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I thought functions like remote play, and game recording were run by separate chip, or at least a dedicated core of the CPU so that game performance didn't impact their ability to function

The black backgrounds got so out of control that Atari allegedly instituted a policy that only space games can have black backgrounds. That's one of the things that screwed up 2600 Pac-man

Every 80s kid knows this was the official soundtrack to arcade games, and some of us will even admit to owning the album

The synthwave aesthetic seems to be about car rides, palm trees and sunsets rendered in the IBM PC CGA color palette (yuck!). I'm not sure what's utopian about that, I'd like to live in a world where green exists

I think it would be a pretty big deal if it couldn't play Pitfall II carts. Being able to sideload the ROM is better than not being able to play the game at all.

It seems like the deluge of space games in the late 70s / early 80 was more tied to the cultural impact of Star Wars after 1977. Before that, Atari was producing games like Football, Baseball, Night Driver, Canyon Bomber, Fire Truck, Sprint. Sure they tried "Computer Space" arcade machine before Pong, but it failed.

Don't get me wrong, it's not having these issues constantly, but it happens enough that I can't imagine playing it away from home and working acceptably. One reason is the upload speed on most home internet is a fraction of the download speed. And remote play off the local network relies on your upload speed being good.

I've never tried it away from home because it's hard to imagine it would be a pleasant experience. On the home network with cabled ethernet I still get frame drops and digital noise at times

The ST had basically the same sound chip as the Intellivision. It wasn't much of an upgrade over other Atari systems, still mostly beep-boop chiptunes, but the ST had enough horsepower to play grainy samples thought that chip too. I didn't enjoy ST music until the STe came along with its enhanced sound.

Is it possible to side-load roms of carts that don't work via USB?

Those music clips art the sound of a culture that has become too technical and is losing its creativity and forgot how to do offline things. They know something is wrong so they are trying to capture the glory of a bygone era, but aren't sure how to do that. Nothing about it screams Atari. The vibe of synthwave/retrowave and the like seem more derived of Miami Vice 80s aesthetic than anything else (neon, palm trees and so forth)

Yes 5200 was based on Atari 400, but different enough so carts/peripherals from one don't work on the other. There were a number of changes that could have been made to 2600 Pacman that don't require modern tools, these seem like the easiest: - get rid of pacman's eye, and make the Pacman sprite rounder and less like diamond-shaped - make the maze colors more reflective of the arcade - make the sounds closer to the arcade: no "boing boing", should be able to get closer to "wakka-wakka" Here are changes that might require more work or exceed the 4K rom, but should still be doable with tools of the time: (they were seen in Ms Pacman) - make a maze that more resembles the arcade with tunnels on sides - intro music melody should be arcade accurate, not the 4 notes we got. - fruits not vitamin pills or whatever they were called. - better flicker management. - ghost sprite changes when blue - Pacman faces up and down when moving up and down - Pacman stops chomping when he isn't moving. I think if they had done some of the above, the game would have been better received. It would have felt like they tried. Ms Pac-man is far from arcade-perfect but it definitely feels like they tried. Pac-man feels like they didn't even try for accuracy.

I'm starting to think Atari-logo branded USB drives could be a winning product for Atari, no matter what software is put on them

Yeah exactly, that GenX dad who is hard to shop for? Surprise him with this. Of course I said the same thing about the VCS, but that never really showed up on retailers shelves so it couldn't be an impulse purchase.

It was just part of being an Atari owner, not everything came to your platform. Even publishers that published lots of games on Atari, like SSI, didn't port everything. In the case of Pools of Radiance, clearly a port was planned since it was advertised. Something happened to cause it to get cancelled. That said the ST did get a large amount of games so I don't feel deprived having owned one. My first AD&D SSI game was actually "Heroes of the Lance", but that was more action-oriented than traditional RPG. SSI had been publishing great RPG games for several years before getting the AD&D license, so I'd already enjoyed Questron, Phantasie, Wizard's Crown. The graphics on the ST version of the Phantasie series were so much better than the 8-bit versions. They showed the right way to bring an 8-bit RPG to 16-bit graphics (The ST/Amiga ports of Ultima 2/3/4 showed the wrong way, haha)

It did? In my mind, I owned Pool of Radiance, but couldn't get a copy of Curse of the Azure Bonds on ST. But when I moved my stuff over to emulators, I was never able to find a dump of Pool, but Curse is readily available. Even Atarimania suggests it was advertised for ST but never released.

