Ataribox will be an open, Linux-based console priced starting at $249
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
That said, I worry that at the price point, it'll be a somewhat disappointing gaming experience compared to a general purpose PC with a decent GPU. Having a high-quality retro experience is cool and all (I hope they have arcade versions of the games, rather than the original VCS 2600 versions, as they were kinda awful), but it's been possible to emulate an Atari on modest hardware for a couple decades...I doubt I'd spend $250 for a pretty box that plays classic Atari games, even though I grew up on them.
The audio is all software-decoded, but I think it can be configured for passthrough directly to HDMI, for at least some formats.
I'd say it's well over two hours over at least a $70 computer (including shipping and handling).
Where did you get yours, and how did you asses quality before purchase?
I bought two of these: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Super-Wired-Game-Controller-...
Both my crappy SNES controllers still work to this day. I only put a usb extension cable between Pi and controller so i can play Mappy on my couch :)
RetroPie's fun, and a great piece of software. Something faster than a Pi3 would open up more systems for reliable emulation, and access to x86 software simplifies a lot of things.
At $200, the Nvidia Shield offers an amazing gaming experience, whether through native games or streamed from my gaming PC. I can definitely see this performing just as well.
And again, I'm so glad I bought the Shield. It's not without it's issues, but I love it. But I'd still be very reluctant buying something even more expensive.
It's when we start talking about hundreds of dollars that I start asking myself, "Do I really need another device when I have a laptop, a desktop, a TV stick thingy, a smart Blu Ray player, a tablet, an Xbox, and a phone?"
Would Netflix / Plex work through that?
I know it's a content driven world but techcrunch, kotaku, polywhatever needs to stop.
Nostalgia works when it's genuine.
Why? There are people who want to know about this kind of thing.
This is not Atari... Atari is gone.
So?
Slapping licensed games and selling a shiny box with common internals is not novel and will not somehow grow a magical following.
Why do you think it needs a "magical following"? Isn't it enough that there's market demand for this box and they are serving that demand?
It's a narrative that has played enough times that it warrants at a minimum skepticism.
Like it or not when you do writeups based solely on the press release it lends credibility to the project. Personally I think a little diligence and curation would go a long way. Most these projects end up being funded when these sites all run to be first to publish... nobody actually spends time investigating whether the people involved have track record or whether claims are even reasonable... all of a sudden overnight it's funded... that sucks.
Viability and credibility should not be confused.
Under your definition if I buy the Coleco name tomorrow and send a press release with a high res image of a console then it's perfectly fine for news sites to just republish my press release without knowing who I am, what I have done or whether what I have claimed is true. This by the way is the primary means of funding on crowdfunding sites... I just disagree with you.
1. https://atari.com/news/atari-reveals-more-details-about-atar...
So this company that bought up a failing and abused brand has produced many other types of consumer devices and has a track record of delivering quality products to people based on promise alone such as the kickstarter model...
That's what you are saying?
Here's a news article: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/atari-box-console-2017-specs
This is the value proposition in my opinion, that makes it newsworthy.
This is why major studios mostly ignore GNU/Linux gamers, as many feel entitled to have nice stuff for free.
OUYA just continued to piss me off by not even bothering to make sure their experience was good and brushing it off by doubling down on marketing on how cool they were. They slapped android on a Tegra and called it "good." At no point did they try to unify the controller api, yet they claimed to support multiple brands/types of controller. It was on the dev to map each one when they can't even predict every brand. I had controllers work in one game but not the next! That's unforgivable. Either handle an SDL2_Gamepad style mapping at the ENV/system level or just say you only support OUYA controllers.
When they were getting complaints about overscan (ugh, why do we still need to deal with this (aside: holy crap iPhone X, not you too!)), they elected to just force-scale the UI down by an inch (memories of PS2) and again tell the devs to just deal with overscan themselves on a game-by-game basis. A good solution would have been to make overscan a system setting that the games could query ("oh, btw, your display area is actually 1900x1000, offset by 9px left, 25px down").
This pattern of "slap a fix on it, and then plug your ears and yell 'LALALA'" was what killed it, and probably all other attempts at an indie console for a while. Hopefully the world has forgotten the OUYA enough that this has a chance.
