Im sure that loading screen is the entire cartridge being downloaded into memory to run in the emulator. No way the cartridge is actually read from during the game. Even though the games are small, those chips on the cartridge probably can't transfer that fast when downloading the entire game.
That's what the 2600+ seems to do, too. That's probably why it can't play any games with non-standard bank switching or expansion hardware (like Pitfall 2 or the Supercharger)
The roms are more than capable of reading almost instantly. While the speeds are slower than roms today, we are still talking about random access times capable of keeping up with a 6502. 2716's are rated at around 450ns at worst. Thats reading an entire 8k rom in 4ms, less time than it should take to notice it. I suspect the time may be booting up an operating system then running the emulator.
Atari's current CEO is a very smart guy, and understands this kind of prodicts is not about money, but rebuilding Atari name, and linking the company past to its present, creating goodwill towards their products. It is not an easy task, but they are nailing it so far.
What if they actually started making modern consoles again... ? And they were actually really good? (Not that it would be that hard. The current console landscape is so damn awful.)
@@arnox4554 There’s barely any demand… only a tiny percentage of video game players are even aware there’s anything wrong with the current landscape, and of that small crowd, only a tiny percentage of them are holding out for a fresh new console free of all that triple-A, gambling mechanics, season pass nonsense. The mainstream big video game companies have carefully trained the entire customer base like Pavlov’s dogs (or Skinner’s rats) to the extent that the kind of system you’re thinking of would be rejected. I doubt even 10% of MVG’s discerning audience would actually buy such a console (although I’m sure you and I would be part of that 10%).
@@happyspaceinvader508 "There’s barely any demand… only a tiny percentage of video game players are even aware there’s anything wrong with the current landscape" Uhhhhh, yeah they are VERY much aware considering the general console userbase is tanking and there's more PC players than ever. Because that's exactly what these major console manufacturers did. Transform their consoles into shitty PCs that they have total control over, but nobody's buying anymore. Except for Nintendo. The only console manufacturer that seems to have even SOMEWHAT of a clue of what they're doing seems to be Nintendo only. And I'm sure I don't need to remind you just how much Nintendo killed it in sales this console generation. And that's just with the Switch being, what I would consider, merely an alright console and nothing more.
I didn’t even know about this pivot from the company until this video. I was upset when I found out they owned Nightdive, but now I’m feeling more confident about it.
@@arnox4554For all its flaws, the Switch did so much right-or delightfully different-that it’s still selling well after almost a decade. It’s kind of insane 😵💫
The Megawin chip is not the SOC, it's a controller chip that interfaces with the cartridge. The SOC is under the heatsink on the righthand side and uses a Rockchip SOC like the 2600+.
I saw that big heatsink and then when MVG said it's that tiny chip that is the SoC I was thoroughly puzzled. I wonder how he could miss that chunky heatsink right there.
Came here to basically say that. It's a black or blue chip clone that is dumping the rom and sending it to the main SoC. I didn't even know this existed so I'm going off what I could see.
Back in the summer of 1982 I was 14 years old. I mowed lawn all summer long so i could buy a Atari 2600 for $200 and a black and white 19 inch tv for $99. It was the very first console I had. It was so much fun. I still have it somewhere. When the Atari 7800 I wanted it so bad. It looked so much better, but unfortunately we couldn't afford it.
Similar: my mom got us Atari 2600 and later Vic20, but what I really wanted was C64! I had a buddy in 1980 who had his own CBM Pet. I worked weekends earning $3.50 per hundred pound sack, peeling and chipping potatoes into French fries, then soaking & hauling up a flight of stairs. Good days I’d get 600 lbs = $21 nearer to my C64. In those days it cost $400 for the computer, $400 for the monitor, and $400 for the disk drive. Anyway, $42 per weekend usually, so I had all the money after 30 weekends = 8 long months. (Well, longer, because I had to pay my own bus fare + my own arcade and slurpee costs. It took awhile. Later on I discovered you could buy a PONTIAC FIREBIRD for $400 but I had blown all my dough!!! 😂)
We had a 2600 growing up and I think that we had ours break and my Dad wasn’t able to fix it for some reason (or didn’t want to) and we got the smaller re-released version of the 2600 that had similar styling to the 7800. Then we got the 7800 when that came out because compared to the Nintendo, we had a ton of games for the 2600 already and my Dad probably saw the value of getting newer hardware to replace the old stuff. I still have my original 7800 and all the games, and a CRT with the RF input so I can’t easily play it-but if I didn’t have that TV or if it dies on me, I’d definitely be interested if it plays original cartridges. The only thing I haven’t seen, but WANT BADLY are a couple of new sets of paddles. The originals were so flaky and I worry I’ll break them if I use them, but 4 player games like Warlords was the most fun I had playing console games as a kid until Super Bomberman with a multi-tap or Goldeneye. It’s funny looking back at how much of an “oof” decision it was to get the 7800 over the Nintendo, because they both have the same chip in them and if you compare specs they looked very much on par as far as capabilities go-but almost nobody made games specifically for the 7800. We had whatever handful of those we could find, and those were the only ones we could use that pause button on.
Woah, now this is what i call timing. Just this weekend i found my old Atari 7800 in the basement, which i thought was lost for over 10 years (of course it still works like a charm) and now you drop this. It makes me so happy to get my earliest video game memories revived two times in a few days! ;)
As someone that played on Atari 2600, 5200, and 7800 as a kid, this is beyond epic to me! My grand parents, of all people, had each console. I am pretty sure my grandmother bought the 2600 used, then she upgraded to a used 5200 (I got the 2600), and then to a used 7800. I had a blast with all three, but the 7800 was the console I played the least, the 5200 and 2600 I had the most time on and had my favorite games. Enduro and Pitfall on the 2600, Star Raiders for the 5200. I would so love to buy one of these just so I can relive my 2600 days and get reintroduced to the 7800.
Same here, still have all my consoles with 100's of games, if you read the history on the release on the 7800, it came out later, like in the NES time frame, not a ton of titles were released for the 7800, it was a great system if it was released when it was originally going to be....
As memory got cheaper and we had huge caches, the boundary between reading and dumping disappeared. A process is reading from a storage medium, but what's actually happening is that it's fetching data from a cache that the OS has dumped into memory.
I figure the same. If they'd been clever, they would have increased the BOM cost by a buck or two and thrown some flash memory in there and just cached ROMs after the console had seen it once.
Mmm if the retail box is not like the one you received I don't think it should be worthy of praise. Of course companies will do everything in their power give a positive impression to reviewers...
I grew up in the 80s, I don't think modern audiences will accept/stand for waiting 15 seconds to play a ROM that's a few KB in size. And then play such rudimentary games (by today's standards). That Influencer Box looks reeeeally nice though! Shame it's unavailable for regular people to purchase. Appreciate the honesty in the review. Cheers! 🍻
@@jinxterx That would make sense if he turned it off and back on. He hot swapped the games with the OS already loaded. This is not an OS level issue but a game level issue.
Regrading the megawin microcontroller. My guess is that thats just handling the IO of the cart. A bridge between the Cart and the real SoC running the emulator (which is under the heatsink on the other PCB).
It is obvious that the embedded system is on the black PCB on the side, probably a Linux that explains the initial loading time. The chip on the connector board is only to read the I/O and the cartridge.
my thoughts too, seems like the RAM and the OS flash is on the black PCB and the microtek chip is just a micro controller running the IO to the cardridge and the controllers as well as the front buttons. Hope it get's hacked. Might be a neat, useful dumper and maybe one stop emulation box for Atari / 8bit systems if the USB-C port has data lines.
@@KrunchyTheClown78 I don't consider unlicensed games to be part of a console's library, and I suspect most people interested in this system at retail don't, either. I'd go even further and say that most people interested in this system at retail don't know what the word homebrew even means. Furthermore, if you count homebrew, how do you count it? The number of unofficial games made for any console is in the tens of thousands if you set the bar low enough.
