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The Atari Lynx

zapiy · 2011-01-24T19:52:18Z

Released by Atari in 1989 the Lynx was actually designed by well known software publishers Epyx and designed by many of the same team as the Atari 8-bit computers and the Commodore Amiga. It cost a massive (back then) £179.99 with California Games free which was double the price of its only competitor, the Nintendo Gameboy. It was criticised for its large size, 12 inches long, but praised for its superb colour screen and excellent speaker. The funniest thing is that when Atari ran a focus group on the machine before its release the majority of people favoured the large size as they felt they were getting more for their money! Within a year the price dropped to £129.99 and not long after that the smaller more compact Lynx II was introduced to the market with a retail price of £89.99 without a game. The new model offered stereo sound, rubber handgrips, a better placed card slot (back instead of side), longer battery life and a backlight switch to save power when the machine was paused. While often considered a failure by many the Lynx managed to sell close to 5 million units worldwide and did especially well in parts of Europe like the UK, Netherlands and France. It's commercial life ended in 1995 as Atari dropped all support to try and bolster its failing Jaguar console. Due to its hardcore following the machine continued to be supported by Telegames for a further few years and is still being supported by Songbird Productions as well as a number of independent homebrew coders. The biggest downfall of the Lynx was its lack of game releases but it does feature some of the best arcade conversions available on any console and the best good to bad ratio of any console too. The Lynx hardware was so good that it remained the most powerful handheld on the market from its 1989 debut up until the release of the Gameboy Advance a full 13 years later! While it used a custom version of the 8-bit 6502 CPU (same as the NES, C64 and PC Engine) running at 4mhz it also featured the following custom chips / abilities: - A 16-bit blitter chip to speed up math calculations. - A 4-Channel DAC stereo sound chip called "Mikey" which allowed sampled sound to played on any channel. - 4096 colours of which 16 could be displayed per scanline with a resolution of 160 x 102 - 64k of RAM with game cards that went up to 512k in ROM size (2 meg is possible) - The graphics chip "Suzy" was also capable of infinate hardware sprites, hardware scaling, rotation, panning, distortion, hardware scrolling and a frame rate of up to 75 fps. I have both versions.. Must say i prefer the 1st version even though its bigger. So there are still new games being made and sold?

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onthinice

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Wow! Those look really amazing!

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Posted : 01/04/2013 8:45 pm

zapiy

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Great to see this stuff.. Cheers

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Topic starter Posted : 02/04/2013 1:54 am

Rogue Trooper

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Jaz Rignal reviewed a batch of Lynx releases for a double-pager in C+VG:

Klax 93%
Road Blasters 76%
Slime World 90%
Xenophobe 79%
Ms Pacman 79%

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Posted : 09/04/2013 1:05 am

(@_tl_)

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Jaz Rignal reviewed a batch of Lynx releases for a double-pager in C+VG:

Klax 93%
Road Blasters 76%
Slime World 90%
Xenophobe 79%
Ms Pacman 79%

I have always thought Jazz Rignall was a dickhead and that confirms it, those scores for Xenophobe and Road Blasters are way too low.

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Posted : 09/04/2013 1:08 am

TrekMD

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Even for Ms. Pac-Man that score is too low.Â

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Posted : 09/04/2013 1:28 am

Rogue Trooper

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Even for Ms. Pac-Man that's score is too low.

Interesting as always to get feedback from 'we' gamers on how we feel games were rated back in the day, got a few more misc scores to post tonight.Keep the comments coming.

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Posted : 09/04/2013 1:38 am

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Posted : 12/04/2013 8:39 pm

onthinice

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Thanks Laird! Really great scans!!!!

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Posted : 13/04/2013 2:57 am

zapiy

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Jaz Rignal reviewed a batch of Lynx releases for a double-pager in C+VG:

Klax 93%
Road Blasters 76%
Slime World 90%
Xenophobe 79%
Ms Pacman 79%

I have always thought Jazz Rignall was a dickhead and that confirms it, those scores for Xenophobe and Road Blasters are way too low.

That's the beauty of reviews they are one persons opinion and therefore rarely put much faith in any review until I play the game for myself. Reviews are guides.

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Topic starter Posted : 13/04/2013 11:41 am

(@_tl_)

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Here are a couple of very rare magazine adverts for 3rd party Lynx games!!!!

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Posted : 16/04/2013 11:30 pm

DreamcastRIP

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Loving that Robotron 2084 ad'.Â :1:

Owned: Spectrum Jaguar JaguarCD Lynx ST 7800 Dreamcast Saturn MegaDrive Mega-CD 32X Nomad GameGear PS3 PS PSP WiiU Wii GameCube N64 DS, GBm GBA GBC GBP GB VirtualBoy Xbox Vectrex PCE Duo-R 3DO CDi CD32 GX4000 WonderSwan NGPC Gizmondo ColecoVision iPhone PC Mac

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Posted : 17/04/2013 12:27 am

TrekMD

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The Official Seal of Quality was something that Atari only implemented for the Lynx, that I can recall.

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Posted : 17/04/2013 2:52 am

108 Stars

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The Official Seal of Quality was something that Atari only implemented for the Lynx, that I can recall.

Seeing the quality of many of Atari's Jaguar-games, it was a wise decision to leave it away there.^^

Systems owned: Atari 2600, Lynx, Jaguar, NES, SNES, N64, GameBoy, Master System, Mega Drive, Dreamcast, Game Gear, PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable, Xbox, Wonderswan

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Posted : 20/04/2013 5:05 pm

TrekMD

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The Official Seal of Quality was something that Atari only implemented for the Lynx, that I can recall.

Seeing the quality of many of Atari's Jaguar-games, it was a wise decision to leave it away there.^^

:4:

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Posted : 21/04/2013 4:27 am

108 Stars

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So, who of you is planning to get a nice screen mod for his Lynx this summer?

Systems owned: Atari 2600, Lynx, Jaguar, NES, SNES, N64, GameBoy, Master System, Mega Drive, Dreamcast, Game Gear, PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable, Xbox, Wonderswan

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Posted : 22/04/2013 12:00 am

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