zzip
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Posts posted by zzip
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19 hours ago, Stephen said:
I've been hyper critical in the past and will open minded about this. The thought of not going for the knockout every time is a good longer term strategy. But it's sad that they are still not profitable. I hope this does not turn into what AEW is (please pardon the analogy, but it fits). AEW is a wrestling promotion. Shahid Khan has more money than god. His young son was a wrestling fan from a young age. So his dad is giving him his inheritance now so he can have fun with it. Tony has built this little toy empire but has ZERO clue how to run it. It's a fun vanity project for him, but it's not a sustainable profitable long term viable thing.
Sorry for the rant. I do wish Wade the best of luck, this is a much better direction than the previous hucksters were going.
I think they were modestly profitable a year or two back.
But right now Atari seems to be trying to expand and raise their profile, they are constantly announcing something new. So it's understandable to not be profitable during such a phase, but hopefully they can turn a profit from some of the things they are setting in motion now.
18 hours ago, Matt_B said:The association with Pac Man and Space Invaders is correct, even, because Atari published the VCS versions of those games alongside many other arcade ports like Defender, Dig Dug, Donkey Kong, Mario Bros, and so on. These games were, generally speaking, more popular than the Atari-owned titles were back in the day too. Also, let's not forget all the film licenses such as Raiders of the Lost Ark, Halloween and, of course, E.T. that were games that they made but don't own.
Dig Dug, Pole Position, Kangaroo and probably some others were in the arcade with Atari logos splashed all over them. Atari was building arcade cabinets for other game developers. So I can understand why people are confused about Dig Dug. More so than say Donkey Kong or Mario Bros.
10 hours ago, Lord Mushroom said:Yes, and then he was about to say something, but stopped himself because he didn´t want to reveal market sensitive information. So maybe they are profitable now.
Anything that could affect the share price up or down is best revealed in a press release or earnings call than on a podcast where it won't reach all investors.
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On 10/7/2023 at 8:12 PM, Giles N said:
1) Powerful Atari Homebrew software
- select system (parameters) 2600, 5200/8-Bit, 7800, (Atari ST), Lynx, Jaguar, Steam/PC/Android [modern]
- select to build from templates or from pure blank,- drag and drop and build your game
- switch coding on/off, or just open the code behind your drag-and-drop game, then insert your own code (at your own risk of the game not running)
- select from a catalogue of sounds and music loops, graphics of backdrops and sprites (chararcters/vehicles), or use an inbuilt graphics editor to create your own graphics or import files, ot enter a music maker and compose your own music and/or design your own soukd effects,
- after everything is set up, you must manage one full playthrough, then you can complete your Game-project and upload it to an Atari homebrew community site where others can play it.
I don't think this is really necessary. With the tools we have now like Batari Basic, there's new homebrew projects appearing daily. If you lower the barrier to entry too far you will get a flood of low-effort content that nobody has time to play, and it will make it harder for the dedicated homebrew authors to sell their works.
Also the systems are too different. A game design tool that can target both the Jaguar and 2600 isn't going to go too deep on either.
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7 minutes ago, Flojomojo said:
I wonder what the average person thinks of the number as name? I suspect it's all Atari to most people.
Good point, it was always "Let's Play Atari". Hell, marketing couldn't decide if it was the 2600 or the VCS, and then you had your friends with the Sears Telegames models which was called neither, not to mention the odd kids with the Coleco Gemini...
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2 hours ago, NE146 said:
Pac-Man on the other hand, I've NEVER said it was a bad game or even that I "hated" it (I did not, and played it a ton), what it was, was a big shock how much it failed to bring home any essence of the arcade game.. unlike Defender above for example. Or Missile Command, or even Crystal Castles! None of those will fool anyone as being the arcade versions, but we all knew they were the arcade games scaled down for home play on the VCS. At a time when the arcade games were the kings of the video game world, we all liked the home ports to try and get a little of that excitement for each of those games in the comfort of your home. You never got that feeling at all from Pac-Man though.
Crystal Castles is another good example. Sure the levels look funny, it's hard to do proper isometric on the 2600. But it's true to the other arcade elements so it kind of works...
