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Oh no, it does exactly what it said it would do. How terrible. Apparently.
And while a Genesis controller will fit in the slot (and work on original hardware), it won’t work on the Atari 2600+, for some reason.
… what the fuck? How? There’s no microchips in those controllers, they’re just bare PCBs where the buttons complete a circuit. Is that warning specific to six-button controllers?
After you plug in a cartridge and hit the power button, a five-second loading screen hangs around just long enough to be annoying before dumping you right into the game (a distinct downgrade from the “instant” boot up of original Atari 2600 hardware).
The hell is inside this thing? I thought they’d just modernized the 7800 hardware. Even an FPGA or SOC shouldn’t need to boot.
Apparently it’s some Raspberry Pi lookin’ thing, and I presume it’s running Stella, because why wouldn’t you. But five seconds for a single-program OS is an eternity for this much overkill. FreeDOS would have a boot time of “don’t blink.”
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The fake wood grain and suitably springy front switches are sure to activate the nostalgia centers deep in the brains of gamers of a certain age.
There’s even a charming, working switch for flipping from Color to Black and White display, an option that hasn’t been relevant to most living room entertainment centers since the Carter administration (at the latest).
The Atari logo on the front now also lights up when the system powers on, a nice small touch that doesn’t distract from the classic styling.
One word of warning, though: for most living room setups, you’ll probably want to invest in some HDMI and USB power cords that are much longer than the basic 1.5 m lengths included in the Atari 2600+ box.
The 1.5 m cable on the included joystick won’t let you stray very far from the base unit, anyway, especially when you account for the fact that the system’s controller parts are authentically (but annoyingly) located on the back panel.
One more word of warning, though; the base system doesn’t come with a second controller, even though a whole lot of Atari games are pretty explicitly designed to be better with two simultaneous players.
The original article contains 499 words, the summary contains 198 words. Saved 60%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
