Exceeds Expectations - New Atari VCS Tear-Down & Ryzen-Powered Console

**The Atari VCS Teardown: A Look Inside**

As we sat down to tear apart the Atari VCS, we couldn't help but feel a sense of excitement and curiosity about what was inside. The console's design is sleek and modern, with a focus on minimalist aesthetics that sets it apart from other gaming consoles on the market. Our first look at the underside of the console revealed a heat shield, which seemed to be designed to prevent excessive heat from building up within the system.

As we continued to examine the underside, we noticed that the console is equipped with a number of trademarks and company names, which seemed to indicate that it was built using a variety of different components and technologies. We also saw what appeared to be initials of people who had worked on the product, which added an interesting layer of complexity to the system.

One feature that caught our eye was the presence of FCC markings, which suggested that the console had undergone some level of regulatory testing or certification. While it's not entirely clear how this relates to the console's functionality, it's certainly a fascinating aspect of its design and development process.

**The Controller Teardown**

Moving on to the controller, we found that it was equipped with a number of interesting features, including a battery and a PCB (Printed Circuit Board) that seemed to be designed for maximum heat dissipation. The controller's design is sleek and modern, but it also feels somewhat utilitarian compared to other gaming controllers on the market.

As we began to disassemble the controller, we noticed that it was equipped with a number of standard components, including switches, springs, and a joystick. However, one feature that caught our attention was the presence of a spinning weight, which seemed to be designed for use in the console's rumble feature.

The controller is also equipped with a number of interesting design choices, including a "reset button" switch that uses carbon contact pads to register inputs. While it's not entirely clear how this works, it's certainly an innovative approach to designing user interfaces.

**Disassembling the Console**

As we began to disassemble the console, we found that it was equipped with a number of interesting components and technologies. One feature that caught our eye was the presence of a "white PCB," which seemed to be designed for maximum thermal conductivity.

We also noticed that the console is equipped with a number of screws, which are hidden behind feet on the bottom of the system. To access these screws, we had to pull out the feet themselves, which required a bit of careful manipulation and planning.

Despite some challenges, disassembling the console proved to be relatively straightforward, and we were able to expose many of its inner workings to view. However, we did encounter one area where the glue was particularly stubborn, and we ended up having to use a bit of solvent to get it to release.

**The Final Pieces Fall Into Place**

As we continued to disassemble the console, we began to see more and more of its inner workings come into view. We exposed the PCB, which revealed a complex array of components and technologies that seemed to be working together to create something truly special.

One feature that caught our eye was the presence of four switches, which were labeled as the "rumble" and "advanced modern rumble" features. While we're not entirely clear how these work, they seem to be designed for maximum impact and realism in the console's gaming experience.

As we continued to explore the console, we also began to see more and more of its design choices come into view. We exposed the battery compartment, which seemed to be designed for maximum safety and reliability. We also saw a number of other components, including the cooling system, which seemed to be designed for maximum efficiency and effectiveness.

