Its is absolutely freaking amazing that 47 years later not only are new games being made for the 2600 you can freaking GET ONLINE with one! What an absolute king!
If I had an Atari 2600 I'd build one of these myself and add an SD card reader while I was at it. I'd love to see someone write an 8-bit web browser though, that would be awesome.
@Sharopolis you should switch the TV-Mode (Setup -> Display Preferences -> TV Mode) to PAL or PAL60. Then the PlusCart menu would look nicer on your PAL TV. If you mark ROMs as "Favorites" in nextcloud then they show up in the PlusCart root folder "My Favorite ROMs". You could also have made it clearer in the video that this is an open source and DIY community project and not a commercial product (Some people here in the comments seem to have the wrong idea of the project).
The limited local storage is crazy - surely it would have been *cheaper* to include 64 MB of storage rather than 800 kilobytes? If not cheaper, it could have been mere pennies more expensive.
There is no additional local memory. The 896 KiB are only the remaining flash ROM of the MCU (128 KiB are used by the firmware and the settings). These can be used for the few ROMs that are larger than 160 KiB and therefore no longer fit into the RAM memory of the MCU, or alternatively as memory for "Offline ROMs"
I think using Wifi-based storage solutions are the way to go especially considering these retro hardware platforms didn't had much storage to begin with. Even a retro DOS-PC would only need a gigabyte or two while even the smallest capacity SD-Cards are 8GB, and I assume that the old CompactFlash cards are also overkill, and they too getting rarer as time goes by. Just think about it: even 2.4 GHz wifi is faster than the hard drives of old, so you could basically stream files from your home server.
I grew up in the PAL territory and i never even knew this was a thing growing up, i only found out about 50/60 hertz with youtube, nothing wrong with PAL games i can only notice the difference when someone puts them side by side
More like “wifi cart for a console from 1977” Am mean what kind of nonsense title is that, If it was a wifi controller for a nes, then you could,ve call title it “?wifi on a console from 1985” whereas in reality it’s just an aftermarket nes controller with wifi feature, Now the idea about a wifi cart to emulate an online shop wnd download play system on such old console is pretty cool but i am already happy with my harmony cart😁
OK, I'll give them credit. The idea of trying to create an ecosystem for homebrewers to sell their games directly on the console is actually interesting. I'd be curious to know if they can talk anyone into joining their paid-ROMs program. After all, theoretically the same concept would work for any retro console which uses cartridges. But, of course, the real question is whether there are actually enough 2600 enthusiasts so dedicated to the hobby that they'd pay for one of these AND be willing to pay for new games. I kinda doubt it, but I won't fault these devs for gambling on the idea.
The paid ROMS are interesting - the $1/week rental cost is about the same as it was on the GameLine a 1200 baud modem and flashcart for the 2600. Of course, these were 1983 dollars, worth about $3 now. The interesting thing about the gameline was the interface. All it had was a telephone-like 12 button number pad that you navigated with the joystick. You would put in a PIN, and then choose a game to download by inputting its three digit catalog number. The list of games and abridged copies of their manuals were shipped as three holed glossy sheets meant to be stored in a branded 3-ring binder. The 2600 couldn't really display a lot of text and downloading descriptions would have used expensive toll-free phone time and modem time, so it was just easier to have full-color catalog sheets printed. As new games were added to the roster, new sheets would be mailed out to add to the cataogue. As an aside, the server technology that went into the Gameline was later used for another online service, which eventually turned into America Online.
Kind of want but not able to justify like $70 CAD right now. Will keep it in mind for when I take my junior out of the storage cart / when I am bringing in money again.
Would be cool if it had hardware to hook it up to RetroCheevos, but other than the community high scores, I don't see any reason to get this over a Harmony Cart. Making the ROMs easily available to the masses is a great way to get ROM sites shut down. I have no idea why this trend is starting to take off.