@@WhiskeyNixon doesn't really matter. I count any game that is complete, and can be played from start to finish. Bentley Bear's Crystal Quest is a homebrew that Atari is selling with the 7800+. The C64 has thousands of homebrew games made for it even when it was still being sold retail.
@KrunchyTheClown78 I don't consider it homebrew if Atari is publishing it. That's official. If any game being complete increases the library count, then by your metric the game I made for Amiga when I was eight years old that consisted of no more than guessing a number from one to ten should be added to the library count. I just don't feel that's right. Or maybe I made a game in the Amiga library. 🤷🏼
The only real review I saw on RUclips. The rest even edit the video to take off the loading. Even people I trusted, I believe the box was too beautifull to complain about anything. Thanks.
Nice to see Atari Love here, something which is lacking & seems to get a pass more often than not. The 7800 had encryption on their games to combat the shovelware which happened on the 2600. We're lucky the 7800 is getting more love since the encryption key was also lost on a tossed Atari ST hard drive! Thankfully Hasbro released the keys for the Lynx, Jaguar, & the 7800. Flash cartridges work on the 2600+. They should work on this, too.
my first computer was an atari 2600, my mother used to play it too when we competed for the high score on centipede when she was pregnant with my younger sister
I have a huge soft spot for the 7800. I was the only person in my town to get one in 1986. It played all my 2600 games (except Starmaster) and I got Pole Position II (the pack in game), Ms. Pac-Man, Robotron 2084, Joust, and Xevious. It was two years before I even saw a NES, and it blew me away. Especially Xevious. Food Fight came later and it was a great game. I don't remember it running that slow. It might be the Atari XE version. The Atari XE was apparently a European version of the 7800 that was also a personal computer. The Atari XE version of Food Fight is part of the Atari 50 compilation, which is very disappointing. I often wonder why Atari didn't port some of its bigger arcade games like Gauntlet or Road Blasters. Ninja Golf, Dark Chambers and Fatal Run came out way too late in the systems life...the SNES was coming out not long after those games were released.
Atari XE is not based on the 7800 it's based on the 800/600xl (Atari 8bit home computers), the 5200 is closer in hardware to the 800/600xl. MVG actually mentioned the Atari XEGS in the intro if you missed it.
Tengen brought many of there arcade games to the Lynx later. The 7800 has a nice library, Midnight Mutants is my personal fav! the 7800 had a ton of power, was more capable than the NES, and Master System.
The XE GS console was a 65XE computer without keyboard (but you could add one). Both XE GS and 7800 were released in Europe. Atari don't have the rights of arcade games post 1984 (Warner Bros. has heredated them from Midway) made by Atari Games/ Tengen like Gauntlet, Pit fighter, Paperboy, Roadblasters, Marble Madness, etc. because they were two separate entities at the time.
At that time, Atari had already split. The arcade games went with Atari Games, and the consoles and home computers went with Atari Corp. Also, Atari Corp was too cheap to care about the 7800. It only got a small release of about 5000, then when The Crash happened,they shoved what hadn't sold into a warehouse. It got sold later as a weak response to the NES, but Atari was still cheap and would barely even let game companies buy dev boards.
I have a 7800 from my childhood with a milk crate of games. I remember connecting it through RF and good 'ol channel 3. Being able to plug those same games into a "modern" console is ridiculously appealing. The load times are a pretty big ding against it, but still... PS. Food Fight is one of the best games ever.
I loved that game so much. I was 14 in 1982 when I got my 2600. I played River Raid so much. I've lost the game through the years, but really great memories. Thank you
As an old Commodore-head I do find resistance to this from the NES and Raspberry Pi guys amusig. 7800+ is right up my alley. Lots of games I missed in the 80s that Ive enjoyed and my kids like even the 2600 games - simple like Combat just works when games these days are a flash of colors and red notification icons.
Oh man, the 7800 was the first console my Grandad bought and was my gateway drug into gaming. So many awesome games, and it even had Asteroids in there if you booted it up without a cartridge.
Why would I pay for hardware that’s just emulation when I can emulate on devices I already own? The vast majority of Atari’s catalog is not fun to play. And the games that are happen to be more fun on a system like the NES. This is purely nostalgia. My kids love retro games but won’t play below NES.
Is the NES really that different? The overwhelming majority of NES games are shovelware trash. It's the same for the Gameboy, GBA, NDS, PS1, PS2... all these console libraries are largely padded. And just like all of them, there is a core group of games for Atari 2600 and 7800 that are genuinely fun.
100% agree. It's aimed at people that like to collect these old systems to look at on their shelves. They don't really think someone is going to sit down and play all 58 games that were released for the system.
I bought the 2600+ last year. I had never played an Atari cartridge in my life but was curious about the IP and wanted to explore the library. I've amassed about 70 games so far and I really love the thing. That said, the 7800+ doesn't offer enough to me to want to buy it. The pause button and the latest firmware are big bonuses, but the 2600+ can also have it's firmware updated. What I'm more excited about are the wireless controllers they're releasing, and the homebrew games they're giving official cartridge releases. All told they are definitely doing a great job rebuilding the brand and I'm totally here for it.
If you want to play Breakout, Night Driver, Warlords etc you need the 7800+. The 2600+ was using the analog inputs built into the Rockchip ARM-based microcontroller and as a result all paddle games are unplayable due to extreme lag. There is no fix because the Rockchip analog inputs can't respond quick enough in real time. The solution was to build a proper analog circuit onto the board and that's the 7800+....
The Atari 5200 did backwards compatibility but it was through a quite large adapter if that counts as the first console to do it. The adapter is practically an entire 2600 that goes in the cartridge slot.
I had one of those adapters for a while. Worked well enough, but made it difficult to find somewhere to put the already-bulky 5200. Intellivision and Coleco offered similar 2600 add-ons
The 2600 module was also incompatible with the original 4-port 5200 because the cartridge slot originally wasn't designed for it. There was only one revision of the 4-port that could work with it, and I only ever saw two of those boards in dozens of 5200s, so I suspect it was a service mod that could be special-ordered as a replacement.
@@8bitwiz_ I must have one of those because mine worked on it before I did the s-video mod on mine. The serial number has an asterisk at the end of it too. If I remember correctly, it wasn't super hard to mod your 4 port to make it work with a little soldering.
One of the coolest things to me is that all their new cartridge releases and controllers (including this wireless one) will also work on the ACTUAL vintage consoles
Yep, these are all new molds. And there are a number of microchips and components in both the console itself as well as the wireless controller. These devices do not cost nothing or next to nothing to produce, even if done affordably. People also completely disregard economies of scale. This is a niche product for a niche audience. The price is very reasonable for what you get - a modern solution to play vintage and new cartridges on modern displays.
That Food Fight is definitly the PAL version. I think there is a menu that can be accessed without a game inserted to enable 50hz mode. Hold down the Select and Start buttons on the console with no game inside. I'm not sure if turning on that mode will help, but it's worth a try.
I'm getting one for Christmas and I'm super excited. I haven't been this excited for a gift since childhood. I've been having a blast buying 2600 and 7800 games. Snagged some classics recently and really looking forward to playing them come Christmas day!
I kept waiting to hear what games it has built in that you can play without a cartridge, and then slowly came to realize there aren't any. what the hell
My cousins in Europe grew up with the Atari 7800, because it was cheaper than NES, and Atari actually had a handful of Nintendo games like Mario Bros, Donkey Kong Jr, Ice Climbers! This console looks cool, but I wish they actually sold them in stores like GameStop, I’m not buying the console online and risk someone in delivery, damaging the package!
