The Lynx was a really interesting piece of hardware, as a kid I really wanted it. It just released during a time where Nintendo was absolutely dominating the gaming space at least in the states, and it was maybe too ambitious for its own good. The Nintendo strategy of using lesser tech to its full potential converted to really great portable games on par w/ the NES, much better battery life, and lower costs. And as stated when you have SHELVES of Gameboy stuff and a small Lynx section, you're gonna naturally drift to the one with more games. On top of that, by the late 80s, Atari was kind of a tainted brand name after the crash and TWO failed 2600 follow ups. Its similar to Sega by the late 90s where they went from being a powerhouse with arcade stuff and the Genesis to spending the rest of the 90s tripping over their own dicks with the Sega CD, 32X and Saturn. By the time the Dreamcast hit, no one had faith in the brand anymore, so a legit good product died.
Atari Lynx uses a 65C02 CPU which is an 8 bit processor. Atari Lynx model 2 also last around an hour extra on batteries. I bought two Atari Lynx model 2 handheld consoles. Not long after release in the UK. One of my then workmates had brought an Atari Lynx model 1, into work to show me it working. I liked what i saw mostly but thought it was a bit large. I also saw the Nintendo Game Boy working ,and was far less impressed with that handheld console. Yes the Atari Lynx was pretty expensive to run on just batteries. But having bought two, i was prepared to buy several sets of AA NiCad batteries. And four AA chargers, i had 24 rechargeable batteries in all. Which took 2 hours to charge a set of 4. The Atari Lynx was a darn good piece of hardware for its time. I have very good memories of my days with my Atari Lynx 2 models.
The Lynx 2, as well as being slightly, slightly, less ginormous, had an extra option to turn the backlight off. Intended for when the game was paused, since you couldn't see anything otherwise. Just to stretch that bit more energy, for people who paused a lot! It wasn't in software, since it wouldn't be backward-compatible, it was a combo of the function buttons around the screen. God it was an amazing system! I kinda want one, even though I could probably emulate one on my wristwatch! It's just so cool to be running advanced hardware, of the time. I got one second-hand for a while and a load of games, it was very impressive.
I went from a Gameboy to an Atari Lynx 2 as a kid and never looked back. The Lynx was so powerful and looked and sounded much better. The gameboy felt like a toy. The people who attack it never owned/played it and just followed the gameboy is better narrative like sheep.
Big ups including our hometown hero and the ribbons of shame scene as well! I had a lynx, loved it. never took it out much but was always plugged into the wall.
Did your power supply start to mess up? Mine did when I was a kid and found if I moved some, it would move the plug on the lynx and the power would shut off. I stuck to rechargeable batteries off begging mom
So one of the reasons that the old handhelds like the game gear, nomad, or Lynx have abysmal battery life is the backlight. Those old consoles use a mini fluorescent bulb behind the screen, and it kills the battery. White LED's hadn't been invented til the mid 90's, and doing a modern mod with led's gives them triple the battery.
Friend of mine had a lynx, I couldn't stand playing it. It had the same issue the GB had, a screen that had ghosting issues. Now we have better screens. Terrible back then though.
As a Gameboy owner of the 90’s, and knowing the history of the Atari Lynx, it came down to Ataris bad marketing and high price point of the system, $179.99 was a lot of money to throw at a device like this when in the early 90’s there weren’t any cell phones to buy and home computers were still fairly new on the market, and the most expensive electronics in homes in the 90’s were usually a TV and VCR, and not much else. So a pricey gaming handheld for a kid was a hard pill to swallow for parents to consider buying plus the price of games. A Gameboy was far more affordable even a Sega Game Gear. And for $179 that would easily buy a Super Nintendo or a Sega Genesis, so it was far more reasonable to put the money towards those than the Lynx.
I personally never found Tetris that interesting and the Nintendo Game Boy. I wasn't ever going to buy not with that awful garish screen. Bought Atari Lynx model 2 instead and was happy I did so.
@@peterpereira3653 I didn't buy a Game Boy until the GB Color came out and I instantly regretted it. It was a pain in the arse to see anything on that screen. I ended up getting rid of it about 6 or so months later. Still, it's hard to deny that one of the greatest selling game franchises didn't push the sales of the OG Game Boy. I have a model 1 Lynx, btw. Sadly, I fried a VRM in it about a year ago, when I was messing around with the shorted power cord from the power brick. I need to get another one, or get around to fixing it.
