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Justin

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Breaking news courtesy of the Atari Weekly Podcast hosted by Brutally Honest Gamer. A new OS update is coming to the VCS next week. The update will reportedly bring two big features: 

- leaderboards

- 2600 emulation

The addition of leaderboards is a long awaited addition to the AtariOS.

2600 emulation is intriguing. Presumably it's a way to sell individual games as Atari does with DOS and 7800 titles on Flashback Fridays. Could it also mean homebrew and 3rd party titles? Time will tell!

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The long awaited and MASSIVE update to the VCS was pushed early this morning! Here are the details courtesy of @BHG_Gaming via the Official VCS Discord server.
 

- Leaderboards: Track and compare scores across your favorite Atari titles with new online leaderboards! See how you stack up against the rest of the VCS community or simply use your rank to brag. The first titles to benefit from the Leaderboard feature are Atari’s Recharged series (Black Widow, Asteroids, Breakout), with more to come in the future. The Atari VCS now supports daily, weekly and monthly leaderboards across regions and globally.

- Public “Friends” Profiles: Enhancements to the friends system, including expanded public profiles, that make it easier to discover and connect with other players.

- DIY Developer Private Beta: With this update, every VCS can be turned into a dev kit. This change makes it easier for developers to create content for the Atari VCS, and creates a pathway for homebrew developers to create games and apps for themselves, and eventually share them with other VCS users. Atari will be working with a small group of independent developers to gather feedback before rolling it out to the full community.

- Stella/Atari 2600 Integration: The popular Atari 2600 emulator system, Stella, is now fully integrated with the Atari VCS operating system. The integration of Stella makes bringing classic and new third-party Atari 2600 titles to the VCS Storefront easy, and VCS owners can expect 2600 titles to join the expanded collection of retro titles.

- And More: Dashboard notifications, USB camera support, and new Customer Support Tools.

Edited by Sabertooth
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Here is the change log from the last update from the Official VCS Discord.

VCS LiveOps Changelist Live Operations Features  

April 21, 2021 

High Level  General

- Family Sharing: This allows users on the same VCS to share the games they have purchased. If users set a box as “Home” all other Home users have access to each other's purchases

- New $ value promo codes for redeeming full or partial price of purchases for any products - New feature to in settings, where users can redeem promo codes for unreleased products

- Bios v24 - ability to set boot order of eMMC vs SSD drive

- Security updates

- Added few Network related changes with optimization

- UI/UX bug fixes and improvements

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8 hours ago, digitalbilly said:

Anyone try Kingston ram?

Kingston FURY Impact 32GB (2 x 16GB) 260-pin SO-DIMM DDR4 3200 MHz CL20 Black Memory (KF432S20IBK2/32)

I haven't but the stock RAM is Kinsgston so the brand should be a good match.

I use G SKILL Ripjaws SO-DIMM 16GB (2 x 8GB) 260-Pin DDR4 SO-DIMM DDR4 3200 in one of mine and it works fine but YMMV.

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Also posted on Facebook.  This is awesome news.  It's cool to see such responsive support. 

I didn't have any issue with the download or install after moving my VCS downstairs yesterday.  I may just leave it there until the house is empty of guests again :) 

It's probably also a good time for me to understand how to extend the storage on the VCS.  I assume a USB memory stick will work, and somehow you individually move games/apps over? 

 

image.png

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29 minutes ago, RickR said:

It's probably also a good time for me to understand how to extend the storage on the VCS.  I assume a USB memory stick will work, and somehow you individually move games/apps over? 

You can use a fast USB stick or external USB SSD. I use a very small Samsung 256 GB stick on one of mine. Alternately, you can install an m.2 SSD. I have a 1TB internal memory in my daily driver.

To move files, go to Storage under settings. It's pretty intuitive from there.

 

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1 minute ago, Justin said:

It almost feels weird for "Atari" to be a real thing in existence out there doing such a nice job and providing support for their own products, it's been decades since we've enjoyed this sort of thing in Atariland.

Right?  And for the life of me I don't understand why people pile on with negative opinions and rumors of "they are stopping production" instead of supporting a product that has some really great games.  SUPPORT THE VCS if you love Atari!  This isn't the fake scam bullsh@t of Amico, this is a real product that has survived for two years now and has some great games planned for release in 2023. 

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Here is the change log for the new OS update:

VCS Dashboard Change Logs for Production - APR 2023
● UI/UX bug fixes and improvements
● All the backend APIs were updated to V13
● Code Optimized for better load performance
● Updated Store UI to display a constant selection frame which differentiate user selected
product tile
● Added a new feature to display the overall count available for the store sections and see all
sections
● Added search and sort option for all the reports in the back office dashboard for a better
visibility to the admin
● Added a quick fix which resolve the issue where some product names are overlap with the
newly implemented selection border
● Cleaned up some of the VCS user from the Stage VCS Dashboard
● Added a new implementation which displays the list of all the orders/purchases happened
along with the status if they went thru fine or any issue with failed to save into the DB in the
Orders module from back office dashboard
● Added a fix which revolves the issue where in friends related section, user can still see the old
product selection boarders
● A fix was added to resolve the issue where some products display the default box art image in
the product info logs section, even though those products have their box art assets.
● Added a new implementation in the back office dashboard which allows the user to download
the list of users associated in the user roles section with all the details
● Updated the latest feature text with localized text
● Added new filters to the reports in the back office dashboard so that admin get the needed
results quick and easy
● Updated/repositioned the Context menu UI in the product detail page so that now user can
view it better and also in better way
● All crashes and exceptions that were registered in the previous production build were resolved
● For the added ease of user to the admin, Added the BCID directly in the list view of the VCS
Users module
● A fix was added to resolve the issues of longer product names displaying improperly in the
Home and games screens.
● A new functionality was added to log and track the admin details while adding the game to
user or modifying the products in the back office dashboard
● A fix was added to resolve the issue of not loading properly the second time when users click
on “load more” in the store.
● Added an additional security for backend on updating the AWS access keys for dev and stage
environments
● A new feature called “Help” was added, which can be accessed from the profile/settings
screens and allows the user to view all the key combinations or features from the controllers
for the VCS Dashboard
● A new feature in the back office dashboard called “VCS Home User” was added, which allows
admins to view the list of all home users tagged to the VCS boxes
● A fix was added to resolve the age rating issues for games, which were not displaying 7+ and
12+ rated games for some age groups in the VCS store and with sharing.

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