Atari VCS (retail deals/discount thread)

[The Helper]

The Speaker Hat is totally useless for me but Awesome for people that wear ball caps!  I gifted mine to a friend at work and he freaking loves it!

[LevelUp]

40% off today for some shirts and hardware in the Atari online shop , if you check your emails they sent a 15% off code a couple days ago , thats a smooth 55% off some stuff , cant beat those deals , waiting on Atari OS store to drop a sale , I missed out on the holiday offerings because I needed to figure out the Flash OS situation on me walnut

[The Helper]

Does that 15 percent off code still work?  It said first 40 sales on the email I got though not the whole day.

[Goochman]

15 doesnt work - the 40% off the complete bundle with Speraker Hat might still be valid, otherwise its 20% off.

[Mockduck]

Best Buy has Modern Controllers on clearance: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/atari-vcs-wireless-modern-controller/6459042.p?skuId=6459042

[+sixersfan105]

12 minutes ago, Mockduck said:

Best Buy has Modern Controllers on clearance: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/atari-vcs-wireless-modern-controller/6459042.p?skuId=6459042

Thanks for the heads up and that's not a bad price. Doesn't beat the $0.03 that I paid at Best Buy last April on a price match that was improperly applied, but most haven't been that lucky 😎

[leech]

4 hours ago, sixersfan105 said:

Thanks for the heads up and that's not a bad price. Doesn't beat the $0.03 that I paid at Best Buy last April on a price match that was improperly applied, but most haven't been that lucky 😎

Thing that irritates me is the proprietary USB cable...

[RadiATIon]

Because I want to help Europeans acquire this machine, I import 10. This is the speakerhat Walnut Black all in bundle.  Normally it is sold 379.99 Usd excluding tax in the USA. When we add taxes, transport costs, customs clearance the price in euros reaches nearly 620 euros. I add the mickey plug to European plug adapter and update each console so that they are plug & play as soon as they are unboxed. I sell the package 400 euros plus shipping costs in UE. So it's very close to the official US price. 

 

If you are interested or know people in European Union who want to get this machine write me privately with your address that I tell you the shipping costs. 

 

If you prefer to kill 2 birds with one stone, come to the GemTOS convention in the north-east of Paris to pick it up. To register for this convention contact Emmanuel Huysman. 

Edited February 28, 2023 by RadiATIon

[Jinks]

Vcs is on sale at best buy in the states for 199.99 the balls deep bundle. 

 

[leech]

4 hours ago, Jinks said:

Vcs is on sale at best buy in the states for 199.99 the balls deep bundle. 

 

Haha, shouldn't that be the name for the NSFW sale on Steam, or for an adult toy bundle?

[Keatah]

Not sure what a ball-deep bundle means.

[schnuth]

3 hours ago, Keatah said:

Not sure what a ball-deep bundle means.

 

It's the VCS 800 All-in Black Walnut bundle:

 

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/atari-vcs-800-all-in-bundle-black-walnut/6459020.p?skuId=6459020

 

This is tempting, but how lower do you think these will get?  I missed the sale at Gamestop several months ago sadly.

[+sixersfan105]

Looks like Best Buy is offering this for store pickup only, and of course there's sales tax on top of that (unless your state doesn't have sales tax). I would match Best Buy's deal for any interested parties, as I've got a spare Black Walnut All-In that's brand new. Feel free to shoot me a PM @schnuth!

[+GoldLeader]

Seems about 200 dollars too high to me...

[Keatah]

Agreed. This is just a several-years old low-end PC at this point now.

[OldSchoolRetroGamer]

44 minutes ago, Keatah said:

Agreed. This is just a several-years old low-end PC at this point now.

[leech]

1 hour ago, OldSchoolRetroGamer said:

Funny thing is?  If Atari hadn't sold it as an open platform and it was as closed as an Xbox or Playstation, people wouldn't be saying this.  The PS and Xbox are just a few gens old PC with proprietary operating systems.

[Keatah]

Aren’t there custom parts/busses in ps and Xbox?

[leech]

14 minutes ago, Keatah said:

Aren’t there custom parts/busses in ps and Xbox?

Just as many as there are in the VCS.  All three are custom embedded chips that you can't just 'pop into a PC.'  The VCS has a custom motherboard.  The only thing that makes it PC-like is the open bios nature of it.

[Matt_B]

Naah, it's a regular Package FP5 APU. Those are also used across a wide variety of AMD-based laptops and mini PCs, so unless you're going to claim that they're not PC-like either, it really is just a bog-standard PC on the hardware front.

 

I suppose they're soldered to the board, so you can't just pop it into a PC for that reason, but the same goes for pretty much all of those other devices too.

 

For what it's worth, there's also a PC version of the PS5 APU. Don't get too excited though, as the GPU is disabled and it needs a very specific motherboard - which it's also soldered to - because in this case the package is unique.

[Keatah]

These soldered-in CPUs eliminate that expensive socket, increase reliability, improve heat dissipation, are cheaper, and have been done this way for years on laptops and phones and many other cheapened up consumer products.