Atari and Plaion have been fantastic supporting the 2600+ via firmware - very engaged in their support and information flow. They also engaged a number of devs at AtariAge who have significantly improved 7800 support in particular. Would be great to see the loading dumping speed improved but is what it is - 2600 games do load much faster though.
You know I never thought about it that much, but Sony's packaging really is a generation behind a lot of competitors both big and small. It's like opening an old VHS player.
I noticed during the video that you mentioned Food Fight running at 50fps compared to other titles running at 60fps and there may be two explanations here. The common sense explanation which you mentioned is that the game could very well be the Pal version which was packaged. Another explanation however is that the game has a feature that was a first which was a "killcam/replay". The game would remember certain levels and replay them which was very innovative at the time. I could consider it demanding enough that the game would have to run at a lower frame rate. I admittedly still play Food Fight on my Atari 7800 from time to time and watching this review has made me want the 7800+. It's a no brainer to me.
I would argue that the new VCS wasn’t forgotten as such, certainly not for Atari fans anyway. Updates and games are still being released for it. I think it is nice thing to have the opportunity to play eg the modern Recharged series and collections like Atari 50 on an actual Atari console. We’ll get less nice new things if everyone just does the sheeple dance and says “the said thing”. Forgotten is probably the wrong word to use around Atari devices and people who like Atari as the formative memories created were so strong and resultant nostalgia are the sole reason Atari still exists today.
It's cool but i have to agree it's more aimed at the casual Atari fan or collectors. As a 7800 homebrew dev my biggest gripe is the ProSystem emulator used. I believe some compatibility work has been done but the emulator was dormant for a long time and far from accurate. The A7800 emulator is much more faithful and i understand it would have been tricky to port. As an enthusiasts id rather just use A7800 on PC. Either way i like the direction Atari is heading and would be a neat system to own
I never owned a 7800. I did have a 5200 which had an addon device released that plugged into the cartridge slot and allowed 2600 games to be played, but I never owned that and I wouldn't call that true backward compatibility. It was basically a 2600 that plugged into the 5200 for power and I guess it passed video through the 5200 system. Having 2600 compatibility truly built-in to the 7800 was a nice feature.
The 7800+ has a settings menu to adjust games to 50hz or 60hz, I'm not sure why he skipped the settings menu. It also has several screen filter options.
I've still got my Sears-branded Atari 2800 (basically a 2600 with 4 joystick ports) and around 75 cartridges. It mostly stays packed away these days but I break it out every 5 years or so. One thing that really stood out to me was that the controllers in this are nothing like the original 7800 joysticks (for the North American market), which were elongated with the buttons on either side. I can understand why they'd use the European version, but for someone who wanted to relive the experience, it wouldn't be the same without using the same controllers.
The original 7800 joysticks were horrible because of the buttons on the side. It's anti-ergonomic. Your thumbs can't both hold the controller AND press/release the buttons without bringing on some wrist pain. That's an experience that I don't want to relive. But the 5200 was worse, because it not only had side fire buttons, but it also had a non-centering joystick, TV remote style buttons before people figured out you couldn't use bare tin contacts, and that row of buttons on top that would wreck the controller if you tried to open it without removing the cover for that row. That and fifteen wires in its cable instead of just five. (one wire goes bad and the controller is ruined) As for Sears, they just had to be different. They also had their own labeling for many 2600 games, and even their own version of the Intellivision.
If you have memories to this system and love these old games, the system itself looks awesome. The built quality looks great, in a world where everything has to be cheap. IF, yes IF, I would be an Atari Player, I would go for it. Just to have such a good looking device in my collection.
The loading times are probably this bad because it is trying to rip the rom from the drive with an underpowered processor. Doesn't look like they have some form of storage to cache stuff into easily. So RIP.
If I had to guess - the load times may have to do with the internal hardware of the cartridges themselves. Assuming that they are actual original hardware cartridges (and not just some adapter connected to a USB or flash drive) this could very well be down to hardware. I'm not saying that pulling data off of a ROM chip is going to be slow, but hey, maybe there is some weird internal circuitry that causes it to be dreadfully slow. Or the internal RAM/storage is just incredibly slow and out of an abundance of caution, is resized or repartitioned each game so they don't have to worry about piracy and dumping games to the console itself. Just some thoughts - I'm no expert.
I love your videos. I am thankful that you mentioned the effort put into the packaging for the review copies. However, if that is weighing the thoughts and score of a review, but customers never receive that kind packaging (thank you for pointing that out in the video), then why does it matter at all? It seems a bit manipulative to have early review copies have amazing packaging to boost scores, then customers get the crappy packaging. I'm not saying you don't deserve it, it's just a bit dishonest on the retailer's part. Review copies should be what to expect when anyone would purchase a copy.
The 7800 is one of the most impressive 8-bit era consoles, especially when in comparison to the then popular console when it was being designed, the NES. Such a shame that it had been shelved and only released by the mid to late 80s, when the NES took hold of the market.
Yeah the graphics on some of those games rivals the best graphics the NES was capable of with hardware tricks, in games like SMB3 or Kirby's Dreamland.
Agreed, the 7800 was powerful enough to do Super Mario World, and if you really wanna push the hardware, it could also handle Link to the Past. The 7800 was a bigger jump over the 5200, than the 5200 was over the 2600. Very impressive machine.
TLDW: its basicly a emulator with a integrated rom dumper, if you want to spend your money on a 7800 get a 7800 not a 7800+ where the rom is streamed from the cartridge rather than dumped to memory witch means no loading screens. Its also cheaper but still compatible with atari+ series games and controllers.
The original has a proprietary power brick which is becoming harder and harder to find, and also relies on RF output. Those are some big obstacles for a lot of people. This is a convenient way to play vintage cartridges on modern displays.
@@autoneuroticit’s no more convenient than any other emulation device. Sure it plays your dumped cartridges, but you could dump your cartridges(or get the rom another way) and load them on a better, more powerful machine that costs half the price
@@autoneurotic Most tvs in the us support ntsc input, and im sure someone recreated the power adpator by now. If not, you can figure out the voltage and amprage and solder on usb-c.
I have around 80 or so Atari 2600 and 30 7800 cartridges. My old Atari 7800 mostly works, but these consoles are falling apart, the plastic they used was cheap and has become very brittle over time. I've been looking forward to this, due to better video output, controller, and ease of use.
I went from the Atari 2600 to the NES, so I never even played the 7800. Nobody I knew growing up had one either. So it would be interesing to see what I missed...
My dad bought me and my brother a 2600 in 1981 (still have it) and that was the only console I knew until my NES. A kid from my church had a 5200, and I remember hating the controller, and the games didn't feel like a huge improvement (at least in my elementary school mind). I remember reading about the 7800 coming out, most likely from a magazine I was reading at the grocery store while waiting on my mom, but at that point I had moved on from that ecosystem. This system looks very cool for nostalgia points to have for a home console museum, but I just see me sticking with my ROM library and emulation. Although, the 2600 backward compatibility is somewhat appealing.
Wait, wait, wait. Hold the phone. Are you telling me that Atari just made the superior EU 7800 controller WIRELESS, and it still works via a 9-pin connector? I'm about to order one of these controllers just to use it on my Amiga, C64, and Ataris! This has so many uses!
I would LOVE to see a video about how the old Atari's (like the 2600) displayed graphics, similar to your videos about the Gameboys and DS. There are some well known homebrew and rom hacks (such as the Halo for 2600 game) that your community might have an interest in
that vid already exists. not by mvg but there are several including one with David Crane (Activision founder and game creator of many great games for the 2600)
My Harmony Encore cart works great with my Atari 2600+. If you set it in single game mode and leave the USB cable attached, you can push a new ROM to it and it's just like swapping the cartridge. I don't have my 7800+ yet, but I think it will work the same.
