The case is delicious. I can't tell anything about it from the article or the company website, so it's anyone's guess what this actually is. But, it sure does look pretty.<p>That said, I worry that at the price point, it'll be a somewhat disappointing gaming experience compared to a general purpose PC with a decent GPU. Having a high-quality retro experience is cool and all (I hope they have arcade versions of the games, rather than the original VCS 2600 versions, as they were kinda awful), but it's been possible to emulate an Atari on modest hardware for a couple decades...I doubt I'd spend $250 for a pretty box that plays classic Atari games, even though I grew up on them.
Tech websites need to stop giving these projects coverage. This is not Atari... Atari is gone. Slapping licensed games and selling a shiny box with common internals is not novel and will not somehow grow a magical following. Ouya was the best example but there's been dozens if not hundreds since.<p>I know it's a content driven world but techcrunch, kotaku, polywhatever needs to stop.
Yeah nah it's going to bomb. Ouya 2.0 but with a nostalgic brand attached. To actually sell in any worthwile amount a console NEEDS to have a proper developer support. And I mean BIG developer, not a bunch of indie studios porting their preexisting products to linux.
What is the point of a Linux based console?<p>Traditional consoles had fixed hardware which could be exploited through vendor specific APIs. If this is just going to run games programmed with OpenGL, this is not different from any other Linux PC.<p>Given the introduction of APIs like Vulkan which bings the programmability of PCs even closer to consoles, I don't see a use case.<p>The only market I can think of the niche of Atari fans.
They never show the back panel with all the connectors, but on this blurry image <a href="https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/21949812_358672201237369_2195478430542396093_o.jpg?w=738" rel="nofollow">https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/2194981...</a> it looks like the device is powered by an external power brick, which is a no go for me. Using external PSU for a stationary device is just lazy engineering.
This will crash and burn. You need a <i>massive</i> marketing budget to even <i>begin</i> to compete with Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft. And professional game developers will not support a platform without a large customer base.
That they've nailed down a price point yet haven't defined the exact GPU beyond saying it's a Radeon makes the whole enterprise very suspect.