Tag: AtariBox

Is the AtariBox fake?

Atari
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Editor’s note: [I’m calling Atari’s new VCS “AtariBox” to differentiate it from the original 1977 Atari VCS (2600)]

Last night, Youtube Gaming channel RGT85 broke news that a developer of Tempest 4000 made public statements which cast doubt on whether the AtariBox is real. There is a discussion thread on Reddit with additional information and speculation.

A year ago, news circulated that Tempest creator Jeff Minter had reconciled with Atari on a dispute over the rights to Tempest, and that he was going to work with them to bring Tempest 4000 to the AtariBox. But according to Llamasoft developer Ivan Zorzin, Tempest 4000 has been in development for PC, XBox, and Playstation 4 platforms, and he knows nothing of any development of a version for AtariBox. According to Zorzin, Atari’s use of footage of Tempest 4000 is not footage of it running on an AtariBox.

At this point, I can only regard these as rumors, but it is definitely a concern that the Tempest 4000 developer and Atari aren’t on the same page. Since the AtariBox hardware is commodity PC hardware, it’s feasible that Atari could have run a Windows build of Tempest 4000 on Windows on AtariBox hardware, or in WINE on Linux on AtariBox hardware. Or it could well be that the footage is not from a running AtariBox at all.

This calls into question whether Atari even have an actual, working prototype yet. Earlier this year at GDC, they did not. Their case was only a mock-up. The case designs that they’ve shown look good, but for the longest time Atari only showed renderings of 3D models of the case. More recently, they seem to have produced a physical example of the case, and supposedly it has working hardware inside it, but these new revelations cast even that into doubt.

When Atari launched their crowdfunding campaign on IndieGogo, they published specifications for the system, but I’m not aware of anyone reporting that they’ve seen an actual working AtariBox. It would not surprise me if they haven’t started manufacturing them as yet, but are running the internal hardware inside of generic cases, and if that were the case it wouldn’t worry me too greatly, provided that they had confidence that the final product case would work from an engineering standpoint (for thermal dissipation, RF shielding, etc).

Atari have been promoting the IndieGoGo campaign heavily, bragging about having raised $2.7 million from over 10000 backers in 8 days, but the rate of buy-in has slowed dramatically — the first 24 hours saw $2 million of that come in. This sounds like a lot of money, but it’s paltry. A real console launch from Microsoft or Sony takes about a billion dollars to do. Manufacturing needs millions of units in order to have a hope of being profitable. 10,000 backers is tiny. Obviously, more customers may line up to buy an AtariBox once it’s actually available, but if their initial manufacturing batch is only in the tens of thousands, there’s no way Atari will make enough money on it to create a viable brand ecosystem for developers to create new games for it.

The worst thing about this (if AtariBox is indeed real and actually ships on time) is that if Tempest 4000 isn’t really an AtariBox exclusive, then once again we have zero first party exclusive launch titles for the console.

It’s shameful if today’s “Atari” are perpetrating a fraud on consumers, exploiting the good will and nostalgia for the real Atari brand that the current company owns the rights to. If this does turn out to be a massive hoax, I can only hope that it doesn’t destroy the Atari name forever, and that the guilty parties are prosecuted and punished. It might be fitting for Atari’s brand to be dissolved in such a situation, and given to reputable and responsible people to curate. People such as Albert Yarusso of AtariAge.com, who have created a niche cottage industry around homebrew development of new Atari carts would be more deserving of ownership of the brand.

Update: According to Hardcore Gamer, Ivan Zorzin has now confirmed that Tempest 4000 will have an AtariBox port. If this is indeed true, it’s amazing if Zorzin continues to be an employee of Llamasoft after the damage to Atari’s reputation as a result of the confusion his original post sparked.  Regardless of whether T4K is going to be a launch title or not, there’s still plenty of good reason to remain skeptical of Atari’s claims for the system, and even if Atari delivers fully on all of their promises, the system will have its work cut out for it to carve a niche out of the current videogame market.  Atari will need everything to go completely flawlessly and better than expected if is to have any hope of lasting success.

If I could design the AtariBox…

Atari
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Atari’s crowdfunding campaign for the AtariBox (or VCS, as they’ve taken to calling it) is underway and has reached the $2.5 million mark, with 25 days left in its IndieGoGo campaign.

My initial interest in the new console has been dimmed by the lack of concrete information about what it would be and what games would be available for it.

We now have some of that information, at least in terms of hardware specs. But we still haven’t seen much in the way of a list of new game titles that will be accompanying the launch. AtariBox will not be compelling enough to gamers if it does not offer a library of exclusive new game titles that are fun to play, and not available on existing platforms.

I’m not opposed to the idea of a new Atari console at all; done right, I think it could be great. The concept of a neo-retro game console is appealing. Atari’s approach is to use emulation to deliver the retro, and commodity x64 hardware to provide the modern.

The problem with this is that the specs aren’t impressive to modern gamers, and this amounts to a “me too” approach that will not provide Atari a means to differentiate themselves in the market. History has shown that the home console market can support at best 3 major competitors, and it’s unthinkable that a rebooted Atari can knock any of the established Big 3 out of the market.

Home consoles are dominated by Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo. Desktop gaming is dominated by Windows. Mobile device gaming is dominated by Google and Apple. I’m very doubtful that nostalgia alone can give Atari the leverage it needs to re-enter the market. Not when Atari’s IP has already been re-packaged and sold on every available platform to be launched since the NES.

