Aaaahhhh come on....
Just slap a Raspberry-Pi in there and be done with it...
We sent a vulture to find the relaunched Atari box – and all he got was this lousy baseball cap
The Ataribox has been renamed the AtariVCS, and it is finally here! Where? Suite 7088 of the Marriott Marquis hotel in San Francisco, USA, directly opposite this year's Games Developers Conference (GDC). There's only one problem: it doesn't work. And by "not work" we don't mean it crashed or is having teething troubles, we …
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Thursday 22nd March 2018 10:58 GMT PaulR79
Re: Aaaahhhh come on....
@Prst. V.Jeltz
Mike, it's ok to use your real name. Tell us the truth now and get it all out.
In all seriousness why bother holding an event where you can shed no light on the problems or give any worthwhile information? Why was it delayed? Has that problem been fixed? When can it be expected? For someone in charge of it to know so little would tell me this is something to be avoided if I was even remotely interested. Which I'm not.
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Thursday 22nd March 2018 13:02 GMT Valerion
Re: Aaaahhhh come on....
In all seriousness why bother holding an event where you can shed no light on the problems or give any worthwhile information?
I imagine that Mike wanted a reason to go to the conference and stay in a nice suite at a nice hotel, and this was the only way he could swing it.
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Thursday 22nd March 2018 13:28 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Aaaahhhh come on....
They already slapped the woodgrain on (almost a lazy cliche of VCS nostalgia exploitation) and included the same old VCS games (#) that we've been re-sold millions of times- it doesn't surprise me they went the whole hog and decided to exploit the VCS name to sell a console no-one would care about if it wasn't masquerading as a new "VCS" (which it isn't) from a company masquerading as the original "Atari" (which they aren't).
(#) As I noted before, these could have been emulated with ease on a typical PC 25 years ago. Nowadays, you could probably run them on the button panel controlling your bloody microwave. (##) No-one needs another console just because it's had some "this is a real late 70s VCS honest!" woodgrain slapped on.
(##) FFS, you could probably emulate them on one with a mechanical clock that goes "ping" when it's ready ;-)
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Thursday 22nd March 2018 16:44 GMT ThomH
Re: Aaaahhhh come on....
Emulating the 2600 exactly is actually more hassle than you think; it predates such niceties as just being able to tell the video chip where to put a sprite: instead there is explicitly a 160-step counter that triggers a draw of the sprite upon overflow and a bunch of conditions affecting when it'll be clocked and when it won't. You can reset it manually or provide some input into clocking to shift the sprite left and right. But the timing-related edge cases add up very quickly. Most games you can fake, hence the ability to emulate most of them on a 486, but at least one* was successfully emulated only in the last couple of years.
Emulating something less simple but with a good abstraction is a lot computationally cheaper — something like a Spectrum, even allowing for contended timing.
* actually, it's only a prototype: Meltdown. A real back-in-the-day prototype, but nevertheless a title that didn't ship.
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Thursday 22nd March 2018 22:37 GMT Mike 16
Re: Reliable Atari
Of course, you are forgetting the "Great Mind Swap" where a bunch of Commodore folks followed Tramiel Per. to his new home at the company formerly known as Atari, oh, wait, it was still known as Atari after Warner gave it to Jack. Meanwhile a bunch of ex-Atarians were busy making a little box you may have heard of: The Amiga. The 520ST was definitely a Commodore design, with all that implies.
A friend worked for Commodore back when they did calculators (pre-Pet), and would come home exhausted from her job of trying to follow the Cutomer Service script while being yelled at by dissatisfied customers.
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Thursday 22nd March 2018 07:36 GMT Anonymous Custard
Space oddity?
Mike doesn't know lots of things about the AtariVCS – standing for Atari video computer system – which is odd because he's the exec in charge of it.
I wouldn't say that it's odd or uncommon - I know a lot of middle and occasionally senior managers in charge of projects that they know absolutely nothing about beyond the fancy PowerPoint buzzwords and maybe the title.
Of course this doesn't stop them claiming all the glory and taking the credit when they are completed...
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Thursday 22nd March 2018 11:44 GMT JimboSmith
Re: Space oddity?
I wouldn't say that it's odd or uncommon - I know a lot of middle and occasionally senior managers in charge of projects that they know absolutely nothing about beyond the fancy PowerPoint buzzwords and maybe the title.
A friend of mine came to London for work purposes from the other side of the pond. Over a drink on the first night I asked if the meetings she was attending were boring. She said boring didn't describe it and she was normally one of, if not the most senior person in the room (and for our American readers by senior I mean in terms of seniority not age). It was then that I introduced her to Bullshit Bingo and she perked up a bit. Apparently people in the financial field also spout buzzwords and have make unrealistic promises and have wild expectations.
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Friday 23rd March 2018 23:48 GMT Unicornpiss
Re: Space oddity?
"I wouldn't say that it's odd or uncommon - I know a lot of middle and occasionally senior managers in charge of projects that they know absolutely nothing about beyond the fancy PowerPoint buzzwords and maybe the title."
I'd have to agree. Often the person drafted for these gigs aren't the people that have a clue about the project or any prior history, but someone that a self-serving manager "trusts" to not crap themselves in public or in any way demean their 'superiors' regardless of their actual skill set or how lackluster the presentation will be.
