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It will be a compact Linux based system with real wood veneer. Priced between $250-$300.
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Read more.Quote:
It will be a compact Linux based system with real wood veneer. Priced between $250-$300.
This is going to tank so quickly.
Once upon a time (in the early 80's) i liked Atari, but for so long the name seems to have been a joke.
This wont help.
I did love Atari back in the day , lets see how they get on now..
Atari is long gone. Infogrammes bought Atari then changed their name to Atari. Sucked the life out the IP and left it in the sorry state it is today.
This will plummet, seen it before, Commodore springs to mind, hoping people would buy into it because of nostalgia. Look what happened there.
Frustrating part of this is I like the idea of the product but I doubt it'll catch on and I just can't see it beating a dedicated PC with steam link (or similar) in the market place.
Don't see what they couldn't just do a mini type system with the best of their numerous machines from the 80's & 90's. Biggest problem with this is the price, I got an Atari 520 STe 3 year ago come Christmas. I upgraded the ram to 4Mb and bought the Ultra Satan external hard drive which is now filled with hundreds of games, that cost me less than what one of these Ataribox will cost.
Neat idea with good intentions but pricing is way of the mark for what you are getting
I am guessing this is aimed at the same market as the not very popular steam box idea, and won't be much different from one either, shame.
Completely agree. Plus when they say "mid range PC" and then go on about "minecraft" you have to ask what they're thinking. If you take a mid range "gaming" PC then this thing has to have some poke for a small SoC but if you take ALL PCs and take the mean performance then it comes down quite low and makes this basically a mobile phone outputting to a TV. Which already exists in the form of the Amazon Fire boxes and so on.
If Apple did this then it might have a chance but Atari doesn't have the kind of market poke it once did (it's basically a nothing now) and the fact that they're crowdfunding it shows just how little they believe in the project.
EDIT: Dunno where I got SoC from, I assume it will be given the format. Or at least a very low powered CPU with integrated GPU.
i think I want some wood veneer on my PC now......
Inwin recently showed some PC cases with wood veneer... :)
I don't think it is a bad product, but I have to wonder if it is a bad price.
Nvidia shield and the 100 Atari games pack on the Google Play store for a tenner gets you this for £200 right now.
There are plenty of dirt cheap Android boxes on Gearbest as well, including dual boot Linux ones.
It's a nice idea but I doubt they have the resources to pull it off.
SteamOS failed for a whole bunch of reasons but one key issue was that Valve did not understand the console market and tried to bring it's PC experience into a market that didn't want that.
Ease of use should be maximum priority, everything should just work, games should at bare minimum be tested against the system and auto run with the optimal settings, always require a game controller as default interface - this is why SteamOS failed as none of that was done and Valve even let keyboard/mouse games be listed as SteamOS compatible of course so long as you have the oddball Steam controller, linux ports ran bad even on official Steam Machines (sucker that I was bought one).
So Atari could make Steam work but they would have to find a way to curate content optimized for the box and get game developers on board to at least deliver a reasonably good experience, this is were they need lots of resources I doubt they have.
It comes with a back catalogue of Atari classics. Exactly like Xbox and PS have. Atari classic bundles are already available everywhere. And being able to handle Minecraft and Terraria isn't really selling it as a powerful modern console.
With PS4 Pro, Xbox One S available for about the same price as the Atari (£230) then, unfortunately, I can't see the Atari doing anything but fail.
I think that SteamOS failed because the only benefit it had was lower cost than Windows, and for gaming PC's, which typically cost a lot more than consoles, that doesn't compensate for the vastly reduced gaming library.
That said, I agree that curation and developer relations could help. However, I'd love to know the hardware for a start. If it's old AMD CPU cores, there would be a lot of need for adapting games, and it won't be that useful as a PC. If it's Raven-Ridge-based, it's likely to be a lot more attractive for the price.
Raven ridge for the price would be amazing (and probably worth getting just to put windows on it, as a media PC or similar) - I'm expecting bristol ridge. Shouldn't be too hard to get games to run on it (other than the foibles of linux), even old AMD cpu's are more than what the current gen consoles have for the CPU