And we still don’t really know what new games will be launched on the console.

Atari needs to deliver something unique. And it has to be good.

Here’s what I’d do, if I were Atari.

Best Legacy

To properly honor Atari’s legacy platforms, I would include FPGA implementations of the Atari 2600, 5200, 7800, and 8-bit computer line. FPGA implementation of original hardware is the best way to provide the most authentic experience of Atari’s legacy. It would quiet objections of “But I can already run an emulator!” The state of emulation is very, very good, but an FPGA would be the ultimate.

I don’t think it would be too difficult to implement, either. The Atari 7800 was backward-compatible with the 2600, and achieved this by including the complete 2600 system in its hardware design. So by implementing an FPGA-based 7800, you get the 2600 as well. The Atari 5200 was essentially an Atari 8-bit computer, stripped down to remove the disk drives and keyboard to make it a dedicated gaming console. So a FPGA solution for the 5200/8-bit computers can share a lot of common components as well. Make both FPGAs a superset of the hardware needed to support the largest system, while keeping compatibile with all systems.

We can’t forget about Atari Coin-op’s legacy. Here, there’s too many unique system architectures to be able to re-implement each of them in an FPGA, so here I think we can accept emulation.

It would be neat if Atari would sell actual arcade cabinets that you can dock an AtariBox into, and use it to drive a more authentic arcade experience for those who have the budget and floor space for it. Modular, interchangeable control decks that can plug into the cabinet and provide the exact control set and layouts for classic arcade games would be amazing. Even just selling kits or blueprints to enable enterprising hobbyists to build-their-own cabinets to an Atari-defined standard would be great.

For less well-heeled fans of the arade, the AtariBox could still be played through a normal TV, with a gamepad-type controller adapting to each Coin-op title as best it can.

What legacy game titles should be included?

Ideally, all of them, of course. First party, third party, everything.

Copyright won’t allow that, of course. But it would be great if the entire Atari library, including third party releases, could be included.

But undoutedly, any list of essential games for Atari consoles would include games published by third parties, and they deserve to be included. The rights to these games would be a nightmare to properly secure. Personally, I’m in favor of expiring copyright on old computer software much earlier than the law currently does. A 10 or 12 year copyright, non-renewable, is more than reasonable. It’s just a dream, but then this entire post is just a dream.

I suppose if we had to accept a curated list of game titles, I wouldn’t miss the terrible games, but I don’t know that everyone can agree on what’s terrible. Since the size on disk for these games is tiny, there’s no technical reason not to include everything.

While I’m thinking about it, I also want the ability to install my own ROMs. Hacks and homebrews are a part of the Atari ecosystem, and should be embraced by the new console. Installing them should be as simple as copying the files to a directory.

Along with the ROM images, customers should expect high-quality digital copies of the manuals, original box art, etc. Since this is a fully modern console, why not develop a robust social community around each game title, as well? Online high score leaderboards, discussion forums, built-in streamcasting support, the works. The community integration features would make owning an AtariBox a must even for gamers who already own all the original hardware.

What peripherals devices should be supported?

This is a tougher question. I’m inclined to want every port and connector to be replicated on the new box, so that the old devices can be plugged in and work, since it’s unlikely that Atari would ever resume manufacturing all of them. But that’s highly impractical, and cost-prohibitive.

Perhaps some kind of USB-to-legacy port adapters could be produced, so that the console itself can have just a small number of USB ports, and any legacy hardware can be routed through it.

Better would be modern production of updated classic designs. I really like Atari’s new take on the CX-40 joystick, and I wish they’d also produce a modern paddle controller as well.

Retro Modern

I really don’t want to play Skyrim or PUBG on an AtariBox. If I want to play modern games, I already have plenty of systems to do that. If it can do it on the AtariBox, then fine, whatever, but I don’t care.

Oyua tried to court Indie game developers, hoping that an open platform with low barrier to entry would be attractive. This approach had merit, but utlimately failed, and so I don’t endorse Atari taking the same approach.

I think it’s interesting and worth a sidebar to examine why Ouya failed.  There were more reasons than what I’ll go into here, but I think these are the ones that are most relevant to Atari in 2018.

First, Ouya tried to market itself as an indie-friendly console, that was easy to develop and publish for.  Every Ouya was a devkit.  The thing was, Ouya came at a time when it had already become incredibly easy for indie game developers to publish games. This wasn’t true several years previous to Ouya’s launch, but it was true by the time Ouya hit the market, and is even more true today. Maybe consoles were still hard to develop and publish on in 2012, but in the PC and mobile space, self-publishing has been very easy, and that’s where indie developers had thrived.

It still remains difficult, however, for indie developers to publish games that are financial successes.  There are a tiny number of notable successes where indie games have made their developers wealthy.  Most developers struggle to make enough money to cover development and operating expenses. Designing and making a very good game is still fairly difficult, but publishing it is comparatively easy. But it’s not enough to simply publish a very good game. You have to know how to market it. A lone indie developer has an almost impossible time doing it all well enough to stand out among thousands of games being released every year.  Many newly released games drown in a maelstrom of other new releases, failing to secure the attention they perhaps deserved.

Second, Ouya didn’t provide indies with a compelling reason to release their games exclusively on Ouya, and the lack of exclusive titles gave gamers little reason to pay attention to Ouya. Ouya started with a lot of crowdfunding hype, but tiny marketshare, and it needed to grow marketshare quickly to be viable.  But they lacked first-party games, and this was a major mistake.  Ouya failed to command market attention, didn’t build marketshare, and thus wasn’t attractive as a market for third party game developers to target with exclusives. It could run games that already ran on other platforms.  But it wasn’t particularly powerful, so couldn’t play everything.  Atari seems to be doing exactly the same thing with AtariBox.