**The Verdict**

Overall, our teardown of the Atari VCS was a fascinating experience that revealed a complex array of components and technologies working together to create something truly special. While some aspects of the design were more impressive than others, we're excited to see how this console will perform in real-world use cases.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso we got an atari vcs in from one of our viewers on loan and from what we understand so far the atari vcs much like the struck through smile on the front of this box has had an unhappy history but we're gonna embark on our journey of understanding it uh we'll start with a tear down in today's video we also have some testing of the console if you can call it that coming up the atari vcs has been in development production for years and years now it was uh a crowdfunded campaign there were a couple hundred dollars each to get one and they're just starting to fulfill those orders finally we were unable to actually get a unit officially from whoever it is that's selling it these days guess atari or what's left of it so we sourced one from gregory parks one of our viewers who is also a patreon backer and thank you to gregory for sending this over on loan we have promised that we will attempt to non-destructively tear it down so if it's like the previous console rehashes then that shouldn't be too hard we'll see if it's just a raspberry pi and a giant empty plastic shell though before that this video is brought to you by thermaltake's core p3 case the core p3 is one of the most unique cases on the market it can serve as an open air standing chassis a test bench in vertical or horizontal orientation or as a wall mounted showcase pc the core p3 now comes with a five millimeter thick tempered glass panel for its side but keeps the front top and back open for air you can learn more at the link in the description below so here's the atari bcs from what i'm patrick is more of the expert on this one he'll be doing a lot of the testing on it what i understand it's sort of like an ouya so we'll be looking at how it actually functions in the console testing performance testing all that but to start off with we do want to get through the teardown and it does have that classic atari look to it but is is all new so let's get we'll start with this then i need to pull the controller out of the box and uh and see how that was oh let's take a look at the marketing actually let's see how they're marketing this product oh hey that's not bad asteroids on the box okay so they're advertising what does it say it says play new and retro games and apps asterisk what is asterisk includes 30 day free trial subscription to and stream arcade payments and subscriptions required for advanced services okay so apps are an advanced service uh includes 100 plus atari classics your stream your favorite games and videos asterisk 30 days of free subscription in 4k resolution it says discover atari's classic joystick and modern controller double asterisk oh that's new double asterisk atari vcs classic joystick and modern controller sold separately individual games depicted for illustration purposes only okay so modern controller featuring led effects and rumble does that really that's what we're defining as modern i guess modern by comparison to the original atari 2600 stuff customize unique pc mode got a triple asterisk triple asterisk pc mode additional operating systems not included upgradable ram and storage okay so that is the marketing we've got some images of asteroids i see is that roller coaster tycoon that must be for the pc mode i think that's roller coaster tycoon which uh most recently was an atari property for titan worlds at least and i guess we just need to actually look at the box now so set that aside so like i said patrick will be doing some console testing on this and that will include actually benchmarks just for fun see how it does we do have custom software we built that will be able to benchmark the frame rate and analyze the frame time performance because why not that'll be kind of fun to do and then the the box itself is going to be more of my focus on the physical assembly side of things here's the atari bcs collector's edition official certificate of authenticity so this is a thing that they are distributing i don't know it just feels a bit pretentious to me this document confirms that the atari video computer system reference tier in got legal words is an authentic atari vcs collector's edition the unit is one of six thousand produced and delivered by atari vcs llc in 2020 numbered hologram the certificate and its numbered hologram there's no there's no number on the hologram ah kind of disappointed i wanted to see like a 50 out of 6000 or something like that but that's not on here there's the number okay numbered hologram is in fact on the console andrew's right it's 31.10 out of 6000. we've also labeled all of these in case you don't know what they are so for the rest uh our viewer and patreon backer did send along from i believe his sister some star trek cats books along with the controller which we'll take out in a second he said hey i'm not asking for a plug i just thought you might like these which is accurate but i mean that's pretty there's kirk fighting the whatever the lizard thing was called that he fought i remember this episode i thought it was pretty cool but uh yeah so star trek cats i guess not included with the atari vcs unfortunately but it was included with ours so controller should be pretty familiar to everybody even if you never had one i do have uh i do have an atari system actually you know what this reminds me many years ago at like pharmacies it was really popular to have those kind of cheap okay we're gonna deal with this first okay many years ago uh at pharmacy it was really common to have cheap sort of i don't know you call them consoles and giant scare quotes but they're supposed to be consoles they're like between 20 and 100 dollars targeted at the kids getting dragged through the store who are forced to be there and wait and i remember i actually did buy a an atari controller that was in one of them and it looked similar to this and it was a i don't know if it was licensed i'm assuming it was but it was a uh an emulator and it had all of the atari classics on it much like this claims it does except it was in that form factor you plug the controller into the tv and then you played the games and it was that simple so certainly atari games have been