A New Atari 800XL With 25 Games Has a Harder Rival Than Nostalgia

Atari is selling a reissue of the 800XL that plugs into a television with 25 games built in. It belongs to the wave of miniature retro machines, applied this time to a home computer from the eighties rather than a console.

It is pure nostalgia, and I am not using that as an insult. Nostalgia is a legitimate thing to buy. The question is what else that money buys.

I own a Chinese handheld, an R36s Pro with a 64GB card and an IPS screen, that cost a fraction of what these reissues go for and carries thousands of games instead of 25. People solder TV out and Bluetooth onto them. It is not as pretty, the build is what you would expect, and it does the one thing a retro machine has to do: it plays the games, anywhere, including at work when nobody is looking. That is the real competitor to an official reissue, and reviews rarely mention it exists.

What the official version sells that the handheld does not is the object. The shape of the keyboard, the 25 games chosen by someone, the thing on a shelf. If that is what you want, fine, but be honest that you are buying furniture with a processor in it.

There is a better reason to keep old machines around. The classics are where the mechanics we still use were invented, and with AI you can now read, mod and even rebuild code for games that were nearly lost. That turns emulation into preservation, which is a long way from a shelf ornament.

So, do I buy it? Only for the object. For the games, a cheap handheld does more for less, and you can take it with you.