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16 minutes ago, Flojomojo said:
Star Wars Ahsoka had space whales
For years No Man's Sky fans demanded Space Whales. Starglider II in the 80s had Space Whales, and I doubt it originated there. There's some space whale meme I'm not up on, and Ahsoka is the latest iteration of it. Someday when I'm bored enough, I'll look into where this idea originates.
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Nice work! brings back memories of the original AtariAge Magazine from the Atari club in the 80s
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Sure, but any game with "Revenge" in the title implies that it's a sequel to something where Vradark was wronged. Will we get the prequel? "Vradark slams his finger in the door" or "Vradark was given onion rings instead of fries"?
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On 10/8/2023 at 11:04 AM, davpa said:
They do already. On top of the A/B use, the RT is for acceleration and the LT is for brake/reverse. I haven't tried a 3rd party controller (Xbox One or PS4 Dual Shock) but the Atari Modern Controller has the triggers as those functions as well.
Triggers didn't work for me on the modern controller, unless it has to be enabled somehow?
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On 9/2/2023 at 6:06 PM, Atari_JaguarVCS said:
Very interesting. I thought the 4k issue got fixed over a year ago. I remember when i used to try and play my Atari VCS 800 with the screen resolution set to 4k my VCS would start to freak out and the fan would ramp up and it would be a slide show, even navigation of the dashboard was impossible but the issue resolved when the OS was updated a long time ago now. Have you tried changing your HDMI cable? Some HDMI cables are just no good when it comes to 4k so its always recommend to get a high quality cable that supports that resolution if you don't already have one.
Depending on your setup, selecting 4K may force 4K / 30hz, and the 30hz causes the choppiness, not the 4K. This is an issue on even the PS5 and I think newer Xbox- you have to turn on certain settings in the TV and console to get it up to 60hz.
For my VCS, I used to see only 4K/30, but now I see 4K/60 is available.
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I don't know what to think of this new Lunar Lander game based on trailers. Seems like they are turning a simple "land on the moon" game into a whole space adventure. Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with it, but Atari has other space games that might be more suitable for that kind of treatment.
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10 hours ago, Atari_JaguarVCS said:
I see. I would have thought there would have been no problem getting a dev kit out to developers, from what i read on Discord a while back was that stock bricked VCS systems that get sent back to Atari just get re flashed with dev OS and sent back out to developers and that Atari was sitting on a backlog of returned systems that got bricked in the update process, so kinda weird its a case of the developer not having a development kit that's holding the game back from the Atari VCS, if that is the issue though hopefully the developer now has a development kit and we will get the game at some point. I think it would play great on the VCS, its where id be wanting to play it for sure.
When I asked about the status of Murtops- a game that was announced for VCS, David said they had problems getting the developer's VCS system through customs, that was the holdup.
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23 hours ago, guppy said:
- Bentley Bear (Atari) (Kindof a generic bear... I guess that's it from Atari's coin-op legacy? Pretty much everything else is a spaceship or a tank)
- Sir Square of Adventure (but he's just a square. The dragons ARE good and Atari and of the era AND unique; they're arguably the best Atari has.)
It's generally agreed that Bentley Bear is the most mascot-ready character in the Atari (SA) portfolio.
The characters in Adventure could have potential if they were fleshed out more in sequels. I'm sure "Sir Square" would have developed into a real character and the dragons would become less duck-like. Another one with potential would have been SwordQuest. The comics that came with those games established characters and lore that could have been used to build a SwordQuest franchise (even if the first games were weak)
One problem is Atari relied too much on licensed characters back then: Indiana Jones, ET, Superman, Bugs Bunny, Road Runner- though some of them were owned by Warner like Atari was. But now they can't use them.
But they did pick up a new villain mascot recently: Evil Otto! Looking forward to the Bentley Bear VS Evil Otto game, with cameo appearances by the Bat!
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7 hours ago, werpu said:
The 7800, I am still scratching my head on why they did it like that, it would not even have made sense if the 5200 came out ca 1980 and the 7800 in lets say 84, given the absymal sound and face it the resolution of the Maria chip was subpar to similar offerings coming out in 84 like the NES!
They didn't really plan for it, Atari had GCC making 2600 carts for them, and the GCC guys came up with the 7800 design on their own and brought it to Atari in 83. Atari was at a weird phase where they had no concept of console generations and seemed to think they could release a new console every year and be fine, they were also talking to Nintendo at the time about releasing the NES under the Atari brand, and had designs on an Amiga-based console to be released in 85...