remade a lot of times the difference i think with this one that got everyone so excited was that it's supposed to do more than that it's supposed to be more advanced box they've got these claims of app support and streaming support pc customization and then it also looks more like the original device so i had forgotten that uh patrick and i actually restored an atari vcs this is an atari video computer system it's one of the older ones we have a whole video on it from a couple from actually march of 2020 and we i bought this for 12 at a comic book store and it was listed as four parts and it actually worked fine we we did buy one part online it was trivial to replace but if i remember correct the conclusion of that video was that it didn't need to be replaced and that this thing worked fine once we had it all plugged in and cleaned up anyway so this is a real atari vcs there were a lot of different versions of this so this if i remember correctly this is the so it's a four switch vcs model the atari vcs was the original naming for this device then the atari 2600 came out after that or was it was rebranded as the 2600 this model is produced somewhere in the range of 1980 to 1982 and the vcs naming existed in 1982 and prior the original release date of the vcs was 1977 so this is not that model the european release was 78 japan was 1983 and the lifespan of the vcs to 2600 is insane it's 1977 to 1992. and from what i recall of the previous video the initial price is about 200 not sure if that's adjusted for inflation or not but that's what we looked up back when we wrote that video so it looks great but this is one of the originals in fact and it all works and everything takes cartridges and we've got a video on that if you're interested in more content like this the controllers were by far the worst part when we cleaned those out there were decades of nerd grime in the controllers when we cleaned them the new one fortunately does not need to be cleaned doesn't need to be taken apart controller i'd say that's not a great feeling that's a little bit how the originals feel like it's got a more appropriate amount of resistance not a big fan of the wobble here and i i can't say that that is authentic because it's not uh yeah i don't know i don't know how i feel about that quality there but man this is so disappointing everything is so disappointing so you can kind of hear the button quality but this is you can feel some some resisting some tension and then this one it just feels shallow it feels kind of like a start select button on a ps2 controller that's the best comparison i can give you so not not very impressed so far i would say this controller is superior in build quality but this one looks like it's got that uh that wannabe space age modern stuff so i don't know how you weigh that i'm assuming that these come off yep okay so that's trivial i have not taken this apart before we're gonna we're gonna learn this together so i do see a torx screw down there this side doesn't come out which makes sense there's a usb port right below it before i think the controller that is the screw there so these are probably on the inside yep so that's going to reveal the screws okay so i pulled i think this is a torx nine that's maybe a little bit loose maybe should use a torx 10 but it's not a it's not slipping so we're going to go with torque sign okay easy enough so i'll just track these screws just in case it gets complicated but i have a feeling it's going to be four screws well i'll give them credit they didn't hide any screws under the uh under the stickers so they get some credit for that so my suspicion is that oh yeah okay i was gonna say my suspicion is that these plates would have to come off in order to remove the back so well that cool that was easy i just started pulling on stuff and that came off without any issue it's just plastic clipped on there all right i see then oh you got to be careful so if you do take this apart you've got to be careful the wireless antenna i just hope we can play et on it okay so first thing i'm going to do is there's a bit of captain tape on here i'm going to take this wireless card out so that we don't accidentally snap the antennas they are soldered into uh into the sheet on the other side and i could peel that tape off but i'd rather not start damaging stuff we could leave the wireless card in and just unsnap the there's snaps for these uh into it so we could do that approach too so nothing important at all on this side i'm going to set this to the side nothing important here except for some molding marks abs not surprising i was just looking for a manufactured date 2020 september is when this was made okay underneath that's the bottom of the console we have some flow guidance here for a fan wow that's got a that's really a long distance of travel for the air so that must line up with this yeah okay so slight mesh uh in front of this kind of laptop style except it is a long travel distance but is there anything in there i think we can actually take this apart non-destructively as well so this screw is just holding in a piece of rubber light diffuser for the led that's underneath it and then there's a ribbon cable here that goes to the other side so we're going to i'm going to disconnect these i always try to identify power if there's a battery in something and ribbon cables i try to disconnect all those first you do have to pull up on this thing right here to disconnect them that's and standard on the other one too we'll figure out where those go later there is a fan power cable here now with the fan power cable i have to be careful because if you pull on the wires if it's not already loose then the wires can come out of the housing so i'm probably going to try to remove all this first then what i'm going to do is keep all the same screws together on the mat that is at least the same that's good so these are plastic screws they're going into plastic on the other side through the pcb and into plastic so so far to give the vcs some credit here this is a lot more pcb uh than i thought it would be it's not very advanced like you can see there's pretty limited amount of traces not a lot of smds or through-hole parts on it really nothing here at all except for that capacitor and uh and an led but maybe on the other side it's definitely more than what i was expecting which was honestly going to be like kind of raspberry pi type of parts yeah so it's getting it's getting more uh more complex i guess that's good so i'm removing