I mean OUYA didn't even have a useful recovery partition COME ON.
Traditional consoles had fixed hardware which could be exploited through vendor specific APIs. If this is just going to run games programmed with OpenGL, this is not different from any other Linux PC.
Given the introduction of APIs like Vulkan which bings the programmability of PCs even closer to consoles, I don't see a use case.
The only market I can think of the niche of Atari fans.
To solve that, I had to build a dedicated living room PC. I didn't go nuts, so it ended up being about $500.
If I could replace that with an handsome Linux powered gaming system for less than $300, then I think it's a no-brainer... especially if it can run third-party marketplaces and apps like Steam or Plex.
This seems like a hard problem, esp. since OP is so emphatic that $300 is preferrable to $500. Let me see if I can figgure this out for us both.
1 child x $500 = $500
1-or-more x $500 = $500-or-more
Oh! That must be it! This solution would be more expensive to implement, and therefore, since cost is a factor, this solution would be less preferable!
Glad I took the time to work this one out, I certainly was very confused as well.
If just games/movies/music then what was the logic for getting that over a console? (PS4, XBox1, Switch are around the same price point or below) Just curious, not suggesting that a console would have been better.
Where it fell short was the overall experience. Most games are of course not designed for this. In PC you always have the keyboard, there are things that are tweaked through Windows. Also it felt that I had to regularly run to the PC to sort out some issue. Disclaimer: I tested just with few games and at least 6 months ago.
I feel this is a significant part of the appeal.
So not sure if it would generate any considerable profit.
Let's break it down
> What is the point of a console?
Very predictable hardware specs & setup.
> What is the point of the console being Linux-based?
Reduction of brand-new OS development costs; potentially zero need for writing drivers depending on hardware setup; very extensive presence of compilers / interpreters / libraries that can be freely usable out of the box.
Until Microsoft do that, it's not actually very necessary. But it might become necessary at short notice.
If you didn't, what makes game development more difficult on Linux¹, compared to the alternatives²?
[1]: More specifically, mainstream GNU/Linux distributions [2]: Windows and MacOS
Another is that it's just generally a lot more heterogeneous than windows and mac (lots of different distros with variously up to date libraries, drivers, etc).
The same is true on a new install of Windows, though. First stop when the OS is running: Non-Microsoft browser. Second stop: Graphics card vendor site, to replace whichever outdated driver Windows shipped it for the hardware.
I mean, not as bad, usually (outdated official drivers on Windows, versus often-inferior unofficial/Open drivers on Linux).
The game developers culture is based on making money of IP, outsourcing game development tasks, not about sharing the code and making the world a better place.
On commercial platforms, the GPU and OS vendors even fly tech support to AAA studios to work around driver issues.
Developers developers developers as Ballmer once said.
SteamOS succeeded in forcing Microsoft to clear up its act, and this is the main reason for Valve's investment. Their continued investment is to continue to make sure that they have a plan B. They are doing a lot of behind-the-scenes work to make the Linux gaming stack amazing. This looks "failed" from the outside because they aren't pushing the platform heavily, but it is actually a lot more beneficial that doing a big marketing push before the platform is ready.
The interesting thing with a platform like Linux is that it's not dependent on one big revenue stream to survive. Because of this, it doesn't matter if it takes years to get massive adoption because it's not burning a hole in the pocket of a company. If xbox was in the same position linux was in, you would be correct in saying that it failed, because anything less than 30% market share means gigantic losses for Microsoft which would lead to axing xbox.
PS: Atari's games run fine on Linux. Their retro emulator runs on Linux. They seem to know what they're doing.
The very fact that Asus and others never really bothered that much to sell Steam Machines, shows how much market relevant it was.
> “A few weeks after this post went out, some very senior developers from Microsoft came by for a discrete visit. They loved our post, because it lit a fire underneath Microsoft's executives to get their act together and keep supporting Direct3D development. (Remember, at this point it was years since the last DirectX SDK release. The DirectX team was on life support.) Linux is obviously extremely influential." [1]
And again, market relevance was not required for SteamOS to succeed. Gabe Newell has been very open about the fact that SteamOS' goal was to keep Microsoft in check and have a plan B for when things go south..
