Ah Tropico. This is another game I keep meaning to play a lot, but haven't had the time... and now they're well into part 6 and I have had it since the very first one.. I keep buying them without the time to play! Tried hardest with 5, but mostly to see how it worked with a controller (like many games like this that have controller support, they still are much easier to play with a mouse / keyboard.)

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All I know is if you're adding something to Quake II to make it run lower than 60fps on a modern system, clearly you are doing something that is extremely taxing.

But yeah doing full raytraced scenes back on the Atari Mega STe would take several days. Good ol' povray!

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Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: slaapliedjePour your heart and soul into something and just have fans rip you a new one.

To be fair, this applies much better to tiny indie devs than big business like CDPR. Their billionaire CEO might get grilled by some investors for the bad press, but in the end they'll be all laughing all the way to the bank. If you've already made a nice profit from pre-orders after a successful hype campaign, who cares about some heckling from the peanut gallery.

Well, if you recall people were sending death threats to them for releasing a buggy Witcher 2 version for Linux!

Indie developers tend to have a much smaller audience and hopefully not as deeply disturbed gamers playing their stuff. The anticipation for games at this level is also much lower. Cyberpunk 2077 has had a HUGE amount of anticipation for it for years, and the delay triggered those same death threat level douche bags.

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Quoting: Hori

Quoting: M@GOidIt could be simply their lack of time to fix everything before launch, but it makes you wonder that 2 thing occurred in this launch:

- SMT is disabled when a Ryzen CPU is detected, leading to worse performance compared to their Intel counterparts. Some enterprising gamers managed to re-enable it using a Hex editor on the game executable;
- Ray Tracing is also disabled on AMD GPUs.

Together with the Hardware Unboxed scandal over RT coverage, makes you wonder if it didn't have a Nvidia finger on this wrecked launch, since they sponsored it.

I'd normally say this is a pretty far fetched assumption... but with what Nvidia has been doing lately (or rather, for a long while), I think it is actually very plausible and I tend to believe it's true.
The Hardware Unboxed scandal was the straw that broke the camel's back and my opinion of them, while already not that great, took a big plunge.

Yeah, I don't know all the details on what happened there, obviously, but it doesn't look great for sure. They have since retracted their stance. Linus's (tech tips, not Torvalds) rant about it was great.

I haven't used an AMD card fir a long time because my experience them was terrible and nvidia's have just worked for me. But I have looked into getting an AMD card this time around. Unfortunately you can't buy them anywhere (either of them). So I will be using my 2080 RTX for a while it seems.

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I find it funny that people were absolutely furious that the game was delayed...
Then it releases in a bug ridden state.

This is why I would think it would suck to be a game developer. Pour your heart and soul into something and just have fans rip you a new one. Then again, this is also why we have so many games in early access and they stay there for so long. I had to stop buying games like that, as I have too many games already anyhow, and no time to play unfinished ones!

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If there ever was a time to make a Firefly quote, it is now.

"Shiny."

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Quoting: The_Aquabatit surprises me taking into account how buggy Cyberpunk currently is. It's a bad sign that devs are getting away with buggy releases imho.

Yeah, my first side mission, I spent like 3 min trying to figure out why the person I was supposed to kill was stuck behind a wall I couldn't get to. Finally gave up and started hearing how buggy it was.
Also seeing the exact same model of characters walking around the town was kind of odd.

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Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: LinuxwarperHow can they do anything with DLSS? It's proprietary and locked down. Perhaps they may decide for AMD's alternative as that will be open and supposedly crossplatform.

Reverse engineering is one option, which Wine as a project is doing all the time, but in this case I'd consider it a waste of resources.

It is like the olden days of Amiga vs ST. Developers having to decide which platform to create software for, and which features to use based on that. Like do you make the game look the exact same on both, then be criticised that you didn't cater to the strengths of each platform?
Realistically the Wine devs should support both parties, but this is also why it is so important to have more competition, it helps level the playing field.

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Quoting: gustavoyaraujoWell, looks like this console will be a big failure. In a scenario with Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft ruling, We can not expect anything different.

(Following of course is just all my opinion).
I think the they missed the people this would sell to by making it a digital only console. Problem is that the Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo consoles out there are very much moving quicker toward digital media only. I'm betting for the next PS6, Microsoft Xbox Season Series Something Extra Letter b+q, and whatever crafty thing Nintendo names their next one, they'll just eliminate the option for physical media. Killing off the possibility to resell your games.

