The Atari Gamestation pro

The Atari/MyArcade Gamestation pro has become my primary console. So much so, I'm thinking about shelving many of my other game consoles. I'm beginning to see this is an underrated console. The system plays Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Atari 7800, Genesis, NES, SNES, Game Boy, MAME Arcade, as well as several other game systems. With Firmware "1.30c", there are ways of making Odyssey2 and Intellivision games run on the console. Really almost any 8-bit or 16-bit game console. Plus the amount of controllers that people have made run on the console is impressive too. If some could get PS1 and PS2 to run this would be my one console, but I'm not holding my breath as I really don't know the amount of horse power under the hood of this console.

As long as you put the games in the "Games" folder of the root of the micro SD card and use the correct extensions for the BIN/ROM file, the system plays thousands of different games across all these systems.

For example (not a complete list): .a26 for Atari 2600 .a52 for Atari 5200 .a78 for Atari 7800 .gb for Game Boy .gba for Game Boy Advanced .gbc for Game Boy Color .nes for NES .bin for Sega Genesis .gg for Sega Game Gear for updated firmware 1.30 [vendor] .sfc for Super Nintendo .sms for Sega Master System

Gaming Room Changes

1) I put together a game controller storage to store and charge my 17 game controllers.

I attached a power supply on the back with 4 USB ports and then drilled holes to run the USB cables so that up to four PlayStation 4 game controllers can charge at a time.

2) I now have all 8 game consoles now setup for power and video with easy switching between.

3) Created a web page to high-light the room as I work to improve it.
http://mrgibson.com/GameRoom/

Video game console release time line

Here is a list of the major video game consoles that have been release starting with the very first, the Magnavox Odyssey. Also the first to use cartridges, and idea that was abandoned till Atari and then Magnavox again started using them.

Company    Console         Year released
Magnavox   Odyssey         1972
          
Atari      Pong            1975          
Magnavox   Odyssey Series  1975

Nintendo   TV-Game 6       1977
Atari      VCS/2600        1977         

Magnavox   Odyssey 2       1978

Mattel     Intellivision   1980            

Coleco     ColecoVision    1982
Atari      5200            1982

Sega       SG-1000         1983
Nintendo   Family          1983

Sega       Mark III        1985
Nintendo   NES             1985

Atari      7800            1986           
Sega       Master System   1986

Atari      XEGS            1987

Sega       Genesis         1988         

Nintendo   Super NES       1991
Sega       CD              1991

Atari      Jaguar          1993

Sony       PlayStation     1994      
Sega       32x             1994
Sega       Saturn          1994

Atari      Jaguar CD       1995

Nintendo   64              1996

Sega       Dreamcast       1998

Nintendo   64DD            1999

Sony       PlayStation 2   2000

Nintendo   GameCube        2001
Microsoft  Xbox            2001

Microsoft  Xbox 360        2005

Nintendo   Wii             2006
Sony       PlayStation 3   2006

Nintendo   Wii U           2012

Sony       PlayStation 4   2013
Microsoft  Xbox One        2013

Nintendo   Switch          2017

SNES Classic vs PlayStation Classic capabilities

Someone suggested to me that it would be better to play PlayStation games on a SNES classic instead of a PlayStation Classic. This would not be true. Upon evaluation, the PlayStation Classic uses considerably more powerful hardware.

What hardware does the PlayStation classic use?

Internally, the console uses a MediaTek MT8167a Quad A35 system on a chip with four central processing cores clocked at @ 1.3 GHz and a Power VR GE8300 graphics processing unit.

It includes 16 GB of ECC flash storage and 1 GB of DDR3 memory.

The A35 processing uses Quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex-A35 cores and an Imagination PowerVR GE8300 GPU.

The MT8167A designed to provide high processing and graphics performance specs, with support for 1080p video decoding at 60fps and support for a Full HD+ (1920x1200)

What hardware does the PlayStation classic use?

It uses an Allwinner R16 system on a chip with four ARM Cortex-A7 40-bit central processing units and an ARM Mali 400 MP2 graphics processing unit.

The CPU is designed for 32-bit operating systems such as Linux.

The ARM Mali-400 MP4 is an OpenGL ES 2.0 capable GPU for ARM SoCs. The GPU is primarily designed for tablets and smartphones with mobile operating systems like Android.

It includes 512 MB of flash storage and 256 MB of DDR3 memory.

PlayStation 1 Classic Menu Icons

On my PS1 Classic
I was curious about the menu icons and have learned a few new things other than they should be 226x226. The PNG files should be RGB and don't have much limitations on colors. So I reworked the menu icons. For example, the Atari icon I had made:

So I remade my menu as:



These look much better on the screen.

This is the information I used to create the config file (Game.ini) for the menu:

Discs     , Title                    , Publisher  , players, Year
SLUS-01427, Atari  Anniversary       , Atari      , 2      , 2001
SLUS-00884, Star War Episode I       , Lucas Arts , 2      , 1999
SLUS-01235, Rayman 2 The Great Escape, Ubi Soft   , 1      , 2000
SCUS-94228, Spyro The Dragon         , Sony       , 1      , 1998

On my SNES Clasic
For my SNES Classic, I have added the Doom ROM using Hakchi2 CE 3.5.2 tool. Honestly, since Nintendo and Sony made the classic consoles so easy to mod, I believe they expected the community to do so. If everyone was going to buy Raspberry Pis, and play their own ROMs, why should they not get some cash out of an official product.