Atari would love to ship its VCS console but – would ya believe it – there's yet another delay. This time, it's the coronavirus's fault Long-suffering Atari lovers will have to wait even longer for their over-priced, under-powered retro console, the intellectual-property shell company that owns the Atari brand, warned on Tuesday. This time it isn’t because there is a new AMD chip, or because the accessories aren’t ready, or its chief architect has quit …
In a tycoon game, that would be the trap in which the unwary player gets caught, leading to the doom of that profile.
In real life, you just do like in games, you reset the box, create a new player profile and start over. Except that, in real life, you're playing with actual people's money, not with a virtual predetermined sum.
But you'd only realize that if you actually played games when you were young. The management of Atari today has obviously not done that, they've only played MBA games, which are far more theoretical and where "people" are as nebulous a concept as "product".
Until I eventually realised that the brand has never been able to live up to the nostalgia associated with it. It's now just a paid for label that increasingly shit companies are using in turn, each wringing another drop of blood out of it. Come back Nolan and your Age of Aquarius! Time Warner ruined it initially by not foreseeing the original VCS would become obsolete, Jack Tramiel gave it a reasonably good shot in the ST era, and really, ever since the ill fated Jaguar it's been rather a torrid affair.
I'd be all up for a buying an amazing new Atari device, but this isn't it. What the 'new' VCS ought to be is a nostalgia machine, similar to the mini SNES and Megadrives recently seen. With simple modern hardware you could easily emulate all the various history of Atari machines and back catalogues of popular games - and maybe even as a major differentiator, include creativity software too. A pocket sized Atari ST with a MIDI sequencer anyone?
Jaguar was only sorta 64 bit, and others were selling "sorta 32 bit" devices at the time. Tom and Jerry (The Jag custom chips) were buggier than a cheap hotel (under any brand name). But one could do some cool stuff, if willing to endure VCS levels of development pain. I was, and then I wasn't.
1. Suing anyone they can think of.
2. Not paying developers who make a version of your own games.
3. Selling off rights to their back catalogue once in a while.
4. A Google News alert which used to monitor the world's press for excuses.
Did I miss anything?
It's not just an excuse, though. I'm waiting on several Kickstarter board game projects that are being manufactured in China, all from companies I trust, and they pretty much simultaneously updated to say the same thing: Chinese New Year celebrations extended slightly this year, then the coronavirus showed up, so they're delayed a bit.
Modded to output vid. I pull it out every couple of years and marvel at how many hours I spent playing Space Invaders and other games including chess when it came out and I was young. By the way Atari Chess cheated every so often by dropping a piece on the board which wasn't there before the screen blanking. It needed the resources for drawing the screen for calculating. The the horizontal and vertical refresh had to be sent by the processor so each program loop had to take up the right number of clock cycles so it could send the signal to move the electron beam to the next line while running in 2-16K of ROM cartridge and 128 Bytes of RAM if memory serves right. I think it is time to upgrade to rpi4.
Pedantically, horizontal sync is automatic; only vertical sync is programmatic. But you have to cycle count anyway if you want to be able to do things like place sprites because they’re not located by telling the TIA e.g. “place at x=27”, they’re located by telling the TIA “reset their circular counter so that from now on they appear at wherever the raster is now”. At least for coarse placement. You can ask for adjustments on the clocking if their counters during horizontal blank in order to shunt them a small amount left or right.
Trivia fact: those blank lines you see intruding into the left edge of the display in many VCS lines are where the machine has extended the border because the programmer requested a sprite shift; making the border slightly longer gives enough time to do that.
At first glance, the "new Intellivision" seems to be doing things much better than Atari, but a closer look at frontman Tommy Tallarico's unhinged rants on AtariAge suggests a similar sad story. Does he really have the backing he claims to have? If so, why the stunt of a "founders edition" to show investors the power of his persuasion?
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