarification. I'm not necessarily as interested in the former explanation as that's pretty open to interpretation (although I still don't see how anyone can possibly interpret it as such), but certainly the latter from a features/functionality standpoint I'd LOVE to hear more about. It seems like it didn't hit some of its target functionality/feature goals, so I don't get the "way better" part. Certainly some were skeptical it would even make it out to the public, but "just being released at all" is a lot different than being "way better".

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1 hour ago, Mockduck said:

Just to make sure people don't lose track of it: I did say "potential for a hit" not "currently experiencing a hit", and it was said relative to a theory that selling the console+1 Classic at $299 would best position them for commercial success. 

Well, it's $399.99 right now with two different controllers for the 800. I honestly don't think dropping the price any more to $299.99 - whether that means removing the controllers from the bundle or even keeping them - would really move the needle in any appreciable way. I don't feel like it's a modest price drop that is stopping more than a relatively small number of people showing interest in it.

 

Maybe if it hit $199.99 it would be more in the "I'll take a look" category for more people for what it offers, but $299.99 is still pretty high compared to other consoles, set top boxes, and compact computers without a more compelling use case than it has in its present state. I'd guess if it dropped to $299.99, maybe they'd move 5,000 more units than they otherwise would, while a drop to $199.99 might move another 10,000 units above and beyond what they would at the current pricing. It's probably not enough either way for them to bother relative to the hit to their likely slim margins.

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How is it exceeding expectations?  It was advertised as a 4k console.  It can't play games in 4k, and it can't even properly display static menus in 4k.  The only expectation it exceeded is by coming out at all.  That's not something to be proud of.  Well - maybe in this world where everyone expects a participation trophy, it is.

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I'd say that it's exactly what everyone who knows how computers work was expecting.

 

The R1606G has been used in a lot of other machines and widely benchmarked. More generally there have been AMD chips with the dual Zen and Vega 3 configuration since the release of the Althon 200GE in 2018 for $55. We already knew how the VCS was going to perform long before it was released, what you had to pay to get that kind of performance elsewhere, and that it's rather underpowered for 4K media streaming and modern games.

 

We also know what you can do with a PC when you plug one into a TV set. Some of us have been doing that for literally decades; I first caught that particular bug back in the 90s when I got an ATi All-In-Wonder card so I could play games and watch DVDs on the TV set. Obviously that's not quite the modern experience, but things like streaming services, ten foot user interfaces, media center applications, HTPC cases and HDMI all appeared in the mid 2000s, with the final piece in the puzzle being Steam's Big Picture Mode in 2012. If you're only just catching up with this now you can consider yourself something of a late adopter.

 

Still, congratulations if you're experiencing all this for the first time. I'm sure it must feel downright revelatory. It's just not something you had to wait until now for or for Atari to bring to you.

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2 hours ago, Matt_B said:

I first caught that particular bug back in the 90s when I got an ATi All-In-Wonder card so I could play games and watch DVDs on the TV set.

Ha, man the TV out for most cards back then were so shamefully bad.  I had (and now have again) a Amtrox Marvel G400 that actually has some decent output and tools, the ATIs if I recall were not bad, but their drivers were terrible.

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1 hour ago, leech said:

Ha, man the TV out for most cards back then were so shamefully bad.  I had (and now have again) a Amtrox Marvel G400 that actually has some decent output and tools, the ATIs if I recall were not bad, but their drivers were terrible.

The composite outputs on the early AIW cards were pretty bad, but once they started shipping with S-Video they were decent, if not quite so nice as the Matrox ones.


The nicest thing about the AIW was that it did the DVD decoding in hardware, so wouldn't flog the CPU. On pretty much everything else, you'd start to get stuttering if you did anything else during playback.

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On 3/25/2021 at 8:38 PM, Matt_B said:

The composite outputs on the early AIW cards were pretty bad, but once they started shipping with S-Video they were decent, if not quite so nice as the Matrox ones.


The nicest thing about the AIW was that it did the DVD decoding in hardware, so wouldn't flog the CPU. On pretty much everything else, you'd start to get stuttering if you did anything else during playback.

I'll have to try it again on my G400, pretty sure by then most had hardware decoding chips.  I mean it was what, '97 or so that hardware mpeg-2 support was standard?  Funny thing is, you can take a high powered CPU these days ans with a crappy video card, still have it struggle playing video.

 

This reminds me of a side rant... Firefox's detachable video doesn't work right in Gnome... normally when you bring up the 'activities' thing, it will show live video thumbnails.  But that break out video becomes blank...

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22 hours ago, leech said:

I'll have to try it again on my G400, pretty sure by then most had hardware decoding chips.  I mean it was what, '97 or so that hardware mpeg-2 support was standard?  Funny thing is, you can take a high powered CPU these days ans with a crappy video card, still have it struggle playing video.

You needed an additional daughterboard for the G400 to have hardware DVD decoding. The All-In-Wonder 128 came with it all on board, as well as a TV tuner and video capture for more multimedia functionality, but cost less.

 

If you just wanted to play games you were probably buying an Nvidia card by that point though.

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11 hours ago, Matt_B said:

You needed an additional daughterboard for the G400 to have hardware DVD decoding. The All-In-Wonder 128 came with it all on board, as well as a TV tuner and video capture for more multimedia functionality, but cost less.

 

If you just wanted to play games you were probably buying an Nvidia card by that point though.

It wasn't until after the Parhelia couldn't play Doom 3 that I finally switched away from Matrox to nvidia.  It was a sad day.  The nvidia and ATi cards I had tried up until that time were just trash.  Either due to drivers, hardware or just blurry ass output.

Fortunately, LCDs got rid of most of the ghosting issues.

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I had a chat with Kieren McCarthy about his misadventures with the Atari SA crew.  Not much new information, but a few additional details putting his existing articles in context.  In particular, the fascination with "chipsets" Mike Artz had.

 

He also ventures a few opinions on the Amico, which I wasn't expecting.

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