Atari VCS operating system won’t update. Help!

[MrBeefy]

On 6/22/2024 at 10:55 PM, famicommander said:

Like 50% of the posts on this site anymore are people making excuses for why we can't reasonably expect Atari to ship products that work. There's no accountability so there's no reason to expect Atari to change. 

Well tbf the VCS was always a doomed project. So they should be grateful it's getting any support considering everything. But I do agree that just buying things with a symbol on it and not because it's quality will lead to more non-quality results down the line. It shows you will buy any junk.

 

I can totally believe Atari ships out consoles that people have to flash themselves to get to work. 🤷‍♀️

 

[famicommander]

4 hours ago, MrBeefy said:

Well tbf the VCS was always a doomed project. So they should be grateful it's getting any support considering everything. But I do agree that just buying things with a symbol on it and not because it's quality will lead to more non-quality results down the line. It shows you will buy any junk.

 

I can totally believe Atari ships out consoles that people have to flash themselves to get to work. 🤷‍♀️

 

This has been the case for a long time.

 

How many broke ass AtGames consoles did they ship with Atari logos on the box that just plain couldn't manage paddle games even when they put paddle controllers in the box? The Atari Flashback Portable is one of the worst devices any "major" games company has ever put their logo on. They used a screen in it that is supposed to be viewable in portrait orientation, but they put it in landscape orientation in the device and the result is some of the most pathetic viewing angles known to man.

Look at the 2600+. It's been out for months and in order to make it semi-functional you have to do separate and convoluted update processes and install experimental software for both the firmware and the dumper. And even then, the final experience is still drastically worse than just using a PC emulator especially on the 7800 side of things.

 

Look at these crap ass MyArcade devices. The handheld unit can't even run 2600 games at full speed and literally all it does is play 2600 games. And the home device with its jank ass controllers is a pathetic joke. 

 

I'm sure the 400Mini has its own set of issues, because why would Atari bother to release something that works? No matter how many pieces of broken plastic trash they put out people on this site will justify it, do Atari's job of trying to make it semi-functional after the fact, and then happily preorder the next cheap toy they announce.

[scifidude79]

On 6/26/2024 at 1:43 PM, famicommander said:

This has been the case for a long time.

 

How many broke ass AtGames consoles did they ship with Atari logos on the box that just plain couldn't manage paddle games even when they put paddle controllers in the box? The Atari Flashback Portable is one of the worst devices any "major" games company has ever put their logo on. They used a screen in it that is supposed to be viewable in portrait orientation, but they put it in landscape orientation in the device and the result is some of the most pathetic viewing angles known to man.

Look at the 2600+. It's been out for months and in order to make it semi-functional you have to do separate and convoluted update processes and install experimental software for both the firmware and the dumper. And even then, the final experience is still drastically worse than just using a PC emulator especially on the 7800 side of things.

 

Look at these crap ass MyArcade devices. The handheld unit can't even run 2600 games at full speed and literally all it does is play 2600 games. And the home device with its jank ass controllers is a pathetic joke. 

 

I'm sure the 400Mini has its own set of issues, because why would Atari bother to release something that works? No matter how many pieces of broken plastic trash they put out people on this site will justify it, do Atari's job of trying to make it semi-functional after the fact, and then happily preorder the next cheap toy they announce.

It's not even just Atari. Not making excuses here, but this is the sad state of many companies in the current gaming space. They release something that's full of problems, incomplete, or just flat out doesn't work as intended, and then they spend a lot of time afterwards making it work like it should have from day one. Or they freaking break it with an update after release. This goes for hardware and software. There's no accountability for any of these companies, and it's really sad. Atari has a chance to be better than the competition, which is important given the niche market that they reside in, but unfortunately they choose to be exactly the same. 🙄 Every time I start to think they're actually getting better, they do something that makes me wonder why I ever thought that.