this in a way that i don't have to interact that fan cable this piece of tape i'm not sure why it's there but that's not us normally this is used to hold a wire on top of something but it was not doing anything in this instance so some holes in it probably for breathing even though there's no airflow in this area this fan is going to be it's a squirrel cage it's going to be pulling air or attempting to pull air anyway from here through probably a heatsink right here is it or is it pulling through the bottom no it can't pull through there it would also have made sense if they set it up so that the fan could pull air through the board would have to be flipped over through the bottom this is the top that would make sense too so i'm not actually sure where this hair is supposed to be traveling but as in i know where it's supposed to be traveling but it has no way of going there it's i don't know what they were why they designed it this way well maybe this so there might be something here where i'm just trying i'm trying to figure out what exactly why atari designed it this way because it's not really an efficient way to use a fan especially this type but i'm guessing this i think is probably mostly for symmetry honestly honestly but but if i'm trying to make it all work because this is completely enclosed on all sides the air would have to both come in through here and get pushed out through here which seems odd uh normally you've got some pull through that uh exposed part of the fan on laptops and unless they block it this is blocked by plastic so you can't really pull through there so where's the air come from i guess here would be it so whatever natural air just kind of drafts in is going to get pulled in through the fan and probably shot out uh that's the best i can make of it now we're on to phillips head and stuff i'm going to take this screw out wow that was really loose so they don't tighten this one all the way down just for anyone at home who might be working on one of these later it's got some two plastic washers two plastic about one millimeter washers on it we're gonna keep these parts together any cables no cables okay here's the bottom we'll look at that in a moment okay cmos battery held in with tape that seems odd but there's a cmos battery are we just covering it okay we're just covering it so they're covering it so there's not a direct short by accident that is why that's there because they have a metal plate on the other side of it so that's that's covered for shorts and then bracket for this the uh the retention for the cooler ram there's your upgradeable ram if you are going to upgrade the memory on this for some reason then this would be how you would access it all the steps before this and this is just standard so dims for laptops and it is so what they've included in ours and this probably will vary based on their suppliers but it's a 1.2 volts kingston stick so cpmm04c1903 or cbd26d4s9s1me-4 and we're going to look up the capacity here so the memory is 4 gigabyte sticks each and they're 26 66 megahertz the pcb is just looking at that and notice this small easter egg this is actually kind of cool i like that small touch reminds me of the master chief on whatever xbox that was that we opened but just asteroids printed on the pcb surface so uh pcb they do actually have the pcb supplier on here which is abnormal to have printed on the board normally they strip all that label in so maybe the the quantity was probably not high enough to get that service but this is our chicon pcb which is actually one of the more common pcb companies and for the rest let's get the heatsink off it's gonna be phillips two screws okay so we've got four spring tension screws two not spring tension screws on the side holding the fan down these were just tightened until the spring was fully compressed so easy enough to put them back exactly the same way there's some loctite on them let's get that fan cable out now that it's fully accessible okay i felt thermal paste for sure that's fine okay so let's start with the fact wow this is so light this is not a thick pcb uh we've played a atari today is that like a reference to something it's interesting how they put that under a giant thing that they know has it's just like there's no components there a bunch of traces i guess a lot of probe points there's a ton of of probe points if for some reason you had to bring a multimeter to your um your vcs let's move on now okay so um it's a thermal pad solution this is actually similar we have some replacements of these by the way so i can get that uh situated replaced once we're done with it but this is a a thermal pad it's not a graphite one it's a standard thermal pad kind of commonly used on older components especially and uh very thin it's maybe 0.2 millimeters or so which is ideal you want as small of an interface as possible to conduct i think that's probably aluminum yeah so that's aluminum aluminum plate 2.95 so it's three millimeter thick aluminum plate that's it huh that's the whole thing i'm going to take this apart a little further and see if there's a fin stack in there it's a phillips one these are plastic screws because they're going into the black plastic uh funnel thing okay all right well that's something for sure very similar to a laptop cooler so small aluminum fin stack there covered with the shroud and i guess i could put this face up this is just an empty chamber i can see all the way through it it's just a plastic shell to guide the airflow out of the or into the box out of the box i think in this case oh i didn't notice they they're have you played atari today thin or has this i honestly i was looking at this and i was like okay it's like trademarks and company names but it's not i'm assuming initials of um of people who worked on the product so that's kind of neat uh you see amd right there so amd uh let's see i don't know if the rest of these are people i mean i see like fcc for example seem seems kind of odd to me to include the fcc in your credits box i guess that's possible but it's maybe more realistically a person's name all right so for the soc it is labeled amd ryzen we're going to get a shot of that so copyright 2016 on here amd ryzen part which is public at this point anyway so that's gonna be it for this part simple enough really uh and then the bottom of it's just got a nice heat shield of sorts let's go ahead and it's definitely not really conducting it maybe emi i don't know it's not like it's it's not a conductor though i mean