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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

From the sub linked article on what VCS is:

> Arzt says that Atari is targeting two groups, with one being the folks over 35-years-old who remember playing the console and playing Atari games in the arcade. The other group is the younger crowd that Arzt says see Atari as more of a cool old brand and want modern capabilities like Streaming video services such as Hulu and Netflix. Arzt says that the Atari VCS is less expensive than a PC and eliminates the need to connect a laptop to the TV.

Who the hell is going to pay $300 for a glorified emulator slash Chromecast?

Considering the 2nd group likely already has a $30-50 Netflix device and the first group has had plenty of options to emulate old Atari (and every other system’s) games for years.

Not a big fan of this Hollywood approach to branding. A retro brand doesn’t make your product interesting, at most it’s a foot in the door.

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They started with a crowdfunding campaign that raised $3 million: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/atari-vcs-game-stream-con...

So there would seem to be at least some demand, though I share your general skepticism — nothing crowdfunds quite as well as nostalgia, particularly geek nostalgia. And this thing is leaning on the nostalgia angle hard.

Get the price to $100, or at least sub $200, and I'll consider it interesting.

The Indiegogo minimum which (seems to) include a base system was only $100, which makes sense for a legit branded emulator + a little more features on top.

Otherwise it's entering semi-luxury collectible to full-fledged competition with current gaming systems entering in their late phase and sub $300 range on Craigslist/EBGames.

This feels like a decent idea faced with feature-bloat and/or early & unrealistic technical requirements. The website is encouraging people to make their own Atari starter-games for kids or whatnot, which then makes it's not only an emulator console but a whole modernized platform w/ an SDK + all the Chromecast browser/etc crap that will probably be rushed at the end.

>Get the price to $100, or at least sub $200, and I'll consider it interesting.

I thought about the same, and ended up reading a few articles on it. Then I went to the website [1] and found the price - $389!!!! No chance, despite me being target market (48, original Atari 2600 owner (still have it in my loft), still moaning about how great the games were in the old days to the kids as I get them off my lawn, etc).

[1] - https://atarivcs.com/

Wow even worse. That’s a terrible idea. No wonder he left, they probably got a fraction of the preorders they expected.

If you're nostalgic about something that's readily within your reach, I find it hard to not just do it. Pretty sure emulators exist and a dedicated fan can easily port this to one of the hundreds of raspberry pi gaming rigs I've seen people post all the time.

Unless you've got money to throw around and not enough time to truly invest, but aint that always the truth.

A cool looking box around a Pi-like device would already be great. A pair of solid joysticks that look like the 2600 ones (could even be pin compatible - it only need 5 IO pins each) would seal the deal.

As a small form factor PC capable of playing some games, it's a pretty good value offering. But that's only really appealing to tinkerers and hobbyists who want to set these things up to their liking.

I have a Linux PC hooked up to a TV in the living room for exactly these purposes (video/streaming and light gaming), thrown together from old parts and a bit of a mess to use. So a £300 device that does the same thing holds some appeal, even moreso if it had a developer behind it pushing some games on the platform, and making a good software experience. But it's not that, it's basically the same as that clunky PC I have in the living room running Linux, capable of playing games if you launch Steam or streaming whatever works in a browser.

I'm not their target audience though, and if I was then it'd be a pretty narrow niche to target.

It's amazing how much you can get away with when you have a recognised brand. They've combined the worst of over optimistic/under prepared kickstarters, with the worst of big corporation penny pinching. And yet just because people know the name Atari, they got millions of dollars in pre-orders, and even got Walmart and Best Buy to sell their (non-existent) device.

Edit: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/08/atari_architect_qui... is another article I read about this which I was basing some of my comments on - they apparently are planning on just releasing it running a generic Linux distro without any sort of console UI/ games launcher, and without any particular support for streaming platforms aside from a web browser.

Also it’s $389! That’s crazy it doesn’t even have streaming

I share your view here, but must admit I've been surprised by people in various chat rooms expressing excitement and enthusiasm about this piece of hardware.

For some, I think it's just a matter of acquiring and hoarding stuff, especially from particular brands. Consumerism.

I must confess, it did sound interesting, even if only for its potential as a future Fact Hunt episode.

"But... hello, you! I'm GuruLarry, and I welcome you to Fact Hunt: Five new console flops from old brands."

