+mytek Posted June 21, 2017 Share Posted June 21, 2017 Ben Sly on Gamasutra said... Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that the current Atari is a rebranded Infogrames that skinned the original Atari in its dying throes and wore its brand name. Glancing over the Wikipedia page, I'm not seeing anything that suggests that company touched hardware development nor indicates that Atari talent was retained to the modern day.Is it accurate to claim that the company last released a console in 1993 when the company has only the brand name in common? I find myself in total agreement with that last sentence. This Atari is not the one we grew up with, has none of the talent that was behind the creation of all the systems we remember and still use to this day. And this is not to say that there isn't potential in the people that make up the present day Atari, but to pretend that they have this shared past is absurd. - Michael 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+kheller2 Posted June 21, 2017 Share Posted June 21, 2017 <-- Linux user since September 1991, bootstrapped atop Minix 1.5 -Thom Thats close to my time. I started in late 91 early 92... and after "The Great ARP Storm" that took out several university residence halls around me (due to a bug in linux networking at the time) I moved to *BSD which made a hell of a lot more sense and was way more stable. When Apple started working their GUI on top of a UNIX OS I just about died and went to heaven. I completely gave up on Windows when 95 came out. And to keep this on topic, the Jaguar was the last Atari console I actually invested any amount of time or money in. The Officially Unofficial Atari Jaguar FTP Site ran for years. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
_The Doctor__ Posted June 21, 2017 Share Posted June 21, 2017 (edited) here we go with pile of that Atari isn't Atari... sorry guys all of the software and some of the game companies have been a part of each other and the talent exchanged between them all... I didn't hear the crap as one developer ate another or programmers went from one to another before.. but Gamasutra comment bias is always prevalent in my mind... It would have been nice if it were the US arm of Atari doing this attempt but it isn't. Say what you will at least they are trying and trying hard to make something of what they bought... I am certain massive opposition will come from the PS$4, M$XBOX crowd in the form of biased fan boi reviews tearing down the effort before it is revealed or seen...... If you wanted it done you could have got it on the cheap during chapter 13 etc.... but they are positive in cash flow and working hard to get the game going... can we give it a chance... or shoot it all to h*ll and continue on with what could have would have should have been Please take your ideas and concerns to that branch of Atari.... It will only help them in their quest to make things up to your expectations! Sure hope I stayed within guidelines on that... Perhaps if Nolan could have snapped it back up during the rough 2013 it would all be ok Edited June 21, 2017 by _The Doctor__ 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leech Posted June 21, 2017 Share Posted June 21, 2017 (edited) Funny thing is.. even when the Jaguar was released, there was the SNES and Genesis, the CD32 was coming out, the Neo Geo for overly rich people, and CD-i then shortly after Sony stormed in with their giant cash cow with the PSX, which oddly was going originally be a Nintendo system at one point, but they didn't want CD-ROM based, so Sony plucked them up. Much in the same manner that the Lynx was bought by Atari. So with that in mind.... maybe we are thinking about this the wrong way. Atari probably didn't develop/engineer anything, some other company probably worked on their own hardware and wanted a famous name to lead it. Edit: I really should not reply from my phone... Edited June 21, 2017 by leech 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
_The Doctor__ Posted June 21, 2017 Share Posted June 21, 2017 That's for the most part true.... nice.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keatah Posted June 21, 2017 Share Posted June 21, 2017 (edited) I think it important that we remind each other, and newcomers, that the Atari of today is not the Atari which bought all the great games of the 80's to life. It is an IP holder, a shell company. They are not creating anything new, at least they haven't to date. Edited June 21, 2017 by Keatah 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leech Posted June 21, 2017 Share Posted June 21, 2017 That's for the most part true.... nice.... Yeah, my understanding of it was that the Psygnosis guys originally approached Nintendo with the Playstation hardware as an expansion to the SNES. When they turned it down, Sony outright bought Psygnosis and turned them into Sony Computer Entertainment (or whatever they're called now). Epyx had created the hardware for the Lynx and sold it to Atari. I can't recall who, but I think the 7800 was kind of the same way? Go figure that Atari of course did something dumb back in the day and wasn't the distributor of the NES. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tschak909 Posted June 21, 2017 Share Posted June 21, 2017 Thats close to my time. I started in late 91 early 92... and after "The Great ARP Storm" that took out several university residence halls around me (due to a bug in linux networking at the time) I moved to *BSD which made a hell of a lot more sense and was way more stable. When Apple started working their GUI on top of a UNIX OS I just about died and went to heaven. I completely gave up on Windows when 95 came out. And to keep this on topic, the Jaguar was the last Atari console I actually invested any amount of time or money in. The Officially Unofficial Atari Jaguar FTP Site ran for years. With me, it literally went like this: Spring 1990... I had UNIX on my Sun3/60. I had UNIX on my Amiga. I kept my Atari 1040ST as it was, as it was my music workstation (didn't have a TT030, although now I regret not getting one), and I had a NeXT cube running NeXTSTEP 2.0... ...and I had a 386 running MS-DOS...but I had been running DesqView/X to actually make it USABLE. My PC became basically another X terminal most of the time to my other systems, while if I needed to run Lotus 1-2-3, or something else, maybe a game whatever, I could do so in another window. I fucking hated Windows, Windows 1.0 was a joke, as was 2.0 and its /286 and /386 variants... 3.0 was somewhat usable, but it had terrible performance, and multitasking anything was guaranteed to blow everything up... I _REALLY_ have to hand it to Quarterdeck...they made DesqView/X which made a PC into a usable system, and it worked amazingly well, all the way from the first version to the last version...but Windows was more successful. ugh. It was horrific, but it was a machine I needed to have... I wanted a UNIX on it, badly. So, the process began... Priced SCO UNIX (and XENIX).... it was going to come out to roughly $5000 for a copy _WITH_ X11 and TCP/IP networking. OUCH. Then I priced BSDI... $1500 .... ugh. I had spent a chunk of change on Amiga UNIX, and didn't feel like getting fleeced there, either. Bill Jolitz's 386BSD hadn't happened yet... It was still Net/2 at that point, and everybody was screaming for SOMEBODY to put together a usable kernel... and at that point I tried Coherent... $99 for a binary unix-work-a-like... it worked...but it didn't feel right... and GNU tools had lots of problems at that time compiling on Coherent, emacs was a bear to get working right. so somebody pointed me over to comp.os.minix, and I thought...oh ok...a teaching UNIX... with source code...a teaching book, and the whole OS on a couple of floppies...$150...bought that... and spent the next 9 months patching the living hell out of it... Why did it need to be patched? Well... GNU tools wouldn't run out of the box on it... and I found out very quickly that MINIX was indeed an operating system to teach an operating systems theory class.. It was elegantly simple, easy to understand, and that came at a cost of some very wonky behavior, the biggest of which, was the I/O was implemented as a single threaded server running in user space. Why is this a problem, you ask? Because ANY time you were doing _ANY_ I/O, didn't matter, screen, floppy, or hard disk, ALL OTHER I/O...STOPPED... this included screen and keyboard. This meant, if you were using emacs, and you found yourself doing a compile, YOU HAD TO SIT THERE and WAIT FOR IT TO FINISH. Was most painful. Right about that time, Linus makes his announcement that he's working on a kernel, and I download it... doesn't do much... boots... prints "aaaaaaaaaaaa" on one screen.... "bbbbbbbbb" on another....but hey, it's running in 80386 protected mode! A couple months pass and... holy crap...they have bash running on it....and tools start to trickle over. GNU toolkit, bit by bit, and stuff starts running...next thing I know, there's an init...and then wow ok...stuff's actually running on this thing...by September 1991, this was... around the time of 0.10... things were running and working, and the version number suddenly jumped to 0.95....and the next year things just flew by at a massive clip... next thing I see, Tom's Root Boot... the BOGUS distribution.... but I knew things had reached a usable point, when I saw that first SLS and not much later, Slackware floppy stack...running better software than I was running on my Sun at the time... I literally missed 386BSD by weeks. If it had been available, I might not have gone with Linux. Of course as we all know 386BSD split into FreeBSD and NetBSD...while Theo de Raadt went and split NetBSD into OpenBSD...and the rest is history... -Thom 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keatah Posted June 21, 2017 Share Posted June 21, 2017 My first serious want of a PC was around the 286 era. It was from AT&T or Leading Edge or somesuch similar computer. Anyways, the system had Xenix on it and it was being sold at the local computer warehouse. Had I gotten into that OS at the time I may never have went the Windows route. Or at least I'd have relegated Windows to a VM today. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