Ouya was based on Android, which in turn was based on Linux, so game developers who wanted to reach the widest possible market were better off developing games for Android which has hundreds of millions of devices, or Linux.  AtariBox is also based on Linux. Ouya lacked the deep pockets that would have been needed to pay developers for exclusive rights to a game, so Ouya never had a “killer app” that would compel gamers to buy Ouya.

Until I see them announce some exclusive new first-party titles, I see the same happening to Atari. Atari can and must learn from this if it wants the AtariBox to be successful, and I haven’t yet seen indication that it has.

The AtariBox we’re getting from Atari is just a nice looking x86/64 system, meaning it’s generic PC hardware that can play games developed to run on this hardware, which means potentially a very large library of pre-existing games. But pre-existing games aren’t enough to compel users to buy a new device. It’s good for developers because they don’t really have to do much to make a game run on the AtariBox, but it’s bad for AtariBox because the same games can be compiled to run on Xbox One, or Playstation 4, or Nintendo Switch, or Windows, or Android, or iOS, and people already own those.

What I would have liked from Atari would be imaginative interpretations of what could have been, if Atari had stayed in business.

In the early 80’s, the differences between different systems were much more apparent. A game might be developed and released on Atari 2600, 5200, ColecoVision, IntelliVision, Oddyssey2, Commodore 64, Apple ][, and IBM PC, ZX Spectrum, MSX, etc. but it would be written from scratch, or ported to each specific hardware architecture, each of which had its own distinct capabilities and limitations. Limitations which, especially for the more primitive sysetms, gave all games for that system a somewhat distinct appearance. This meant that, even if you had never seen a particular game before, you could look at a screen shot for a game and have a pretty good chance of being able to guess what system it was running on.

With today’s computers, and their 64-bit, multi-core, multi-gigaHertz CPUs, multiple gigabytes of RAM and Terabytes of Storage, 32-bit color and 1080P or 4K resolution, there is nearly limitless capability, but barely any constraints. Game developers are free to make games that look like anything. But yet they mostly make games that look the same — only, the constraint is the market success of whatever the best selling games are — design tends to converge on the look of the top AAA titles.

Those constraints that the old systems had often served to inspire creativity, out of necessity to work around the limitations of tiny, slow systems. In recent years, “fantasy consoles” such as the PICO-8 have turned back to this idea that small systems with harsh constraints can inspire creativity while achieving a greater unity of aesthetic.

It would be very cool if Atari embraced this, by designing a “fantasy console” to run neo-retro Atari games on. This fantasy console could be a virtual machine, and run on commodity hardware, which would help keep costs down and also give the AtariBox capabilities where and when it needs them — for things like media streaming and so forth.

I think that Atari could design a flexible fantasy console, with soft constraints that are configurable, to be managed by the game developer, who could relax them by degrees to simulate hardware constraints that would have been in place in 1977, or 1982, or 1984, etc. A configurable fantasy console could impose limitations such as: number of sprites that can be drawn to the screen, number of colors per sprite, number of colors displayed simultaneously in one frame, number and type of sound channels, specific color palettes available to the graphics system, amount of memory available to the game program, and on and on.

This would give AtariBox games a specific flavor, and make its games look and feel distinctly unique from the current modern-day look.

We won’t be getting any of that, but I think it’s an interesting idea. And there’s no reason Atari couldn’t give us a neo-retro fantasy console to develop for and run exclusively on the AtariBox hardware, without changing anything else about how they’re doing the actual AtariBox.

The way to attract developers to create exclusive titles for the AtariBox is simple: Pay them, and respect them. I doubt that Atari has the pocket book for this, but if they could pay indie developers say, six figure salaries, and/or royalties, to create unique and exclusive games for an AtariBox fantasy console, I’d be very excited — both as a gamer and as a developer. The current industry is incredibly competitive and harsh, and the way it treats developers is not sustainable.

What about the GAMES?

The most important thing about the AtariBox, as with any game console ever released, is the games it plays.  AtariBox must have good, unique, exclusive games that excite the market and make people feel compelled to own the console, or it will be a flop.

I can’t answer the question, “what do people want?”  But I can say, if AtariBox’s new games are just the same modern titles that are available on existing consoles, it will not excite the market or compel buyers.

I can better answer the question “what do I want?”

I don’t really want Atari to try to do modern AAA games with old classic IP.  You can easily envision Atari putting a Pitfall Harry skin over Lara Croft Tomb Raider, or making “Combat 2018” as a Call of Duty/Medal of Honor/Battlefield FPS.  I don’t want more of the same, “me too” games like that.

What I would rather have is new games that continue the aesthetic and style of the early 80’s Atari. That’s the main reason I suggest AtariBox use a “fantasy console” approach, to constrain developers to those limits.  There isn’t really a word for it — I guess retro is it — but if you can imagine what Steampunk did for science fiction based on an 1890s world, I’d like AtariBox to do for videogames based on a 1980s world.  I want games that answer questions like: “What would Pitfall 3 have been like, if they’d done it on the 7800?” “What kind of games could have been made for an Atari with 1 megabyte cartridges and 128 kilobytes of RAM?”

