The Atari Lynx

Started by zapiy, January 24, 2011, 19:52:18 PM

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zapiy



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?

Own: Jaguar, Lynx, Dreamcast, Saturn, MegaDrive, MegaCD, 32X, GameGear, PS3, PS, PSP, Wii, GameCube, N64, DS, GBA, GBC, GBP, GB,  Xbox, 3DO, CDi,  WonderSwan, WonderSwan Colour NGPC

TL

Quote from: "zapiy"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?

Oh yeah, all the time.

Most recent releases from the last year include:



Zaku - By Super Fighter Team



Solitaire Card Games - By Karri



Eye Of The Beholder - TSR Inc / Eric DeLee



Peg Solitaire - Ninjabba



Megapak 1 - Songbird



Hot Dog - Beta Phase Games



Relief Pitcher - Beta Phase Games

zapiy

Wow that amazing. I need to look into that a lot more.

Own: Jaguar, Lynx, Dreamcast, Saturn, MegaDrive, MegaCD, 32X, GameGear, PS3, PS, PSP, Wii, GameCube, N64, DS, GBA, GBC, GBP, GB,  Xbox, 3DO, CDi,  WonderSwan, WonderSwan Colour NGPC

dubchaser

The Lynx is a great handheld.  It's got some briliant games.  My faves are:

California Games
Checkered Flag
Chips Challenge
Crystal Mines II
Desert Strike
Dracula The Undead
Joust
Klax
Qix
Rampage
Switchblade II
Toki
Todd's Adventures in Slime World
Turbo Sub

zapiy

I spent hours on Klax and Rampage. Fantastic games

Own: Jaguar, Lynx, Dreamcast, Saturn, MegaDrive, MegaCD, 32X, GameGear, PS3, PS, PSP, Wii, GameCube, N64, DS, GBA, GBC, GBP, GB,  Xbox, 3DO, CDi,  WonderSwan, WonderSwan Colour NGPC

TrekMD

My most favorite handheld console!  :)  I'm looking forward to some of the new releases for this  year.

Going to the final frontier, gaming...


zapiy

Nice collection fella, Looked for mine on Sunday.. Pehaps i should show you all a photo of my garages current state lol.

Own: Jaguar, Lynx, Dreamcast, Saturn, MegaDrive, MegaCD, 32X, GameGear, PS3, PS, PSP, Wii, GameCube, N64, DS, GBA, GBC, GBP, GB,  Xbox, 3DO, CDi,  WonderSwan, WonderSwan Colour NGPC

AmigaJay

Yeah really nice collection there, when I had mine, i got to around 70 games and most of the accessories and hardware....sniff i no longer own any but one of my favourite boxes was the big flat California Games box which was half the depth of a normal box, which i cant seem to find a picture of on the net!
Old School Gamer Since 1982 - Creator of various gaming websites and blogs 1998-2018

dcultrapro

eye of the beholder looks excellent! I've recently gotten back into the lynx and bought the following games:

Battlewheels
Electrocop
Hydra
Rygar
Todds Adventures in Slime World

Zaku is on the way

I find the lynx to have a far better game library than say the game gear in terms of variety, the games can be long, indepth and challenging where as a lot of Game Gear games are fairly short and basic, I have some photos coming soon so I will show my collection etc... I think I have a post somewhere with my collection already but I need to update it
Ultrapro on xbox live

TL

We were having a great discussion about the Lynx last night in the Retro Gamer chatroom and got onto the discussion about just how good the sound chip was. There certainly wasn't any other machine back in 1990 that could do speech like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8axK_fYC79c

Skip to 2:12 to hear the digitised speech

TrekMD

The Lynx is a remarkable device and it was ahead of its time when it launched.  It is remarkable how poor marketing and support killed what was superior to the GameBoy in almost every way (size may be the only detractor by comparison).  It took years for any other handheld to match the Lynx.

Going to the final frontier, gaming...


zapiy

It pains me to think what Nintendo would have achieved with it.. Far more than Atari did, i guess it was a money issue?

Own: Jaguar, Lynx, Dreamcast, Saturn, MegaDrive, MegaCD, 32X, GameGear, PS3, PS, PSP, Wii, GameCube, N64, DS, GBA, GBC, GBP, GB,  Xbox, 3DO, CDi,  WonderSwan, WonderSwan Colour NGPC

TL

Quote from: "zapiy"It pains me to think what Nintendo would have achieved with it.. Far more than Atari did, i guess it was a money issue?

Epyx actually offered the Lynx to Nintendo first and they turned it down  :o

Pretty much though, yes. Atari just didn't have the money to support it like they could of.

TrekMD

Quote from: "The Laird"
Quote from: "zapiy"It pains me to think what Nintendo would have achieved with it.. Far more than Atari did, i guess it was a money issue?

Epyx actually offered the Lynx to Nintendo first and they turned it down  :o

Pretty much though, yes. Atari just didn't have the money to support it like they could of.

Which is quite unfortunate.  Despite that, it has a nice set of games and many of the homebrews are very good.

Going to the final frontier, gaming...


TL

It would have been a very different machine had Nintendo got hold of it, lots of shit platformers and RPG's probably.

We certainly never would have got all those fantastic arcade conversions.