That title is not clickbait, it is real. The Atari 2600 finally gets capabilities to play media like movies and television shows. I could easily see this being something Sheldon would do on Big Bang Theory if that show was still going. What is amazing here is, this seems to really work on real hardware.
The hardware behind the MovieCart, as it is named by its creator, is super impressive considering what it is pulling off here. With the supplied software to convert media, you can apparently expect 30 frames per second playback with decent audio quality.
The video quality is sub-par, to be expected, but it is still stupidly impressive as this is running through the Atari 2600 hardware.
That means the visuals take a hit but the audio is surprisingly quite good – maybe a bypass of some sort was used? I am not sure since all the magic is contained on the PCB, no need to open your Atari or solder anything in. The MovieCart will work on a stock 2600 (imagine rolling up to a garage sale and showing them this – talk about price suddenly going up).
Media is stored on a micro SD card after being encoded using software the developer has made available.
Please note, your purchase (when it is back in stock) will not include a cartridge casing. The developer recommends using a Combat cart for this. While I am against cannibalizing one game for another, sometimes it is necessary.
You can grab loose carts on eBay (affiliate link). Combat is a rather easy to find game.
I do not think we have to worry about this one any time soon. It would be interesting though and I am sure someone somewhere is probably working on something like this. MovieCart started development in 2017 and seven years later we see it released.
This is a neat novelty for fans of the Atari 2600 and something they can say Nintendo NES or Sega Master System cannot do (yet). For now, let’s just enjoy the dedication of developers like this.
Source: Hackster.io
