I grew up with Atari and Commodore 64. When I first heard the chatter about this hardware, I was incredibly excited. It had a lot of the warm, look and feel of the original Atari 2600 but with a modern, sleek, almost living room like aesthetic to it. Since the CPU is of the 64bit, x86 architecture, that means, I could shape it to my liking. I did wonder, is it going to be great or disappointing, over 5 years after its initial announcement? Will have have any regrets in this purchase and will I even continue to use it or was it a novelty purchase?
History
For the super abridged, “CubicleNate” perspective of the history: This was first announced in June of 2017. It made quite the splash on the Linux podcasts that I listened to at the time with all the speculation and roller coaster ride of whether or not it will actually make it to market, following the December 2017 opening for pre-orders. Shipping was expected in the second quarter of 2019 which was missed and a lot of consternation over whether backing the Indegogo crowdfunding by many in the tech pundit sphere was a good investment. Then 2020 happened with all the world disrupting actions, still no Atari VCS but it was finally sent out to backers of December of that tumultuous year. It finally became available to the masses in North America by June of 2021.
At this time, I had largely lost interest, admiring the aesthetic but in a kind of strange place in life with lots of transitions. I largely forgot about it unit Matt, one of my cohosts on Linux Out Loud sent me a link and announcement that it was on sale for $190 in early 2023. I was sold. I bought the bundle with the Bluetooth Atari hat and waited impatiently for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_VCS_(2021_console)
Why I Purchased
Atari was running a sale on this machine and frankly, I was worried I wouldn’t get a chance to own one. Let’s call it, “the fear of missing out.” The price is low enough and I have the discretionary funds I could put toward it. I didn’t have to think much about it.
The machine has a strong similarity of the design language of the Atari 2600. Between the vents that span the width of it to the wood grain faceplate. It just looks so nice and would easily compliment any room with its appearance. As much as I like big box computers and laptops, they always look out of place in a living room or bedroom by the TV. This looks like a part of a piece of furniture or decoration, this is a visual masterpiece.
Purchase your very own here:
https://atari.com/pages/atari-vcs
Intended Use
My intent of purchasing this was to displace my SteamDeck as the system my kids would use when they wanted to play some Steam Games. The SteamDeck was quite the popular thing and if I wanted to do some retro gaming, it was already in use and I didn’t want to be the big jerk, I had work to do anyway…
I also believed it would look great in the living room beneath the TV. It looks more like something that belongs in a more elegantly designed living room, not that of someone that collects video game consoles and old computers. In a way, I felt that this could class up my place a bit.
Upgrades
The Atari VCS is fairly light on specifications by today’s standards for gaming machines but in 2018, when this would have been pretty fantastic. Since I wanted to extract as much as I can out of this machine, I did some upgrades to it to include adding 1TB of storage and maxing out the ram to 32GB.
Atari VCS Specifications
APU – AMD Ryzen™ Embedded R1000 SoC with “Zen” CPU. This is surprisingly performant. The CPU benchmark itself isn’t all that fantastic but the actual gaming performance is quite great, so, no complaints there at all.
GPU – The “Vega” GPU architecture appears to hold its own when it comes to gaming performance. Any game I play in my Steam collection runs great, not just acceptable but great! I’m really happy with this!
There is a lot more to explore but more importantly, here is what I did to upgrade it.
RAM
The 8GB of RAM was just not going to be good enough for me. After doing a bit of research, I ended up maxing out the slots by purchasing 2, 16GB DDR4-2400 SODIMM RAM modules giving me a respectable 32GB of RAM. Was this excessive? Perhaps, but I’m glad I went for it.
Performing the upgrade was a bit of a pain as you have to open the machine up and take out the mainboard to access the memory modules on the underside of the board. This wouldn’t be so bad if there weren’t so many obstacles to getting the main board out. Since these were only 16GB DDR4 modules, the cost was very reasonable.
32 GB RAM Upgrade: $63.59
Storage
This comes with 32GB eMMC internal storage. The fact is, this is just too small and too slow for my liking. It’s great for the Custom, Linux based, Atari OS but I would not be happy using this for anything else. I also did not want to wipe what originally came on there because it is quite charming and I do appreciate very much the time and effort that went into its creation and maintenance. I decided to go with having a dual boot console.
