waynel

Back in the early days of iPhones, there was an app that had a few Atari arcade games, and a few 2600 games. It was interesting to flip back-and-forth between the arcade and 2600 versions of games, but I ended up not playing it very much because using a virtual on-screen joypad and button was tremendously annoying, especially since the screens were so small back than. This was before the Apple joined the plus-sized phablet craze. Like many of the early apps, it's no longer available. It's because of apps like that one that I almost never buy third-party phone apps. They can disappear at any time, and you're out whatever money you spent. I prefer to buy programs, rather than rent them. (I Love Katamari, and Aurora Feint come to mind.)

The weather item doesn't seem insurmountable. There are already wifi-enabled carts for the 2600, and endless sources of free, reliable weather data on the internet if you live in certain places. I think this would be quite neat. I'd love the chance to design the graphics, if someone else did the hard part. The thing to monitor Atari.io for messages would be much harder, specifically because it would require the cart to create an encrypted connection to atari.io. Maybe it's not as hard as I imagine, but based on my tinkering, you'd need a helper computer like a Raspberry Pi or an Arduino shoved in there. If you could do that, perhaps it could poll the RSS feed. But you'd need to figure out a way to communicate your login information to the cart if you wanted anything specific to the threads you follow. Not insurmountable, as demonstrated by countless AppleTV apps that display a five-letter code on the screen that syncs to your streaming account. But it would require a lot of heavy lifting on the back end of Atari.io. I don't think it would be worth their while for less than $10/month.