Last week I received my Atari VCS! After three years, it was finally here in all of its glory.
It's built well, so well in fact I can't open it to install an M.2
(Apparently the first 100 or so had too much adhesive, so they won't open without pretty much ripping the whole thing apart. Mine was number 37).
I didn't buy the classic controller or the modern controller, so I can't speak to their quality.
The VCS uses its own debian based operating system called Atari OS. The store is very sparse at the moment due to it not being released to the public yet, however they do have the Atari VCS vault 1 and 2. In my opinion, these are the killer games and at this point, would be the reason you get one.
The Atari VCS vault 1 and 2 play old Atari arcade, 2600 and 5200 games. With both, you get around 150(?) old titles. While you can probably get a similar experience from emulators, I'm pretty sure they made their own in-house emulator for these games.
Missile Command Recharged on the other hand is kinda meh, even for being free. Also, Antstream Arcade sucks.
The OS itself is well thought out, it's just the little things that irk me. For instance, the "apps" they have are just links to Chrome pages. On random menus, my xbox one controller just won't work for some reason, but using the Atari VCS companion app does. It comes with 32GB of storage, but only 7GB is left to the user to install games.
You can boot from a USB and I will be installing Windows on a portable SSD after the holidays, but like I said above, no upgrading the RAM and adding an M.2 for me.
There's nothing inherently wrong with the Atari VCS, nothing that can't be fixed with updates (of which there's already been one). They've also committed to updating the OS every two to three weeks, so we'll see how that goes.
For the $200 I spent in the indiegogo campaign three years ago, it's a no-brainer. The AMD R1606G CPU (as much as I like to poke fun at it) is really capable, For the $400 it retails for at GameStop and Walmart, it becomes more of a stretch. The biggest pro currently is that you can boot any 64-bit OS on it, connect any USB accessories, and use it like a normal computer. While not the most powerful machine, it CAN push 4K, so it would be a great long term media box.
Overall, I'm really happy with it. While not the Series X killer we were obviously expecting, it's still a good console. It was originally designed to be a competitor to the Switch, and I still believe it is more powerful, however, it will probably be more of a competitor to the Intellivision Amico and the as-of-yet unannounced SNK console. A "sub-generation" of consoles.
It's built well, so well in fact I can't open it to install an M.2
(Apparently the first 100 or so had too much adhesive, so they won't open without pretty much ripping the whole thing apart. Mine was number 37).I didn't buy the classic controller or the modern controller, so I can't speak to their quality.
The VCS uses its own debian based operating system called Atari OS. The store is very sparse at the moment due to it not being released to the public yet, however they do have the Atari VCS vault 1 and 2. In my opinion, these are the killer games and at this point, would be the reason you get one.
The Atari VCS vault 1 and 2 play old Atari arcade, 2600 and 5200 games. With both, you get around 150(?) old titles. While you can probably get a similar experience from emulators, I'm pretty sure they made their own in-house emulator for these games.
Missile Command Recharged on the other hand is kinda meh, even for being free. Also, Antstream Arcade sucks.
The OS itself is well thought out, it's just the little things that irk me. For instance, the "apps" they have are just links to Chrome pages. On random menus, my xbox one controller just won't work for some reason, but using the Atari VCS companion app does. It comes with 32GB of storage, but only 7GB is left to the user to install games.
You can boot from a USB and I will be installing Windows on a portable SSD after the holidays, but like I said above, no upgrading the RAM and adding an M.2 for me.
There's nothing inherently wrong with the Atari VCS, nothing that can't be fixed with updates (of which there's already been one). They've also committed to updating the OS every two to three weeks, so we'll see how that goes.
For the $200 I spent in the indiegogo campaign three years ago, it's a no-brainer. The AMD R1606G CPU (as much as I like to poke fun at it) is really capable, For the $400 it retails for at GameStop and Walmart, it becomes more of a stretch. The biggest pro currently is that you can boot any 64-bit OS on it, connect any USB accessories, and use it like a normal computer. While not the most powerful machine, it CAN push 4K, so it would be a great long term media box.
Overall, I'm really happy with it. While not the Series X killer we were obviously expecting, it's still a good console. It was originally designed to be a competitor to the Switch, and I still believe it is more powerful, however, it will probably be more of a competitor to the Intellivision Amico and the as-of-yet unannounced SNK console. A "sub-generation" of consoles.