technically it's a conductor but it's not attached to anything let's take apart the controller maybe it's a reset button pin on the bottom this might be harder to non-destructively take apart okay controller's got a battery in it definitely want to disconnect that before doing anything else so there's no residual well not even residual just there's no charge and a white pcb is a really interesting choice maybe it's changed in recent years i haven't really looked into it lately but a couple years ago doing a white pcb did add a little bit to cost and for an unseen part that's just sort of interesting got probe points up there peace piece of hard plastic for some reason right there not really sure why i guess support maybe rigidity oh this is for the button okay so there's a switch standard switch hooked up to just a spring tension button right there you can see the two springs one on either side i just got a plus sign that hits the switch so that's a reset button i think right there up here that switch it's actually labeled x11 there's clips here in the middle that are holding the pcb in and there's some rubber coming through it these things here and i do see a little bit of glue around one of them that's probably going to be holding because of where they're positioned it's it's helping retain this joystick okay all right let's disconnect this might actually it looks like i can't take it apart safely let's disconnect that ribbon cable there's your wobble that's what's causing that so okay all right so there's gonna be four switches under this thing so there's the rumble this is their advanced modern rumble feature they're talking about it's not quite as advanced of the playstation 5's controller but it does have a spinning weight pretty standard way to do things except not contained anywhere that's weird so these are just carbon contact pads and they get pressed by the joystick and that's all there is to that so that's the atari vcs teardown definitely more pcb in there than i thought the cooler is not impressive but it probably doesn't need a lot of cooling we haven't tested it uh that's something we might do i don't i don't know how much people care about thermals for the vcs let us know if you care enough for me to spend days on it instead of doing something else the controller i'll say does not feel great compared to even the old one but there's more in the box than we thought and at this point we just need to do the actual testing pretty easy to disassemble there is glue involved you will have to break glue and i'm probably gonna have to re-glue some of these things when i put it back together unfortunately because the feet on the controller but on the the console so not the controller the thing that people might actually take apart to put different ram in there that there was no glue involved in the process for removing it so if you pull out the feet that hide the screws and they're stuck to it then stop you need to pull out the other side of it and that'll expose the screw and then it's pretty simple from there so that's it for this one uh i guess we'll be back shortly with the actual testing of this it may be like a week out from when this video goes up but we're going to work on some some game testing and see what we think of it if it's worth it at this point and thanks for watching you can subscribe for more go to store.gamersexes.net to help us out directly or patreon.com gamersnexus we'll see you all next timeso we got an atari vcs in from one of our viewers on loan and from what we understand so far the atari vcs much like the struck through smile on the front of this box has had an unhappy history but we're gonna embark on our journey of understanding it uh we'll start with a tear down in today's video we also have some testing of the console if you can call it that coming up the atari vcs has been in development production for years and years now it was uh a crowdfunded campaign there were a couple hundred dollars each to get one and they're just starting to fulfill those orders finally we were unable to actually get a unit officially from whoever it is that's selling it these days guess atari or what's left of it so we sourced one from gregory parks one of our viewers who is also a patreon backer and thank you to gregory for sending this over on loan we have promised that we will attempt to non-destructively tear it down so if it's like the previous console rehashes then that shouldn't be too hard we'll see if it's just a raspberry pi and a giant empty plastic shell though before that this video is brought to you by thermaltake's core p3 case the core p3 is one of the most unique cases on the market it can serve as an open air standing chassis a test bench in vertical or horizontal orientation or as a wall mounted showcase pc the core p3 now comes with a five millimeter thick tempered glass panel for its side but keeps the front top and back open for air you can learn more at the link in the description below so here's the atari bcs from what i'm patrick is more of the expert on this one he'll be doing a lot of the testing on it what i understand it's sort of like an ouya so we'll be looking at how it actually functions in the console testing performance testing all that but to start off with we do want to get through the teardown and it does have that classic atari look to it but is is all new so let's get we'll start with this then i need to pull the controller out of the box and uh and see how that was oh let's take a look at the marketing actually let's see how they're marketing this product oh hey that's not bad asteroids on the box okay so they're advertising what does it say it says play new and retro games and apps asterisk what is asterisk includes 30 day free trial subscription to and stream arcade payments and subscriptions required for advanced services okay so apps are an advanced service uh includes 100 plus atari classics your stream your favorite games and videos asterisk 30 days of free subscription in 4k resolution it says discover atari's classic joystick and modern controller double asterisk oh that's new double asterisk atari vcs classic joystick and modern controller sold separately individual games depicted for illustration purposes only okay so modern controller featuring led effects and rumble does that really that's what we're defining as modern i guess modern by comparison to the original atari 2600 stuff customize unique pc mode got a triple asterisk triple asterisk pc mode additional operating systems not