The NEW Atari VCS: The Ultimate Retro Gaming Console?

Atari is, of course, a name synonymous with video games and for many original gamers, the Atari vcs 2600 was their introduction to the world of

gaming

and, to this day, the brand remains iconic and connected to those early days, now the original Atari. It left the

console

market after the launch of the Atari Jaguar in 1993, when the company was liquidated in 1998 and since then its intellectual property has passed from one company to another over the last two decades, but in the summer of 2017 a new

console

using Initially the name av

atari

box it was renamed

atari

vcs with a style very similar to the classic atari system from 1977, but instead of the many reissues and cloned systems of the classic atari, this is a new microconsole designed to play modern games and was released on the crowdfunding website indiegogo now it's fair to say that it has had a bit of a troubled development path and the team has made several mistakes along the way which have attracted bad press and skeptics in recent years and due development delays.

It took longer than expected and a global pandemic, I imagine, didn't help either. They even hired former Xbox system architect Rob Wyatt in June 2018, only for him to very publicly resign in late 2019, claiming he hadn't been paid. Six months also had a dispute with the British technology website The Register, which published a series of scathing articles even questioning the legitimacy of the project and I just want to thank Paul Keward, who is one of my viewers, a very generous viewer. in fact, because he was one of the backers of atari bcs on indiegogo, this exact one here, which he got in December of last year, he found out that he wasn't using it much and instead decided to donate it to my channel so that I I could make this video, so thank you very much, Paul, much appreciated and as happy as I am to have it in my hands.

I have to admit that the fact that Paul got bored just a few weeks after receiving it only fills me with a bit of skepticism. I'm honest, but in this video we're going to set up the machine and not only see what it's like for modern

gaming

, what it comes with, but also because I love its form factor, it's going to be the best

retro

emulation. system or dive into everything that follows now quickly before getting into that. I wanted to take a real quick moment to say a big thank you to this video. Sponsor my amazing friends at shiny now. shiny is so good that it allows you to see math and science. in a completely new way and if you are someone like me who tends to learn in a very visual way, this will be perfect for you.

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Brillante is great for the whole family, its course library is perfect for ages 10 to 110. Whatever your experience, from beginner to advanced, you will be taken on a guided tour where you will learn to think and become a better problem solver and enjoy new challenges every week, so why not jump in right now and get started? In fact, I have an amazing offer for you, so if you're quick and you're one of the first 200 people to sign up with my link which is shiny.org slash danwood you'll get 20 off your annual subscription and of course you'll support the channel supporting our sponsors and many thanks to shiny, so the atari vcs is an AMD Ryzen based machine with an integrated r1606g CPU. with four or eight gigabytes of upgradable RAM, 32 gigabytes of internal flash storage and apparently running on a custom Linux-based operating system and the console is currently on sale for 399 on their website, although I have read that it will cost less . 4 gigabyte version that only supports 1080p when it is generally released and will sell for 249.99, so depending on the model you choose, there are cheaper skus.

I couldn't find any UK pricing, although unfortunately at the time of recording this video now Paul was generous. enough to give me the 800 onyx version, the 8 gigabyte model that supports 4k video and you can buy two different controllers now there is a classic joystick that looks like the original atari that sells for 59.99 or the one I have here which is a gamepad more modern style manufactured by an outside company called power. Now you have to buy them separately or together in a package. I don't think this is included in the basic packages. Obviously, this has Paul already unpacked, but he repackaged everything back into the boxes, so while it's not a true unboxing experience, it's a very rarely used system, but at least we can see what's here, so we open it up. just sliding it. on the side here, outside of this sleeve, so it reminds me a little bit of a shoe box, but we also have a great design here, you know, the asteroid spaceship there, you know, crushing the asteroids, the atari vcs. logo on the front also there again, very minimalist which you know I like the design and everything that's on the packaging and then inside we have a foam insert to protect the console and the first thing you see is the atari vcs itself and uh just take it off here as you can see, it's actually a handy little place to put your finger and then you should be able to lift the console up, come on and yeah, it actually feels pretty good, it's got a little bit more weight to it than you might imagine. and yes it doesn't feel cheap or plasticky and that has a pretty quality feel to it I have to say so we'll look at the console in a bit more detail in a moment also in the box we have this little compartment underneath that just houses the power supply and that's all we got in the box and while we're in the unpacking mood I thought I'd take a quick look at the controller as well. that again comes in its own packaging because you can buy them separately and as you can see here this is the modern wireless controller they make version 2 of the old school joystick.