To everyone talking about what happens when the "cloud" service goes down: THEY'RE JUST RUNNING NEXTCLOUD a FOSS, self hosted alternative to things like Google Drive. As long as people can modify the endpoint URL the cartridge connects to, you can *literally* just make your own "cloud" That being said, custom URL ought to be a built in feature IMO
I love the idea of wi-fi connectivity, but this is just pointlessly complex for no benefit, especially for a console where just about the entire library can fit on a handful of floppies.
The 2600 hombrew scene is very active. There a new ROMs nearly every day. If you want to make the effort to keep your SD card up to date then go ahead, for others a community maintained repository is a much better solution than fiddling around with SD cards.
i fail to see who this is marketed towards. sure the high score upload is an interesting novelty. but perhaps online multiplayer would be a great selling point.
Love the idea of online leaderboards and online multiplayer but hate the limited local storage space and reliance on an external service. If this device had a microsd card slot and let you add games locally, it would be much better.
Cool idea, poor implementation. I'd want to connect it to my PC without having to go through a third party or jump through any hoops. Should also have more onboard storage.
The whole 'store' thing is a hard stop for any interest I might have had. Great work on the cart's UI, though. Legible 32-column text? Damn. But another bit is how sketchy this feels: once money starts changing hands it becomes difficult to look the other way when pirating a console's entire library. Even if you don't care about the legality (I sure don't), it makes them a potentially tempting target. And if the company goes down, apparently that leaves you with a plastic brick. Which is what I would be concerned about. :P
I am the creator of Hellway for the Atari 2600. The author of the plus cart himself was the one that made my game compatible with the online leaderboard. The game has to read and write to specific memory addresses to send and receive information over the network, unlike emulators that holds the full state of the system and can submit leatherboards based on triggers on the game state. This means the game has to be recompiled accessing the correct plus cart addresses. This can be explored not just for online leaderboards, but for any online functionality in your game. The plus cart creator is super nice and active in the AtariAge homebrew community.
Why not cloud gaming? You could have the cloud run just about any game you want (cheating, I know). Of course, then you wouldn't be playing a 2600 anymore. ;)
If the peripheral has more computing power than the console it's being connected to, can you really say you're doing it "on the original console"? I mean, I respect the creativity and intelligence required to pull this off, but all it's really demonstrating is that you could pump modernized content through an old interface...
If you're a homebrew developer hoping to produce actual cartridges, it can be a more reliable indicator that it _would_ work as one than just running it in an emulator. For anyone else I dunno what the appeal is. Other than getting that authentic crappy video signal that I guess old people are nostalgic for.
Well, what with the SuperFX chip on the Super Nintendo? Or the DCP in Pitfall 2 on the Stella? Or that third party BASIC module with the real keyboard? My take is, if it runs on original unmodified hardware, ie. i can plug it into any Atari 2600 and it runs then its fair game. And if some cheap ARM is running the show in the background by spoonfeeding the 6508 the right commands, who cares if the game is fun?
As said in the video the "Paid ROMs" area is only for testing. And there is currently no payment system. The price categories can be created dynamically, depending on how the developers want to offer their ROMs (e.g. if a developer wants to offer his game for €50 a week the folder "Pay 50 for 1 week" will appear with only this game).
if the cart really is open source, it shouldn’t be hard to make a fanserver if the company goes belly up, but still… the internet connectivity should be a feature, not a requirement
On a technical level this is incredibly awesome. For me personally I can just load roms on a SD card and put it in the 7800 Game Drive so there's no reason to upload roms to a cloud just for the novelty of pulling them back down from it to play them.
Way too much Cloud involved here. What ever happened to micro SD cards or USB connectivity? This kind of Cloud service won't be around in 10 years. You really do need things to be completely offline.
I always found that Genesis had inferior music for the most part. TG16 being second, but some games produced some of the most memorable tracks like Ninja Spirit, Final Lap twin and Aero Blasters
