These kinds of things are typically just a money sink. When was the last time you played an Atari game? How often do you find yourself wanting to play them?
I bought an Atari Flashbacks for my mother, and she played it one time. The ColecoVision I got her, she played one time, and that was a console she grew up with. Nostalgia alone isn’t enough to really justify buying it, especially if you only use it once and then it collects dust.
I’m a fan of the MyArcade series, but would look for a Atari Flashback Classics with an SD card port rather than this new item.
Certain versions of the Flashback Classic will play additional games added via SD Card, if you happen to have them. Yo ho ho.
I love the old Atari games, but 200 Atari 2600 games isn’t a lot of games, in the context of how quick these games are to master and finish.
Many arcade games from the same era are worthy of hundreds or thousands of hours of play. But the Atari 2600 was working with an incredibly limited set of hardware, and even it’s arcade ports are usually very limited.
That said, $80 will also buy a Raspberry Pi, which will play everything from the Atari 2600 up through the PlayStation One. If you don’t already have a RetroPie, and aren’t afraid of doing some research, I would start there. Total cost is closer to $130 after buying some controllers and heatsinks and a CPU fan.
Also, for $50, the HyperMegaTech portable is coming out soon which plays Evercade cartridges (500 available games, on various $20 multi-gane carts). Or the Evercade VS for $150 if you’re looking for multiplayer.
Everything you can play on Evercade you can pirate onto a RetroPi, but paying for Evercade cartridges saves a lot of work setting up and configuring and tuning each game on the RetroPi.
All that said, this looks like a lot of fun for $80!
TL;DR: This thing looks really cool to add to an existing collection, but it’s not where I would start, or even likely to be my favorite way to play Atari games.
These emulator box things usually have very poor quality prehaps the evercade might peak your interest and its only a little bit more or a raspberry pi
I pre-ordered a Raspberry Pi 5 earlier this year. I am newbie to the Pi devices, but I am fan of Linux (ubuntu, pop os, mint). Retro Pi sounds interesting!
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