
Aaaahhhh come on....
Just slap a Raspberry-Pi in there and be done with it...
The Ataribox has been renamed the AtariVCS, and it is finally here! Where? Suite 7088 of the Marriott Marquis hotel in San Francisco, USA, directly opposite this year's Games Developers Conference (GDC). There's only one problem: it doesn't work. And by "not work" we don't mean it crashed or is having teething troubles, we …
@Prst. V.Jeltz
Mike, it's ok to use your real name. Tell us the truth now and get it all out.
In all seriousness why bother holding an event where you can shed no light on the problems or give any worthwhile information? Why was it delayed? Has that problem been fixed? When can it be expected? For someone in charge of it to know so little would tell me this is something to be avoided if I was even remotely interested. Which I'm not.
In all seriousness why bother holding an event where you can shed no light on the problems or give any worthwhile information?
I imagine that Mike wanted a reason to go to the conference and stay in a nice suite at a nice hotel, and this was the only way he could swing it.
They already slapped the woodgrain on (almost a lazy cliche of VCS nostalgia exploitation) and included the same old VCS games (#) that we've been re-sold millions of times- it doesn't surprise me they went the whole hog and decided to exploit the VCS name to sell a console no-one would care about if it wasn't masquerading as a new "VCS" (which it isn't) from a company masquerading as the original "Atari" (which they aren't).
(#) As I noted before, these could have been emulated with ease on a typical PC 25 years ago. Nowadays, you could probably run them on the button panel controlling your bloody microwave. (##) No-one needs another console just because it's had some "this is a real late 70s VCS honest!" woodgrain slapped on.
(##) FFS, you could probably emulate them on one with a mechanical clock that goes "ping" when it's ready ;-)
Emulating the 2600 exactly is actually more hassle than you think; it predates such niceties as just being able to tell the video chip where to put a sprite: instead there is explicitly a 160-step counter that triggers a draw of the sprite upon overflow and a bunch of conditions affecting when it'll be clocked and when it won't. You can reset it manually or provide some input into clocking to shift the sprite left and right. But the timing-related edge cases add up very quickly. Most games you can fake, hence the ability to emulate most of them on a 486, but at least one* was successfully emulated only in the last couple of years.
Emulating something less simple but with a good abstraction is a lot computationally cheaper — something like a Spectrum, even allowing for contended timing.
* actually, it's only a prototype: Meltdown. A real back-in-the-day prototype, but nevertheless a title that didn't ship.
Of course, you are forgetting the "Great Mind Swap" where a bunch of Commodore folks followed Tramiel Per. to his new home at the company formerly known as Atari, oh, wait, it was still known as Atari after Warner gave it to Jack. Meanwhile a bunch of ex-Atarians were busy making a little box you may have heard of: The Amiga. The 520ST was definitely a Commodore design, with all that implies.
A friend worked for Commodore back when they did calculators (pre-Pet), and would come home exhausted from her job of trying to follow the Cutomer Service script while being yelled at by dissatisfied customers.
Mike doesn't know lots of things about the AtariVCS – standing for Atari video computer system – which is odd because he's the exec in charge of it.
I wouldn't say that it's odd or uncommon - I know a lot of middle and occasionally senior managers in charge of projects that they know absolutely nothing about beyond the fancy PowerPoint buzzwords and maybe the title.
Of course this doesn't stop them claiming all the glory and taking the credit when they are completed...
I wouldn't say that it's odd or uncommon - I know a lot of middle and occasionally senior managers in charge of projects that they know absolutely nothing about beyond the fancy PowerPoint buzzwords and maybe the title.
A friend of mine came to London for work purposes from the other side of the pond. Over a drink on the first night I asked if the meetings she was attending were boring. She said boring didn't describe it and she was normally one of, if not the most senior person in the room (and for our American readers by senior I mean in terms of seniority not age). It was then that I introduced her to Bullshit Bingo and she perked up a bit. Apparently people in the financial field also spout buzzwords and have make unrealistic promises and have wild expectations.
"I wouldn't say that it's odd or uncommon - I know a lot of middle and occasionally senior managers in charge of projects that they know absolutely nothing about beyond the fancy PowerPoint buzzwords and maybe the title."
I'd have to agree. Often the person drafted for these gigs aren't the people that have a clue about the project or any prior history, but someone that a self-serving manager "trusts" to not crap themselves in public or in any way demean their 'superiors' regardless of their actual skill set or how lackluster the presentation will be.
That'd be four times more video memory than the VCS.... no, it wouldn't. Actually, the VCS didn't even have anywhere near even *1KB* of video memory. (It only had 128 bytes of RAM for regular use!)
As far as I'm aware, it had enough to store *one* scanline's worth of screen memory. That's it.