Games like Solaroids and Rashlander would be right at home on a console like this.  Pac Man: Championship Edition, which came out over a decade ago on Xbox 360, would also be a natural fit for this console.  (I bought my Xbox 360 solely because of Pac Man CE.) These titles already exist though, and that kindof begs the question of why the AtariBox is even needed.  Retro games already exist, and exist on multiple modern platforms.

But I do think AtariBox would be best off targeting the market that wants to play that kind of game.  Atari has trademarks that they can reboot, and if they do it the retro way, rather than trying to bring them up to date, with the right talent behind it, it could be awesome.  As AtariBox exclusive titles, it could make the system a success.  And without them, I don’t see how it can be.

Atari launches IndiGoGo pre-order for AtariBox (VCS)

Atari
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Atari’s crowdfunding campaign for the AtariBox (VCS) launched earlier today. [Editor’s Note: I am refusing to call it the VCS in order to avoid polluting the namespace with the original Atari VCS, launched in 1977.] With a fundraising goal of just $100k, by 10AM they had already exceeded their funding goal by almost 8x. $100,000 is barely one full-time employee salary for a project like this.

Despite the lack of detailed information about what the AtariBox is, and the loud skepticism of most of the gamer community, it seems that thousands of suckers are eagerly lining up to pre-order a videogame console that Atari don’t plan to release until mid-2019.

The announced specs for this system are more than adequate to serve as an emulation box for vintage 80’s game systems, but that’s hardly surprising, considering that emulation of the Atari 2600 has been around for at least 22 years (Stella was released in 1996, when computers were considered fast if they had 133Mhz CPU and 16 MB of RAM. The MOS 6507 CPU that drove the Atari 2600 had a 1Mhz CPU and could access up to 128 bytes of on-board RAM. That’s bytes, not kilobytes.) But as to its “modern” gaming capabilties, thehardware specs of the AtariBox is about on par with a high end gaming PC from 2006 (4GB RAM, 32GB onboard storage). The AMD Bristol Ridge CPU and Radeon R7 GPU — I would have to assume based on Atari’s form factor this will be an R7 240 — are obviously more current, but still old (AMD’s Bristol Ridge was launched in 2016, so still pretty current, but the Radeon R7 line dates from 2014, and is decidedly midrange and budget at a sub-$100 pricepoint today).

It appears that coincident with the launch of the pre-order, Atari is also, only just now, starting to work out a process for game developers to submit titles to Atari for publishing on the AtariBox platform. This gives the console a distinctly OUYA-like feel. I liked the idea of a console that was open to publishing for any indie developer, but in practice this strategy proved unsuccessful as Ouya attempted it, with hordes of low-quality shovelware published to the system by developers who weren’t yet ready for prime time.

AtariBox Developers Announcement... This seems rather vague and "to be determined" for getting third-party developers on board, and they're ALREADY taking pre-orders?

This seems rather vague and “to be determined” for getting third-party developers on board, and they’re ALREADY taking pre-orders?

This gives me the feeling that Atari have no real clue about how to successfully launch a console in 2018.

Still, you can pre-order just the controllers, and I do kindof like the design of Atari’s contemporary take on the classic CX10/CX40 joystick. If the build quality is good, and if it will work with any PC over USB or Bluetooth, then it might be worthwhile to get one. But putting $$$ down on a pre-order and then waiting at least year for it, if they are able to launch on time, is definitely a gamble.

Beyond that, I can’t recommend pre-ordering anything. Wait for launch, and see whether Atari has any decent first-party launch titles supporting the AtariBox, and if there are any killer exclusive titles that make the console a must-own device. It seems unlikely to me — pretty much any game developer wants to maximize sales, and you do that by publishing to any and every platform that you can, not by going exclusive. Exclusive titles tend to happen only when the owner of the platform wants to pay the developer a mountain of cash to keep the title exclusive. Think Microsoft buying Bungie in order to keep Halo exclusive on the XBox. I haven’t seen any indication from Atari that they have the inclination or the deep pockets to do this.

AtariBox/VCS smells like vapor, poop

games
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Today, UK news source The Register published an article on the new Atari VCS, formerly known as the AtariBox. I refuse to call it the VCS, because that name is already in use, so I’ll just stick to calling it the AtariBox, to avoid confusion.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/22/atari_lempty_box/

I love the URL for the story. “Atari Lempty Box” has such a nice ring to it. Like a French existentialist “L’empty Box” that smokes cigarettes in Parisian cafes, complaining bitterly about the meaninglessness of life.

Lol. OK. Here’s CNet’s slightly more forgiving coverage.

The Atari fan communities that I follow on Atari Age and Facebook have been roasting this system for months. There’s so much to signal that this is going to be a disaster. The biggest is the lack of any hard information about hardware specs, developers, games, capabilities, etc. What has been announced is either vague or very uninspiring.

And now this article. After months of feeble, empty pre-launch hype, and an aborted attempt at a crowdfunded pre-order, “Atari” shows up at GDC 2018 with an inert piece of plastic shaped like their new console, and no new information. The CNet article at least explains why — according to Atari, they couldn’t agree on the controller, and ended up rethinking the whole project, which is why they canceled their crowdfunding campaign last year, and why they still don’t have a lot to show for themselves yet. But that’s still not a very good sign.

Putting aside the obvious con job that this is turning out to be, let’s look at why AtariBox is such a bad idea. Let’s take a look at AtariBox’s selling points:

  1. OMG the case! It has real wood grain! An Atari Logo! And lights!

    By far, the biggest selling point that Atari have presented was the attractive design of the case. It looks nice, I’ll give it that.