Related: There are multiple vintage typewriter stores in NYC.

https://www.google.com/search?q=nyc+typewriter+stores

If those stores can stay afloat, there's a decent chance this Atari could sell. (Assuming it's actually built).

I could see it selling for the same reason things like the snes classic do. Nostalgia goggles combined with a dislike of, I guess, unofficial emulation, for whatever reasons that don't make much sense to me. Either that or for the slightly more interesting things people do with these things like hacking and modding them. For me though, retroarch seems to have 99% of everything I'd ever want to emulate covered so...meh.

The controllers, mostly, for me. Which Just Work and don't decide to become unmapped for no damn reason (admittedly less common on Retroarch/Lakka systems than others, though). I mean those things are legit. About as close to the originals as you could hope, and I've side-by-sided them. Only real loss on the NES are the four-score games (Super Spike V'Ball and World Cup Soccer are both actually good and are actually good with four players!) and light gun games, of which I love two but would only really defend one as even sort-of worth a damn (Duck Hunt). Still don't get why that wasn't on the Wii. SNES classic, on the other hand, is damn near perfect. After you hakchi all your other games on, in both cases, obviously.

NES controllers especially are great for kids, for whom even SNES controllers are confusing with their four face buttons plus two shoulders—and I remember, as an NES kid who didn't get another console until I bought myself a PS2 in college, finding anything with more buttons than a 3-button Sega Genesis controller kinda tricky at first, though I eventually managed well enough to hold my own on some N64 games at friends' houses. Only "complicated" controller I've found to be almost as usable for my young kids is the Gamecube controller, so they got that right after all I guess.

Sure you can get knock-offs, but Nintendo doesn't screw around with controller quality, even on cheapish emulator systems.

[EDIT] also I've owned two Wii-connector-to-USB adapters, both from Mayflash, and both were janky and soon stopped working at all, so just buying the controllers (or just using the Wii Classic Pro controller, which is what I actually attempted those times) hasn't given me acceptable reliability.

> a dislike of, I guess, unofficial emulation, for whatever reasons that don't make much sense to me.

For a reason that might make sense, but which I rarely see repeated: standardized “first-party” products allow a level playing field for speedruns and the like. Whereas nobody’s gonna trust a run you did on your modded toaster.

A more likely reason, though, is that quite frequently now collectors are also content-creators (gamer YouTubers, etc.) and these folks need officially sanctioned games and consoles for the same reason professional artists need official copies of Photoshop: you’re way more likely to get sued as a business profiting off of piracy than as an individual just playing.

What about people not wanting to pirate? However small, I'm sure the demographic is bigger than the content creator demographic.

Then there's Christmas. My partner happily bought me a Nes Mini for Christmas, I don't think she would have been so happy to get me a raspi, controllers, case, possibly install emulators, roms, etc.

Its like building your own PC, most people on HN could probably do that no problems, the majority of the population would prefer to get a Dell.

The Atari Flashback consoles already exist for this reason, the last one even had HDMI and upscaling built in as well as the ability to run ROMs from an SD card. You don't need a Ryzen processor to run old Atari games.

I could see the appeal of them maybe designing the VCS as a SteamOS box in a cool woodgrain retro-styled case, even I'd be tempted. Stick an officially-endorsed emulator and ROMs on there and you're well away. But this talk of their own proprietary gaming platform? What developer in their right mind would want to develop games for such a small market?

It essentially is just a Steam box. It's all Linux based, and they're supposedly not building any sort of console UI or launcher for it. Install Steam, launch big picture mode, and it's basically the same as any other SteamOS box.

If they'd actually positioned it as a low cost SteamOS box which can run a decent amount of PC games for cheaper than most PCs, they might have at least have a niche market for it. If they some integration with SteamOS to launch an Atari emulator and they'd have some extra selling point. But it's basically just a small low-powered Linux PC that might get a few exclusive deals.

The price is a bit high, and it now seems there was nothing behind the smoke and mirrors, but I would consider this if it weren't vapor to be similar to a chromebox in a cuter case. Without this news, the development time was puzzling and off-putting; I just don't see how it was supposed to take so long to put together a system with off the shelf x86 hardware and put together a software suite.

I bought it because I maintain a collection of misfit computing projects that never had a chance. It'll look great between my Virtual Boy and Atari Jaguar.

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