 

That zip code bug where we couldn't buy games in their store for months on end was almost the breaking point for me. I almost ditched my VCS entirely during that time. If it had gone on a month or two longer, I probably would have. At one point, I was checking daily to see if that crap was fixed, then weekly, and then very few weeks. Given enough time, I would have stopped caring if it was fixed and stopped checking. I saw a lot of the excuses you're talking about during that time, and believe me, it wasn't helpful. They were mostly given by people who weren't experiencing that bug. If I'd bought my VCS during that time, then couldn't update it without jumping through ridiculous hoops, and then couldn't buy games on top of that, it would have gone back into its box and been shipped back to Atari.

[jhd]

On 7/1/2024 at 12:00 PM, scifidude79 said:

It's not even just Atari. Not making excuses here, but this is the sad state of many companies in the current gaming space. They release something that's full of problems, incomplete, or just flat out doesn't work as intended, and then they spend a lot of time afterwards making it work like it should have from day one. Or they freaking break it with an update after release. This goes for hardware and software. There's no accountability for any of these companies, and it's really sad.

 

The best solution is to simply boycott all of them! With the exception of the 2600+ (which I have yet to unbox) and a cheap Famiclone system, the newest gaming hardware that i own is the PlayStation 2. I refuse to spend money on current generation hardware, so this saves me much aggravation and frustration. 

[MrBeefy]

On 7/1/2024 at 10:00 AM, scifidude79 said:

It's not even just Atari. Not making excuses here, but this is the sad state of many companies in the current gaming space. They release something that's full of problems, incomplete, or just flat out doesn't work as intended, and then they spend a lot of time afterwards making it work like it should have from day one. Or they freaking break it with an update after release. This goes for hardware and software. There's no accountability for any of these companies, and it's really sad. Atari has a chance to be better than the competition, which is important given the niche market that they reside in, but unfortunately they choose to be exactly the same. 🙄 Every time I start to think they're actually getting better, they do something that makes me wonder why I ever thought that.

 

That zip code bug where we couldn't buy games in their store for months on end was almost the breaking point for me. I almost ditched my VCS entirely during that time. If it had gone on a month or two longer, I probably would have. At one point, I was checking daily to see if that crap was fixed, then weekly, and then very few weeks. Given enough time, I would have stopped caring if it was fixed and stopped checking. I saw a lot of the excuses you're talking about during that time, and believe me, it wasn't helpful. They were mostly given by people who weren't experiencing that bug. If I'd bought my VCS during that time, then couldn't update it without jumping through ridiculous hoops, and then couldn't buy games on top of that, it would have gone back into its box and been shipped back to Atari.

Other than the VCS what hardware are you talking about? I've had had a Switch for around 3 years and an Xbox1 before that. I've never had a point with either that they've been broken.

34 minutes ago, jhd said:

 

The best solution is to simply boycott all of them! With the exception of the 2600+ (which I have yet to unbox) and a cheap Famiclone system, the newest gaming hardware that i own is the PlayStation 2. I refuse to spend money on current generation hardware, so this saves me much aggravation and frustration. 

Hasn't the 2600+ needed update to fix add compatibility? That puts it in line with the grievances with other modern hardware.

[jhd]

Sadly, I was unaware of this deficiency with the 2600+ when I placed my original order. As noted, it still remains in the original box until the software update issue is settled. 

 

 

[zzip]

On 7/1/2024 at 11:00 AM, scifidude79 said:

It's not even just Atari. Not making excuses here, but this is the sad state of many companies in the current gaming space. They release something that's full of problems, incomplete, or just flat out doesn't work as intended, and then they spend a lot of time afterwards making it work like it should have from day one. Or they freaking break it with an update after release. This goes for hardware and software. There's no accountability for any of these companies, and it's really sad. Atari has a chance to be better than the competition, which is important given the niche market that they reside in, but unfortunately they choose to be exactly the same. 🙄 Every time I start to think they're actually getting better, they do something that makes me wonder why I ever thought that.

I work in the software industry, and nothing would make us happier than releasing something that is 100% bug free the day of launch.   But the software gets bigger year after year with sometimes hundreds of thousands or even millions of lines of code, it integrates with more third party software libraries/services any of which can break or create instability.   That and the business often has hard launch dates that can't be skipped (because a lot is riding on them) so we often have to prioritize the bugs,  fix the worst before release, deal with the rest after release because there isn't time to fix all the known ones.   That's not to even mention the unknown ones that were never discovered in testing that come up after the product gets in user hands

 

Seeing it from the inside, it's amazing that anything works at all, haha!

