The ongoing journey of the Atari VCS from mysterious teased concept, to Indiegogo sensation, to fully-realized product nearing mass production has been a long one, filled with plenty of twists and turns.

There’s still much to do before the team feels it can change the Indiegogo status from “Prototype” to “Production,” but we get closer each day.

As we’ve always said, the Atari VCS is not like other game systems. It’s meant to be your machine, with numerous capabilities that allow for customization and personalization of both the hardware and software. Today’s update blog re-focuses on the hardware side and brings lots of photos and detailed descriptions covering the past several months of development that we are excited to share!

Atari VCS pre-production board, September 2019

The first thing we will talk about is the photo of the PCB board we shared last time and have included again here. That view is of the top of the Atari VCS circuit board; you should be able to quickly and easily spot the AMD Ryzen APU, along with the two USB 3.0 ports, one HDMI port and one power connector that will be accessible from the back of the machine. The large, relatively open space in the center of the board is where the cooling solution, comprised of a blower fan and venting system, will sit. Toward the front of the board is an open area with receptacles that will accept an M.2 SATA solid state hard drive so users can upgrade the internal storage. Not visible here are the twin SODIMM DDR4 4GB RAM sticks (8GB total) on the board’s belly, which can be upgraded. There are also two additional USB ports that will be accessed on the front riser of the VCS, right under the front fascia.