Rechargeable wireless Bluetooth for PC and mobile games with noise and LED light effects. compatible with most PC and Android systems, which is quite interesting, it's not actually locked to Atari Vcs. You can actually use it with any PC to play Steam games or something, so if you want a controller just for other devices this will work. on those also around the side there's not much on that side a little picture of the controller which I'll pull out and show you more details at the moment as you can see there their partnership with power a which is the company that makes this. and then we just have the Fuji Hitari logo on the side, so again we just remove the case here and yeah, the packaging is very similar to the console, you know, with the asteroid ship there and then we'll just open this carton. box here actually a little quick start guide on the front there again you have this foam here to protect it and then the controller here nothing more and the feel is quite nice um it's rechargeable so you don't have like a battery compartment from the looks of it there is a built-in battery um the design is obviously very inspired by the xbox from the way it looks you know the placement of the analog sticks and the action button in the center there uh the menu button and also, you know, even the fire buttons and everything, they are all very similar, the d-pad yeah, it's not that bad, I actually prefer you know a real d-pad with instructions instead of just having a puck, but um, it actually feels a little more comfortable to what it looks like in use, the analog sticks have a nice responsive feel, they feel very similar to the controls on an xbox, same buttons, very similar to those on a third party xbox one. controller, if I'm honest and it turns on there, stop charging it already, it's pretty amazing considering it's been in the box for about five months, so, yeah, not a bad little controller, you've got the side buttons and your triggers on The back also feel very similar to an Xbox One controller and there isn't much innovation there, but you know if it ain't broke, don't fix it and the more I look at this console, the more I like it.

Appearance, I mean, it's essentially a mini PC that looks like an Atari 2600, which I don't like about having that on your desktop, although now that I've unpacked it, there's one thing I've already discovered that I don't like about this and that. it's on the front here, but we have shiny plastic and yeah, as you can see, you touch it and it's a fingerprint magnet. Now I've always had a lovely relationship with shiny consoles and the PlayStation 3 was the same too. The first day you take it out of the box, clean it and put it on your shelf, it looks great and then a couple days later it's usually covered in dust, dog hair fingerprints every time you touch it, for so I generally prefer matte plastic on consoles rather than glossy surfaces. but you know, that's just individual taste and then on the top of the console here we have some grills that I think are actually just for looks, there doesn't seem to be any cooling holes on the side, yeah, nothing. there, um, at the bottom we just have um, yeah, serial information and then at the back is where the main business happens on the atari vcs and in terms of IO ports, I mean, it's very minimalist again, you know , is a micro PC in an elegant style.

It's really a case, so we have a couple more USB 3 ports on the back, an HDMI connector, Gigabit Ethernet, the AC adapter plugs in there and we have a power button that just stays in place, doesn't appear or a couple opens. There are vents here for cooling on the sides and that's very minimalist, but in terms of aesthetics, I really like the look of it, it's compact, it's neat, it looks great on your desk, but obviously the main question is how well does it work? . play so we'll set it up we'll install it and obviously to do that we're going to need the AC adapter which is here again it looks like a standard one not sure if there's any brand here um yeah it's not an atari brand it looks like it's just a standard off the shelf that's probably made in china um the plug that it has, you might be wondering about this paul told me that this came without a plug on the end and that's pretty weird because i think everything you buy in the UK comes with a molded plug since around 1991 1992 they made that law but obviously as this is done abroad maybe that rule doesn't apply but had to find an old plug that's why this one probably It dates back to the 80s or 90s to put it here, so yes, it doesn't come like that out of the box, although it does add

retro

charm. so everything is unpacked and set up and it's time to get started.

I have to say the system installation process was actually a huge headache on first power on, you get this really cool animation and logo again following the box design, it really has it. Cool asteroid theme and the first thing it will do is try to pair with the controller via Bluetooth and then you get this instruction screen that basically tells you what all the buttons on the controller do, but the question is if you've ever used an Xbox. controller, you already know how to use it, even the layout of the fire button is identical to the Xbox, if you have played a video game in the last 20 years, you probably don't need this tutorial and then we need to set our language and connect to our network Wi-Fi which again you know everything is very standard and then the system will check for updates so nothing out of the ordinary so far and you know I'm all for system updates in 2021 having regular updates is something good.

