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Lookin’ Back #11 – Atari Lynx
Before the GameGear, before the Gameboy – there was the Lynx
Balls I hear you cry – Gameboy was out before Lynx, right? Wrong! Way back in 1986 the original concept for the Lynx, then called Handy Game, was in development by a company called Epyx . This prototype was shown at the Winter CES in January of 1989 by a financially struggling Epyx. Luckily Atari happened to be wandering the show floor with a pocket full of cash and decided to partner up with Epyx to produce the hardware side whilst Epyx concentrated on the software side.
Atari made a couple of modifications like changing the infra-red multiplayer system to being wired and changing the internal speakers and then came back to CES in the Summer of 1989 with the new, shiny Portable Colour Entertainment System (what a great name guys!). The name soon changed to the more palatable Lynx. Atari seemed to have the thing in the bag, a new handheld system, backlit COLOUR LCD screen and software ready to roll. The fly in the ointment – Nintendo.
Yes also prowling the show floor this time was the big N touting for business with it’s chunky grey monochrome box – The Gameboy. The race was then on to see who could get their system out first and for what price. Nintendo won this hands down, the console as shipping for Christmas and at around $90/£180. Atari could barely mange to get a few units out the door in time for the holiday season and it came in at a whopping $180/£360! Hello – Déjà vu – Sony anyone?
So Atari were screwed from the start really. No one cared that this little device was a gaming beast. It had dedicated sprite scaling chips for god’s sake! Sadly to say that not long after this battle Sega introduced their GameGear and that was all she wrote for the Lynx. Production of the hardware ceased and from 1994 – 1996 hardware and software dried up.
The worlds loss was my gain though as I picked up one of these consoles in the Atari Lynx II veriety (nicer case, smaller, lightweight and the batteries lasted about 2 hours longer!) for £15/$30 with 3 games. The sheer quality of the screen (for back then) was immense. The colours were vivid and the backlight did not bleed them out. What struck me was the quality of the games as well. My first title on the system was California Games, a compilation of mini-games based around sun and fun sports. Surfing, Haky-Sack etc. The next was Chip’s Challenge – a great puzzler and still a top game to this day. Finally I was just nuts for Gauntlet, Klax and Roadblasters. All made to look so good with the hardware sprite scaler.
All in all, much like beta-max and vhs, the worse quality system won the fight. The Nintendo Gameboy was fuggly and backward in comparison to the Atari Lynx. The dreaded price point and the complete lack of high profile games are what killed the Lynx – that and the might of the Nintendo / Sega PR departments.
Blue Lightning running on the Atari Lynx
If you see a Lynx in a bargain box grab it and take a look – for it’s day it walked the competition. I have owned over time the Gameboy, Lynx and GameGear and hardware wise the Lynx won, no contest. Game wise though, you just can’t touch Nintendo on a handheld platform.
For more games on the Lynx go to this page.
Technical specifications
* MOS 65SC02 processor running at up to 4 MHz (~3.6 MHz average)
o 8-bit CPU, 16-bit address space
o Sound engine
+ 4 channel sound (Lynx II with panning)
+ 8-bit DAC for each channel (4 channels × 8-bits/channel = 32 bits commonly quoted)
o Video DMA driver for liquid-crystal display
+ 4,096 color (12-bit) palette
+ 16 simultaneous colors (4 bits) from palette per scanline (more than 16 colors can be displayed by changing palettes after each scanline)
o 8 System timers (2 reserved for LCD timing, one for UART)
o Interrupt controller
o UART (for ComLynx) (fixed format 8E1, up to 62500Bd)
o 512 bytes of bootstrap and game-card loading ROM
* Suzy (16-bit custom CMOS chip running at 16 MHz)
o Graphics engine
+ Hardware drawing support
+ Unlimited number of high-speed sprites with collision detection
+ Hardware high-speed sprite scaling, distortion, and tilting effects
+ Hardware decoding of compressed sprite data
+ Hardware clipping and multi-directional scrolling
+ Variable frame rate (up to 75 frames/second)
+ 160 x 102 standard resolution (16,320 addressable pixels)
o Math co-processor
+ Hardware 16-bit × 16-bit → 32-bit multiply with optional accumulation; 32-bit ÷ 16-bit → 16-bit divide
+ Parallel processing of CPU and a single multiply or a divide instruction
* RAM: 64 KB 120ns DRAM
* Storage: Cartridge – 128, 256 and 512 KB exist, up to 2 MB is possible with bank-switching logic.
Some (homebrew) carts with EEPROM to save hi-scores.
* Ports:
o Headphone port (3.5 mm stereo; wired for mono on the original Lynx)
o ComLynx (multiple unit communications, serial)
* LCD Screen: 3.5″ diagonal
* Battery holder (six AA) ~4-5 hours
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