No, really. There wasn't a "bitmapped" display as such- you had (from Wikipedia) "two bitmapped sprites, two 1-pixel "missile" sprites, a 1-pixel "ball," and a 40-pixel "playfield" [background graphic]" that you could set the patterns and position for.
To the best of my knowledge, you could set that and leave it to repeat over multiple scan lines, but unless you wanted a screenful of nothing but vertical patterned stripes (i.e. the same arrangement on every line)- which of course you bloody did!- you had to update these registers on the fly- at the appropriate time for successive scan lines- to give the illusion of a bitmapped display.
If you are interested in how to program them (on emulators primarily obviously) I recommend this book
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01N4DSRIZ/ Making Games for the Atari 2600 by Steven Hugg.
For a more general book about it there is Racing the Beam by Ian Bogost (who you may have heard of) and Nick Montford https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/racing-beam
It is somewhat academic in tone (I mention that not as a pejorative term, but to give an idea as whether it might be for you)
It'll have 4KB of video memory
Well, given that the original (according to pikiwedia) only had 128 bytes of RAM even that would be overkill..
(According to the article, later versions allowed up to 32K for the ROMs, using bank-switching but the initial ROMS were 2k-4K in order to reduce costs )
@ CrazyOldCatMan; That 128 bytes was for the main RAM as far as I'm aware.
As I noted in the comment above yours, the VCS doesn't even have bitmapped screen memory as such.
AFAICT, all it has are registers for (one-dimensional) playfield and sprite patterns (along with horizontal position and colour data) that need to be manually updated for successive scan lines if you want anything other than vertical stripes.
If we're playing this game, it also doesn't have independent storage for all 40 background pixels. It can store only 20 of them, plus a decision either to mirror them or repeat them. That's why so many games have symmetrical backgrounds. If you want 40 independent background pixels, you'll need to write to the storage as the raster runs.
@ DJV;The situation with Commodore seems- if anything- to be worse. It's a complete clusterf**k!
The rights to the "Commodore" brand, to the "Amiga" name, to the various lines of hardware, and to the Amiga OS itself have all been variously and repeatedly split up, sold on, sublicensed to other parties and used for completely unrelated purposes numerous times over the years.
Hence, we have new version of the Amiga OS (whose historical and present-day rights are split and sublicensed between multiple parties). Or the new "Amiga" hardware- don't get excited if you just want to play Lotus II a bit faster, it's all based on PowerPC architecture, very expensive for what it is and completely incompatible at a bare iron level with the old 68000 Amigas, but intended to run new versions of the Amiga OS for rabid diehard Amiga fans.
Then we had at one point people- completely unrelated to the above- selling HTPC cases using the names of classic Amigas (e.g. Amiga 3000) that otherwise had nothing to do with them.
We also had the "relaunched" Commodore 64 a few years back (actually a PC clone in a C64-style case made by a now-defunct company called "Commodore USA" that had only ever licensed the Commodore brand), who also sold small form-factor computer-in-keyboard PCs called "Vic" that had nothing to do with the Vic 20 (not even the case style) beyond the name.
Oh, and what happened to that stupid idea to sell a generic Android tablet using the "Commodore PET" name (which was to have included C64 and Vic-20 emulators, but not apparently a PET emulator)? Last I heard, they might not have had the rights to the name after all. (Though if you want one anyway, you can just buy a cheapass Android tablet, scribble "Commodore PET" on it with a marker and you're already there.)
If anyone else has the time or inclination to keep track of it all, you're better than I am.
Yeah, I know. Total clusterf**k squared!
As someone who started off in 1979 on a CBM PET (original chiclet key version that I managed to upgrade all the way to Basic 4) and at various times owned a C64, C128D, CBM-500 (no, not the Amiga 500 - that came later), CBM-600 (B Series in the US), Amiga 500 and finally a 2000, I watched in horror as CBM crashed and burned in the 90s and was then tossed around like a seal amongst killer whales. I always wonder if it would have turned out any different had Commodore UK managed to buy the whole kit n kaboodle before Escom got hold of it.
I other words they have nothing, and no development is happening. Otherwise they would have actually shown SOMETHING. If a product was indeed very close to launching in December they would have had a working model now. It might not be perfect and need polishing, but they'd have SOMETHING to show for themselves instead of a "the dog ate my homework".
You hit the nail on the head. I'm an electronics/IT engineer and I'm friends with quite a few industrial designers. So many of their ideas and concepts are so entirely detached from physical plausibility that could be rectified by just having one person on board who vaguely remembers using a RasPi a long time ago. I have the impression that they're educated in a complete vacuum, unaware that engineers or practicality even exist.
