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General discussionRelease: Atari 50: the Anniversary Celebration(106 posts)(106 posts)
(106 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted November 11, 2022
Everyone, and we mean absolutely everyone knows this video game titan. And while there is no point in introducing them, celebrating their 50 years in the industry is the whole other thing!

Atari 50: the Anniversary Celebration is available on GOG taking you on an interactive journey through 50 years of video games via interviews with designers, developers and industry leaders, documentary footage, product design documents, high-res original artwork, and a curated list of awesome playable titles - all of that put into one cohesive experience. When you encounter a game in the Timelines, you can immediately play it without losing your place.

The massive selection of over 100 games spans seven different platforms: Arcade, 2600, 5200, 7800, Atari 8-bit computers, and, for the first time ever on modern consoles, Atari Lynx and Jaguar! Play the classics like Tempest 2000, Asteroids, and Yars' Revenge, or dive into some deeper cuts.

Behind every game are the stories of Atari, what was happening at the company, and what went into the creation of the games and the hardware on which they ran, all told by the people who were there.

And in addition to all that, Atari 50: the Anniversary Celebration also includes six new games:

Swordquest: AirWorld – a new entry in the legendary Swordquest series, inspired by the design concepts of original Swordquest creator Tod Frye. Who will be the first to solve its mysteries – and finally complete the quest?

Haunted Houses – The original “survival horror” game for the Atari 2600 gets a modern 3D voxel-based sequel, featuring more houses, more spooky situations, and more urns.

VCTR-SCTR – This mashup celebration of the vector era of gaming combines the gameplay from Asteroids, Tempest, and other vector-based arcade classics into a single, continuous challenge.

Neo Breakout – An amazing and addictive two-player competition that combines the best features of Breakout and Pong, with a modern graphic style

Quadratank – The first new entry in the classic Tank series since 1978 combines features from the original games with four-player fun in team or free-for-all modes.

Yars’ Revenge Reimagined – The Atari 2600 masterpiece gets a whole new look. Swap between original and modern graphics at any time!

Join in the celebration!
Posted November 13, 2022
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cmclout: It seriously begs the question of whether or not those are actual requirements or if someone just said "I don't feel like testing it, so let's just pick numbers on which we think it should run successfully".
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Trooper1270: I'm guessing you know what (system/hardware/machine) emulation is ?, and understand that the requirements needed (by the host machine) to run such a game, and an entire software version of the original hardware (an Atari Jaguar in this case) underneath that, is vastly higher that just running a ported or compatible version of said game ?.

This is the current (Sept 22) state of Atari Jaguar emulation according to this wiki page below. Not very good considering the age of the machine...

https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Atari_Jaguar_emulators
Thing is, this may explain the CPU requirements to run the games. However, it does not explain:
* The RAM requirement (the emulator itself doesn't take much space, and you only need the amount of RAM the original system has + the RAM the emulator takes up + the RAM the host OS needs to host the emulator)
* The GPU requirement. Emulation is CPU-instensive, not GPU-intensive (unless emulating a modern system). Even if the Jaguar emulation, for some reason, requires a modern GPU, there's no reason for it to specifically require a discrete GPU. (Worth noting that this requirement would actually exclude that steam deck that I've been hearing about.)
* Only a handful of the games in the collection are Jaguar games; the other games, particularly those for the oldest Atari systems, have no reason to need system requirements this high.
Posted November 13, 2022
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JeniSkunk: The arcade original of Defender was Williams Electronics, not Atari.
What makes this 50th anniv release, something that I won't be wasting money on, is it's missing three Atari arcade games that I loved. Battlezone, Marble Madness, Kangaroo, so for me the collection is just shovelware I've no interest in.
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andysheets1975: Battlezone I believe was sold to Activision a good while ago - one of those shortsighted decisions previous ownership made that the current company has to live with. Marble Madness was made after the company was split and I think it's one of the Midway/Warner-owned games now. Kangaroo was a Japanese game Atari licensed for overseas distribution, similar to stuff like Pole Position. It's a tough situation because so many of the most memorable Atari games were licensed deals.
Don't know how old this info is...but the BZ FPS was created and published by Activision way back when but now it lists Rebellion as the publisher on GOG.

