Ah yes, Atari VCS, the delayed Linux-powered gaming box that was crowdfunded on IndieGoGo. It's still a thing and the team seem to think it's all going well.

In a new development update on the Atari VCS Medium account, the team posted a set of questions and answers from the COO Michael Arzt as to what's been happening recently. This follows on from the news back in October, where their system architect Rob Wyatt quit citing non-payment.

From the post they said they're currently going over the hardware to test "for functionality and reliability" and doing tweaks as needed, as then design and engineering teams recently went over to visit their partners in China who are building the actual Atari VCS units along with some photos:

Also detailed in the Q&A post is that they're developing the UI and store in the Unity game engine and they say it's "almost complete". Unity are apparently working closely with them on this, and they have "several studios" lined up ready for the Atari VCS launch. They're not saying who or what games though.

For streaming services like Amazon, Netflix and so on, it does sound like they will not have dedicated applications for them. Not yet anyway, they said for such service there will be the choice of viewing them through a web browser and that "the first big wave of apps isn’t likely to come before Q1".

When talking about the Atari OS, they confirmed yet again it's based on a "Linux foundation" with their integrated Atari VCS store and the Sandbox Mode will be available for installing and booting more traditional operating systems, like a standard Linux distribution (or Windows) so you could boot up Steam on it if you wanted.

IndieGoGo backers were supposed to be getting their units before the public release in December this year. That is now being delayed, although they claim "we are talking weeks here, not months, and the Indiegogo backers remain our top priority".

According to the post, they are on schedule for a full release in March 2020. Let's see what happens.