 

In Atari's case my understanding the zip code issue was caused by a third party provider, and it wasn't anything Atari could fix directly, just pressure the provider to fix it, or find a replacement.

[scifidude79]

18 hours ago, MrBeefy said:

Other than the VCS what hardware are you talking about? I've had had a Switch for around 3 years and an Xbox1 before that. I've never had a point with either that they've been broken.

Most recently, there's a problem with my XBOX Series S that a lot of other people have reported where the download speed crawls along. I get about 1/6 to 1/5 the download speed I should be getting. My XBOX One downloads faster than the newer console. This happened after an update to the console last year. I've tried every suggested fix to remedy the issue and nothing helps. I even tried a factory reset on the console. After the reset, there was a mandatory update, which downloaded fairly quickly, then it was back to downloading really slowly. Given that most modern games are on the larger side, with many being over 100 GB, this issue means that a game that used to download in maybe half an hour to an hour will now take many hours to download. I saw a forum post from last December where someone said that Microsoft "acknowledges" the problem. Yet, over 7 months later, there's no fix in sight. I've seen some people say that, in some cases, I guess the console's firmware gets borked somehow. It's nothing I did, I just used the console normally.

 

Other than that, not as much specifically comes to mind on the hardware side, unless you want to go way back to something like the infamous red ring of death on the XBOX 360. But, I was talking more on the software side. I do a lot of PC gaming, and there's a bad trend of big studios just dumping games on PC that are ports of the console versions that aren't even optimized for PC. They run like garbage and people have nothing but issues with them. Some are so bad that they eventually get pulled so that they can be fixed, others just struggle along as the developers release patch after patch to try and make them playable. Or they don't even do that, depending on the studio. There are also incomplete games that are released, on PC and on console. I'm not talking about bugs as much as I am games that are just missing features or things don't work because the release was rushed. Some studios continue to work on the games after release and get them to where they should be, others get abandoned. I'm more forgiving when it's a small studio that does this, but there are a lot of instances of big studios doing this too these days.

[scifidude79]

15 hours ago, zzip said:

In Atari's case my understanding the zip code issue was caused by a third party provider, and it wasn't anything Atari could fix directly, just pressure the provider to fix it, or find a replacement.

I know, we were told that multiple times during the issue. It wasn't helpful to those of us who couldn't buy games. That went on for something like 8 months with more and more people being affected by it. They even released an update to the OS during that time when they didn't change payment options or even just add something like PayPal to the mix, which would have remedied the problem while the third party payment provider got their stuff together. I know there's probably a lot of work involved in doing that, but from our end it seemed like Atari wasn't doing much about it and just saying "it's not our fault." I'm sure there was a lot going on behind the scenes that we don't know about, but that's just because they refused to tell us anything about what was being done to fix it. Then, one day, it was just fixed. I still hold my breath whenever I buy a game on that system, until my payment goes through.

[zzip]

3 hours ago, scifidude79 said:

I know, we were told that multiple times during the issue. It wasn't helpful to those of us who couldn't buy games. That went on for something like 8 months with more and more people being affected by it. They even released an update to the OS during that time when they didn't change payment options or even just add something like PayPal to the mix, which would have remedied the problem while the third party payment provider got their stuff together. I know there's probably a lot of work involved in doing that, but from our end it seemed like Atari wasn't doing much about it and just saying "it's not our fault." I'm sure there was a lot going on behind the scenes that we don't know about, but that's just because they refused to tell us anything about what was being done to fix it. Then, one day, it was just fixed. I still hold my breath whenever I buy a game on that system, until my payment goes through.

Yeah you would think "customers aren't able to pay us" would be a top priority issue.   I don't know what happened behind the scenes there or why they couldn't add other payment options,  but it's a good example of how your problems can be caused by a third party where you have limited options other than scream at them on a daily basis.  And these days there are web of cloud services and web services integrated into every software product, any of which could be the weak link that causes an outage taking the whole thing down.  I'm amazed things work as well as they do.