History of video games/Platforms/Atari VCS

Development
The Ataribox was announced in June 2017.

The Ataribox was renamed to the Atari VCS in March 2019.

The new Atari VCS lead architect Rob Wyatt quit the project in 2019, claiming that invoices had not been paid for the six months leading up to his leaving.

The system was demonstrated at CES in January 2020. A March 2020 launch date for the VCS was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Launch
The VCS began shipping to crowdfunding backers in December 2020.

Compute
The 2020 VCS uses an AMD Raven Ridge 2 Ryzan R1606G APU. The system shipped with either 4 or 8 gigabytes of DDR4 RAM, and could be upgraded by the user to use up to 32 gigabytes of RAM. The system shipped with 32 gigabytes of eMMC flash storage, and contained an M.2 slot. 7 gigabytes of this storage was open for user use at launch. On early systems this slot is hard to access due to use of excess adhesive.

The VCS runs a modified version of Debian Linux called AtariOS. The Chrome browser is used by the system for running web applications.

Hardware
The system contains a number of communication subsystems. Radios are included for Bluetooth 4.0, as well as dual band Wi-Fi a/b/g/n. The system also has a Gigabit ethernet port for wired network connections.

The system has 4 USB 3.1 ports, distributed evenly between the front and back.

External Resources

 * Atari VCS - Official website.