Yeah but so what? Chip's Challenge is a fun puzzle game, so's Klax. They're not as addictive as Tetris, sure. Nintendo made one of their best deals ever, in getting Elorg to license it exclusively. They ought not to have, for one thing it's hardly good communism! There's Zelda too, also an awesome game and already re-made and ported half a dozen times, just the one game, solely on Nintendo platforms. But still, one game doesn't sell a console. Tetris _almost_ did. You might choose a Gameboy over no handheld console, it might convince you of the fun just by itself and you find the rest of the fun later. But comparing one console against another, nah mate! Just a different experience. There were very few shooters or arcade games on the Gameboy. Not just the CPU but the LCD in particular was REALLY, REALLY slow! You couldn't animate anything at any sort of speed and still be able to see what it was! Slow animation was required. 4 colours looked poor. A lot of devs did their best and pulled off some great tricks, but you can't optimise around a rubbish slow 1989 LCD. It was price and battery life, and I think mainly battery life, that decided it. Software library too I suppose, back then Nintendo wrote some _very_ good games, and always exclusive. But the machines were in different categories, price wise. Lynx had all the tricks, but really wasn't optimised for battery life or portability. The GB was the opposite and designed completely around it's portableness. Lynx was more compromised by it, than designed for itt. This day and age you can get clever game carts that take SD-cards with the entire machine's library on. If that had been possible and easy to get, back then, I think Lynx would have done much better. With modern lithium batteries, too. And of _course_ if it had an LED backlight that used 1/4 the power and wasn't gigantic! Battery life would have at least doubled. Also some people here have mentioned the belt-worn battery pack that powers the Lynx by a cable. Not sure if they used C or D batteries, but D have more than twice the capacity, and usually the same price! Always design D cells into your toys, in future, future toy designers. Or else just lithium like everybody. You could make those fun! Have them wrap around your shoulders maybe, like grenade holders! Or a little backpack. All sorts of stuff! Lead-acid rechargable, or Ni-Cad, back then. The Lynx was a much better machine, admittedly the GB had better games. The Game Gear was a portable Master System (you could get an adaptor to play SMS games!). A bit underpowered, no special amazing video chips. But decent versions of the games of the time, and in full colour, not that awful 4-colour thing the NES was stuck with! The Master System just looked so much better! Then, with competent hardware, an outdated Z80 CPU but enough RAM and whatnot to run games without needing endless expansion chips inside each cartridge. Providing the stuff the console out to have had to start with! But yeah... Lynx wins, baby! Now let me go find someone who cares!
@@greenaum Excellent type up by you, I don't like many puzzle type video games. But to me Chip's Challenge is a better video game than Tetris. I just don't find falling blocks as interesting as most people seem to do.
I'm among those who appreciate this underrated console. I ended up finding one at a local Charity Shop a decade ago. It was in good condition, in a carrying case with two games. And for $5AU, that's money well spent, given the price it goes for nowadays.
@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 I agree. Rounds 2 (the street) and 4 (wilderness) are missing from the arcade. 256KB wasn't quite enough... management shouldve given them 384 (3 megabit). STUN Runner is another great port. All the stages, the voice, and a good simulation of the 3D effect using the Lynx's scaling... pretty much everything. While the computer ports blew it, Lynx got it right.
True, the vertical mode was something special! Body of the console designed round it, and even an unprecedented left-handed flip mode! On your iratA XNYL! AFAIK, the 4 fire buttons were wired in parallel so there really only were 2 buttons, like it said. The machine couldn't detect them as different. Shame cos 2 more buttons are always handy, and a game could handle swapping them about in it's software.