It costs money to manufacture these things and have them shipped. There are several microchips in these devices not to mention they needed to cut steel to produce the molds for the housing. I think this is a very reasonable introductory price.
Because it's emulation and not FPGA, it probably needs to rip the whole rom from the cartridge and then play the game rom from ram, not the cart itself. I'm just throwing out ideas here, but maybe the cartridge itself is the bottleneck, not the console. If the cartridges can only be read so fast, then no matter what they do to the console, there is no way to improve the loading times. For example, if you plug a really old usb flash drive or SD card, it can only read/write so quickly, no matter how powerful or optimized your PC is due to the limitations of the USB/SD/game cartridge.
I remember having an Atari 5200 just shortly before getting a NES somewhere in 1988 or 1989. I had a bunch of games, probably around 30. The ones i remember most are Q-Bert, Pac-Man, Popeye, Pitfall, Mario Bros, Donkey Koing, and Pengo. Once i got my NES i put it in a plastic bag and would sporadically played a bit. The NES was vast improvement over my 5200.
I got an Atari 2600 for free from a neighbor who was getting rid of their old stuff. came with some games. it was cool setting it up on an old crt but i never had any fun with it as the games were too primitive for my liking, so the system is now in a box somewhere in my mom's place lol
I had a 2600 growing up. Played a ridiculous amount of hours on it, but even I can't go back and play any of the games for longer than 5 minutes without getting bored. It's really a "you had to be there" thing. It doesn't hold up today, and these emulator systems are far more likely to be shelf decorations, rather than things that actually get played.
I'm actually impressed by the 7800+... conceptually, particularly that it plays the old cartridges *and* that Atari has licenced honebrew games and is selling them as"new" cartridges for the system. Something about a 7800 and new cartridges being available in stores in 2024 tickles my fancy, as an eighties kid lol
emulation uses the same data in the roms that were originally inside a cart. On a PC it's like that and in the 2600+ and 7800+ it's exactly the same but instead of you downloading the roms off the net you insert a cart and the console downloads the rom into the internal memory. They are really doing this for 2 reasons. 1 - to allow people to play old collections of carts and 2 - to allow them to sell more re-released new carts. Atari is a business and the only reason businesses exist is to make money. This is also the reason why they don't allow multi-game carts to work. They could easily support them but they want to sell you carts and make even more money. The reason for almost everything is money ;-)
@@g4z-kb7ct - Fair enough, lol... I wish I had my old carts from when I was a kid. We lost my childhood home to flooding and had to move, leaving behind a lot of core-memory stuff.
I didn't own a 7800 growing up, we had the 5200. So I have no nostalgia attached to this one. It looks cool, but I'm probably going to save my money for something else. But thank you for the informative video and stay safe out there!
This video brings up nothing but nostalgia. Seeing Berserk was a flash that is for sure. I am 42 and it is crazy to think I have been playing since I was 2-3 years old. It does not take much to start off with Ms. Pac-Man.
Pausing the game at any time doesn't mean it's not FPGA-based emulation, but the loading screens basically confirm it's using software emulation, even without checking their website.
I've grown up playing a 2600 Atari but never saw or really knew of the 5200 and 7800 versions because we had all moved onto NES and Sega by that time. I had to learn about them by watching AVGN
Atari was always something my friends had, but not me. My family's first console was actually a ColecoVision which, of course, could play Atari 2600 games which an expansion module. Within a few years, we actually had way more 2600 games than ColecoVision games. But that was as far as I went with Atari - didn't care for the 5200 nor the 7800. By that time, I had an NES which offered a far more enriching experience.
The analog has been fixed. The original crappy Rockchip in the 2600+ can't do real-time analog so they added a special circuit to the board that can do real-time analog feedback.
Not sure who the target market is for this thing. Aside from the aesthetic value (which I cannot deny), you’d expect 38 years to be long enough for a dedicated fan from back in the day to work out how to play it on these same emulators on their device of choice.
Im sure that loading screen is the entire cartridge being downloaded into memory to run in the emulator. No way the cartridge is actually read from during the game. Even though the games are small, those chips on the cartridge probably can't transfer that fast when downloading the entire game.
That's what the 2600+ seems to do, too. That's probably why it can't play any games with non-standard bank switching or expansion hardware (like Pitfall 2 or the Supercharger)
The roms are more than capable of reading almost instantly. While the speeds are slower than roms today, we are still talking about random access times capable of keeping up with a 6502. 2716's are rated at around 450ns at worst. Thats reading an entire 8k rom in 4ms, less time than it should take to notice it.
I suspect the time may be booting up an operating system then running the emulator.
could've just dump the cart to internal flash first time, then used that next time instead of loading from cart.
I bet that is Linux loading In its entirety and then launching the emulator that reads the cartridge
It's just like what the retron systems do also
Atari's current CEO is a very smart guy, and understands this kind of prodicts is not about money, but rebuilding Atari name, and linking the company past to its present, creating goodwill towards their products.
It is not an easy task, but they are nailing it so far.
What if they actually started making modern consoles again... ? And they were actually really good? (Not that it would be that hard. The current console landscape is so damn awful.)
@@arnox4554 There’s barely any demand… only a tiny percentage of video game players are even aware there’s anything wrong with the current landscape, and of that small crowd, only a tiny percentage of them are holding out for a fresh new console free of all that triple-A, gambling mechanics, season pass nonsense.
The mainstream big video game companies have carefully trained the entire customer base like Pavlov’s dogs (or Skinner’s rats) to the extent that the kind of system you’re thinking of would be rejected.
I doubt even 10% of MVG’s discerning audience would actually buy such a console (although I’m sure you and I would be part of that 10%).
@@happyspaceinvader508 "There’s barely any demand… only a tiny percentage of video game players are even aware there’s anything wrong with the current landscape"
Uhhhhh, yeah they are VERY much aware considering the general console userbase is tanking and there's more PC players than ever. Because that's exactly what these major console manufacturers did. Transform their consoles into shitty PCs that they have total control over, but nobody's buying anymore.
Except for Nintendo. The only console manufacturer that seems to have even SOMEWHAT of a clue of what they're doing seems to be Nintendo only. And I'm sure I don't need to remind you just how much Nintendo killed it in sales this console generation. And that's just with the Switch being, what I would consider, merely an alright console and nothing more.
I didn’t even know about this pivot from the company until this video. I was upset when I found out they owned Nightdive, but now I’m feeling more confident about it.
@@arnox4554For all its flaws, the Switch did so much right-or delightfully different-that it’s still selling well after almost a decade. It’s kind of insane 😵💫
Wish you could buy the influencer set in that box. It would be an excellent gift set.
The Megawin chip is not the SOC, it's a controller chip that interfaces with the cartridge. The SOC is under the heatsink on the righthand side and uses a Rockchip SOC like the 2600+.
@@theretropal this intuitively makes more sense.
I saw that big heatsink and then when MVG said it's that tiny chip that is the SoC I was thoroughly puzzled. I wonder how he could miss that chunky heatsink right there.
Came here to basically say that. It's a black or blue chip clone that is dumping the rom and sending it to the main SoC. I didn't even know this existed so I'm going off what I could see.
I like this channel, but this review feels a little rushed.
Mvg fell off
Back in the summer of 1982 I was 14 years old. I mowed lawn all summer long so i could buy a Atari 2600 for $200 and a black and white 19 inch tv for $99. It was the very first console I had. It was so much fun. I still have it somewhere. When the Atari 7800 I wanted it so bad. It looked so much better, but unfortunately we couldn't afford it.
Similar: my mom got us Atari 2600 and later Vic20, but what I really wanted was C64! I had a buddy in 1980 who had his own CBM Pet. I worked weekends earning $3.50 per hundred pound sack, peeling and chipping potatoes into French fries, then soaking & hauling up a flight of stairs. Good days I’d get 600 lbs = $21 nearer to my C64. In those days it cost $400 for the computer, $400 for the monitor, and $400 for the disk drive.