    But that’s it. It has an Atari logo on it, and real wood grain. I’m pretty sure the original Atari used fake wood grain. The hardware inside the case is what matters, though, and we still know nothing about that, other than some very vague mention that it’s going to be AMD-based.

    It looks like an original woodgrain Atari 2600 was crossbred with an old cable TV channel selector boxes they used to have in the 80s.
    Atari 2600

    +

    Image result for 80s cable tv box

    =

    AtariBox
    I’ll grant it does look nice. But, I don’t really care that it looks nice. When I play a game console, I’m looking at the screen, not the case. I play the console for the games it can run, not for its brand. A game company creates a good brand by consistently creating great games.

    Focus on the games. AtariBox has revealed almost nothing about the games it will run. Over a year of hyping the new console. That’s troubling.

    We’re teased that they’re talking to developers about creating new games based on classic Atari IP. We’re told that AtariBox will run hundreds of “old games”. We’re told it will run “new games” too. We’re told it will cost ~$300, so we don’t expect it to be capable of running cutting edge games, at least not at high framerates with all the bells and whistles.

  2. It runs Linux!

    Nothing against Linux, I love open source software. It’s a good choice. But so what? In 2018, anything can run Linux. It’s not a big deal.

    The real selling point of a game console isn’t the OS, it’s the Games.

    IT’S THE GAMES, STUPID.

    A nice Atari-themed desktop environment would be cool, but inherently whatever they build to run on Linux could be run on any other hardware running a build of Linux compiled for that hardware. Thanks to the GPL, Atari is required to make available the source code for this Linux build.

    Like, I could take a commodity AMD PC, slap AtariBox’s Linux distro on it, and then I could run the same software on it.

    But perhaps they’ll keep their applications that run on top of the Linux layer proprietary. (Of course they will, who am I kidding?)

    In that case, what do I care that they made use of some open source stuff? As an open source proponent, I like when open source propagates and begets more open source. Open source being leveraged as a platform from which unfree software is sold isn’t exciting if you’re attracted to the openness aspect of the system.

  3. It streams video as well as plays video games!

    Yeah? So does my TV. So does my phone. So does my car. So does everything.

    This is 2018. Streaming video over the internet is not amazing anymore, it’s basic. And just like how every home appliance in the 1980s had to have a digital clock, which no one cared about, because they already had a dozen appliances that all had digital clocks built into them, not including it would be weird because everything has it.

    But do you need to buy another thing that streams video?

    No, you don’t.

  4. It plays old games AND new games!

    Old games:

    I like old games. I’m glad new devices can play old games. If you didn’t have that, old games would die off. So I’m glad there are new devices that can play old games.

    But here’s the thing: This is another solved problem. We have Stella. In fact, it’s pretty much guaranteed that the old games that you can play on an AtariBox will be played through Stella. After all, why would they bother to develop a competing system to run Atari games, when Stella is stable, mature, open source, and amazing?

    It’s remotely conceivable that rather than emulating the Atari 2600 in software, they could have their hardware include an FPGA implementation of the Atari 2600 hardware, which would be pretty cool, since it would be that much closer to the original hardware, and could perhaps do things that Stella can’t do. But I can’t think of anything that Stella can’t do. I’m sure Stella must not be 100% perfect, because nothing is, but I have been using it since at least 1996, so 22 years, and it was pretty damn good even back then, and I couldn’t tell you something that I wished it did, but doesn’t do as well as I want it to. Granted, I’m not a hard core user who deeply groks the hardware it emulates and can discern imperceptible differences between original hardware vs. emulator. It’s possible that there’s something Stella can’t do, or can’t do well, that would make an FPGA Atari worth it.

    But it’s probably useless to speculate about it, because it’s all but given that the AtariBox isn’t going to be an FPGA system.

    Even if it was, AtariBox almost certainly won’t be selling you every ROM ever released. No single entity, not even Atari, owns the IP rights to the entire Atari 2600 library. At best, they’ll be offering a good chunk of the total library. And granted, out of the 700+ titles developed for the Atari 2600, a huge proportion of them are not good enough that anyone is going to miss them. Still, the entire library is under a megabyte. So what the hell, you might as well include everything.

    But this is where “abandonware” (software “piracy” of “dead” systems) shines.

    (Of course, Atari never died, if people never stopped playing it, did it?)

    But it did exit the market, and that’s what I mean by a “dead system”. Even notwithstanding a brilliant homebrew community continuing to publish new titles for the system, I still think it’s reasonable to consider the Atari 2600 dead, and not just dead, but long dead.

    Once it was no longer viable to sell in the mass retail market and sustain a company, if our copyright laws were just, old obsolete games should have been ceded to the public domain, say abandonware proponents.

    Of course, legally, that never happened.

    And so, year after year, we see various attempts at re-incarnating Atari’s classic library of games. This never really stopped happening. NES killed Atari, but many classic titles of the Atari era have NES ports. And SNES. And anthology collections on every generation of game console since then, until now.

    See what I’m getting at? Why do we need an AtariBox to “bring back” the classics, when this stuff has never gone away?

    But the thing is, these commercial repackagings that we get re-sold again and again, are always inferior to what you can get if you aren’t encumbered by intellectual property laws and can treat 30-40 year old software as having entered into the public domain. Go to a ROM site, download 700+ Atari 2600 ROMs in one click, unzip, launch Stella. You’re good to go.

