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I feel like Atari is missing a trick by not going after the Edu market. They could make it easy for students to rebuild old games and old boards, through some s

by toyg 3y ago

I feel like Atari is missing a trick by not going after the Edu market. They could make it easy for students to rebuild old games and old boards, through some sort of subscription program for school.

MegaDeKay 3y ago
My guess is that this wouldn't be appealing to a younger crowd. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, and it is the older folks with the interest and the cash to make efforts like these viable. For Edu, something slapped together around Retropie that is cheap and not difficult to assemble is already popular.
- jmount 3y ago
  I suspect you are right. The systems are clever compromises against the affordable technology options of they day. What feels clever/satisfying will differ by era. Or, as I assume you are anticipating, kids these days also have their own good and interesting ideas.
- samtho 3y ago
  For a younger, student electrical engineer, they could easily gain the appreciation for the engineering that went into these things. Especially as a someone who wrote a lot software prior to completing my EE training, I wanted to learn on something that was fairly “pure” to learn major concept and patters on: a large MCU that only breaks out into a bunch of connectors is not it. While convenient and inexpensive, it doesn’t let you learn the more basic concepts that empower you to understand what is going on a at the lower levels of its operation. I would love to be able to teach (or have had the opportunity to learn) system architecture from analysis of arcade cabinets, starting with a CPU, adding ram, rom, peripherals, etc. Ben Eater’s 6502 computer kit[0] comes very close and is closer to the ballpark of what I would want out of a learning experience. [0]: https://eater.net/6502 https://eater.net/6502
II2II 3y ago
They wouldn't be very useful in education unless you could populate them with difficult to obtain chips. It is essentially the schematic in PCB form. Depending upon what they included in the silkscreen, it would be even less than a schematic (e.g. you would not know the specifics of each component). The education market would also expect some accompanying materials, such as the theory of operation and datasheets that are under copyright (assuming they haven't been lost to time).

by toyg 3y ago

I feel like Atari is missing a trick by not going after the Edu market. They could make it easy for students to rebuild old games and old boards, through some sort of subscription program for school.

MegaDeKay 3y ago

My guess is that this wouldn't be appealing to a younger crowd. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, and it is the older folks with the interest and the cash to make efforts like these viable. For Edu, something slapped together around Retropie that is cheap and not difficult to assemble is already popular.

jmount 3y ago
I suspect you are right. The systems are clever compromises against the affordable technology options of they day. What feels clever/satisfying will differ by era. Or, as I assume you are anticipating, kids these days also have their own good and interesting ideas.
samtho 3y ago
For a younger, student electrical engineer, they could easily gain the appreciation for the engineering that went into these things. Especially as a someone who wrote a lot software prior to completing my EE training, I wanted to learn on something that was fairly “pure” to learn major concept and patters on: a large MCU that only breaks out into a bunch of connectors is not it. While convenient and inexpensive, it doesn’t let you learn the more basic concepts that empower you to understand what is going on a at the lower levels of its operation. I would love to be able to teach (or have had the opportunity to learn) system architecture from analysis of arcade cabinets, starting with a CPU, adding ram, rom, peripherals, etc. Ben Eater’s 6502 computer kit[0] comes very close and is closer to the ballpark of what I would want out of a learning experience. [0]: https://eater.net/6502 https://eater.net/6502

II2II 3y ago

They wouldn't be very useful in education unless you could populate them with difficult to obtain chips. It is essentially the schematic in PCB form. Depending upon what they included in the silkscreen, it would be even less than a schematic (e.g. you would not know the specifics of each component). The education market would also expect some accompanying materials, such as the theory of operation and datasheets that are under copyright (assuming they haven't been lost to time).