included upgradable ram and storage okay so that is the marketing we've got some images of asteroids i see is that roller coaster tycoon that must be for the pc mode i think that's roller coaster tycoon which uh most recently was an atari property for titan worlds at least and i guess we just need to actually look at the box now so set that aside so like i said patrick will be doing some console testing on this and that will include actually benchmarks just for fun see how it does we do have custom software we built that will be able to benchmark the frame rate and analyze the frame time performance because why not that'll be kind of fun to do and then the the box itself is going to be more of my focus on the physical assembly side of things here's the atari bcs collector's edition official certificate of authenticity so this is a thing that they are distributing i don't know it just feels a bit pretentious to me this document confirms that the atari video computer system reference tier in got legal words is an authentic atari vcs collector's edition the unit is one of six thousand produced and delivered by atari vcs llc in 2020 numbered hologram the certificate and its numbered hologram there's no there's no number on the hologram ah kind of disappointed i wanted to see like a 50 out of 6000 or something like that but that's not on here there's the number okay numbered hologram is in fact on the console andrew's right it's 31.10 out of 6000. we've also labeled all of these in case you don't know what they are so for the rest uh our viewer and patreon backer did send along from i believe his sister some star trek cats books along with the controller which we'll take out in a second he said hey i'm not asking for a plug i just thought you might like these which is accurate but i mean that's pretty there's kirk fighting the whatever the lizard thing was called that he fought i remember this episode i thought it was pretty cool but uh yeah so star trek cats i guess not included with the atari vcs unfortunately but it was included with ours so controller should be pretty familiar to everybody even if you never had one i do have uh i do have an atari system actually you know what this reminds me many years ago at like pharmacies it was really popular to have those kind of cheap okay we're gonna deal with this first okay many years ago uh at pharmacy it was really common to have cheap sort of i don't know you call them consoles and giant scare quotes but they're supposed to be consoles they're like between 20 and 100 dollars targeted at the kids getting dragged through the store who are forced to be there and wait and i remember i actually did buy a an atari controller that was in one of them and it looked similar to this and it was a i don't know if it was licensed i'm assuming it was but it was a uh an emulator and it had all of the atari classics on it much like this claims it does except it was in that form factor you plug the controller into the tv and then you played the games and it was that simple so certainly atari games have been remade a lot of times the difference i think with this one that got everyone so excited was that it's supposed to do more than that it's supposed to be more advanced box they've got these claims of app support and streaming support pc customization and then it also looks more like the original device so i had forgotten that uh patrick and i actually restored an atari vcs this is an atari video computer system it's one of the older ones we have a whole video on it from a couple from actually march of 2020 and we i bought this for 12 at a comic book store and it was listed as four parts and it actually worked fine we we did buy one part online it was trivial to replace but if i remember correct the conclusion of that video was that it didn't need to be replaced and that this thing worked fine once we had it all plugged in and cleaned up anyway so this is a real atari vcs there were a lot of different versions of this so this if i remember correctly this is the so it's a four switch vcs model the atari vcs was the original naming for this device then the atari 2600 came out after that or was it was rebranded as the 2600 this model is produced somewhere in the range of 1980 to 1982 and the vcs naming existed in 1982 and prior the original release date of the vcs was 1977 so this is not that model the european release was 78 japan was 1983 and the lifespan of the vcs to 2600 is insane it's 1977 to 1992. and from what i recall of the previous video the initial price is about 200 not sure if that's adjusted for inflation or not but that's what we looked up back when we wrote that video so it looks great but this is one of the originals in fact and it all works and everything takes cartridges and we've got a video on that if you're interested in more content like this the controllers were by far the worst part when we cleaned those out there were decades of nerd grime in the controllers when we cleaned them the new one fortunately does not need to be cleaned doesn't need to be taken apart controller i'd say that's not a great feeling that's a little bit how the originals feel like it's got a more appropriate amount of resistance not a big fan of the wobble here and i i can't say that that is authentic because it's not uh yeah i don't know i don't know how i feel about that quality there but man this is so disappointing everything is so disappointing so you can kind of hear the button quality but this is you can feel some some resisting some tension and then this one it just feels shallow it feels kind of like a start select button on a ps2 controller that's the best comparison i can give you so not not very impressed so far i would say this controller is superior in build quality but this one looks like it's got that uh that wannabe space age modern stuff so i don't know how you weigh that i'm assuming that these come off yep okay so that's trivial i have not taken this apart before we're gonna we're gonna learn this together so i do see a torx screw down there this side doesn't come out which makes sense there's a usb port right below it before i think the controller that is the screw there so these are probably on the inside yep so that's going to reveal the screws okay so i pulled i think this is a torx nine that's maybe a little bit loose maybe should use a torx 10 but it's not a it's not slipping so we're going to go with torque sign okay easy enough so i'll just track these screws just in case it gets complicated but i have