I can add new features, fix bugs and security issues and the first one didn't take long, actually about 15 minutes and then the system rebooted and we went through the controller pairing screen and tutorial again, the language screens appeared and wi-fi. again but we were actually able to bypass them and then it checked for another update and this time it found a system bios update so we rebooted later and it shows the system bios to the latest version and we got this big red warning not to power on. turn off the machine as I imagine if you probably like most PCs you have the option to lock the system and after a third reboot we get the controller pairing and tutorial screens which I went through and at this stage I got a black screen now that I just updated the BIOS, I must admit I was really nervous about doing a hard reset here in case I was still working on something in secondflat and it was after one in the morning at this point and I had to get up for work in six hours so I decided to leave the Atari on overnight and then use it again the next day and then when I was done working I came back at 6 pm the next night and turned on my monitor.

We went back to the controller setup screen, so I'm not sure how long it stayed on that black screen, but I probably gave it about 15 minutes before I went to bed, so then we checked the controller language and Wi-Fi screens. -Fi again. for updates and to my surprise he actually found another one now. I'm not sure how often they update this system. Do you know if they are doing daily updates and that's fair enough, but you know I found it quite unfortunate to get three separate updates in the space of about 15 hours, so I waited 15 minutes again, another reboot checked the controller pairing and screens of tutorials, language and wi-fi.

I'm very familiar with how to bypass them now, but luckily this time we got to the account setup stage. You can now log in as a guest, but I thought I'd create a proper account as I obviously want to use the store and check out some. from the software so we have this really big euler that I obviously read in depth after that we can choose an avatar and there's a really good selection of avatars that you can choose from here including classic atari machines like the atari 800 the st. and the atari jaguar here too, what do you know, I had to choose the atari jaguar, then you choose an account name, enter your email and again all the very common steps and it's just as complicated to do this on a controller as it is on an xbox or a playstation, but at this stage I was trying to get that immediate experience, so I hadn't connected a mouse or a keyboard yet and after you've verified your account via email, we'll send you an email.

I'm ready to see the atari vcs board for the first time and my initial impression was as slick as it looked, now don't get me wrong the design looks great but the lack of content isn't exactly surprising at first. Print now, we just have a few things pre-installed, we have the Atari Vault, which is a collection of old school Atari 2600 games, we also have the Chrome web browser and the companion mobile app setup, and that's it. I have to be honest, even the ouya made a better first impression than this one, but despite what they say, first impressions aren't everything so I thought I'd review the atari vcs vault and again it looks very stylish.

We've got some really nice intro animations and the UI gives you these really nice scrolling 3D arcade machines that you know very well and there's a great selection of classic Atari titles here and a lot of the big famous names that we all know including the titles . like missile command asteroids tempest and of course pong although interestingly not e.t and when you select one of the arcade cabinets they also give you a very nice gallery section and from here you can see old advertisements from when these machines were released and images taken from in the past , which is actually a really nice touch and gives you some nice historical context of the game and the games themselves look pretty decent, you know, as decent as a game from 40 years ago will look on a modern TV, but playing them was Not exactly the experience you get in the arcade now, I'm actually pretty decent at playing pong, believe it or not, I usually play it in places like arcade clubs, but controlling a game designed for a paddle with an analog stick on the controller was actually quite complicated. and the CPU gave me a hard time several times.

I knew where I wanted to be on the screen, but getting there was quite difficult. I know I blame the tools, but I found the same thing was happening with Tempest as well. You already know these arcade games. They were made to be used with rotary controls, they were designed for that, so when trying to control them with a modern controller and the analog stick I found it quite unpredictable, overall more glitches for me, but you know, I guess that's something that probably improvements. With practice and time, and speaking of controls, some games like asteroids deluxe here only work with the d-pad and not the analog controllers, which I find quite strange because I actually think controlling asteroids would be a little easier with the analog joystick than with the.

D-pad, but they don't really do anything here and these games are presented well, you know, they have good scanline filters on the graphics, but these are games that almost everyone already has access to, it's not really a reason convincing. go out and spend 399 on a new console but it's a nice inclusion and launching chrome from the dash brings up the atari vcs home page and then using the console itself you can't do anything there's no on screen cursor that you can move around with the controller and I couldn't see any way to open an on-screen keyboard.

Admittedly, it's not a really pleasant way to browse the web, but it's nice to have the option if you just want to jump around. and do something quickly as is, you can't really use it at all without adding your own mouse and keyboard or opening the companion app on your phone and what I was most looking forward to here was the play store as it comes. With so little software out of the box, I really wanted to buy some games and download some apps and make this a more fun experience, but getting to the store was another big disappointment.