"In 2013, Rebellion Developments bought the Battlezone franchise from the Atari bankruptcy proceedings.[38] In 2016, a virtual reality game titled Battlezone was released for the PlayStation 4.[39] It was ported to Microsoft Windows in 2017.[40] It supports Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR.[40]"
Post edited November 13, 2022 by allope
Posted November 13, 2022
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andysheets1975: Battlezone I believe was sold to Activision a good while ago - one of those shortsighted decisions previous ownership made that the current company has to live with. Marble Madness was made after the company was split and I think it's one of the Midway/Warner-owned games now. Kangaroo was a Japanese game Atari licensed for overseas distribution, similar to stuff like Pole Position. It's a tough situation because so many of the most memorable Atari games were licensed deals.
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allope: Don't know how old this info is...but the BZ FPS was created and published by Activision way back when but now it lists Rebellion as the publisher on GOG.

"In 2013, Rebellion Developments bought the Battlezone franchise from the Atari bankruptcy proceedings.[38] In 2016, a virtual reality game titled Battlezone was released for the PlayStation 4.[39] It was ported to Microsoft Windows in 2017.[40] It supports Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR.[40]"
Ah, right, that does sound familiar. I probably got Activision stuck in my head because of the 90s game. Thanks!
Posted November 13, 2022
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dtgreene: Thing is, this may explain the CPU requirements to run the games. However, it does not explain:
* The RAM requirement (the emulator itself doesn't take much space, and you only need the amount of RAM the original system has + the RAM the emulator takes up + the RAM the host OS needs to host the emulator)
Emulation can use a decent amount of RAM, for things like caching translated code and so on.
* The GPU requirement. Emulation is CPU-instensive, not GPU-intensive (unless emulating a modern system). Even if the Jaguar emulation, for some reason, requires a modern GPU, there's no reason for it to specifically require a discrete GPU. (Worth noting that this requirement would actually exclude that steam deck that I've been hearing about.)
Not really; you can have very high GPU requirements for emulators that use high-level emulation for any console that had 3D graphics, no matter how old. Aside from upscaling to 4K resolution and beyond, some emulators use very expensive shaders in order to work around differences that consoles use to display stuff compared to how computers work. Only software rendering is CPU-bound.

* Only a handful of the games in the collection are Jaguar games; the other games, particularly those for the oldest Atari systems, have no reason to need system requirements this high.
So? Even one Jaguar game would determine the minimum requirements for the entire collection, if that's what they were determined by. However, considering there are 6 new games, which seem to have things like "modern 3D voxel-based" graphics, the whole emulation conversation is irrelevant anyway.

Anyway, 8GB is just kind of a realistic minimum requirement for a modern 64-bit OS (even if technically it would work with less), and you'd be hard-pressed to find a Windows 10 system that didn't have at least that. 8GB storage seems wrong, but that's because actual size according to the game details is 11.5GB. Presumably you'd use more than that after installing, which makes sense considering this isn't just a bunch of old games, it seems to be a multi-media thing with video footage etc. And "integrated graphics not supported" is quite common. Not because they wouldn't work, but because the developers won't guarantee it. It's not uncommon for integrated graphics to have terrible drivers and devs can't be expected to spend all their time working around someone else's broken code. Hence "not supported". If it works, cool; if not, they did warn you.

Short version: the system requirements are reasonable and getting mad about them is silly.
Posted November 13, 2022
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P-E-S: I've never seen a Lynx in person. Only ever saw the ads for it back in the day, so it's nice to get to see what some of the games were like without sacrificing a gajillion AAs. ;)
I own one, and it's so ridiculously massive and power-hungry that I have rarely used it.
Posted November 13, 2022
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eric5h5: Anyway, 8GB is just kind of a realistic minimum requirement for a modern 64-bit OS (even if technically it would work with less), and you'd be hard-pressed to find a Windows 10 system that didn't have at least that..
My small laptop, as I call it, has only 4GB of RAM (and the CPU is a Celeron), and I have actually done a decent amount of gaming on it. I've played through the majority of Ikenfell on it without any issues, and Celeste, when I tested it, ran perfectly fine. And yes, I am running a 64-bit OS on it, specifically Debian testing.