[1] http://gadgets.ndtv.com/games/news/steam-s-linux-and-opengl-...
But they've gone a little too far with Windows 10 - for me at least, of course everyone will have their own "measure" where too much will be too much.
Sadly every piece of software and hardware since win95 has been made with windows in mind and no alternative has been able to come even close to that.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3045249/linux/linux-gaming-i...
[1] http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/?platform=combined
Valve doesn't really care how many users are running Linux right now —they still have their Windows revenue. What they do care about is how many users would switch to Linux if Valve was for some reason forced to drop Windows support altogether (like, Microsoft goes Apple on their users and mandates an app store). That number may be much higher.
You'd also have to keep in mind what's keeping users to Windows. From where I stand, exclusive titles play a big role. Linux has no exclusive title to speak of. Why would it, that market is way too small for such madness. Windows, understandably has loads. My only reason for still using Windows is a couple titles I can't bring myself to renounce.
Then there are drivers and tooling, but that's just the same kind of network effects, really.
^^ this is something no other game console has.
Just there is not a lot of Linux Desktop users though it appears we are around 3% now.
It depends heavily on the engine being used or if custom engine on how much the devs have relied on stuff designed to wall your product into windows.
There's like a couple of games out of ~100 I got on Steam that I've had big problems with in Ubuntu. A couple others just needed launch options to prevent the game from guessing settings so wrong I can't even fix those in-game and launch a launcher program where I can tweak those before starting the game.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_4_system_software
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Switch_system_softwar...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_One_system_software
And add to the mix that Playstation and XBox actually are using PC hardware...
http://switchbrew.org/index.php?title=Sockets_services
http://switchbrew.org/index.php?title=Services_API#Service_L...
dude, we're riding the Vulkan wave now!
Atari know that - they tried it with the Jaguar
"Traditional" consoles used lock-in not because it was good to do, but because they were either too weak and required very close to the hardware APIs (and no portable APIs like that existed), or because vendors were just lock-in inclined.
I've only have public knowledge of the Atari, but X86, cheap, and linux does open some rather interesting possibilities.
I've yet to see a media player that does it better than Roku. If the Atari could be the roku of gaming it could be quite interesting, even if it doesn't have the latest/greatest $50-$100 game that the PS4 of Xbox has.
There are probably hundreds of us!
On the other hand, I'm eagerly looking for more details about Ataribox. I only have a laptop(s) with Intel GPUs and I'm more and more in need of some device with stronger GPU with dedicated VRAM (mostly for testing, but occasional gaming with higher FPS would be nice too). I'm not keen on updating the laptop, as GPU is pretty much the only thing that would need to be replaced (and with Intel's worry-free open drivers stack, I actually like to have it on my main computer). I thought about building some cheap desktop just for those needs, but if Ataribox keeps on its promise of being so open, it might be just right (and cheaper) option for me.
Atari emulator would then be just a nice bonus.
GP2X, Novatio, Pandora, Pyra, Ouya, Steam Machines, ...
I still want a Dingoo A320 but they don’t make them anymore. Only Android based stuff.
If it turns out to be X86 with decent AMD graphics, it'll make a much larger game catalog available.
Yeah, yeah, piracy boogeyman, but considering I've bought most of these more than once already, my conscience is clear when I don't pay Nintendo $5+ for emulated games. In my mind, it's equivalent to format shifting.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Jaguar_CD [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Flashback
Both the PS4 and XbOne runs on a AMD supplied APU, that in turn is using the x86-64 ISA.
The hope was that the PS3 would be a test bed, and that the Cell would be popular in supercomputers. I am not sure if that panned out beyond some images of PS3s being piled into racks.
And the Xbox 360 i think was a 3 core PowerPC design.
Looking back at it i wonder if the reason both Sony and Microsoft went with AMD APUs this time round is that AMD brought ATI. And ATI has a history of building graphics hardware for games consoles.
Offering up both parts as a single die would greatly simplify the board design of the new consoles. Never mind that by using x86 for the CPU there would be no cross-complication complications to deal with.