    New games:

    I like new games, too! But there’s no shortage of platforms to play them on already! What does AtariBox offer that’s new or different from XBox, Playstation, Switch, PC, Android, iOS? What could it offer? The company calling itself “Atari” doesn’t have the deep pockets of Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Apple, Google.

    Exclusives? Nobody wants to be exclusive on the smallest upstart competitor’s box. Successful games that people want to play are generally ported to as many platforms as possible.

    Nintendo doesn’t port their first-party titles to Xbox and PlayStation, but that’s because they’re very well established, and well-heeled, and they can afford to. That’s what it’s like when you never went bankrupt.

    Atari has some very iconic, classic IP, which they could conceivably bring back, but it’s not nearly as attractive as Nintendo’s A-list. Tempest 4000 looks pretty cool, but Tempest is not Mario, Zelda, or Metroid caliber, not even close.

    Various incarnations of Atari already have re-packaged and licensed that IP to anyone and everyone over the last 20+ years. They could try to create some brand new titles inspired by their old IP, and keep it reserved as exclusive content to help sell their platform. This is probably what I would be most interested in. Not playing “new games” from a couple years ago, like Skyrim or Hotline Miami on AtariBox, but playing an all-new Pitfall! that looks and feels like the Atari 2600 game, and just has some more to it. Give it to the guy who did Spelunky, maybe. Let him see what he can do with it. Or maybe bring back David Crane if you can get him, and see what he can come up with now.

    But the thing is, if those games are any good, they would sell far better, wider, and more copies if they were made available on every platform. We learned this a few years ago from Ouya. Ouya courted indie developers, but indies released anywhere and everywhere they could, and in the end no one gave a shit about Ouya.

    The AtariBox hardware is all but certain to be less powerful than the XBox One, PS4, or even the Switch. So it’s not going to play cutting edge new games, but will play “new-ish” games from 2-5 years ago that we’ve already seen and played through. Why would we want to buy them again, just to play them on a box with a Fuji logo on it?

As much as I would love for there to be a viable Atari console in 2018, I just don’t see what possible niche they could occupy that would work for them well enough to enable the company to compete in today’s market.

AtariBox rebrands itself to “Atari VCS” in an apparent attempt to sew confusion^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H reboot brand

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Ataribox is now Atari VCS, preorder date revealed soon

In a move that endears me to the new gaming console not the slightest bit, Atari has announced that they are re-naming their upcoming AtariBox console to the already-taken name, “Atari VCS”. Henceforth, people who want to search for the 1977 Atari VCS, later renamed the Atari 2600, will have to wade through hits for the modern AtariBox-Atari VCS that will be released sometime in 2018 (maybe). And vice versa.

That won’t be completely annoying to fans of either console.

AtariBox update: who is Feargal Mac?

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I learned more today about Feargal Mac, real name Mac Conuladh, one of the guys behind the AtariBox. And what I found out wasn’t so good.

It looks like this guy has been involved in a number of dubious crowd funded tech gizmos before. And by dubious, I mean disastrous. This guy’s LinkedIn profile reads like a character from Silicon Valley: a CEO of various incarnations of rapidly pivoting smoke/mirrors vaporware startups that promise a lot while having nothing.

If you look at Mac’s twitter profile, he still lists his website as gameband.com, one of the crowdfunded gadgets he was involved with. Here’s a screen capture that I took of the page today:

gameband.com screencap

Not quite as exciting as zombo.com, but give it time!

Based on this track record, it’s going to take a LOT of evidence and convincing to get me interested in the AtariBox. Maybe it’ll be different this time, after all people do fail, try again, and succeed, and maybe this time they’ll deliver something worth owning, but until I see some substantial evidence of this, I’m no longer interested in the system.

[Update 3/26/18:] I’ve just learned according to this interview with current Atari CEO Fred Chesnais that Feargal Mac Conuladh is no longer with Atari as of 12/14/17.

[Update 11/26/18:] Feargal Mac Conuladh has sued his former partners at Atari over the terms of their agreement and moneys owed.

AtariBox: more prelaunch details emerge

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According to VentureBeat, the AtariBox will cost between $250-300, be powered by AMD hardware, and run Linux. Out of the box, it will come packaged with some collection of classic games, playable via emulator, and be capable of playing “midrange” games but not the high-end AAA titles that sell on XBox and PlayStation. No word as yet how the hardware specs compare with Nintendo’s Switch, or really any specs.

According to Atari, AtariBox will be an open system, meaning the end user will be free to customize the Linux environment and install whatever software on it they like, including existing games that run on Linux. This means that games for AtariBox need not be purchased solely through a gated community marketplace, unlike similar app stores offered for Microsoft Xbox, Sony PlayStation, Apple iOS devices, and Windows 10.

As much as I love openness, this seems like a questionable business decision on the part of Atari. Those who remember history will recall that the original Atari 2600 was a huge success when launched in 1977, but eventually 3rd party software developers figured out how to make games for it, culminating in a glut of shovelware which brought the videogame industry to its low point in 1983. Atari was powerless to prevent third parties from flooding the market with crapware, nor were they able to earn revenue from any third party releases.

When Nintendo revived the North American home videogame market in 1985, they did so by launching more powerful hardware than existing previous-gen consoles, and by locking unlicensed third parties out of development with the 10NES chip.

