The new Atari VCS is a weird piece of nostalgia

The new Atari VCS system is a strange oddity, one I cannot help but admire. On the outside, it looks like a modern reimagining of the original 2600 hardware. On the inside, it is a PC running AMD Ryzen and Vega components. That combination makes it a whole lot more than something like the Super NES Classic Edition, but it’s not exactly your next gaming PC, either.

As a modern consumer-electronics device, the $300 VCS (or $400 with controllers) is maybe closest to an Nvidia Shield. It’s a set-top box that you can turn into a whole lot more if you so choose. That means you can run Chrome-based apps for Netflix, Disney+, and more. But you can, if you want, actually run Windows, ChromeOS, or Linux off of a USB stick.