Anyway, $42 per weekend usually, so I had all the money after 30 weekends = 8 long months. (Well, longer, because I had to pay my own bus fare + my own arcade and slurpee costs. It took awhile. Later on I discovered you could buy a PONTIAC FIREBIRD for $400 but I had blown all my dough!!! 😂)
We had a 2600 growing up and I think that we had ours break and my Dad wasn’t able to fix it for some reason (or didn’t want to) and we got the smaller re-released version of the 2600 that had similar styling to the 7800. Then we got the 7800 when that came out because compared to the Nintendo, we had a ton of games for the 2600 already and my Dad probably saw the value of getting newer hardware to replace the old stuff.
I still have my original 7800 and all the games, and a CRT with the RF input so I can’t easily play it-but if I didn’t have that TV or if it dies on me, I’d definitely be interested if it plays original cartridges.
The only thing I haven’t seen, but WANT BADLY are a couple of new sets of paddles. The originals were so flaky and I worry I’ll break them if I use them, but 4 player games like Warlords was the most fun I had playing console games as a kid until Super Bomberman with a multi-tap or Goldeneye.
It’s funny looking back at how much of an “oof” decision it was to get the 7800 over the Nintendo, because they both have the same chip in them and if you compare specs they looked very much on par as far as capabilities go-but almost nobody made games specifically for the 7800. We had whatever handful of those we could find, and those were the only ones we could use that pause button on.
Woah, now this is what i call timing. Just this weekend i found my old Atari 7800 in the basement, which i thought was lost for over 10 years (of course it still works like a charm) and now you drop this. It makes me so happy to get my earliest video game memories revived two times in a few days! ;)
Freaky when that happens
As someone that played on Atari 2600, 5200, and 7800 as a kid, this is beyond epic to me! My grand parents, of all people, had each console. I am pretty sure my grandmother bought the 2600 used, then she upgraded to a used 5200 (I got the 2600), and then to a used 7800. I had a blast with all three, but the 7800 was the console I played the least, the 5200 and 2600 I had the most time on and had my favorite games. Enduro and Pitfall on the 2600, Star Raiders for the 5200. I would so love to buy one of these just so I can relive my 2600 days and get reintroduced to the 7800.
Same here, still have all my consoles with 100's of games, if you read the history on the release on the 7800, it came out later, like in the NES time frame, not a ton of titles were released for the 7800, it was a great system if it was released when it was originally going to be....
Ninja Golf is criminally underrated. I would love a full HD remake of that game on current consoles.
You have no jaw, thus the beard. Having a jawline is criminally underrated!
there was a remake made for phones that was recently sunsetted. you can still download the APK if you have android
@@prezidenttrump5171Spoken by someone who can't grow a beard.
I suspect "Loading game..." really means "Dumping ROM" here.
As memory got cheaper and we had huge caches, the boundary between reading and dumping disappeared. A process is reading from a storage medium, but what's actually happening is that it's fetching data from a cache that the OS has dumped into memory.
I figure the same. If they'd been clever, they would have increased the BOM cost by a buck or two and thrown some flash memory in there and just cached ROMs after the console had seen it once.
As he said in the beginning of the video it does use software emulation
Mmm if the retail box is not like the one you received I don't think it should be worthy of praise. Of course companies will do everything in their power give a positive impression to reviewers...
Ninja Golf looks fun. It looks exactly like the kind of game that would appear in the background of a Simpsons episode.
I think any company worth their salt would appreciate your no BS approach and take any criticism on board and make the necessary changes
I grew up in the 80s, I don't think modern audiences will accept/stand for waiting 15 seconds to play a ROM that's a few KB in size. And then play such rudimentary games (by today's standards). That Influencer Box looks reeeeally nice though! Shame it's unavailable for regular people to purchase. Appreciate the honesty in the review. Cheers! 🍻
Jeepers - even with some super DRM unpacking each cartridge, it should still load a game in milliseconds.
Yeah the load times are boggling
It's got to load the operating system first.
@@jinxterx That would make sense if he turned it off and back on. He hot swapped the games with the OS already loaded. This is not an OS level issue but a game level issue.
The term ‘OS’ is used VERY loosely here. This ‘OS’ should load instantly.
I don't get it. Bentley Bear is 144 KB uncompressed. How can it possibly take that long to copy/load?
The Atari 2600 was my first venture into the world of videos games as kid back then.
Still happily gaming now at the young age of 38.
Regrading the megawin microcontroller. My guess is that thats just handling the IO of the cart. A bridge between the Cart and the real SoC running the emulator (which is under the heatsink on the other PCB).
It is obvious that the embedded system is on the black PCB on the side, probably a Linux that explains the initial loading time. The chip on the connector board is only to read the I/O and the cartridge.
I do think so as well.
@@artur...cordeiro >It is obvious
No so much to MVG 😛
my thoughts too, seems like the RAM and the OS flash is on the black PCB and the microtek chip is just a micro controller running the IO to the cardridge and the controllers as well as the front buttons. Hope it get's hacked. Might be a neat, useful dumper and maybe one stop emulation box for Atari / 8bit systems if the USB-C port has data lines.
Yeah that was very werid of him to assume that was the actual soc, which clearly is not
As ubiquitous as emulation is for the 7800, there should have been a greatest hits or top 50 games packed in with this system at this price.
50 games is nearly the entire 7800 library.
@@WhiskeyNixon 59 games is the size of the original library, but homebrews have expanded that number to around 150.
@@KrunchyTheClown78 I don't consider unlicensed games to be part of a console's library, and I suspect most people interested in this system at retail don't, either. I'd go even further and say that most people interested in this system at retail don't know what the word homebrew even means.
Furthermore, if you count homebrew, how do you count it? The number of unofficial games made for any console is in the tens of thousands if you set the bar low enough.
@@WhiskeyNixon doesn't really matter. I count any game that is complete, and can be played from start to finish. Bentley Bear's Crystal Quest is a homebrew that Atari is selling with the 7800+. The C64 has thousands of homebrew games made for it even when it was still being sold retail.
@KrunchyTheClown78 I don't consider it homebrew if Atari is publishing it. That's official.
If any game being complete increases the library count, then by your metric the game I made for Amiga when I was eight years old that consisted of no more than guessing a number from one to ten should be added to the library count.
I just don't feel that's right. Or maybe I made a game in the Amiga library. 🤷🏼
My first home console was my dad’s old 2600… so many memories on that system playing with my dad, he passed last year. This upload takes me back ☹️
The only real review I saw on RUclips. The rest even edit the video to take off the loading. Even people I trusted, I believe the box was too beautifull to complain about anything. Thanks.
Nice to see Atari Love here, something which is lacking & seems to get a pass more often than not.
The 7800 had encryption on their games to combat the shovelware which happened on the 2600. We're lucky the 7800 is getting more love since the encryption key was also lost on a tossed Atari ST hard drive! Thankfully Hasbro released the keys for the Lynx, Jaguar, & the 7800.
Flash cartridges work on the 2600+. They should work on this, too.
Send reviewers the nice box and the people actually paying the crap box…
Yeah that’s kind of shit
@@mindthreatx The normal 7800+ box is still better than the PS5 Pro box 😂
@@Joey-The-Frog True that!
Especially cause he's making his value assessment based off what he actually has seen and not the retail box's internals.
It's how promo items work. Unfortunately, in this case it seems like a real slap in the face when it's just a nicer box
Atari made the 2024 game of the year, Yar's Rising.