I've been able to run many emulators on it, with the most advanced being, I think, PSP. Therefore, this computer really should be able to run the Atari 2600 games, and probably most of the games in the collection, with the outliers being only the ones that actually do have high system requirements.

In any case, emulating the Atari 2600 should not be RAM intensive, seeing as how, apparently the system has only 128 bytes of RAM and 64 KB of cartridge storage; translating that code is not going to realistically reach even a megabyte of RAM usage. (Not to mention that one shouldn't need JIT compilation, seeing as the CPU isn't exactly powerful.)

(Also, Nox Archaist, which is an Apple 2 game, runs without issue on this system.)

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eric5h5: And "integrated graphics not supported" is quite common. Not because they wouldn't work, but because the developers won't guarantee it. It's not uncommon for integrated graphics to have terrible drivers and devs can't be expected to spend all their time working around someone else's broken code. Hence "not supported". If it works, cool; if not, they did warn you.
On Linux, the drivers for Intel integrated graphics are actually quite good, sometimes (I believe) better than on Windows. In fact, for some desktop usage (particularly if using Wayland, from what I hear), they may even be preferable to NVIDIA's Linux drivers.

I could also mention that steam deck that I've been hearing about, mainly because it has (AMD) integrated graphics, as would likely the majority of other devices of that type that might appear. Also, I think the GPUs in some game consoles and modern Macintoshes may also be integrated, yet considered quite powerful (and the ones in game consoles are definitely powerful enough for gaming).
Post edited November 13, 2022 by dtgreene
Posted November 13, 2022
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dtgreene: On Linux, the drivers for Intel integrated graphics are actually quite good, sometimes (I believe) better than on Windows. In fact, for some desktop usage (particularly if using Wayland, from what I hear), they may even be preferable to NVIDIA's Linux drivers.
That's nice, but this collection only runs on Windows, so it's not particularly relevant.
Also, I think the GPUs in some game consoles and modern Macintoshes may also be integrated, yet considered quite powerful (and the ones in game consoles are definitely powerful enough for gaming).
Yes, they all have integrated graphics, and phones too, many of which are more powerful than the Switch, including all iPhones (which have essentially the same chips as ARM Macs, just with fewer cores/downclocked). However that's also not relevant, given that I specifically called out drivers as often being the issue for "not supported" rather than technical capability. And again, "not supported" isn't the same as "doesn't run". In some cases it's simply because the developers don't have access to the hardware in question (often with small/indie devs).
Posted November 13, 2022
Big Atari Fan........... surprised at the high cost, going to wait until it is at least 50% off in a sale so going to be a long time I think.

It is indeed a pity about not having Activision titles in there as they are some of the best VCS titles. Pitfall and River Raid of course are musts. Speaking of VCS titles, incredible that Space Invaders is not there.

Whatever the reasons, rights etc, I am glad they made this. The interface looks georgeous, prepared to wait a year or more though for the price to come down. For where I am currently, it's almost $57, that really needs to be at least 50% less.

Who knows, maybe they will make "DLC" for this and add more titles like activision. Now that would be super awesome :)

[EDIT]
I thought Atari Collection from 5-6 years ago was available here on GoG but I just searched and it's not there. I guess it was my imagination.
Post edited November 13, 2022 by styggron
Posted November 14, 2022
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P-E-S: While it certainly is true that old Atari drove the early rise of video games, they were also kind of responsible for the video game crash of the '80s. ;)
Not in Europe it didn't! Ha, ha!
Posted November 14, 2022
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dtgreene: On Linux, the drivers for Intel integrated graphics are actually quite good, sometimes (I believe) better than on Windows. In fact, for some desktop usage (particularly if using Wayland, from what I hear), they may even be preferable to NVIDIA's Linux drivers.
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eric5h5: That's nice, but this collection only runs on Windows, so it's not particularly relevant.
WINE exists, and these days, is very good at running Windows games, sometimes even better than Windows itself.
Posted November 14, 2022
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styggron: Big Atari Fan........... surprised at the high cost,
It is expensive but I would expect it, for a hundred games, and the documentaries, and the emulation and the wrapping, plus a couple remakes. I remember official Amiga emulation packages (cloanto?) bring costly and less stuffed.

