Yeah, the novelty wears off after an hour or so. I’m getting that with NES games these days too, we’re so spoiled. shakes cane for emphasis
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Awww yeah Star Raiders. Never quite figured out what I was doing in that game but that was the magic of it. Nowadays there’s a lot of hand-holding in games, I miss the days where you tried a game and had to figure it out with no manual. Oh and this was probably one of 3 games you would have owned so you’d better figure it out. (the other games being E.T. and obligatory Pac Man)
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looks pretty rad.
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NES games were cool because they were punishingly hard.
SNES and early 90’s PC games are what I can really still play. That was when vibrant colors with many hues and gradients started to show up in graphics.
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I recently played Combat on a real Atari 2600. There is a version of Tanks where you are able to control the shell after shooting it. If you are nimble enough you can guide it around walls.
That was a lot of fun.
The rest though? Meh.
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We have all the games, the hardware is simple enough, a Pi3 could do the job… BUT , we’re going to put effort time & cost into building an interface to an app-store experience … the hardware has to support this and the classic 2600 joystick won’t do, the supplied mouse and keyboard are needed… perhaps a laser-projected IR phantom keyboard made by an Israeli firm… , and the URL will be mask-burnt into the CPU, it MUST be pinged on power-up otherwise machine won’t boot.
Anyone looking to buy whatever hardware this ends up being probably has a computer and ability to surf to a site, right-click save-as an .img to a USB stick… but no, gotta add expense of Ethernet and a GPU w/500 shaders.
Sigh… hauling out my old 2600 console and cartridges … old-school but authentic experience.
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That’s not what this is, however. It’s not even clear if it’ll play the library of old Atari games, if they’ll be offered, or in what format. Instead, Atari is pitching this as a mid-tier underpowered streaming box along the lines of the Steam Machine which could play older PC games, browse the web, and stream TV and music. Which, okay, if I was looking for an Apple TV -esque box with woodgrain that looked awesome in my living room, isn’t a terrible idea. For $300, it’s bonkers, though.
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Agreed on both points, I love when games are really experimenting with the capabilities of the machine, rather than making a cookie cutter copy of a preexisting game. SNES had a lot of stuff that played with the new capabilities, the multiple layered backgrounds, the soundtracks etc. Dune for pc comes to mind on this, i remember being really excited about having a SCSI drive and the capabilities to hear the improved soundtrack. Interesting to see what still holds up after all this time; also, with the advent of ‘pixel art’ I think it’s helped to really appreciate these titles for what they are.
I think that was the sweet spot for me. There was something imaginative still about the VGA art way back. The wider color palette but still relatively low resolution was evocative and beautiful, but still left room for the imagination.
Hence why, as much as I loved subsequent Monkey Island games, the best ones were MI 1 and 2 with the CD Audio and VGA support. The CD Audio made those games much richer than even the voice support did.
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You can get a 2600 emulator on Google Play and ALL 2600 ROMS together are still a pretty small file =).
It got one of the worst cumulative reviews I’ve ever seen on Steam. 22% positive.
My bad! I skimmed it and read that it was a Linux box, saw something about 2600, and automatically filed it with the many retro emu projects out there. But yeah, I wouldn’t pay that amount for a streaming box either.
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Indeed- the 7800 port was way better then the 2600 version.
I mean, that’s the real shame and failure of this thing – I think 99% of its target audience would rightfully assume when looking at it that it’s a snazzy retro-hip emu box for 2600/7800 games, and would happily drop $100-ish on it at Christmas. But when you see the specs and its intended use, and the price… cripes. For $300, I could buy a PS4 or several Linux boxes, put some woodgrain on the sides, and play all the Atari games I want.
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Lol yes! I want to be a fireman… errr pirate!
In '77-78 I spent hours every week playing Breakout on an arcade box at 30th Street Station in Philly. If Atari could reproduce that experience - including the sounds of the station, but maybe excluding the smells - I’d buy it in an instant.
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For that you need to make a MAME cabinet:
That’s not mine, but I’ve made a few over the years. With a little curating you can get literally every game from whatever era you want. I don’t actually play mine that much but it’s always priceless to watch people play whatever game they were playing all the time when they were 14 or whatever, and seeing the really specific memories come washing over them. The smell of the pizzeria that hosted the machine, the dingy carpeting, the endless hunt for quarters, etc.
Get an old arcade cabinet, ideally one where the game doesn’t work anymore, gut it, put a computer in it (doesn’t take much, anything P4 or better will do), personally I like to run Lubuntu Linux but even Windows will do, I like the Attract Mode front end, and spend a few weeks making the thing look indistinguishable from the old arcade machines. Except that this one has every goofy old arcade game ever made. Hacker time well spent!
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Where is the part that produces the warm soft pretzels?
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While eBay is OK for this, I highly recommend that anyone who likes arcade games should seek out arcade auctions in your area. They’re wonderful. Huge warehouses or arenas filled with rows of arcade machines (and jukeboxes and ticket machines) in various working condition. Take one of those extension cords on a reel and you can plug anything in and try it out. You can get an arcade cab in good condition (without a working game) for cheap – price depends on what game it is.
arcade auctions
Ha that sounds awesome. I’ve also had good luck on Craigslist, especially just finding people who obviously sell games for a living, since they probably have some unrepairable junkers in their shops that make perfect MAME cabs.
I’m still looking for that holy grail: an old cocktail cabinet (sit down type) ready for conversion.
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