I'm sure I said something similar regarding one of the other various failures at making a nostalgia-focussed box, but how do they all manage to make this so complicated and difficult? Literally all you need is some low-end, off-the-shelf parts stuffed into a nostalgia-shaped box with a pre-installed software emulator. Even if you don't really know what you're doing and mess up on manufacturing time, cost estimates, and the like, how is it possible to be so incompetent that you find yourself months after your expected release date still with no idea what chips you're going to put in it? How can anyone be so oblivious to reality that they can claim they've solved all the hardware problems in the same breath as admitting they don't even know what hardware they're going to use?
As far as I can tell it doesn't even seem to be the usual scam, since they've repeatedly delayed crowdfunding and pre-orders. They've genuinely just taken this long to make a box with nothing in it.
A fine candidate for understatement of the year.
Unfortunately they're not the only company promising a retro-computing experience which deserves such negative accolades.
I'm getting tempted to start a whole slew of nostalgic home computer revivals on Kickstarter so I can retire to the Bahamas and avoid the impact of brexit.
An ARM SoC should be more than fast
Solution: buy up all the old landfill Android phones and use them.
That'll be £2.5m pounds please for my well-trained designer time. Cash only. Preferrably in brown[1] envelopes.
[1] I believe that's the traditional colour..
Thinking about it , this none working mock up box is not all that much more worthless than the planned product.
My reasoning is. This could be done much more easily cheaply and effectively with an emulator.
But for those hardcore fans who want woodgrain - buy the non working mock up and put it on top of your laptop.
That's right. They admitted that they don't know.
Here's what I know:
Atari VCS (2018) - $250.00 (est)
Xbox One S (new) plus Atari Flashback Classics Volumes 1 and 2 (used copies) - $254.22
Compare and contrast the value proposition between the two. The chasm is breathtaking.
I am an unabashed lover of classic video games, and absolutely adore fawning nostalgia for the classics. I should be the target consumer for this device, but I wouldn't touch it with a 10' pole. I'm not sure I'd even bother to hook it up if I was given one. These cheap pimps turning out the Atari name have no idea what they're doing.
These cheap pimps turning out the Atari name have no idea what they're doing
In other words, accurately replicating the authentic Atari[1] experience..
(For purposes of full disclosure I need to reveal that I had an Atari ST. But I got rid of it once the Acorn Archimedes came out..)
[1] Other fly-by-night late 80's computer manufacturers are available. Hardware may go down as well as up. Your experience may vary, please consult a qualified professional. Or, if you can't find one of those, that bloke[2] in the pub that once used a computer and brags about it endlessly..
[2] Once got into a conversation with a kid who solemnly told me that "he knew all about viruses because they they were all written in machine code". Since I was (at that time) a mainframe assembler programmer I was somewhat underwhelmed..
[2] Once got into a conversation with a kid who solemnly told me that "he knew all about viruses because they they were all written in machine code". Since I was (at that time) a mainframe assembler programmer I was somewhat underwhelmed..
I wonder what His Kidness would have made of the virus called "Concept". It was written in Word-Macro because it was, in fact, the very first Word macro virus, written by a guy at Microsoft who told a colleague "hey, we can use this macro system to make viruses" and the said colleague pooh-poohed the idea. So Chuckles went off to make it (as a proof of concept), and because the A/V software of the time hadn't yet heard of the idea, it spread throughout Microsoft faster than corn through a goose, as they say.
meme or buzzword for "nostalgia vampire[1]"?
I believe it's a subclass of "scammer".
[1] Now, nostalgia is fine in the right context - I'll happily go and see a (good) Genesis tribute band, for example. Or even Steve Hackett[2] - who isn't a tribute band since he was really there. And his departure hastened the descent into prog-pop.
[2] He whose music prompted my wife to exclaim "too many notes and all in the wrong place!". Which is exactly why I listen to it..
OK. So the product is supposed to be a machine which can run the old 2600 games via emulation, and run Linux for some other games.
Where's the hard part in making that? I mean, you can do the whole thing with a Raspberry Pi in a day. The only different bit would be the controllers - and there's companies that specialise in those so could knock something out for them in no time.
Then stick the R Pi in a nostalgia fulfilling case and you're done. The software is something a uni graduate could sort in a couple of weeks!
Bizarre.
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Erm....seriously now....how difficult could it possibly be to emulate a console from the 70s? Nerds have been doing it for decades now, but the company that made the original is having trouble doing it? Or am I missing something and what they're actually trying to do is create a modern console that just happens to have an emulator built in like Nintendo* has been doing?
*Ok, if we're using Nintendo as the example then we should say modern-ish since they generally build their consoles on last-gen hardware. But still....
I recall when Coleco showed their "Gemini" at some trade show and Curous Minds discovered the cables running under the tablecloth to an actual 2600 under the table. Or the time I peered into the cabinet running (IIRC) Space Invaders at a coin-op show, to see an Apple ][ inside. If you are going to fake a product, give it a _bit_ more effort.