@@JudgmentStorm Could they make 512K carts back then? I don't think 384K ROMs were ever manufactured by anyone, so that'd need 2 ROM chips together. Would they have fit into the needlessly thin carts? Incidentally it's funny putting the Mr Creosote "it is only waffer-thin" cart into a console the size of a shoebox. Really wouldn't have killed them to allow the carts a bit bigger, stick stuff like battery-backed RAM for game saves, in more complex games that were never made because you can't fit a battery in, and they'd be unplayable without saving. So nobody ever wrote one for the Lynx. Hm for some reason I'm pondering a Pokemon port to the Game Gear. Not gonna write one, just thought it'd be a cool idea to see how Gen 1 turns out on Sega's hardware, and exploiting it's better features. 12-bit, 4096 colours for one!
@@greenaumGood chance they could make higher ROM cards. Densha de GO! on the Game Boy Color was a 1024K cart (8 megabit). GB/GBC carts are fairly small as well.
The complaint of lacking software is nonsense. People act like they're gonna buy EVERY game and not getting a 100 titles ruined console. NO. A typical person had twelve or so games, and a console supporting OPTIONS had different niches of customers, who had nothing in common. All sorts of consoles that DID succeed, did so on core gamers like SNES players with SFII and Mortal Combat, or Genesis shooters. N64 didn't do great but its small library is absolutely iconic. When a console sells a LOT, it can still be a console that barely makes it even with hardwre sales like PS1 or Wii, but every actual GAME is a relative disappointment because the options have people dilute their purchasing power so wide. The console sells, sure, but in actually buying games, it just sinks into the salaries of 100x more devs working on the games.
@@sboinkthelegday3892 I partially agree with you. You are correct, not everyone will buy a ton of games, regardless of hardware specs. But you have to agree that having a vast library will affect your purchase somewhat. I went with a PS1 over the N64 and to this day do not regret it. The amount of games available to not only buy, but RENT, really made a difference in the long run. Plus if many of your friends owned the same console(s), your library of games just went up via trading and borrowing. thanks for the feedback and thanks for watching!
I did buy a good amount of games for Atari Lynx. And I bought all of them through mail order. So I wasn't ever going to a shop to buy my Atari Lynx games. Bought many through Tele games in the UK.
Definitely a bit of both. I owned a lynx as a kid and loved the handheld and its games. I owned around 20 games for the lynx. Battery life was terrible for sure, but the system had some great games. I think the problem is as another person said, the price was just stupid high, you could pretty much buy a Genesis or Super Nintendo for the price of a Lynx.
@@alexojideagu it came out in the early 90s. By the time it was 99 bucks (still pricey back then) no one wanted it. Playstation was out and Atari was done.
@@allgood5140it came out in 1989 at 180 but was half that by 93/94. I got a Lynx 2 and it blew the gameboy away. I sold my gameboy to get a Megadrive around 92
The short lifespan of the Lynx? The Atari Lynx is still alive and and kickin' at the ripe old age of 35 years. Long Live the Lynx, especially if yours has a BennVenn IPS LCD upgrade like mine! I also bought a brand new screen lens, upgraded speaker, and USB 9v adapter for my model 2 from K-Retro.
The tragic thing about the Lynx to me is that those specs, and what it could do with them, still put many later handhelds to shame, such as the Game Gear, Neo Geo Pocket and Gameboy Color. If the Lynx had been given another chance with the NGPC's screen and size, I wouldn't have hesitated to get one. I'm not surprised that the Lynx did a bit better in Europe. The video game crash was a US-only thing, and at that time Atari and especially Sega were better known than Nintendo here. But the GameBoy did quickly change that. For me the question is, even as a Sega fan at the time, how did the Lynx get beaten by the Game Gear, even though the Game Gear had the same weight and battery consumption problems and was noticeably weaker on the graphics and audio side?
Game Gear had a far superior library, Atari didn't want Mortal Kombat for example, as they had Pitfighter, they turned down HMS offering them a conversion of Elite. Sega had third part development support Atari could only dream of.
From what I heave read online, the Game Gear actually had worse battery life. I have no way to confirm this of course. The Lynx, like the Vita, are tragic stories of how not to market a handheld console.
@@gamingquarterly6353at the time, I owned a Lynx, Mk 1 and MK II, also a Sega Game Gear, they all ate through batteries to the point of not much in it. I was extremely fortunate with my Game Gear screen, it didn't suffer the chronic ghosting my friends units did.
They should have sold the console at cost or less... Arguably, the US Government should have subsidized it so America didn't lose the video game wars to Japan.