I mean take a look at how even the last few generations have been. You very rarely even get a single insert in the physical game. You never get manuals anymore, or maps or anything extra unless you get Collector Editions that are extra money. They still charge the same price for a digital game as they do for physical media these days because it costs hardly anything to print and ship a case with a color case and a disk. Hell most disk games, you install it then the damn system still re-downloads the entire game anyhow, sometimes because things have been patched.

PC games aren't any better. When I bought Postal III (yeah before everyone knew it was crap) the install asked for both DVDs... and then re-installed the whole thing over Steam anyhow.. took forever to install.

The Atari VCS should have included a cartridge port, to tickle that nostalgia even more, and to allow releases as physical games. Also given it some sort of unique edge. As it is, maybe people can use it to play on Stadia, or the other streaming service that's included with it (Antstream?) My intentions though are basically to install GamerOS on it :)

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Quoting: emphy

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: sarmad

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: M@GOidThey cornered themselves badly with those prices. $390 bucks is PS5 money, and a XB Series S is $300.

They need a $150 price tag fast or this thing will be a collectors thing in a couple months.

From my understanding, the Atari VCS is somewhere spec wise between the PS4 and PS4 Pro. There is no way they could sell it for 150. PS4s are still selling for 300-400. (Okay, just checked Amazon, some of the bundles are 640!)

So the price is probably about right actually. It is abkut as available to order as the PS5 is too... :p

Not accurate. The GPU is far from being on par with PS4, let alone PS4 Pro. If I remember correctly, the GPU is around half the performance of PS4, if not even less than that.
This is a machine designed for indie games so don't expect any graphics beyond what a Wii U can achieve, though that's not necessarily a bad thing, there is still a big market for indie games and they can compete against traditional consoles with price and availability of those indie games.

Did you miss that it got a huge upgrade from their original development board? Pretty sure the specs are out there for a newer one that was a decent amount better and not the weaker board you are thinking of.
https://variety.com/2019/gaming/news/atari-vcs-upgrade-launch-1203166492/# [External Link]!

Official specs say it's an Embedded R1606G from amd. That's roughly an athlon 3000g with inferior cpu and slightly faster clocked igpu (1200mhz vs 1100Mhz). That igpu is not going to come even close to that of the ps4.

The Lowspecgamer youtube channel has a few videos on the 3000g if you are curious about what sort of performance you can expect. It's quite a nice low budget part with surprising performance for the price, and I'd choose the 3000g's cpu part over the one in the ps4 any day - but graphics performance is definitely not at the ps4's level.

Sources:
https://shop.atarivcs.com/hardware-specs [External Link]
https://www.amd.com/en/products/specifications/embedded/11411 [External Link]
https://www.amd.com/en/products/apu/amd-athlon-3000g [External Link]

Ha, this reminds me of the conversation I was having with my brother yesterday about the video game generations.
Basically, if you look back through all of the PS versions, you can REALLY see the differsnce in the jump from PS1 era consoles (like the Saturn) and the jump to the PS2 / Dreamcast.
Then it gets fuzzy going from PS2 to PS3 as mostly you have higher resolutions, but more detailed textures, and better frame rate. And going from PS3 to PS4, there really doesn't seem to be that big of a difference at all until you get to the game that have come out in the last couple of years that really start to push the system.
Then nkw with the PS5, what do you get over the ps4? Higher resolution, better framerate and ray tracing... so probably for the next while you'll end up with the equivalent of the HDR ads you see on bluray movies and wonder why if they can show that nicer picture on your non-hdr picture, then why don't they all look that anyhow...
For me, the only cool thing about the PS5 would be load times and the potential with the new controller. Problem Sony and everyone else has always had, in the entire history of video games, is if you have a controller with special features, it will go unused outside of first party titles, or a very few random ones. Like hiw many games for the PS4 use the gyroscope? Or even the touchpad?
Sorry, went on a rant there... but really what it comes down to is specs don't mean a whole lot in the end as long as the games are fun! If the VCS doesn't float ykur boat? Don't buy one. Sony and Microsoft can sell their hardware at a loss, and make up for it easily with software sales / subscription fees. Atari SA cannot, but also tgey are bundling games with it, since when has that happened? It has been years since a console came with any game, without buying special bundles.

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