Anyway 5200 was plagued with technical issues, high price and complaints about 2600 compatibility. Instead of addressing those they decided to kill it in 84 and offer the 7800 instead. That was probably a huge mistake that hurt Atari's reputation- killing an expensive console after less than 2 years, but we didn't have the internet back then to hear the shrieking.
I think it would be better if they told GCC to go back to the drawing board refine the design for an eventual 5200 successor in 86 or 87-- get a real sound chip, improve the high-resolution issues, for example. But there was too much disarray and lack of forward thinking for that to happen.
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3 hours ago, davyK said:
I defend it, but can understand why people who were really into the arcade game were disappointed by Pacman. Even the colour scheme alone was a bizarre choice but Atari management's rule was only space games have a black background. That alone would made such a difference re the look of the game and the visibility of those multiplexed , flickery ghosts. The flicker against that background really compromised the enjoyment. Even on a CRT with phosphor effects the ghosts were hard to see at times. But for those who weren't really into the arcade game and didn't play it that much, the game was playable as it had most of the elements albeit presented minimally.
The arcade port that disappointed me the most was Defender because the ship disappeared every time you fired and the swarmers weren't really swarmers. The disappearing ship really put me off at first but I got past that and ended up playing it a lot. I rolled both the score and the level counter playing at diff A. It was a very playable game. I even found the Easter egg myself. Clocked up a huge number of hours on it.
Stargate / Defender 2, like Ms. Pacman, was a huge improvement over the 1st game.
I was a big fan of Arcade Defender, and the 2600 version was kind of a letdown, but it didn't annoy me as much as Pac-Man. I felt like they tried on Defender and hardware got in the way. Pac-Man never felt like they tried hard enough- they deviated from the arcade in ways that weren't necessary, like the color scheme you mention.
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27 minutes ago, UHATEIT said:
"CatBox" but thats already taken. However since no one outside of the Jag community has ever heard of the catbox it would probably be alright
Catbox sounds too much like "litter box" to me
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6 minutes ago, diamax said:
Will it be available for PC also ?
Atari typically publishes to Steam so I'd imagine so.
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The people on discord really seem to like it, I'll pick it up later tonight!
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9 minutes ago, davpa said:
Join the early access test and the discussion in the NeoSprint Forums
Do you have to sign up for early access on discord or is that for feedback?
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I'm never quite sure what exactly we should expect from modern remakes. They could go in so many directions. The graphics are so primitive that you're likely to lose something by modernizing them.
And the gameplay, For the original games, I often have to ask "Is that a bug or a feature?" Not being able to run and shoot at the same time, or only being able to shoot one shot at a time in Galaxian. Many games had this "one shot" thing going on, and it's usually due to hardware restrictions or being easier to program that way rather than design choices? I suspect they weren't deliberate design choices, so I don't get upset if they don't stick to that- But on the other hand if Berzerk Recharged doesn't include the ability for robots to shoot straight through your neck, it won't feel right (again neck invincibility probably had to do with sprite collision detection rather than a deliberate design choice)
Atari has Haunted House coming out next week, I'm excited for it, I the art style looks cool. But it doesn't have a whole lot in common with the original game. In all honesty, I don't really want a modern haunted house game to look like the original with sparse rooms and a pair of eyeballs. I want something creepier. If Atari had evolved their properties over the years like Nintendo did, then modern versions wouldn't feel like a shock to the system, they'd seem more like the logical next step in the franchise. But because so much time has passed since the original release, there's going to be drastic changes that don't please everyone.
But for the purists who feel the new versions aren't true enough, the originals are still available. There's a new 2600 Berzerk voice-enhanced coming out, and I'm sure the arcade Berzerk will show up in the next Atari compilation.
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18 hours ago, MrTrust said:
Like I've said a million times, I don't necessarily want pennies-on-the-dollar access to a billion games that I could spend every waking hour of the rest of my life and never make a dent in the library. Even my own Steam collection has stuff I'll probably never play. I say I will, but life is short. I want a closed system where things are verified and dependable, yes, but that is also limited in some way. The VCS store is a ghetto, but I'm enough like everyone else in the ghetto that the games I have on there are all (or almost all) things that I enjoy and I don't get drinking-from-a-firehose syndrome with the thousands of thousands of titles and buy-it-all-for-a-dollar binge buying to stack stuff that sits unplayed.