_The Doctor__ Posted June 21, 2017 Share Posted June 21, 2017 (edited) true Xenix and Posix are also blasts from the past making windows look like a play thing with a messy gui and way off topic we go again.... Edited June 21, 2017 by _The Doctor__ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keatah Posted June 21, 2017 Share Posted June 21, 2017 That's ok, at least it is more interesting conversation compared to the same regurgitation of non-facts and pure speculation. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Stephen Posted June 21, 2017 Share Posted June 21, 2017 Yeah, my understanding of it was that the Psygnosis guys originally approached Nintendo with the Playstation hardware as an expansion to the SNES. When they turned it down, Sony outright bought Psygnosis and turned them into Sony Computer Entertainment (or whatever they're called now). Epyx had created the hardware for the Lynx and sold it to Atari. I can't recall who, but I think the 7800 was kind of the same way? Go figure that Atari of course did something dumb back in the day and wasn't the distributor of the NES. To me, Atari is the 2600 and 8-bit computers. The in-house innovation then stopped. 7800 was developed by GCC, Lynx was done by Epyx, Jaguar by Flare 1. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leech Posted June 21, 2017 Share Posted June 21, 2017 Don't forget the ST was done by engineers from Commodore, though to be fair, the 2600 and 8-Bits were helped along by Jay Miner, who was then moved over to Commodore. Such a weird industry, if you thought of engineers as wives and companies as husbands, it'd be one big cuckold after another... 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zzip Posted June 21, 2017 Share Posted June 21, 2017 Ben Sly on Gamasutra said... I find myself in total agreement with that last sentence. This Atari is not the one we grew up with, has none of the talent that was behind the creation of all the systems we remember and still use to this day. And this is not to say that there isn't potential in the people that make up the present day Atari, but to pretend that they have this shared past is absurd. - Michael It's not, but then the Tramiel Atari wasn't really the Atari that made the VCS a household name either, they got rid of most of the former employees by that point. But is 2017's Atari the Infogrames Atari or isn't it? Did someone else buy the name in the bankruptcy? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zzip Posted June 21, 2017 Share Posted June 21, 2017 Yeah, my understanding of it was that the Psygnosis guys originally approached Nintendo with the Playstation hardware as an expansion to the SNES. When they turned it down, Sony outright bought Psygnosis and turned them into Sony Computer Entertainment (or whatever they're called now). . I believe they became Sony Liverpool Studios and were shut down a few years back. Sony did release a remake of 'Shadow of the Beast' last year, but it was developed by a different studio. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zzip Posted June 21, 2017 Share Posted June 21, 2017 Nice, I've really been a Linux user since around '96-'97. There was a guy on Reddit that called it a "Trash OS" because you "have to compile everything." Dude try using it 20 years ago or something? I don't compile hardly anything anymore, and I work with Linux professionally. Hell, even most of the things that are custom and compiled are done with a simple click of a button, and a yum or apt install.... Silly people. Oddly, my first Unix-y setup was on my Mega STe where I actually had managed to get X11 and Emacs running. Though time has made my memory fuzzy on if I had managed to get them to work both at once, I remember Emacs being a HUGE memory hog (considering 4mb of ram). I installed MintNet and X11 on my ST after I got my first PC with Linux. Thought it would be cool to have the ST networked with the Linux system and run remote X11 apps. But I discovered that the ST's 640x400 screen was much too small to display most X11 apps, and SLIP networking over the ST RS232 port was too slow too. I did manage to have Netscape Navigator displaying on my ST's X11, but it just wasn't practical to use. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mclaneinc Posted June 21, 2017 Share Posted June 21, 2017 (edited) So an 'Atari' interviewed in the Sun Newspaper says Atari is releasing a new hardware console for the first time in years but yet again almost no other info.. Its not likes there any real hype because there's not so far a real product to get hyped, just showboating and little else.. Personally i thing we are going to get an really poor let down with an item that isn't what it seems to be, who would fund the Atari in name only item, a complete fool? Now is not the financial time to be getting in to a console business that is already packed and even has the under powered Switch managing because of the Nintendo BIG names its playing with glowing but not flawless reviews, Atari have nothing to bring to the party apart from the name and there's not many free lunches to dine out on the Atari name these days. Edited June 21, 2017 by Mclaneinc 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