I wonder how much extra it would cost to embed a 7-segment LED and select button into the cart like the cheap GOTEK drives have. (And would the 2600 be able to power this?) Still retro, but much more user friendly

Unlike the difficulty switches, DIP switches are tiny and difficult to manipulate with large fingers

I think the interest in upgrading was there- kind of. As kids, we salivated over the graphics of the CV and 5200, but the parents buying the console would balk at the cost, especially if they just bought the 2600 in the past year or so. The other issue was the 5200 had very few exclusive titles that weren't on the 2600. It needed a killer game to get people to flock to it (like Space Invaders did for 2600), and it just didn't have that. EDIT: And Atari killed the 5200 off before it had a chance to amass a compelling library. It took the 2600 3 years to get its killer app in Space Invaders. The 5200 didn't even get 2 years on the market! Yeah, it seems like Pacman came out just before 8K rom carts were commonplace. It should have been Atari's most important IP that year and they should have pulled out all the stops to get it right. Instead they just treated it like "We can slap the Pacman name on anything and it will sell!" But a better job could still be done in 4K

Morrisey (Smiths Singer) is in a class of his own when it comes to "bored/depressed melodically complaining" That said, there are two songs by him I actually like: "Everyday is like Sunday" and.. well I forget the other one. But I disagree that most of the music of that era was like that. Most of it is happier and more upbeat, and even the darker songs don't resort to Morrisey-style vocals. Well maybe the Cure is in that class...

I was looking forward to Pool of Radiance, It was announced but apparently never released on ST, so I never got a chance to play it. But even if I did get a copy, there was a good chance it would have just sat in my backlog. SSI was releasing a ton of RPGs around that time, and I didn't have enough time to play the ones I already owned plus I was going through college around that time.

I would say Raiders is even more convoluted. Without the manual, you will not get far in that game. But you don't hear complaints about it being terrible. I think it was the rumor (at the time) of large amounts of ET carts being buried in the desert that created the urban legend around ET in the games media (step 1: "it must have been terrible, why else would they bury it?" step 2: "not only was it terrible, it was the worst of all time!" step 3: "it was so bad, it single-handedly crashed the entire industry!") But what can you do? consumers were still buying 2600s in droves, but not really embracing the next-gen replacement (5200/CV) The low-price and large library made the 2600 a desired console in spite of the limitations. Atari had originally planned to replace it by 1980, but they would have missed out on the 2600's prime years had they done so. Back then, we all knew the 2600 was limited, but we also played enough 2600 games to know that a bunch of the issues plaguing the 2600 Pac-man port were not technical limitations, but design choices (color scheme, giving Pac-man an eye, sounds that don't even try to mimic the arcade, and so on)

technically New Wave is the music that came out of 'post-punk', but everyone in the US associates it with the "MTV Sound". But before MTV, came along, you did have Blondie on the charts, and Devo, Gary Numan, The Cars, and a handful of other New Wave acts. But then MTV came along and created the 'second British Invasion' because British bands tended to make more music videos than US bands at the time and MTV was desperate for whatever music videos they could get! Bands like Duran Duran are actually considered "New Romantic" rather than New Wave. And yeah I remember a lot of those bands had the big Roland synthesizer front and center, but a lot of the music was more guitar-driven and less synthy than we remember.

It is possible to use it without a mouse. You can move the mouse pointer by using the arrow keys while holding down either ALT or Control (forget which), left click is INSERT + (ALT / CONTROL) right click is the same for a nearby key. Not ideal, but it got me through a time when my mouse broke and had to wait for replacement.

Typically a Linux live usb would come with drivers for most modern hardware, so unless they went in and removed stuff, it should work on any PC. The only caveat is if you have an nVidia GPU in the other PC, the "good" nVidia driver is proprietary and needs to be installed later. It will have an open source nvidia driver though, so at least you'd get graphics. The VCS is based on AMD graphics and you don't have to worry about its driver.