Following the trend of re-releasing every single game console as some kind of modern re-imagining or merely an ARM-SBC-with-emulator slapped into a nice looking enclosure, we now got the announcement from Atari that they will soon be releasing the Atari 7800+.
It’s now up for pre-order for a cool $130 USD or a mega bundle with wired controllers for $170 and shipping by Winter 2024. Rather than it being a cute-but-non-functional facsimile like recent miniature Nintendo and Commodore-themed releases, this particular console is 80% of the size of the original 7800 console, and accepts 2600 and 7800 cartridges, including a range of newly released cartridges.
On the outside you find the cartridge slot, an HDMI video/audio output, a USB-C port (for power) and DE-9 (incorrectly listed as DB-9) controller ports, with wireless controllers also being an option. Inside you find a (2014-vintage) Rockchip RK3128 SoC with a quad core Cortex-A7 that runs presumably some flavor of Linux with the Stella 2600 emulator and ProSystem 7800 emulator. This very likely means that compatibility with 2600 and 7800 titles is the same as for these emulators.
Bundled with the console is a new 7800 cartridge for the game Bentley Bear’s Crystal Quest, and a number of other new games are also up for pre-order at the Atari site. These games are claimed to be compatible with original Atari consoles, which might make it the biggest game release year for the 7800 since its launch, as it only had 59 official games released for it.
Given the backwards compatibility of this new system, you have to wonder how folks who purchased the 2600+ last year are feeling right about now. Then again, the iconic faux-wood trim of the earlier console might be worth the price of admission alone.
No mention of an SD card slot…
It has a USB port. I doubt it’s only connected to power…
I played atari growing up and there isnt enough nostalgia in the world to get me playing them again. NES is as far back as I can stand.
a lot of my favorites are just early primitive entries in the genre. like i might say that star control/uqm obsoletes combat. but maze craze is still a great game by any measure.
Not for me. What I would like to see is a gate-exact FPGA implementation. I already have a box full of different ARM SBCs.
Emulation running on an FPGA is still emulation. Despite the marketing from groups like Analogue Inc., there aren’t magic silicon-gnomes wheelbarrowing gates around inside an FPGA – if the synthesis software decides that some equations (which would have been evaluated by multiple individual gates on an original chip) can be folded into a single LUT, that’s what it will do.
This isn’t to say that there’s anything wrong with emulation based around FPGAs. Far from it: The research being done to work out the exact functionality of chips or hardware benefits emulators running on a CPU as well. It’s research that could have been done before, but FPGAs provided the motivation for people to actually do it.
I just believe it’s important to push back against the mythos surrounding FPGA emulation, and to be aware that just like software running on a PC, the implementation of any given emulator is only as good as the effort put into it.
FPGA chips often have an ARM core, though.
The emulator software could also run there instead of running on the actual FPGA.
Either way, it’s still a form of emulation if function blocks get re‐programmed to simulate behavior of formerly discreet hardware.
The only type of real programmable hardware not relying on emulation would be old logic chips that get their matrix altered physically, without them running software to do it.
Like old‐style UV‐erasable EPROMs, PALs and GALs. These chips alter inputs/outputs depending on their internal configuration/matrix.
They’re not running emulation software, but react depending on how they got “wired” by their programming process.
EPROMs, for example, can act as address decoders that way. The C64 PLA, if broken, was sometimes being replaced by an specially programmed EPROM that worked as an address decoder.
it’s not that an fpga is magically identical to the old hardware, but that it’s more flexible than a clocked cpu if you give a solid effort at emulation. most cpus these days fast enough to emulate the precise timing of old systems (i.e. that can do a hundred or a thousand instructions in the time of one instruction, giving you full flexibility to do whatever you want with that time interval) also have deep caches and so on that you have to contend with. but with the fpga, you get just a little more control.
but you’re right, you really have to be mindful about how you use it.
I don’t remember the 7800 at all and it was released well after the video game crash of 1983.
7800 released 1986, did poorly due to lack of new games. Colecovision was my fav.
Warner selling Atari to Jack Tramiel after he left Commodore sidelined the 7800 while he tried and failed to turn atari and its ST into an amiga/apple killer. By the time he paid GCC and drug them out of the warehouse it was already out of date and out of steam. It really only served as a minor fundraiser and an apologetic gesture for the 5200s lack of backward compatibility with the 2600. While it only got 59 games of its own, being able to play the hundreds of 2600 games floating around every garage sale in america made it worthwhile.
The old 7800 were backward compatible with 5200 games cartiridges. Will this be too? Article only mentions 2600 and 7800.
7800 wasnt able to play 5200 games. Neither will this
The 7800 was only ever backwards compatible with the 2600. The 5200 had far more in common with the Atari 8bit computer line.
The 7800 wasn’t backward compatible with the 5200. The 7800 would play both 7800 and 2600 games, but not 5200 games.
The closest backward compatibility tie-in I know of is that the 5200 had a “cartridge adapter” that would play 2600 games. “Cartridge Adapter” could be a bit misleading. It really was a full 2600 inside that shell. It had its own game select, reset, and difficulty switches. It even required plugging in 2600 compatible controllers to the adapter rather than using the controllers directly attached to the 5200. As I understand it, it pretty much just used the 5200 to pass through the video and audio. It did at least use the 5200’s power switch.
https://www.pixelatedarcade.com/media_groups/atari-5200-vcs-cartridge-adaptor.
Are you really Nolan Bushnell?
Quick! Was Chuck E. Cheese a mouse when he was born?
This is not a quote from Nolan Bushnell.
We loved the 7800 and still have all of the cartridges.
As a Gen Xer, I get feelings of nostalgia seeing this. Though, I can’t stand playing games this old. I’m spoiled from playing much better games from this century.
As a GenXer, playing Atari games with the kids and later grandkids beats ALL! We’ve got a 32 inch trinitron, a working 7800 and a few hundred cartridges in the playroom. They cant get enough.
I would buy something like this, if I could pick 100 games myself. My favorite was always pitfall, yars revenge, haunted house etc. Can’t find a package with all of my favs over this time period.
This isnt one of those “bunch of games included but cant play anything else” systems. You can ebay all the cartridges you want or just pickup a Gamedrive/harmony multicart and load roms