So I'll start by saying that I got my VCS yesterday morning as a slightly early Christmas present. I also was going to submit an article, but don't feel like changing my username on any forum to use my real name :P



As we can see in the image here, the size is quite small in comparison to the 5200, 7800 and the Jaguar+CD. Pretty compact and has some heft to it. (yes, I've already pulled it off my TV stand a few times, it's built pretty sturdily).

I bought the collector's edition, which are all numbered (6000 in total). It has two USB ports on the front, and two in the back (they're either 3.0 or 3.1, depending on which spec sheet you read). Includes power and an HDMI cable. The controllers (I bought the 'Modern' and 'Classic') come with exceptionally well built cables, and they are long! Both are micro-USB though. But they have a square cut out in the controller with the matching cable filling that, to strengthen the connection.

Controllers feel great, with the modern one having rough edges around the top of the analog sticks, so slipping doesn't really occur, though they may be a bit rough for sensitive thumbs. The classic joystick has a spinner built into it, fantastic for games like Tempest, but it is a bit sensitive and takes some practice to getting used to it (either that or I suck at Tempest). It lights up the direction that you're pointing, and also the circle around the base will light up showing the battery power left when you first turn it on.

Upgrades of the machine seem like they may be a little difficult, but you can apparently swap out the Bluetooth / Wifi adapter and the memory can be upgraded to 32gb of ram (2x16 DDR4 2400), and there is an m.2 SATA internal connection you can use either for the 'PC Mode' or you can add to the AtariOS storage (which is only 32gb of space on an eMMC drive(? not 100% sure about this, only know the size) I'll open mine up once I get the drive / memory delivered.

So now onto the software!
AtariOS is Linux based (once you hook a hard drive up to it, you can even see a bit of the kernel loading. Right now it's pretty basic, upon booting it up, it asked to connect to the WiFi, but since I couldn't find the MAC address, I couldn't set this up. There is no way to find it currently either (that I've seen, or have gotten answers from Atari on yet).
PC Mode also only really just restarts your system, you still need to press ESC on start up to get into the bios, to then select Boot Manager.
Outside of some lock ups (Antstream and Boulder Dash Deluxe are the two I've probably played around in the most, but both of them crash when you hit the Atari button on the joystick, which is supposed to take you back to the dashboard). Keep in mind, the backers basically got a beta version of stuff, so that bugs could be ironed out before they're shipped out to Walmart / Gamestop (still don't understand how they still exist...)

Now for the interesting part for a lot of people here. "Does it do Linux proper?" Well yes and no. My initial attempt was to get GamerOS installed! So I first create the USB stick, tell it to boot and get a big 'nope!' Seems they have enabled Secure Boot and have not given out the passwords to unlock it. So any Linux distribution that does not support signed keys for Secure Boot will not work on the VCS. Now you can potentially set up something on a hard drive (usb or the m.2 SATA) and fix the secure boot first, but I figured I'd wait until my m.2 shows up then I'll try that on my main desktop.

Since GamerOS was out, I installed Debian Buster. Upon reboot GDM was black. So I dropped to a shell, enabled the non-free and contrib and backports repo, ran 'sudo apt install linux-image-5.9.0-0.bpo.2-amd64' rebooted and the gnome login started right up.
Only other issues I had were that it complained about some realtek firmware, (sudo apt install -t buster-backports firmware-realtek) and that it wouldn't recognize the Bluetooth adapter, so I stuck in a USB one I had laying around that I know worked. After that I had my bluetooth Thinkpad keyboard connected to it.
I was able to download Steam and launched Streets of Rage 4 and played with my Steam Controller. Otherwise it was a pretty straight forward install.

Biggest complaints so far are the lockups when trying to exit games, and that PC Mode is more or less useless at this point, only really rebooting the system. Every time you want to boot into an Alt system, you have to have the keyboard plugged in, hit escape until the bios pops up on the screen, select Boot Manager, then select the partition you want to boot from.

My next thing to test out is the controllers on standard Linux / Steam (I have Debian Unstable).

Also of note, they did modify the Atari Vault from the normal PC version, as it now shows the Atari VCS logo, and the onscreen pictures of buttons diagrams, etc are all of the Atari Modern controller (or the Classic if you have that connected). I'll have to test out some other peripherals on it as well, after all Centipede and Missile Command need a trackball!