Is the VCS Wifi bad or is it just me?

[Mockduck]

Exciting news FYI: I was sure my Wifi issue was bad wiring, due to getting less than .10 mb upload over Wifi previously, but pulled the Ethernet last night, made sure the system was set for Wifi, opened Chrome, and did a speed test. Got full Internet for my home (about 75mb down, 15mb up). Very cool!

 

Unfortunately, neither I nor several other people in the Discord have seen any improvement related to 4K output in AtariOS. Still absolutely not really usable. 

[justclaws]

49 minutes ago, Mockduck said:

Exciting news FYI: I was sure my Wifi issue was bad wiring, due to getting less than .10 mb upload over Wifi previously, but pulled the Ethernet last night, made sure the system was set for Wifi, opened Chrome, and did a speed test. Got full Internet for my home (about 75mb down, 15mb up). Very cool!

Great news! It's amazing the different a good driver can make!
Clearly you were affected by some edge-case with the driver, but I think everybody got a great boost.

I'm very pleased to hear that you get finally such good performance. Here, my Internet is more equal,
with 60 Mb/s download, and 25-30 Mb/s upload. I should do some LAN tests from my servers, I guess!

I have to check if the video driver changed also, or not, but certainly Atari were looking for similar gains
to the WIFI chips on the AMD video-driver a while back, they said, but it's not clear if that has happened!
I'm really curious now. ?

[PaulXMann]

So, it seems like the consensus is clear...   there are issues with Linux that the Atari OS is built on and the Realtek chips Atari chose to use in the VCS. The issues are both with poor WiFi connections, and with sub-par Bluetooth range, stability, and pairing. We know it's not the Realtek chip itself, since both WiFi and Bluetooth are fast and reliable when the system is booted into any other OS (Windows, Batocera, etc.). It's not until you boot into the Atari OS that the issues become apparent.  

 

All of which to say... when is Atari going to get on this? We either need a more recent Linux distro, or perhaps there's something at a different level that can be leveraged. But either way, there are days that the VCS is virtually unplayable in the Atari OS due to these connection issues. And that's not acceptable for a $300+ console. 

 

[justclaws]

On 10/13/2021 at 7:54 PM, PaulXMann said:

So, it seems like the consensus is clear...   there are issues with Linux that the Atari OS is built on and the Realtek chips Atari chose to use in the VCS. The issues are both with poor WiFi connections, and with sub-par Bluetooth range, stability, and pairing. We know it's not the Realtek chip itself, since both WiFi and Bluetooth are fast and reliable when the system is booted into any other OS (Windows, Batocera, etc.). It's not until you boot into the Atari OS that the issues become apparent.  

 

All of which to say... when is Atari going to get on this? We either need a more recent Linux distro, or perhaps there's something at a different level that can be leveraged. But either way, there are days that the VCS is virtually unplayable in the Atari OS due to these connection issues. And that's not acceptable for a $300+ console. 

 

The AtariOS distribution of Linux has no problems with Bluetooth or WIFI since an update some months ago.
Controller Bluetooth connection usually takes 2-3 seconds max, and range of Bluetooth is normal range for most people.

I'm getting service linespeed via WIFI, not close to the VDSL router.



Atari is not responsible for updating Ubuntu or any other distribution which a user might select, which may have
shortcomings. As I recall, I had no problem with WIFI on Fedora, and the driver support works fine under Windows.