What I did was install, 1 TB, M.2 SATA. Note, this is NOT NVMe. This machine cannot take an NVMe, it MUST be SATA. So keep that in mind if you decide to do a storage upgrade on your Atari VCS. This particular modification is not so troublesome.
1TB M.2 SATA SSD: $51.93
WiFi
When disassembling the machine, I attempted to remove the WiFi antennas and in the process ripped the connectors right from the board. As a consequence, I purchased a new WiFi card and and antennas which added another $11.70 for the WiFi module and $8.47 for a pair of antennas.
WiFi Repair Total: $20.17
The cost of the upgrades was well worth it and could have been cheaper, had I not messed up the WiFI module and Antennas. I had footage of this glorious mistake but it seems to be lost to time or possible drive failure.
Total Cost of Upgrades: $144.00
Total Cost of Project: $334.87
What it should have cost: $305.52
Alternative Operating System
I have no regrets from purchasing this machine. In fact, I had it in my living room for quite some time, unmodified, in its original state but it was rarely used. Only on the occasion to get my Atari fix but the time between such activities subjected the device to being disconnected from the TV in favor of something else far more often than not.
To satisfy my almost unhealthy obsession, I installed openSUSE Tumbleweed. Currently, it has Plasma 6.1.5 on it and the upgrade to Plasma 6 proceeded without incident. I had already learned my lessons from previous upgrades performed on other machines. The change from 5.27 to 6.0.x did not have any regressions that I am aware of so I am quite happy there.
My one major complaint is that I am not able to edit the boot options in the order that I wish. I have tried many “passwords” that I found on the internet but I am not able to select the default boot device.
On reboot or from cold boot have to hit ESC until I get into the very not-so-pretty BIOS screen to select the SSD as the boot device to get into openSUSE Tumbleweed.
Benchmarks
Considering the age of the APU in this machine, I am rather impressed by gaming performance. The type of gaming I am doing with it, this is more than adequate. I think that the GPU portion of the APU does a great job of picking up the slack of the machine as games I enjoy most that are more graphically intense, like any of the Lego games, all work fantastically well.
In comparison, the benchmarks on my Framework 13 with the Intel i7-1360p.
This means, by the numbers, the AMD APU from 2018 is about 1/6th the speed of my laptop… and that’s really okay for what I do with the AtariVCS. When it comes to Steam Games, on but a few games to I really feel the difference.
My co-host on Linux Out Loud, Matt, who is more of a gaming expert says you can expect PlayStation3 level performance and I think that is pretty much on par but I do want to stress that this does perform better than I anticipated.
How I’m Using It
I am using this machine in various ways. The first and maybe most often I am using it as a Home Theater PC, or HTPC. I have a local media server from where I stream as well as some other services like Netflix and Paramount Plus. What I most commonly watch is YouTube. Most of my entertainment now comes from YouTube. It’s like a modern day PBS but for my niche hobbies of Linux and vintage tech along with a sprinkling of fitness content. Using either a PlayStation 5 or Logitech K400+ works great for remote control of the machine.
I really don’t do a lot of gaming with this outside of more story based games. So, this is primarily a casual gaming machine. I do occasionally switch to the built in Atari operating system for updates and to play the various Atari games bundled with it but that is not as common as using Steam, Heroic or RetroArch I find that the games I really enjoy playing with this machine just don’t tax the AtariVCS very much at all.
Lastly, I do a bit of casual web browsing but not much. What may happen is that I will click on a link from a YouTube video or podcast that has some product or potential solution for something else that I am attempting to learn about to solve a problem. Since I have logged into my Firefox sync account on this machine, clicking on the link will also add the web-visit to my history so it is very easy to hop to another machine to concentrate on that bit of information. The other option too is to use Firefox Send to open the site on another machine as well.
With all that said. This machine is used daily. Outside of my primary driver, I probably put more time on this machine than anything else right now. I am grateful to have this hooked up to my TV while I do laundry or want to wind down for the night before clocking out for the day. This is really the perfect machine to use as an HTPC. It looks great, is nice and slim and although I do hear the fans kick up from time to time, it is a comforting and welcome sound.