I'm afraid I now understand that this system is barely available. to backers, but it is scheduled for general release in Spring 2021 and looking at the Atari Age forums, people there have reached out and asked and the general consensus seems to be that they are planning to release this to market in the next three. to six weeks hopefully now we've had a global pandemic and you know there's a chip shortage so I don't know if that will happen but as it stands I guess this is almost ready for release but at the time of recording this video.

As of mid-May 2021, there is almost nothing here. Now there are more Atari Vault collections here again containing old Atari titles from the '70s and '80s, which I guess is cool if you don't have them on either system yet and can. install ant stream retro game streaming service again very good but native games here are very scarce now when I record in this video there are only about 20 real games in the store and most of them look like indie clones of retro titles like you know missile command reloaded um boulder dash deluxe again even the ouya had more to offer in terms of indie games than this one and there are also plenty of apps here so you can use the usual streaming services including disney Plus, which is a nice addition considering not many smart TVs seem to have that included and you know my missus spends all day on it and the only game I really recognized from the list here is Degeneration, which is a title from back in the day. 30 years.

I used to play my friend in the past, but you know, for £10 it's a fun game and I wanted to buy something and check out the purchasing process, so at this stage I plugged in a USB keyboard to fill out these forms with a non-controller. It looks like a lot of fun and I was a little disappointed by the lack of payment options. I generally always try to use PayPal on services nowadays because it means you don't have to change your details and everything when the card expires and you get a new one and frankly I've used too many services over the years that have been breached and my card details got leaked online so I really prefer to use PayPal if I can but the only option here is to fill in your credit card details and having done that degeneracy I downloaded it in seconds you know against a pretty old game and it plays as good as ever.

It was really nice to control it on the Atari controller. A very pleasant experience. I have no complaints. this and another service you can install is ant stream now if you haven't tried it before it's actually really good it's like the netflix of retro gaming and when you open the app here they send you to antstream.com atari to sign up so they have some association there and you can choose a free model with ads or you can pay 39.99 for a one year subscription, but logging into my account on Atari showed a huge inconsistency in the user interface.

I couldn't type my login details when using my attached keyboard or using a mouse with the on-screen keyboard and in fact it looked totally different to the last time the on-screen keyboard appeared so I had to complete this again the cumbersome way using the controller, now maybe I can I've used a companion app on my phone, but I didn't try it at the time, and frustratingly, this limitation doesn't end there. I found this also applies to the YouTube app and even things like Disney Plus can't be controlled from the controller. you have to use a mouse and keyboard or the companion app on your phone which makes the media room experience very awkward and you know for services like this like Netflix it feels like the app is actually just a link to open the Netflix website.

Chrome and Stream themselves have a very good selection of retro classics that are available by selecting them with the controller. Fortunately, that works here and surprisingly the UI is a little slow and I'm not sure if that's the hardware's fault. or ant stream and many of the games I tried here work very well with the atari controller and you will be pleased to know that many of the games here also allow you to play with the keyboard which was quite nice for me because that is why I am used to to play pinball fantasies with the shift keys and it allows you to do that here and of course text adventure games, there are a lot of them on that stream and playing them with an on-screen keyboard frankly sounds horrible. but fortunately you can use your USB keyboard to play them, but this video is not an ant stream review and it is not a system seller either because you can download the ant stream client for your PC, your Mac, your phone and play the exact games there. but it is true that the atari vcs is a nice little box and works well with its controller and pc mode is another much talked about feature of the atari vcs.

This is where you can install a full PC OS like Windows or Linux and activate the machine into a full PC and there is space inside the machine to add a second m2 ssd so you can install one of those and then put Windows in there for a neater way to do it, but I just installed it on an external USB. 3 now, admittedly it was a pain to install. There are instructions online, but it's not as simple as you might imagine and when you have Windows installed, it behaves as well as you'd imagine a PC to do.

So yes, you can use it to write documents or spreadsheets for work. You know, I installed Office 365 here just for the novelty and you know how strange it is to have it running on a console. You can browse the web, but for gaming, it's not really like that. that's all impressive now, I'm not a big benchmark tester, I find them very boring, but for those who care, this is the geekbench score you'll see on the screen now and as I mentioned above, you can update this system with greater storage. put in more RAM, up to 32 gigabytes, but the big drawback is the integrated Vega 3 graphics, you can't upgrade them, which means you will be stuck with this performance, which for modern games is not much, in fact several games.