(And if we calculate the actual worth of MAME-based emulations, let's just say some of us would probably deserve a few years in prison... :-/ )
Post edited November 14, 2022 by Telika
Posted November 14, 2022
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dtgreene: WINE exists, and these days, is very good at running Windows games, sometimes even better than Windows itself.
Yes, obviously; I use it myself. However using Wine is not in the system requirements and is not supported. If you buy the game and you don't have Windows, you're on your own.
Posted November 14, 2022
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P-E-S: While it certainly is true that old Atari drove the early rise of video games, they were also kind of responsible for the video game crash of the '80s. ;)
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pferreira1983: Not in Europe it didn't! Ha, ha!
And it wasn't even so much of a crash as a mass market contraction.

Didn't affect Asian (mostly Japan at the time) Markets either. The Famicom was in stride as was the SG-1000, PC-88, MSX, all those fun Japanese computers too.
Posted November 14, 2022
Regarding the minimum requirements, they are not that high for modern mainstream computers.

8GB RAM would be the minimum to run Windows 10 confortably for the majority of users. Yes it can run on 4GB just fine but it will slow down as soon as Chrome, Office and Teams is loaded. Even using Chrome alone can be a chore in a tab hoarder style.
I played and finished many games on a 2GB RAM Windows 8.1 computer, so I know first hand how to save RAM but it requires some level of computing hygiene.

Integrated graphics not being supported is not a surprise either, since the dedicated videocards mentioned are from a era that integrated graphics were dreadfull to play games, where sometimes DirectX versions were not correctly implemented. The Intel GMA chipset graphics got the bad reputation for a reason and nowadays it serves nothing more than to output video signals, since it can't accelerate nothing usefull. AMD was ok-ish though.

Note that the AMD HD 4800 (not sure about the nVidia 8800GT) can't run DirectX 11, so the games are either run on DirectX 9/10 or OpenGL 3.3 wich any modern integrated graphics do support.

I'm pretty sure Atari collection will run fine on any integrated graphics made by Intel on 4gen CPU's and above (Haswell and some Ivy Bridge).
Post edited November 14, 2022 by Dark_art_
Posted November 14, 2022
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Dark_art_: Regarding the minimum requirements, they are not that high for modern mainstream computers.

8GB RAM would be the minimum to run Windows 10 confortably for the majority of users. Yes it can run on 4GB just fine but it will slow down as soon as Chrome, Office and Teams is loaded. Even using Chrome alone can be a chore in a tab hoarder style.
I played and finished many games on a 2GB RAM Windows 8.1 computer, so I know first hand how to save RAM but it requires some level of computing hygiene.

Integrated graphics not being supported is not a surprise either, since the dedicated videocards mentioned are from a era that integrated graphics were dreadfull to play games, where sometimes DirectX versions were not correctly implemented. The Intel GMA chipset graphics got the bad reputation for a reason and nowadays it serves nothing more than to output video signals, since it can't accelerate nothing usefull. AMD was ok-ish though.

Note that the AMD HD 4800 (not sure about the nVidia 8800GT) can't run DirectX 11, so the games are either run on DirectX 9/10 or OpenGL 3.3 wich any modern integrated graphics do support.

I'm pretty sure Atari collection will run fine on any integrated graphics made by Intel on 4gen CPU's and above (Haswell and some Ivy Bridge).
The question is, will the game run unmodified on modern integrated graphics, or will the game check to see what it's running on and refuse to run?
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This is my favourite topic
Community
General discussionRelease: Atari 50: the Anniversary Celebration(106 posts)(106 posts)
(106 posts)