If I saw End's Reach on Steam? Not in a million years would I pay more than a buck or two, if that. What is this thing? Looks like shit; probably some cheap asset swap. I would likely never play it. The only reason I gave it a chance at all is because it's the most interesting game to come along on the VCS, maybe ever, other VCS guys were going gaga over it (not like they don't over everything, but they really were this time). Now, I'm glad I did, because I enjoyed the hell of the game, and I can't praise it highly enough for being basically a one-man effort.
That's the thing, the kind of guys who want to put games on the VCS, for whatever reason, are the kind of guys whose games I want to have put in front of me, and I don't necessarily want to be in a walled garden, but I would like a nice fence around it. The VCS, for all its different quirks and flaws, is almost the perfect model for me, even though it's not probably economically viable. Maybe a just a liiiiiiiitle more openness, like what leech is describing, would be good, but I really wouldn't want it to be too much more so.
Yeah I agree it is cool that Atari has been able to highlight games that would have gotten lost in the shuffle on Steam/Switch.
But on the other hand, I wish I didn't have to dual-boot the VCS to switch between Atari's content and my content. It would be cool if there was an official way to add my own content to the Atari side so that I could play everything from a single dashboard. Steam has this, maybe Atari will eventually.
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On 10/5/2023 at 11:06 AM, leech said:
Yeah, that's true. I recently changed to an AMD card after finding out that something as simple as the webgtk code that the gnome online accounts software uses is simply broken on nvidia proprietary drivers, and Red Hat developers are refusing to fix it. Amazingly after that, a few other websites also started working better. Like playstation.com in Firefox for some reason now is actually usable... no clue if they make some weird 3d acceleration call, or what the deal is...
Are you certain you were using the nVidia proprietary drivers and not the Nouveau drivers? I always see weird stuff like that with Nouveau, but the proprietary drivers have been rock solid for me.
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I was messing around with terminal colors the other day and decided to see if I could make a VCS logo to use as a login banner.
I think it turned out alright so I decided to share it in case anyone else finds it useful. This should work with any Linux installed in PC mode, (maybe even MacOS). just unzip the attached file and copy the motd file to /etc. (if you have an existing /etc/motd, you may want to back it up first
sudo cp motd /etc/motdmotd = "message of the day", the contents of that file will be shown to a user when the login.
If installed correctly, you should see a banner like this when you login via ssh
Download: vcsmotd.zip
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19 minutes ago, leech said:
Yeah, I think the idea I had hear was for Atari to make more money on the sales, so they could continue to support it. Nice thing about the VCS versions; DRM Free, much like GOG. You can pluck them off the drive and play them on your desktop. Well, assuming you run Linux. Definitely would be cool if you could just install Steam straight onto the VCS/AtariOS, instead of needing to dual-boot. Ha, I still think it'd be cool to have Valve and Atari team up to make a new 'Steam Box'. The VCS is practically already that... Little Linux based game machine. Though I think at this point the Steam Deck is a bit more powerful. Maybe I'll try some benchmarks between the two. Both basically run at 720 or 800p. Which makes a huge difference.
I would have liked to see something like "Atari Store, powered by Steam" rather than Atari's own DIY store. A Steam-based store might still be Atari themed, feature Atari content, and Steam games certified to run well on the VCS (controller based, performance good) but allow access to the full Steam catalog without guarantees. Of course Valve would have to allow such an arrangement.
But still, the VCS can benefit from all the work Valve did on the Steam Deck, the new big picture mode is a lot sleeker. Whenever Atari discontinues support for the VCS, you could just install SteamOS on it, copy your VCS purchases over and are good to go
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3 minutes ago, Flojomojo said:
Frenzy is just different enough to make it worth doing, in my opinion. Then again, they haven’t done a Millipede Recharged yet.
I don't think Frenzy ever got ported to any Atari platform. I wonder if Atari would consider releasing a 2600 or 7800 version of it?
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The best interview with Atari CEO Wade Rosen to date has just been released
in Atari General
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Even if they could just get a license to release. It would be awesome to have an arcade game collection featuring both sides of Atari. Maybe they could release a few more Lynx/Jag titles as part of the deal too.
Midway stopped releasing such collections some time back.