whisperer_in_darkness Posted June 22, 2017 Share Posted June 22, 2017 Concerning game consoles the old brand and a nice logo is pretty much all Atari has at this point. And some money. Not a lot of money compared to Microsoft and Sony, but enough that they should be able to build a decent product if the idea is good. I think It needs a some kind of gimmick to separete itself. If it turns out that only special thing about the Ataribox is the Atari logo... I'll be disappoint. Not really surprised, but disappoint still. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Csonicgo Posted June 22, 2017 Share Posted June 22, 2017 In my opinion, Atari would have been better off teaming up with Nintendo or something, not making another console. But who knows? Maybe it's amazing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leech Posted June 22, 2017 Share Posted June 22, 2017 I believe they became Sony Liverpool Studios and were shut down a few years back.Sony did release a remake of 'Shadow of the Beast' last year, but it was developed by a different studio. It was the reason I wanted a PS4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+mytek Posted June 22, 2017 Share Posted June 22, 2017 (edited) I came across this by accident while Googling for something entirely different today, and thought that it might be of historical interest since it tells the story of yet another effort to create a new console by Atari employees following the Jaguar. So what happens when Ex-Atari engineers involved with the Jaguar go off on their own to create a 128-bit game console DVD build-in? It's called the Nuon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lpViVaMtrM Article: Remembering Nuon, the gaming chip that nearly changed the world—but didn’t - Michael Edited June 22, 2017 by mytekcontrols 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Stephen Posted June 22, 2017 Share Posted June 22, 2017 I came across this by accident while Googling for something entirely different today, and thought that it might be of historical interest since it tells the story of yet another effort to create a new console by Atari employees following the Jaguar. So what happens when Ex-Atari engineers involved with the Jaguar go off on their own to create a 128-bit game console DVD build-in? It's called the Nuon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lpViVaMtrM Article: Remembering Nuon, the gaming chip that nearly changed the world—but didn’t - Michael I bought the Samsung DVD-N501 when it came out. They soon released an SDK for it, and I did a bit of development work. Got to chat with a few of the original design team. Good times. Of course, I bought it for Jeff Minter's VLM2. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+mytek Posted June 22, 2017 Share Posted June 22, 2017 (edited) I bought the Samsung DVD-N501 when it came out. They soon released an SDK for it, and I did a bit of development work. Got to chat with a few of the original design team. Good times. Of course, I bought it for Jeff Minter's VLM2. Wow all kinds of Atari stuff I somehow missed . I had to look up Jeff Minter to see who he was, and was surprised to find out that he was the creator of Tempest 2000. Very interesting guy, would have been fun to be a part of those times and working along side him. Jeff Minter - Wikipedia minotaurproject https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcQQ9NryVH8 - Michael Edited June 22, 2017 by mytekcontrols 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Stephen Posted June 23, 2017 Share Posted June 23, 2017 Wow all kinds of Atari stuff I somehow missed . I had to look up Jeff Minter to see who he was, and was surprised to find out that he was the creator of Tempest 2000. Very interesting guy, would have been fun to be a part of those times and working along side him. Jeff Minter - Wikipedia minotaurproject https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcQQ9NryVH8 - Michael My Jeff Minter saga: 1985 - Atari 8-bit Colourspace 1988 - Atari ST ColourSpace 1988 - Atari ST Trip-A-Tron 1993 - Atari Jaguar, Tempest 2000 1995 - Atari Jaguar CD, VLM 1998 - Nuon, VLM2 2005 - Neon (VLM3) XBox 360 2007 - Space Giraffe XBox 360 2014 - TxK PSX Vita 2016 - Polybius PS4 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leech Posted June 23, 2017 Share Posted June 23, 2017 Damn, you mean I'm going to have to buy a PSVR now? I already have a Vive.. Polybius looks cool, but it looks more like a game than a VLM, right? 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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