I do have this machine set to go to sleep after 15 minutes of inactivity, so the way it works out, should the video or movie end and the machine is unattended, it goes into sleep mode and will ultimately shut the TV down too. So handy and I appreciate that feature so that TVs and computers don’t stay on, wasting electricity.
What I Like
The visual aesthetics are top notch and certainly worth the price of admission. I very much admire the attention to detail on the case which really looks like it was designed as a kind of nod of respect to the designers of the original Atari 2600. It is clearly evident that much time, love and attention was put onto this machine.
Fairly easy to work on, at least, it is better than many machines I have opened up. Sure, this isn’t as good as the Framework laptop but it isn’t all that bad either. If not for the wifi card issue, I would have been much, much more a fan of the process. Yes, this is easy to work on but it is also rather painful, at the same time.
With the way I have it set up now, this is such a great system as a home theater PC. I largely stream from my local repository of movies and TV shows but also YouTube, Netflix and Paramount Plus for my Star Trek fix. The other main thing I stream is from my home server. I have accumulated quite the collection of movies and TV shows, thanks to the big box, bargain bin.
With the capabilities of this machine being a little low for anything fast-paced, I find it to be simply spectacular with point and click story adventures and slower paced games, it’s more of a leisure gaming machine.
I absolutely LOVE running Tumbleweed Linux on this machine too. It is an absolutely perfect desktop or home theater PC experience and Steam / Heroic / Retro gaming console. The price of admission is absolutely worth the experience.
What I Don’t Like
When upgrading the machine, I did end up breaking the WiFi card and antennas. This was highly aggravating and did put the whole project on hold until new antennas came in. I did have an Intel WiFi card that I popped in there and it seems to work fine so seemingly, and reports about replacing the real tech Intel card had no effect on functionality.
This machine is very repairable but it is not an easy process to take apart for the purpose of adding memory and storage. It is also not the most difficult device I’ve taken apart to do upgrades either. It’s probably going to be somewhere in the middle. That said, I do wish the memory was on the top side of the mainboard as accessing the memory meant I had to remove everything which was a little precarious around the front USB connectors.
It would be great if I could somehow access the AtariVCS game portion from the Tumbleweed Linux side more easily. Rebooting is not my favorite thing to do, not because it takes long but rather because I have to make special effort to get back into the Linux side. Really, if I could access the regular Linux functions from the AtariVCS OS side, that would be great too but there is this segregation between that makes for a less than stellar situation. Heck, I’d even take a boot menu where I have to choose which boot device each time. That would be great too.
Final Thoughts
I would like to see a version two of this machine with upgraded internals, something more on par with the SteamDeck’s performance or slightly better. Thinking about it, it is nearly the same width as a Framework 13 which makes me think, it would be cool if Atari would work with Framework to use the Framework 13 AMD mainboard to pop in and go, make this console relevant for years and years to come. Sure, there would be some work necessary to keep the same IO or a slight redesign of the case could be made with a different backplate.
I would also like to see some synergy of these small, unique and interesting hardware manufacturers to utilize the technology from Framework to propel their own unique tech experience. It seems like an amazing match but maybe not exactly at the price point needed by all parties but one could hope.
There has to be some opportunities of economies of scale here. If enough of a board is made to bring the price down of lets say, some kicking AMD APU mainboard with all the gaming goodness packed in, everyone wins!
When it comes to controllers, I tend to use the PS4 or PS5 controller on the Linux side and leave the bundled Atari controllers paired on the AtariVCS OS side. It just makes hopping in and out of the fun so much simpler.
The bottom line is, I am very happy with this purchase. The fact it isn’t too locked down (ahem… BIOS password needed) and I could upgrade the components means that this is simply fantastic. It looks great and has all the right aesthetics for any room. I have no regrets on this purchase, except maybe a WiFi card but that is absolutely it. Nicely done Atari, NICELY DONE!
References
https://atari.com/pages/atari-vcs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_VCS_(2021_console)
AtariVCS Technical Specifications
https://tuxdigital.com/podcasts/linux-out-loud/
https://get.opensuse.org
Framework 13
Emby Media Server on openSUSE Linux | Review
SteamDeck
KDE Plasma 6 on openSUSE Tumbleweed
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