After the first Atari Flashback met with poor reviews (Ported, not emulated games, crappy controllers, too small of a console) Atari went back to the drawing board with the next iteration, and reviews have been much better.
As seen by the above link, which leads here, the new flashback is a real 2600 on a chip, and as such, can be hacked to use cartridges. It also has the styling woodgrain paneling.
The guy who wrote the above hack also helped to engineer the device, and is currently working on a third iteration. People on the board are speculating it will be an Atari 800, and it has been confirmed that it will take in some sort of cartridge, although details haven’t been released:
While I can see the appeal of this to very casual gamers, for an even slightly ‘core’ gamer, it’s easier, cheaper and more versatile just to buy one on E-Bay. For $20 you can get a 2600 and 5-10 carts. for $50 you can get one with 30+ carts.
I still have zero interest in something like this. If they want to offer retro games then just put out an arcade/oldies hits disc on the consoles like Midway has done. Why they see the need to remake the hardware I don’t get.
They have. Activision has Activision Anthology with 40 games, and Atari released Atari Anthology with something like 80 games. As always, most of them are crap, but they’re there. In a way I’m more interested in the Flashback unit because the controllers are better for the games. Getting an old 2600 sounds nice, but the new unit realistically has most of the games I’m interested in anyway, without all the mucking about with cartridges and old controllers.