Wayforward made that. Atari just published. And it's alright. I wouldn't call it game of the year but it's enjoyable
hope it has a spot to keep my rolling rock in
That was the 5200
my first computer was an atari 2600, my mother used to play it too when we competed for the high score on centipede when she was pregnant with my younger sister
How young is your younger sister now?
@@deltakid0 34, happily married lol
Mine was the 2600 as well, got it in around 83', my mum used to love playing asteroids.
@@djhumanrights ...hopefully not to each other, lol
The 2600 is Not a Computer.
I have a huge soft spot for the 7800. I was the only person in my town to get one in 1986. It played all my 2600 games (except Starmaster) and I got Pole Position II (the pack in game), Ms. Pac-Man, Robotron 2084, Joust, and Xevious. It was two years before I even saw a NES, and it blew me away. Especially Xevious.
Food Fight came later and it was a great game. I don't remember it running that slow. It might be the Atari XE version. The Atari XE was apparently a European version of the 7800 that was also a personal computer. The Atari XE version of Food Fight is part of the Atari 50 compilation, which is very disappointing.
I often wonder why Atari didn't port some of its bigger arcade games like Gauntlet or Road Blasters. Ninja Golf, Dark Chambers and Fatal Run came out way too late in the systems life...the SNES was coming out not long after those games were released.
Atari XE is not based on the 7800 it's based on the 800/600xl (Atari 8bit home computers), the 5200 is closer in hardware to the 800/600xl. MVG actually mentioned the Atari XEGS in the intro if you missed it.
Tengen brought many of there arcade games to the Lynx later. The 7800 has a nice library, Midnight Mutants is my personal fav! the 7800 had a ton of power, was more capable than the NES, and Master System.
The XE GS console was a 65XE computer without keyboard (but you could add one). Both XE GS and 7800 were released in Europe. Atari don't have the rights of arcade games post 1984 (Warner Bros. has heredated them from Midway) made by Atari Games/ Tengen like Gauntlet, Pit fighter, Paperboy, Roadblasters, Marble Madness, etc. because they were two separate entities at the time.
At that time, Atari had already split. The arcade games went with Atari Games, and the consoles and home computers went with Atari Corp. Also, Atari Corp was too cheap to care about the 7800. It only got a small release of about 5000, then when The Crash happened,they shoved what hadn't sold into a warehouse. It got sold later as a weak response to the NES, but Atari was still cheap and would barely even let game companies buy dev boards.
I have a 7800 from my childhood with a milk crate of games. I remember connecting it through RF and good 'ol channel 3. Being able to plug those same games into a "modern" console is ridiculously appealing. The load times are a pretty big ding against it, but still...
PS. Food Fight is one of the best games ever.
Atari is what got me started. My mom showed me her fav River Raid n the story begins right there. Also loved keystone kappers
I loved that game so much. I was 14 in 1982 when I got my 2600. I played River Raid so much. I've lost the game through the years, but really great memories. Thank you
@robertw31968 I didnt play it till the early 90s. I was like 5. I hear ya with my memories.
I still have my boxed woody atari 2600 from '83,its in immaculate condition 😊
As an old Commodore-head I do find resistance to this from the NES and Raspberry Pi guys amusig. 7800+ is right up my alley. Lots of games I missed in the 80s that Ive enjoyed and my kids like even the 2600 games - simple like Combat just works when games these days are a flash of colors and red notification icons.
Oh man, the 7800 was the first console my Grandad bought and was my gateway drug into gaming. So many awesome games, and it even had Asteroids in there if you booted it up without a cartridge.
Why would I pay for hardware that’s just emulation when I can emulate on devices I already own? The vast majority of Atari’s catalog is not fun to play. And the games that are happen to be more fun on a system like the NES. This is purely nostalgia. My kids love retro games but won’t play below NES.
This!! Atari games are barely even... games, most of the time
tbf the 7800 is more of an nes type system at least graphics wise
It's very expensive to be nostalgic 🤷🏼♂️😅
Is the NES really that different? The overwhelming majority of NES games are shovelware trash. It's the same for the Gameboy, GBA, NDS, PS1, PS2... all these console libraries are largely padded. And just like all of them, there is a core group of games for Atari 2600 and 7800 that are genuinely fun.
100% agree. It's aimed at people that like to collect these old systems to look at on their shelves. They don't really think someone is going to sit down and play all 58 games that were released for the system.
What would have really been cool is if they had an online marketplace that you could buy and download games, as well as use the cartridge slot.
I bought the 2600+ last year. I had never played an Atari cartridge in my life but was curious about the IP and wanted to explore the library. I've amassed about 70 games so far and I really love the thing. That said, the 7800+ doesn't offer enough to me to want to buy it. The pause button and the latest firmware are big bonuses, but the 2600+ can also have it's firmware updated. What I'm more excited about are the wireless controllers they're releasing, and the homebrew games they're giving official cartridge releases. All told they are definitely doing a great job rebuilding the brand and I'm totally here for it.
If you want to play Breakout, Night Driver, Warlords etc you need the 7800+. The 2600+ was using the analog inputs built into the Rockchip ARM-based microcontroller and as a result all paddle games are unplayable due to extreme lag. There is no fix because the Rockchip analog inputs can't respond quick enough in real time. The solution was to build a proper analog circuit onto the board and that's the 7800+....
The Atari 5200 did backwards compatibility but it was through a quite large adapter if that counts as the first console to do it. The adapter is practically an entire 2600 that goes in the cartridge slot.
I had one of those adapters for a while. Worked well enough, but made it difficult to find somewhere to put the already-bulky 5200.
Intellivision and Coleco offered similar 2600 add-ons
The 2600 module was also incompatible with the original 4-port 5200 because the cartridge slot originally wasn't designed for it. There was only one revision of the 4-port that could work with it, and I only ever saw two of those boards in dozens of 5200s, so I suspect it was a service mod that could be special-ordered as a replacement.
@@8bitwiz_
I must have one of those because mine worked on it before I did the s-video mod on mine. The serial number has an asterisk at the end of it too. If I remember correctly, it wasn't super hard to mod your 4 port to make it work with a little soldering.
The years is 2024 and Atari of all companies is keeping their history alive far better than the big 3. That’s kinda scary.
One of the coolest things to me is that all their new cartridge releases and controllers (including this wireless one) will also work on the ACTUAL vintage consoles
People should look into the cost of moulding plastic cases. I wouldn't imagine the originals are available and would have had to be recreated.
Yeah, the shells are not from the origional moulds, the new ones are 80% the size of an origional one.
Yep, these are all new molds. And there are a number of microchips and components in both the console itself as well as the wireless controller. These devices do not cost nothing or next to nothing to produce, even if done affordably. People also completely disregard economies of scale. This is a niche product for a niche audience. The price is very reasonable for what you get - a modern solution to play vintage and new cartridges on modern displays.
I work as a 1st Class Machinist / CNC Programmer doing molds.... they usually start at $50K and go up to $250K or more depending on size.
That Food Fight is definitly the PAL version. I think there is a menu that can be accessed without a game inserted to enable 50hz mode. Hold down the Select and Start buttons on the console with no game inside. I'm not sure if turning on that mode will help, but it's worth a try.
I'm getting one for Christmas and I'm super excited. I haven't been this excited for a gift since childhood. I've been having a blast buying 2600 and 7800 games. Snagged some classics recently and really looking forward to playing them come Christmas day!
I kept waiting to hear what games it has built in that you can play without a cartridge, and then slowly came to realize there aren't any. what the hell
Cartridges only.
There are many, many different ways to play Atari games. Think of this console as a new alternative for those who want to play physical releases.
@@autoneurotic Agreed.
@@KrunchyTheClown78yup its an emulator that only plays cartridges by dumping the rom beforehand. Definitely some goofy shit lol
My cousins in Europe grew up with the Atari 7800, because it was cheaper than NES, and Atari actually had a handful of Nintendo games like Mario Bros, Donkey Kong Jr, Ice Climbers! This console looks cool, but I wish they actually sold them in stores like GameStop, I’m not buying the console online and risk someone in delivery, damaging the package!