AtariBox will do neither of these things. While the move to lock out the hardware was controversial, and resulted in Nintendo holding monopoly power until the 16-bit era — which they abused — locking out did help Nintendo to establish a level of quality control with the software that could be published for the NES. (Although, to be fair, there were still a lot of terrible NES games — but importantly they did not glut the market and result in a crash that also bankrupted companies that produced high quality games, and the licensing program enabled Nintendo to generate revenue from 3rd party games.)

The ability to play already-released games is nice, but doesn’t seem likely to drive hardware sales. Presumably if you already have games that could be installed on an AtariBox, you also already have some other device already to play them on.

In order for AtariBox to have a hope of being successful, it really needs to have some new, original games, ideally exclusive to its platform, and ideally tied to classic Atari-era properties.

To date, we’ve still seen nothing of this. 2017-style reboots of classic titles like Adventure, SwordQuest, Pitfall, Space Invaders, Crystal Castles, Dig Dug, Pac Man, Frogger, Galaxian, Tempest, and so on, might make the console attractive to old school gamers. But to be honest these old games have already been re-released, sequeled, and rebooted numerous times over the decades since they were originally released, and usually to diminishing returns, failing to capture the magic that made the original game a hit.

Nevertheless, I believe that, if done well, rebooted classics could sell enough to sustain a business. A perfect example of a well done reboot would be the outstanding Pac Man Championship Edition, released some years ago on XBox Live Arcade.

Atari cannot rely on 3rd party developer support to provide AtariBox with exclusive titles, however. There’s zero incentive for studios to produce exclusive content, and sacrifice the entire rest of the market, unless they receive a cut of hardware sales, or are otherwise compensated for the favor they’re doing for the platform. Developers want to release their games everywhere, if possible, and will release games on every platform they can afford to reach. For AtariBox to attract gamers with exclusives, they need to do first-party development.

The console looks nice, but I’ve still yet to see a compelling reason to buy one when it comes out. Atari, heed me: Announce some new games, and make sure they’re good.

We still haven’t seen the controller for the AtariBox, but I’m expecting a modern-looking gamepad rather than the traditional Atari CX40 joystick or paddles. Perhaps these will be options. Certainly the AtariBox would be smart if it had a couple of DB9 ports to accommodate original controllers. As it is, a USB-to-DB9 adapter is perhaps feasible, but not as slick as I’d like for a brand-specific console like this.

(For that matter, it’d be cool if they put a cartridge slot on it, and allowed you to either play your old games on it, or rip them as ROM files to play through emulator. Obviously that’s not a part of the physical product design, but that would have been on my wish list for such a console.)

I would also like to see emulation of games for consoles other than the Atari 2600. The Atari 5200 and 7800 are not as well known, but had some great games, and deserve to be included.

As well, classic Atari coin-op emulation would be a great idea. Real arcade games are a big part of Atari’s legacy, and deserve a showcase. An AtariBox plus authentic controller decks replicating classic arcade controls would sell.

“Atari” releases new images of upcoming, mysterious AtariBox console

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As soon as I found out about it, I signed up for announcements about the AtariBox. Today, the company currently owning the rights to call itself Atari released some new images of what the console will look like. I think they look quite nice, for what it’s worth. It’s tough to say, but I’m not convinced that these are photographs — they could very well be 3D models from the mock-up phase, that have been approved for production.

AtariBox AtariBox AtariBox AtariBox

From the announcement:

Our objective is to create a new product that stays true to our heritage while appealing to both old and new fans of Atari.

Inspired by classic Atari design elements (such as the iconic use of wood, ribbed lines, and raised back); we are creating a smooth design, with ribs that flow seamlessly all around the body of the product, a front panel that can be either wood or glass, a front facing logo, indicator lights that glow through the material, and an array of new ports (HDMI, 4xUSB, SD). We intend to release two editions: a wood edition, and a black/red edition.

We know you are hungry for more details; on specs, games, features, pricing, timing etc. We’re not teasing you intentionally; we want to get this right, so we’ve opted to share things step by step as we bring Ataribox to life, and to listen closely to Atari community feedback as we do so. There are a lot of milestones, challenges and decision points in front of us in the months ahead. We’ll be giving you lots more information and status updates as we progress, and we are thrilled to have you along for the ride!

The HDMI is not a surprise, but it’s good to see that the AtariBox will use standard USB ports and an SD slot. Proprietary ports are all too common on game consoles, in order to lock consumers in to buying officially licensed peripherals at considerable markup.

What the console looks like isn’t all that important, but from what I see so far, this isn’t bad.

We still don’t know what the consoles hardware capabilities will be… but what the console’s specs are isn’t all that important, even.

What matters is what games it’ll play, and if they’re any good.

How can Atari create a unique platform for games that is simultaneously contemporary yet pays good homage to the past? It remains unknown.

AtariBox hype, speculation

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I’ve been around long enough to know how the Hype Machine works with videogame launches.

First, there’s a teaser announcement. It doesn’t tell you anything, but it’s designed to make you very curious, excited, and speculate about what it could be. The AtariBox website currently has a simple video showing the famous Atari Fuji logo, and the suggestion that a new game console is coming soon.

Next, there’s a bit more information leaked to the right media outlets; Joystiq, Kotaku, Polygon, etc. A few more bare details are leaked, but mostly as unconfirmed rumors. This creates a lot of buzz among the most dedicated followers of games. Gamers are incredibly demanding and fickle, or else ultra-apologist fanboys who will eat up (and forgive) anything. Everyone starts talking about what they hope the new product will be.