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Thursday 22nd March 2018 13:59 GMT Michael Strorm
Re: "It will do 4K video"
That'd be four times more video memory than the VCS.... no, it wouldn't. Actually, the VCS didn't even have anywhere near even *1KB* of video memory. (It only had 128 bytes of RAM for regular use!)
As far as I'm aware, it had enough to store *one* scanline's worth of screen memory. That's it.
No, really. There wasn't a "bitmapped" display as such- you had (from Wikipedia) "two bitmapped sprites, two 1-pixel "missile" sprites, a 1-pixel "ball," and a 40-pixel "playfield" [background graphic]" that you could set the patterns and position for.
To the best of my knowledge, you could set that and leave it to repeat over multiple scan lines, but unless you wanted a screenful of nothing but vertical patterned stripes (i.e. the same arrangement on every line)- which of course you bloody did!- you had to update these registers on the fly- at the appropriate time for successive scan lines- to give the illusion of a bitmapped display.
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Thursday 22nd March 2018 17:26 GMT John Styles
Re: "It will do 4K video"
If you are interested in how to program them (on emulators primarily obviously) I recommend this book
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01N4DSRIZ/ Making Games for the Atari 2600 by Steven Hugg.
For a more general book about it there is Racing the Beam by Ian Bogost (who you may have heard of) and Nick Montford https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/racing-beam
It is somewhat academic in tone (I mention that not as a pejorative term, but to give an idea as whether it might be for you)
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Thursday 22nd March 2018 14:03 GMT CrazyOldCatMan
Re: "It will do 4K video"
It'll have 4KB of video memory
Well, given that the original (according to pikiwedia) only had 128 bytes of RAM even that would be overkill..
(According to the article, later versions allowed up to 32K for the ROMs, using bank-switching but the initial ROMS were 2k-4K in order to reduce costs )
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Thursday 22nd March 2018 15:51 GMT Michael Strorm
Re: "It will do 4K video"
@ CrazyOldCatMan; That 128 bytes was for the main RAM as far as I'm aware.
As I noted in the comment above yours, the VCS doesn't even have bitmapped screen memory as such.
AFAICT, all it has are registers for (one-dimensional) playfield and sprite patterns (along with horizontal position and colour data) that need to be manually updated for successive scan lines if you want anything other than vertical stripes.
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Thursday 22nd March 2018 16:55 GMT ThomH
Re: "It will do 4K video"
If we're playing this game, it also doesn't have independent storage for all 40 background pixels. It can store only 20 of them, plus a decision either to mirror them or repeat them. That's why so many games have symmetrical backgrounds. If you want 40 independent background pixels, you'll need to write to the storage as the raster runs.
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Thursday 22nd March 2018 16:07 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Have they the rights
@ DJV;The situation with Commodore seems- if anything- to be worse. It's a complete clusterf**k!
The rights to the "Commodore" brand, to the "Amiga" name, to the various lines of hardware, and to the Amiga OS itself have all been variously and repeatedly split up, sold on, sublicensed to other parties and used for completely unrelated purposes numerous times over the years.
Hence, we have new version of the Amiga OS (whose historical and present-day rights are split and sublicensed between multiple parties). Or the new "Amiga" hardware- don't get excited if you just want to play Lotus II a bit faster, it's all based on PowerPC architecture, very expensive for what it is and completely incompatible at a bare iron level with the old 68000 Amigas, but intended to run new versions of the Amiga OS for rabid diehard Amiga fans.
Then we had at one point people- completely unrelated to the above- selling HTPC cases using the names of classic Amigas (e.g. Amiga 3000) that otherwise had nothing to do with them.
We also had the "relaunched" Commodore 64 a few years back (actually a PC clone in a C64-style case made by a now-defunct company called "Commodore USA" that had only ever licensed the Commodore brand), who also sold small form-factor computer-in-keyboard PCs called "Vic" that had nothing to do with the Vic 20 (not even the case style) beyond the name.
Oh, and what happened to that stupid idea to sell a generic Android tablet using the "Commodore PET" name (which was to have included C64 and Vic-20 emulators, but not apparently a PET emulator)? Last I heard, they might not have had the rights to the name after all. (Though if you want one anyway, you can just buy a cheapass Android tablet, scribble "Commodore PET" on it with a marker and you're already there.)
If anyone else has the time or inclination to keep track of it all, you're better than I am.
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Friday 23rd March 2018 20:31 GMT DJV
@AC
Yeah, I know. Total clusterf**k squared!
As someone who started off in 1979 on a CBM PET (original chiclet key version that I managed to upgrade all the way to Basic 4) and at various times owned a C64, C128D, CBM-500 (no, not the Amiga 500 - that came later), CBM-600 (B Series in the US), Amiga 500 and finally a 2000, I watched in horror as CBM crashed and burned in the 90s and was then tossed around like a seal amongst killer whales. I always wonder if it would have turned out any different had Commodore UK managed to buy the whole kit n kaboodle before Escom got hold of it.
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Thursday 22nd March 2018 09:09 GMT imanidiot
I other words they have nothing, and no development is happening. Otherwise they would have actually shown SOMETHING. If a product was indeed very close to launching in December they would have had a working model now. It might not be perfect and need polishing, but they'd have SOMETHING to show for themselves instead of a "the dog ate my homework".
Biting the hand that feeds IT