Atari and Plaion have been fantastic supporting the 2600+ via firmware - very engaged in their support and information flow. They also engaged a number of devs at AtariAge who have significantly improved 7800 support in particular. Would be great to see the loading dumping speed improved but is what it is - 2600 games do load much faster though.
You know I never thought about it that much, but Sony's packaging really is a generation behind a lot of competitors both big and small. It's like opening an old VHS player.
I hope they sell Jaguar carts again. I specifically want AVP.
That would be great. There's so little supply of the old carts.
I noticed during the video that you mentioned Food Fight running at 50fps compared to other titles running at 60fps and there may be two explanations here. The common sense explanation which you mentioned is that the game could very well be the Pal version which was packaged. Another explanation however is that the game has a feature that was a first which was a "killcam/replay". The game would remember certain levels and replay them which was very innovative at the time. I could consider it demanding enough that the game would have to run at a lower frame rate.
I admittedly still play Food Fight on my Atari 7800 from time to time and watching this review has made me want the 7800+. It's a no brainer to me.
I would argue that the new VCS wasn’t forgotten as such, certainly not for Atari fans anyway. Updates and games are still being released for it. I think it is nice thing to have the opportunity to play eg the modern Recharged series and collections like Atari 50 on an actual Atari console. We’ll get less nice new things if everyone just does the sheeple dance and says “the said thing”. Forgotten is probably the wrong word to use around Atari devices and people who like Atari as the formative memories created were so strong and resultant nostalgia are the sole reason Atari still exists today.
My first Atari was the Jaguar and loved it. The CD addon was cool.
I love the Jag!
I bought a Jag a few years ago. Not sure why I wanted it, but I ended up loving it! 🎉
The Sega Mark III beat it to market by a year in Japan and could play SC-3000 and SG-1000 cards.
It's cool but i have to agree it's more aimed at the casual Atari fan or collectors. As a 7800 homebrew dev my biggest gripe is the ProSystem emulator used. I believe some compatibility work has been done but the emulator was dormant for a long time and far from accurate. The A7800 emulator is much more faithful and i understand it would have been tricky to port. As an enthusiasts id rather just use A7800 on PC. Either way i like the direction Atari is heading and would be a neat system to own
I never owned a 7800. I did have a 5200 which had an addon device released that plugged into the cartridge slot and allowed 2600 games to be played, but I never owned that and I wouldn't call that true backward compatibility. It was basically a 2600 that plugged into the 5200 for power and I guess it passed video through the 5200 system. Having 2600 compatibility truly built-in to the 7800 was a nice feature.
The 7800+ has a settings menu to adjust games to 50hz or 60hz, I'm not sure why he skipped the settings menu. It also has several screen filter options.
Love your honest reviews! 🖖
I've still got my Sears-branded Atari 2800 (basically a 2600 with 4 joystick ports) and around 75 cartridges. It mostly stays packed away these days but I break it out every 5 years or so.
One thing that really stood out to me was that the controllers in this are nothing like the original 7800 joysticks (for the North American market), which were elongated with the buttons on either side. I can understand why they'd use the European version, but for someone who wanted to relive the experience, it wouldn't be the same without using the same controllers.
The original 7800 joysticks were horrible because of the buttons on the side. It's anti-ergonomic. Your thumbs can't both hold the controller AND press/release the buttons without bringing on some wrist pain. That's an experience that I don't want to relive.
But the 5200 was worse, because it not only had side fire buttons, but it also had a non-centering joystick, TV remote style buttons before people figured out you couldn't use bare tin contacts, and that row of buttons on top that would wreck the controller if you tried to open it without removing the cover for that row. That and fifteen wires in its cable instead of just five. (one wire goes bad and the controller is ruined)
As for Sears, they just had to be different. They also had their own labeling for many 2600 games, and even their own version of the Intellivision.
The Atari 7800 is for me one of the best console designs ever.
That promobox package is awesome. Will have a great collectors value in a few years.
If you have memories to this system and love these old games, the system itself looks awesome. The built quality looks great, in a world where everything has to be cheap. IF, yes IF, I would be an Atari Player, I would go for it. Just to have such a good looking device in my collection.
The loading times are probably this bad because it is trying to rip the rom from the drive with an underpowered processor. Doesn't look like they have some form of storage to cache stuff into easily. So RIP.
The Atari 7800+ should've at least have a 5200 cartridge adapter to make it into a new deal.
That was a great overview as usual. Will you be doing the new 'The Spectrum' review?
Phew, I'm glad this one fits in your living room!
If I had to guess - the load times may have to do with the internal hardware of the cartridges themselves. Assuming that they are actual original hardware cartridges (and not just some adapter connected to a USB or flash drive) this could very well be down to hardware. I'm not saying that pulling data off of a ROM chip is going to be slow, but hey, maybe there is some weird internal circuitry that causes it to be dreadfully slow.
Or the internal RAM/storage is just incredibly slow and out of an abundance of caution, is resized or repartitioned each game so they don't have to worry about piracy and dumping games to the console itself.
Just some thoughts - I'm no expert.
its literally the time it takes for the onboard os to boot up the linux kernel and start the emulator running on the SoC, that's it.
@ if that’s the case that’s even worse. That’s one stupidly slow SoC.
I love your videos. I am thankful that you mentioned the effort put into the packaging for the review copies. However, if that is weighing the thoughts and score of a review, but customers never receive that kind packaging (thank you for pointing that out in the video), then why does it matter at all? It seems a bit manipulative to have early review copies have amazing packaging to boost scores, then customers get the crappy packaging. I'm not saying you don't deserve it, it's just a bit dishonest on the retailer's part. Review copies should be what to expect when anyone would purchase a copy.
I'd pay extra for the "influencer" SKU - were they to offer it.
The 7800 is one of the most impressive 8-bit era consoles, especially when in comparison to the then popular console when it was being designed, the NES.
Such a shame that it had been shelved and only released by the mid to late 80s, when the NES took hold of the market.
Yeah the graphics on some of those games rivals the best graphics the NES was capable of with hardware tricks, in games like SMB3 or Kirby's Dreamland.
Agreed, the 7800 was powerful enough to do Super Mario World, and if you really wanna push the hardware, it could also handle Link to the Past. The 7800 was a bigger jump over the 5200, than the 5200 was over the 2600. Very impressive machine.
TLDW: its basicly a emulator with a integrated rom dumper, if you want to spend your money on a 7800 get a 7800 not a 7800+ where the rom is streamed from the cartridge rather than dumped to memory witch means no loading screens. Its also cheaper but still compatible with atari+ series games and controllers.
The original has a proprietary power brick which is becoming harder and harder to find, and also relies on RF output. Those are some big obstacles for a lot of people. This is a convenient way to play vintage cartridges on modern displays.
@@autoneuroticit’s no more convenient than any other emulation device. Sure it plays your dumped cartridges, but you could dump your cartridges(or get the rom another way) and load them on a better, more powerful machine that costs half the price
@@autoneurotic Most tvs in the us support ntsc input, and im sure someone recreated the power adpator by now. If not, you can figure out the voltage and amprage and solder on usb-c.
If it's using emulation, might as well just get a Pi or something.
I have around 80 or so Atari 2600 and 30 7800 cartridges. My old Atari 7800 mostly works, but these consoles are falling apart, the plastic they used was cheap and has become very brittle over time. I've been looking forward to this, due to better video output, controller, and ease of use.
Emulation rather than FPGA generally means Everdrives won't work. That is a deal breaker for me.
Some of the compilations are quite good I hear.