 

Sockets are luxury items for the enthusiast and high-end costly processors. And besides no mainstream consumer is going to go changing out the vcs' processor anyways. Not the target audience.

[leech]

2 hours ago, Matt_B said:

Naah, it's a regular Package FP5 APU. Those are also used across a wide variety of AMD-based laptops and mini PCs, so unless you're going to claim that they're not PC-like either, it really is just a bog-standard PC on the hardware front.

 

I suppose they're soldered to the board, so you can't just pop it into a PC for that reason, but the same goes for pretty much all of those other devices too.

 

For what it's worth, there's also a PC version of the PS5 APU. Don't get too excited though, as the GPU is disabled and it needs a very specific motherboard - which it's also soldered to - because in this case the package is unique.

When I went looking for it, I never saw the same APU setup in a laptop, I did see stuff for the embedded / NUC style (that was more expensive than the VCS.)  This was when everyone kept saying it was just a raspberry Pi.  Funny enough, Raspberry Pis have gotten more expensive...

Now what would be cool is if someone could figure out how to cram a VCS motherboard into a case in the style of an 800xl...

 But the fact remains, the VCS has a custom PCB, with an AMD APU setup, and a custom case with all the airflow and such designed by Atari engineers working with AMD, just like the PS5 is.  You can't just go into the store and build your own.

This more or less necessitates that it will be old hardware, as the design, testing, manufacture and eventual shipment of the product takes time.  A PC doesn't have to deal with that as you can bump it up as you go!

If the VCS had been able to ship 1 year earlier than it did (stupid plague), I think the opinion on it could have been at least slightly better.

 

I think my biggest complaint about it (and I have the same complaint about all modern consoles) is the damn fan noise.  Consoles should be silent.  But because Intel based CPUs haven't given a crap about being silent and cool since the 386 days, I am not sure what I should expect...

[zzip]

1 hour ago, leech said:

When I went looking for it, I never saw the same APU setup in a laptop, I did see stuff for the embedded / NUC style (that was more expensive than the VCS.)  This was when everyone kept saying it was just a raspberry Pi.  Funny enough, Raspberry Pis have gotten more expensive...

Now what would be cool is if someone could figure out how to cram a VCS motherboard into a case in the style of an 800xl...

 But the fact remains, the VCS has a custom PCB, with an AMD APU setup, and a custom case with all the airflow and such designed by Atari engineers working with AMD, just like the PS5 is.  You can't just go into the store and build your own.

This more or less necessitates that it will be old hardware, as the design, testing, manufacture and eventual shipment of the product takes time.  A PC doesn't have to deal with that as you can bump it up as you go!

If the VCS had been able to ship 1 year earlier than it did (stupid plague), I think the opinion on it could have been at least slightly better.

 

I think my biggest complaint about it (and I have the same complaint about all modern consoles) is the damn fan noise.  Consoles should be silent.  But because Intel based CPUs haven't given a crap about being silent and cool since the 386 days, I am not sure what I should expect...

The fan is a trade-off for CPU/GPU power.

My Raspberry Pi 400 is completely quiet with no fan, but VCS blows it away in terms of power.

 

The VCS has a dinky fan, PS5 has a monster of a cooling device.   which is part of why that console is so large.

 

I keep hearing people claim that mobile devices will overtake PCs/Consoles in power--  not unless you want a mobile device with a massive cooling device attached to the back of it!

 

 

[Keatah]

9 hours ago, leech said:

But the fact remains, the VCS has a custom PCB, with an AMD APU setup, and a custom case with all the airflow and such designed by Atari engineers working with AMD, just like the PS5 is.  You can't just go into the store and build your own.

Does this customness enable the vcs to have any unique or special capabilities above and beyond a standard PC?

[Matt_B]

1 hour ago, Keatah said:

Does this customness enable the vcs to have any unique or special capabilities above and beyond a standard PC?

No.

 

It was all just one long and expensive exercise in reinventing the wheel.

Indeed, when you look down the list of far more powerful APUs available in the FP5 package, Atari appear to have gone out of their way to saddle it with a particularly weak one, especially when it comes to the GPU. I guess nothing shows their priorities quite like thinking that a games machine doesn't need the best one they could get their hands on. It was always destined to be somewhat underwhelming up against consoles, but if they could have worked a Vega 8 or 11 in there it might still have turned a few heads. Gigabyte made a similarly priced machine at around the same time based around the V1605B which, even if I wouldn't have recommended it as a games machine, at least showed what might have been possible. It's off the market now, because it's already been supplanted by newer and more powerful models, but the spec page is still up:

 

https://www.gigabyte.com/Mini-PcBarebone/GB-BSRE-1605-rev-10

 

For those looking for a silent mini PC, I believe there's at least one model of NUC on the market that's fanless as well as the Mac Mini. Those are just the elephant-in-the-room level options beyond the Raspberry Pi. I'm sure you could find a heck of a lot more by scouting the market. There are no current fanless mainstream consoles, although the Series S is impressively quiet for something that'll play the latest games:

 

https://www.thegamer.com/why-xbox-series-s-quietest-console-ever-owned/