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Comment by h2odragon | Hacker News Reader

> Plays both Atari 2600 and 7800 game cartridges

and they include one "10 in 1" cart already. Expect it wont be long before someone has a Pi or Arduino shim to feed this thing any ROM one likes, assuming theres not already some direct facility for it to have an SD card or something.

I suspect there's few people who own many original Atari 2600 or 7800 carts that really want to use them like this: surely that'll degrade their antique value? Its like "dont play with the beanie babies"... And emulation will be available with all sorts of extra features as well as fewer drawbacks.

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Yep, there is a flash cartridge called the Harmony Cartridge. It’s great for playing Atari home brew games which in many cases are better than anything available on the original VCS. Pac-man 4k is a great example. https://harmony.atariage.com/Site/Harmony.html

Expect it wont be long before someone has a Pi or Arduino shim to feed this thing any ROM one likes

I get why a curious engineer would do this, but there are already so many devices we have laying around that can already hook into the TV and play atari (and other) games...

I suspect there's few people who own many original Atari 2600 or 7800 carts that really want to use them like this: surely that'll degrade their antique value?

History shows that if this takes off, it'll increase demand for carts and raise prices. Of course, prices on these carts aren't that high to begin with. There's a ton of them laying around, so the supply might be able to absorb the demand...

True collectors pieces might be something CIB, and yeah, you wouldn't want to crack those open, but even some games like Galaga are only going for $20 CIB...

>Expect it wont be long before someone has a Pi or Arduino shim to feed this thing any ROM one likes, assuming theres not already some direct facility for it to have an SD card or something.

Well sure... but that defeats the entire purpose. Of course you could just run an emulator and not even need the hardware. The point is that people enjoy collecting old cartridges. Hence why used N64s now sell for $200.

It is an emulator though :/ the specs say it’s a Rockchip with 256MB of RAM, not an FPGA. It’s also not 100% compatible with all cartridges.

>It is an emulator though :/

Well that sucks. Honestly I'd be more surprised if it wasn't, given Atari's zombie status as an IP holding company.

If it's really compatible with 2600 carts, SD card carts already exist and work great!

Personally I've found 2600 carts to be pretty durable. Almost all of the carts I bought new still work, and I still use them frequently!

They have a list published; it’s compatible with some, but not all, cartridges. It’s a Rockchip-based system, not an FPGA like Analogue’s stuff; my guess is this will work like the Hyperkin RetroN. Those systems dump the ROM off of the cartridge and then start an emulator it, which doesn’t work with SD card carts - the emulated ROM loads but can’t find the SD card because the emulator doesn’t actually talk to the cartridge hardware directly.

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