I went from the Atari 2600 to the NES, so I never even played the 7800. Nobody I knew growing up had one either. So it would be interesing to see what I missed...
Not an Atari fan myself but I do think for those who do care this is an awesome buy.
My dad bought me and my brother a 2600 in 1981 (still have it) and that was the only console I knew until my NES. A kid from my church had a 5200, and I remember hating the controller, and the games didn't feel like a huge improvement (at least in my elementary school mind). I remember reading about the 7800 coming out, most likely from a magazine I was reading at the grocery store while waiting on my mom, but at that point I had moved on from that ecosystem. This system looks very cool for nostalgia points to have for a home console museum, but I just see me sticking with my ROM library and emulation. Although, the 2600 backward compatibility is somewhat appealing.
I can see there being a delay the first time you play a cartridge if it's copying it (and verifying). Does it do that on the second insert of a cart?
I would definitely buy one if they release the atari xegs or the jaguar
The Jag wouldn't make sense, the carts are already pretty rare. It would hike up demand and reduce the supply even further.
It's a great time to be an Atari fan right now. I LOVE my VCS.
I grew up in US in the 80s and 90s, the Atari you speak of and the Atari that was part of that life are light-years apart
Playing Star Raiders two years before the C64 was released must have been mind blowing.
Wait, wait, wait. Hold the phone. Are you telling me that Atari just made the superior EU 7800 controller WIRELESS, and it still works via a 9-pin connector?
I'm about to order one of these controllers just to use it on my Amiga, C64, and Ataris! This has so many uses!
Yep, I preordered two a few months back. They'll work on all original Atari hardware , per Atari themselves.
I would LOVE to see a video about how the old Atari's (like the 2600) displayed graphics, similar to your videos about the Gameboys and DS. There are some well known homebrew and rom hacks (such as the Halo for 2600 game) that your community might have an interest in
that vid already exists. not by mvg but there are several including one with David Crane (Activision founder and game creator of many great games for the 2600)
My Harmony Encore cart works great with my Atari 2600+. If you set it in single game mode and leave the USB cable attached, you can push a new ROM to it and it's just like swapping the cartridge. I don't have my 7800+ yet, but I think it will work the same.
Might be a fun novelty but honestly, it should've been no more than $60 at most.
agreed - for $129, I would expect the promotional pack presentation with those 8 pack-in games.
It costs money to manufacture these things and have them shipped. There are several microchips in these devices not to mention they needed to cut steel to produce the molds for the housing. I think this is a very reasonable introductory price.
@@autoneurotic Oh yea of course the steel for the molds.
Meanwhile, the NES Classic console, which was 60 dollars. lol
@@mrbisshie It's also several years later, and inflation has made everything stupid expensive.
Because it's emulation and not FPGA, it probably needs to rip the whole rom from the cartridge and then play the game rom from ram, not the cart itself. I'm just throwing out ideas here, but maybe the cartridge itself is the bottleneck, not the console. If the cartridges can only be read so fast, then no matter what they do to the console, there is no way to improve the loading times. For example, if you plug a really old usb flash drive or SD card, it can only read/write so quickly, no matter how powerful or optimized your PC is due to the limitations of the USB/SD/game cartridge.
its absolutely not, these roms are tiny. the time its taking is to actually boot up linux and start the emulator from the separate frontend.
I remember having an Atari 5200 just shortly before getting a NES somewhere in 1988 or 1989. I had a bunch of games, probably around 30. The ones i remember most are Q-Bert, Pac-Man, Popeye, Pitfall, Mario Bros, Donkey Koing, and Pengo. Once i got my NES i put it in a plastic bag and would sporadically played a bit. The NES was vast improvement over my 5200.
does it run the old cartridges.
I got an Atari 2600 for free from a neighbor who was getting rid of their old stuff. came with some games. it was cool setting it up on an old crt but i never had any fun with it as the games were too primitive for my liking, so the system is now in a box somewhere in my mom's place lol
I miss my Atari.
Try Solaris. It blew my mind
I had a 2600 growing up. Played a ridiculous amount of hours on it, but even I can't go back and play any of the games for longer than 5 minutes without getting bored. It's really a "you had to be there" thing. It doesn't hold up today, and these emulator systems are far more likely to be shelf decorations, rather than things that actually get played.
Yeah, basically every single game from that era is literally unplayable unless you have tons of nostalgia backing up your experience.
the 7800 is a bit better. I have a 2600 myself, but i doubt i've ever used it more than a few times in the last 10 years.
I'm actually impressed by the 7800+... conceptually, particularly that it plays the old cartridges *and* that Atari has licenced honebrew games and is selling them as"new" cartridges for the system. Something about a 7800 and new cartridges being available in stores in 2024 tickles my fancy, as an eighties kid lol
I may have missed this in the video, but is it still using emulation when you use physical cartridges??? Or is that just for non-physical copies?
emulation uses the same data in the roms that were originally inside a cart. On a PC it's like that and in the 2600+ and 7800+ it's exactly the same but instead of you downloading the roms off the net you insert a cart and the console downloads the rom into the internal memory. They are really doing this for 2 reasons. 1 - to allow people to play old collections of carts and 2 - to allow them to sell more re-released new carts. Atari is a business and the only reason businesses exist is to make money. This is also the reason why they don't allow multi-game carts to work. They could easily support them but they want to sell you carts and make even more money. The reason for almost everything is money ;-)
@@g4z-kb7ct - Fair enough, lol... I wish I had my old carts from when I was a kid. We lost my childhood home to flooding and had to move, leaving behind a lot of core-memory stuff.
@@rawkfistgaming easy enough to re-buy a large lot. plenty available at the usual places. Last year I picked up about 350 carts in a few large lots.
I didn't own a 7800 growing up, we had the 5200. So I have no nostalgia attached to this one. It looks cool, but I'm probably going to save my money for something else. But thank you for the informative video and stay safe out there!
This video brings up nothing but nostalgia. Seeing Berserk was a flash that is for sure. I am 42 and it is crazy to think I have been playing since I was 2-3 years old. It does not take much to start off with Ms. Pac-Man.
That game was Frenzy. It's essentially Berzerk 2 ;-)
@g4z-kb7ct LOL, much thanks for the info.
Rosen is CEO of a subsidiary of Atari, based in America, which concentrates on the retro side of Atari. The main French company, has another CEO.
Going by the Box that came with Food Fight from another video it is indeed the Pal Version that came with this set
The system looks nice, i really like the design and i have good memories of playing Pitfall.
Is it easy to interface with, for development? (could probably just use an emulator)
Pausing the game at any time doesn't mean it's not FPGA-based emulation, but the loading screens basically confirm it's using software emulation, even without checking their website.
I've grown up playing a 2600 Atari but never saw or really knew of the 5200 and 7800 versions because we had all moved onto NES and Sega by that time. I had to learn about them by watching AVGN
Atari was always something my friends had, but not me. My family's first console was actually a ColecoVision which, of course, could play Atari 2600 games which an expansion module. Within a few years, we actually had way more 2600 games than ColecoVision games. But that was as far as I went with Atari - didn't care for the 5200 nor the 7800. By that time, I had an NES which offered a far more enriching experience.
So what's the difference between this and the 2600+, other than the case and controllers?
The analog has been fixed. The original crappy Rockchip in the 2600+ can't do real-time analog so they added a special circuit to the board that can do real-time analog feedback.
wow, actually kinda surprised at who atari has acquired, they've actually got some decent muscle for prospective future projects
Not sure who the target market is for this thing. Aside from the aesthetic value (which I cannot deny), you’d expect 38 years to be long enough for a dedicated fan from back in the day to work out how to play it on these same emulators on their device of choice.
Did you enter the system menu and select 50 or 60hz mode? That could explain Food Fight running at the slower speed.
The 7800 is a beast. Even I was okay with the Throwback Console.