a feeling it's going to be four screws well i'll give them credit they didn't hide any screws under the uh under the stickers so they get some credit for that so my suspicion is that oh yeah okay i was gonna say my suspicion is that these plates would have to come off in order to remove the back so well that cool that was easy i just started pulling on stuff and that came off without any issue it's just plastic clipped on there all right i see then oh you got to be careful so if you do take this apart you've got to be careful the wireless antenna i just hope we can play et on it okay so first thing i'm going to do is there's a bit of captain tape on here i'm going to take this wireless card out so that we don't accidentally snap the antennas they are soldered into uh into the sheet on the other side and i could peel that tape off but i'd rather not start damaging stuff we could leave the wireless card in and just unsnap the there's snaps for these uh into it so we could do that approach too so nothing important at all on this side i'm going to set this to the side nothing important here except for some molding marks abs not surprising i was just looking for a manufactured date 2020 september is when this was made okay underneath that's the bottom of the console we have some flow guidance here for a fan wow that's got a that's really a long distance of travel for the air so that must line up with this yeah okay so slight mesh uh in front of this kind of laptop style except it is a long travel distance but is there anything in there i think we can actually take this apart non-destructively as well so this screw is just holding in a piece of rubber light diffuser for the led that's underneath it and then there's a ribbon cable here that goes to the other side so we're going to i'm going to disconnect these i always try to identify power if there's a battery in something and ribbon cables i try to disconnect all those first you do have to pull up on this thing right here to disconnect them that's and standard on the other one too we'll figure out where those go later there is a fan power cable here now with the fan power cable i have to be careful because if you pull on the wires if it's not already loose then the wires can come out of the housing so i'm probably going to try to remove all this first then what i'm going to do is keep all the same screws together on the mat that is at least the same that's good so these are plastic screws they're going into plastic on the other side through the pcb and into plastic so so far to give the vcs some credit here this is a lot more pcb uh than i thought it would be it's not very advanced like you can see there's pretty limited amount of traces not a lot of smds or through-hole parts on it really nothing here at all except for that capacitor and uh and an led but maybe on the other side it's definitely more than what i was expecting which was honestly going to be like kind of raspberry pi type of parts yeah so it's getting it's getting more uh more complex i guess that's good so i'm removing this in a way that i don't have to interact that fan cable this piece of tape i'm not sure why it's there but that's not us normally this is used to hold a wire on top of something but it was not doing anything in this instance so some holes in it probably for breathing even though there's no airflow in this area this fan is going to be it's a squirrel cage it's going to be pulling air or attempting to pull air anyway from here through probably a heatsink right here is it or is it pulling through the bottom no it can't pull through there it would also have made sense if they set it up so that the fan could pull air through the board would have to be flipped over through the bottom this is the top that would make sense too so i'm not actually sure where this hair is supposed to be traveling but as in i know where it's supposed to be traveling but it has no way of going there it's i don't know what they were why they designed it this way well maybe this so there might be something here where i'm just trying i'm trying to figure out what exactly why atari designed it this way because it's not really an efficient way to use a fan especially this type but i'm guessing this i think is probably mostly for symmetry honestly honestly but but if i'm trying to make it all work because this is completely enclosed on all sides the air would have to both come in through here and get pushed out through here which seems odd uh normally you've got some pull through that uh exposed part of the fan on laptops and unless they block it this is blocked by plastic so you can't really pull through there so where's the air come from i guess here would be it so whatever natural air just kind of drafts in is going to get pulled in through the fan and probably shot out uh that's the best i can make of it now we're on to phillips head and stuff i'm going to take this screw out wow that was really loose so they don't tighten this one all the way down just for anyone at home who might be working on one of these later it's got some two plastic washers two plastic about one millimeter washers on it we're gonna keep these parts together any cables no cables okay here's the bottom we'll look at that in a moment okay cmos battery held in with tape that seems odd but there's a cmos battery are we just covering it okay we're just covering it so they're covering it so there's not a direct short by accident that is why that's there because they have a metal plate on the other side of it so that's that's covered for shorts and then bracket for this the uh the retention for the cooler ram there's your upgradeable ram if you are going to upgrade the memory on this for some reason then this would be how you would access it all the steps before this and this is just standard so dims for laptops and it is so what they've included in ours and this probably will vary based on their suppliers but it's a 1.2 volts kingston stick so cpmm04c1903 or cbd26d4s9s1me-4 and we're going to look up the capacity here so the memory is 4 gigabyte sticks each and they're 26 66 megahertz the pcb is just looking at that and notice this small easter egg this is actually kind of cool i like that small touch reminds me of the master chief on whatever xbox that was that we opened but just asteroids printed on the pcb surface so uh pcb they do actually have the pcb supplier on here which is abnormal to have printed on the board normally they strip all that label in so maybe the the quantity