Gradually, more mainstream media starts to pick up on the story, and reporting on it. We’re at that point now.

I read the Forbes opinion. The author’s take on it is that gaming consoles have become indistinguishable from each other, there’s too much sameness between Xbox and PlayStation, so (he thinks) maybe Atari can make room for itself in the market by differentiating itself… somehow.

And it’s true. In the old days, there was a lot more variety in game consoles. The hardware developed by various big players and also-rans (alsos-ran?) was widely divergent in its engineering and capabilities, especially in terms of how they handled graphics and sound. Most systems were built around one of two chips: the MOS 6502 or the Zilog Z80, but had vastly different approaches to generating sound and drawing pixels to the TV screen, resulting in characteristics that could not be replicated by any other game console, meaning that each system necessarily had to take a unique approach to implementing a port of a given game design, resulting in vastly different experiences for the same title on various systems (when a title was even released on multiple systems, which wasn’t always a given).

But as engineers iterate, designs gradually converge on what works best. And in 2017 with the launch of the Nintendo Switch, we’re currently at the 9th generation of game consoles.

The thing is, the old consoles were different because their hardware was very different, AND because games were coded in ASM so that they could get every last bit of the very limited hardware’s capability. Neither of those is true now, nor will it ever be again. Computer hardware is extremely expensive to R&D, so open, commodity architectures that are well known to developers will be favored, leading to a convergence in hardware. Games are programmed in high-level languages so that the same code runs on multiple platforms. The result is uniformity.

No new modern console will support some non-standard resolution or unique color palette that will give their games a look uniquely its own. It’ll be 32-bit RGB color, 1080p or 4K, 60Hz or better. Controllers may vary, slightly, but the fact is if a game cant sell on multiple platforms, it won’t get developed (except by Nintendo). So having a unique controller only means you’ll secure a small segment of the market for yourself, while conceding the bulk of the market to games developed to more common/standard controllers. That’s what Nintendo’s approach has been since the Wii. And while NIntendo was successful with the Wii, they stumbled with its follow-up Wii U, and most people believe that Nintendo are only able to continue to be successful on the strength of their first-party IP that they keep exclusive to their platform.

What does that leave Atari? If they think they can go toe to toe against MS and Sony, they’re dreaming. Atari’s R&D and innovation more or less stopped in 1983, despite the last gasps the Lynx handheld and Jaguar console represented. Atari does have some strong IP in their arcade classic titles, but these have been re-released and re-hashed probably on the order of a dozen or more times already, mostly as nostalgia bundles that have been put out for every next-gen console since the SNES, occasionally as “reboots” or “sequels” that never seem to recapture the original magic.

The Ataribox *could* be a cool console, if it embraces retro. I have no interest in a 9th-Gen game system just because it happens to have the Atari name on it. What I *am* excited about is the possibility of a “what if” console, where imaginative game developers do a kind of speculative retro-future take on where 8-bit style games that Atari were known for in the 70s and 80s could have gone — a bit like what steampunk is to science fiction, the Ataribox could be to modern-retro gaming. Think an graphics processor constrained to 8-bit index color graphics, driven by a modern 3+GHz CPU with gigabytes of RAM instead of a few kilobytes, and beautiful (but limited-palette, low-fi) graphics without the sort of severe limitations such as sprites per line, etc.

That’s kind of what I hope it turns out to be. I have no idea, but that would be cool and truly different. Not just another Xbox/PS with a Fuji logo, please.

A Pitfall III that looks and feels like Pitfall I and II, but has all kinds of cool new challenges would be kind of awesome. (Of course, we already have Spelunky… but that’s just it, there’s a ton of retro-inspired modern indie games that could feel right at home on a modern retro console. A few years ago, I had high hopes that the Ouya would be that console. I still think the concept has merit, but whether it can survive and thrive in the market is largely in doubt.)

The thing is, there’s no reason to design special hardware constraints into such a system; a designer can voluntarily impose any such constraints on themselves to produce “retro style” games. That’s what we do now, when we want to.

I’m interested in seeing what the AtariBox is, but my enthusiasm is held in reserve. Why? Simply because at this point we know nothing about it, and because everything about the history of the videogame industry strongly suggests that it’s unlikely to succeed at a level needed to support a large company, and small companies tend to fail.

AtariBox, RetroN 77 teasers 

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In the past few days, I’ve become aware of chatter about two potentially exciting new bits of hardware for Atari 2600 fans: Atari’s AtariBox, and Hyperkin’s RetroN 77.

Atari (well, the company who now owns Atari’s trademarks) has scant information about the AtariBox. Beyond the name, we know basically nothing about it so far.

RetroN 77 is a new console from Hyperkin, which is designed to play real Atari 2600 carts, apparently through emulation via the excellent open source Stella emulator, with real controllers, using the same ports as the original, so compatible with 3rd party Atari controllers, and outputting 1080p over HDMI.

Since I know nothing about the AtariBox yet, my early excitement is for the RetroN 77, but that could easily change. Hopefully Hyperkin will do the venerable VCS justice for the HDTV Age.

My hope for the AtariBox is that it will be a retro-inspired platform that caters to indie developers who want to make games in an old school style, that look like they could have been at home in the late 70’s/early80’s, albeit not strictly constrained by the hardware limits of that time. Think what Shovel Knight was to the NES; I’d love it if AtariBox were a platform for the equivalent of such games for the Atari 2600/5200/7800/400/800/Intellivision/Colecovision era of home videogames.