I tried to complain that this system didn't meet the minimum standard requirements even for gaming, now it handles emulation very comfortably. I installed friend forever and c64 forever and playing these old school games with the Atari controller was actually a very enjoyable experience. It was smooth and responsive and I have no complaints and I also install Steam here and you know that many of the not too demanding games also work perfectly here, but I find that in PC mode there is one thing that is quite distracting and that is the constant turning up and down. down the internal fans almost every time you start a program or do something that even slightly drains the system fans they start running for a second and then quickly spin up again, in fact I think To be honest I would prefer it if the fan was constantly on higher settings to be honest, when I had this system set up on my desktop and was trying to write this script, I actually ended up shutting down the machine due to the constant spinning up and down of the fans.

It was very annoying and the games I show here work well but they are not too demanding and in fact I have an intelligence corner in my living room connected to my TV that can play these games well and really the more I think about it , the atari vcs reminds me of the corner, it is a system on a computer with a chip that can do basic level games andThere are people who have games like cyberpunk running here on the lowest settings with little detail at 720p, but the fact is that it won't be a monster gaming rig in 2021.

Now Atari claims that this model, the 800, is 4k capable, so i thought i would bring it into my living room, hook it up to my 4k tv and try some ultras. HD content now I didn't do extensive testing here but I watched some 4k videos on netflix and streamed some 4k movie trailers on youtube and this royalty free 4k footage you are watching right now and even though the fans are in overdrive. the console pretty regularly actually handled it quite well, the odd frame drop here and there but you could definitely see it and while I was here I also took the opportunity to try out the companion mobile app which is really just a remote control on your phone and it worked quite well when navigating the main menus, I found it a little complicated in Google Chrome, especially in ultra hd mode, but many times, unless you have a keyboard and mouse connected, it is your only option for many of multimedia applications. here so after using the new Atari Vcs for a week I have pretty mixed opinions on it and to be honest my impressions are actually what I expected before getting it in many ways it's currently a bit disappointing but you know , I love seeing a classic brand like Atari back on shelves, although this is obviously not the same Atari we loved in the past and every time a project is completed, you know we have a team that has put their heart and soul into it. on this project for many years.

I really want it to succeed but I really feel like you know what it is. an ultra-compact PC in a nice case and I must say it is a very nice case, it's gorgeous and in fact I'm thinking of using it maybe as a work PC office and internet browsing and maybe a bit of audio editing or a home theater PC just because of how incredibly cool it looks you know it's a big deal and again we have to keep in mind that this console is not officially released to the public, but still only available to backers. at the time of recording this video, but obviously if they're aiming for that spring 2021 release that would mean it's imminent any week and hopefully they've been working behind the scenes and maybe working to resolve some of these issues in the next month or two, but as it stands now there is a real lack of software in the Atari store and its gaming performance puts it about two generations behind current consoles and I think the lack of custom applications and the fact that it depends Therefore, using a keyboard and mouse a lot despite not coming with one or the accompanying mobile application is a problem.

It would be nice to see real apps written for this system where you can use the controller and it feels like a native experience, but that said, it's early days. days, if they managed to get some decent ports here maybe they'll get more involved in the retro community, it would be cool to see things like an official retro arc and a maymap in the store because it's so easy to load your own roms on this system. and maybe the indie games scene could also embrace it a bit more and I think if the price was lower maybe £199-£150 which I know is expensive when making custom hardware but maybe that will happen sometime day, this would be a real nice little emulation box to house all your old school emulators.

I mean, it definitely looks like that, so in conclusion, I'm a little torn on this system. I think it has a lot of potential and feels like a very complete system. package, they have done an amazing job with the case, the packaging, the presentation is top notch and it really feels like a lot of work and attention has been put into this, it really comes down to the fact that you need more software in the end. of the day and I hope that if more of these are made they can eventually lower that price over time, but I want to congratulate the team at Atari for their work on this project.

I'm really excited to see where it goes next. and I hope to be able to do a follow up video at some point in the future and just let you know that I actually do a weekly retro gaming podcast every Friday where we bring you an industry veteran on the show and update you with everything there is . been happening in the world of retro gaming and technology for the last seven days, get it in your favorite podcast client or visit our website at retrohour.com and while you're here on YouTube, here are another couple of videos that I think You might Enjoy it thanks for watching, see you next time.