VCS stuff
February 4, 2021 - Reading time: 3 minutes
Right now I have a collector's edition VCS chugging along on day 3 or so of a heavily optimized gentoo custom build. Here's some info about the machine:
The bios password is Piano18482 (courtesy of Retro Axis https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNgdmEaoXbG7EeP0KCujjFA)
The bios password can be removed safely (just hit enter when it asks for a new one)
You can set your APU reserved memory by going into the AMD options and finding the Integrated Video Card setting and turning it to 'Force' instead of auto. There's another option below that (UMA something-or-another) you will need to change to 'Manual' and then it'll unlock the menu entry (UMA Framebuffer?) allowing you to determine the amount of memory set aside. I personally think anything over 3GB would be overkill for this APU. You aren't going to be pushing 1080p at Ultra settings.
You can set an m2 ssd as the primary boot device. You will have to add a UEFI boot entry for the OS you've installed onto it (use efibootmgr for linux). You can leave "MMC boot" enabled but you'll need to go into the EFI boot menu option in the bios setup and deselect both of the MMC drive partitions. If left enabled they will always take over the primary boot role. You could probably use Grub to setup a menu to boot from the MMC partitions afterward. I prefer having UEFI boot straight to an image so I enter the bios and use the boot manager when I want to boot into Atari VCS native mode.
Though in some places this APU identifies itself as Picasso, I found that it requires Raven Ridge 2 platform support to actually work.
It will run at 100C anytime it's doing heavy work. It will run for days like this (as my compiling of gentoo is demonstrating).
It will happily overclock RAM for you if you have sticks it likes. I'm using G.Skill Ripjaws F4-3200C18D-16GRS 3200mhz CL18 sticks that are working fine for said days of 100C compiling at 3333mhz (update - running at 3600 now, still stable!)
The ethernet chipset is a realtek 8169. Note that the one in mine seems to be pretty flaky. It can't take running at 1Gbps with sustained transfers very long at all. It starts dropping connection more frequently until it does so every 3 seconds or so. It was making compiling via distcc practically impossible. To fix I had to set it to 100mbps, though it's truly only running at around 10mbps during periods of high activity. The ethtool command to make it stable for me was:
ethtool -s enp2s0 speed 100
The bluetooth/wifi chipset is a rtl8822ce
The MMC host driver is SDHCI over ACPI
It has the standard k10 temp sensor for hardware monitoring.
There is an hid-atari.ko on the VCS filesystem root that I cannot trivially get to load onto my gentoo build since it requires options I do not want built into my kernel. (CONFIG_FUNCTION_TRACER and -fstack-protector).
The Atari VCS
January 4, 2021 - Reading time: 3 minutes
It's an x86 mini-PC in an attractive package that seems ideal for HTPC use. It has a mobile Ryzen APU chipset that sips at power and gives only a little more than it takes. You'll never be playing cutting edge FPS games on this thing unless it's via Stadia. In my opinion, that doesn't matter in the least. Console FPS games are all pretenders anyway, a proper PC is required for real FPS gameplay.
I've been working on and contributing to open source HTPC software since around the year 2000 (Freevo->MythTV->Kodi). This website was registered in hopes of someday finding just the right combination of affordable hardware that could run my long-lived gentoo baked HTPC system my family has been honing for about the past 15 years. Then the Atari VCS was announced. It grabbed my attention but I'm not a crowd-funding kind of guy.
After much moaning and gnashing of teeth after nearly two years of delays they actually delivered a product. By all accounts it's downright decent if you can get past the anemic 3d capabilities of the APU. I looked into things a bit to see how hackable it seems to be (very) and waited for ebay prices to drop to reasonable levels and today I pulled the trigger and purchased one of the collector's editions with both joysticks for what the same hardware would have cost me (at this time) to pre-order.
I intend to tinker the snot out of this thing. My goal will be to sideload things into the Atari user interface and hopefully release installation scripts to get steam and indie titles onto the machine. There's a catalog of thousands of games already out there for linux in Steam, and at least a few hundred very solid titles that would play fine on the VCS and be more suitable for couch play than lame twin-stick FPSes anyway.
The company that calls itself Atari these days has taken a lot of flack on social media for some questionable honesty leading up to this launch as well as the long delays in finally getting the product out. However, having gone back and looked at their initial press releases for the machine compared to what has actually been released, they really nailed it, hardware wise. I've seen some moaning about it not having all the features that were promised, such as an encrypted filesystem, but as far as I'm concerned, the more open and hackable the machine is, the better chance it has at actually selling any volume. As-is it's not much competition for Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo, but with Kodi, the best OSS games out there and access to Steam's huge existing library of games, it suddenly becomes a much more interesting device.
More to come!