was probably not high enough to get that service but this is our chicon pcb which is actually one of the more common pcb companies and for the rest let's get the heatsink off it's gonna be phillips two screws okay so we've got four spring tension screws two not spring tension screws on the side holding the fan down these were just tightened until the spring was fully compressed so easy enough to put them back exactly the same way there's some loctite on them let's get that fan cable out now that it's fully accessible okay i felt thermal paste for sure that's fine okay so let's start with the fact wow this is so light this is not a thick pcb uh we've played a atari today is that like a reference to something it's interesting how they put that under a giant thing that they know has it's just like there's no components there a bunch of traces i guess a lot of probe points there's a ton of of probe points if for some reason you had to bring a multimeter to your um your vcs let's move on now okay so um it's a thermal pad solution this is actually similar we have some replacements of these by the way so i can get that uh situated replaced once we're done with it but this is a a thermal pad it's not a graphite one it's a standard thermal pad kind of commonly used on older components especially and uh very thin it's maybe 0.2 millimeters or so which is ideal you want as small of an interface as possible to conduct i think that's probably aluminum yeah so that's aluminum aluminum plate 2.95 so it's three millimeter thick aluminum plate that's it huh that's the whole thing i'm going to take this apart a little further and see if there's a fin stack in there it's a phillips one these are plastic screws because they're going into the black plastic uh funnel thing okay all right well that's something for sure very similar to a laptop cooler so small aluminum fin stack there covered with the shroud and i guess i could put this face up this is just an empty chamber i can see all the way through it it's just a plastic shell to guide the airflow out of the or into the box out of the box i think in this case oh i didn't notice they they're have you played atari today thin or has this i honestly i was looking at this and i was like okay it's like trademarks and company names but it's not i'm assuming initials of um of people who worked on the product so that's kind of neat uh you see amd right there so amd uh let's see i don't know if the rest of these are people i mean i see like fcc for example seem seems kind of odd to me to include the fcc in your credits box i guess that's possible but it's maybe more realistically a person's name all right so for the soc it is labeled amd ryzen we're going to get a shot of that so copyright 2016 on here amd ryzen part which is public at this point anyway so that's gonna be it for this part simple enough really uh and then the bottom of it's just got a nice heat shield of sorts let's go ahead and it's definitely not really conducting it maybe emi i don't know it's not like it's it's not a conductor though i mean technically it's a conductor but it's not attached to anything let's take apart the controller maybe it's a reset button pin on the bottom this might be harder to non-destructively take apart okay controller's got a battery in it definitely want to disconnect that before doing anything else so there's no residual well not even residual just there's no charge and a white pcb is a really interesting choice maybe it's changed in recent years i haven't really looked into it lately but a couple years ago doing a white pcb did add a little bit to cost and for an unseen part that's just sort of interesting got probe points up there peace piece of hard plastic for some reason right there not really sure why i guess support maybe rigidity oh this is for the button okay so there's a switch standard switch hooked up to just a spring tension button right there you can see the two springs one on either side i just got a plus sign that hits the switch so that's a reset button i think right there up here that switch it's actually labeled x11 there's clips here in the middle that are holding the pcb in and there's some rubber coming through it these things here and i do see a little bit of glue around one of them that's probably going to be holding because of where they're positioned it's it's helping retain this joystick okay all right let's disconnect this might actually it looks like i can't take it apart safely let's disconnect that ribbon cable there's your wobble that's what's causing that so okay all right so there's gonna be four switches under this thing so there's the rumble this is their advanced modern rumble feature they're talking about it's not quite as advanced of the playstation 5's controller but it does have a spinning weight pretty standard way to do things except not contained anywhere that's weird so these are just carbon contact pads and they get pressed by the joystick and that's all there is to that so that's the atari vcs teardown definitely more pcb in there than i thought the cooler is not impressive but it probably doesn't need a lot of cooling we haven't tested it uh that's something we might do i don't i don't know how much people care about thermals for the vcs let us know if you care enough for me to spend days on it instead of doing something else the controller i'll say does not feel great compared to even the old one but there's more in the box than we thought and at this point we just need to do the actual testing pretty easy to disassemble there is glue involved you will have to break glue and i'm probably gonna have to re-glue some of these things when i put it back together unfortunately because the feet on the controller but on the the console so not the controller the thing that people might actually take apart to put different ram in there that there was no glue involved in the process for removing it so if you pull out the feet that hide the screws and they're stuck to it then stop you need to pull out the other side of it and that'll expose the screw and then it's pretty simple from there so that's it for this one uh i guess we'll be back shortly with the actual testing of this it may be like a week out from when this video goes up but we're going to work on some some game testing and see what we think of it if it's worth it at this point and thanks for watching you can subscribe for more go to store.gamersexes.net to help us out directly or patreon.com gamersnexus we'll see you all next time\n"