I think the biggest hurdles for it was the battery life and most likely the nintendo lockdown on 3rd party publishers and developers. Even as kid back then, I was totally amazed on how such an amazing piece of harware could fall to the very limited gameboy (which I never liked).
@@gamingquarterly6353 Yeah but it could have still kept going .. It was impressive.. They could have kept making games but Atari decided to put all their eggs into the Jaguar.
As a kid, I wanted one too, because through magazines seeing the graphics 😂 , but personaly much years later, I tried several games and the gameplay...meuh
Yeah, unfortunately, the vast library are arcade ports (great for their time) and arcade like games. Arcade games are great, in short spurts. Although some have stated here on postings that Bill and Ted is an actual full fledge RPG.
My brother had one. IMO it was a great gaming platform, but it had few decent games available. It also was too big for portable gaming and the screen was too small to make best use of the hardware.
Atari did not cause the crash, but they had a huge part in it. You are also correct in stating the crash did not happen across the pond. This was a north american thing. However, companies did take notice of what had happened. In Japan, they call it the Atari Shock. I go into some detail on this on my Nintendo video and the 10NES system.
I had the Lynx growing up. I have some fond memories but honestly? Was only really Chips Challenge which stands out in my mind, that game was really great and easily the best version. The Lynx had the same issue as the Game Gear really. The screen was blurry as heck making it really hard to see, and it used far too many batteries. The Gameboy succeeding despite being worse spec wise seems quite the norm for Nintendo in hindsight.
@@gamingquarterly6353 Probably the same reason as most rival handhelds failed in comparison, Nintendo just dominated the market and had a much more robust library of games / affordability. I don't recall ever seeing Atari Lynx advertised but seeing Gameboy ads was common. It was just pure chance I even knew the Lynx existed at all. I never knew anyone else who owned one. But in regards to the Game Gear, whenever mentioned back then it was usually met with discussions about how bad the battery life was. I'd presume a similar discussion surrounded the Lynx. So in short, lack of marketing, lack of games, and excessive battery use.
The thing was huge. It was the Steamdeck of its day rather than the Game Boy and sadly the market was not developed enough for such a system to thrive, with batteries being an insurmountable problem when it's pitched as a kids system. The library really is underrated though (although many tentpole releases are WAY too hard) and it's worth going back and playing through a romset.
I went from a Gameboy to an Atari Lynx 2 as a kid and never looked back. The Lynx was so powerful and looked and sounded much better. The gameboy felt like a toy. The people who attack it never owned/played it and just followed the gameboy is better narrative like sheep.
From the Time Extension interview.. Lawrence Siegel: The Lynx was a fabulous little handheld. The problem was Nintendo wouldn’t let any of their third-party people come and do software. If you made software for the Game Boy or the Nintendo system you couldn’t put it on anybody else’s system. Sega had some of the Japanese publishers. Nintendo had the rest. And we had none. And in those days, the Japanese publishers ran the roost. So we had this really cool colour item that was just a vastly superior item and it was relatively inexpensive. But I just couldn’t get any software for it and the Lynx failed because almost every piece of software for the Lynx I made in my office in Chicago. I don’t think we had half a dozen third-party publishers that might have made a few titles here and a few titles there. Nobody was able to make any titles for it. Every single one of those games I executive produced and it’s terrible
Game Boy was a garbage system that unfortunately got all the 3rd party support. I was a kid back then, and thought the game boy screen was trash. Had I known the Lynx, or GG existed in the early 90's, I would have wanted them instead. Jack Tramiel was hated in the industry, so maybe developers didn't want to deal with him.
I was given one some years after owning both the Lynx and Game Gear, my God, that screen. No matter how many adjustments i made, I couldn't see a damn thing and my eyesight was 20-20 back then. Simply horrendous
The Tramiels were hard to negatiate with, from what I have read. I never got into the original gameboy. The lack of colors and super blurry screen didn't entice me. My first handheld was the nomad...unfortunately.
It's the weight and battery life that got it. 4 - 6 hours is optimistic. Colour LCDs require a white backlight, and the only white lights back then were incandescent or fluorescent. No white LEDs. The backlight is also why the Lynx is so thick, if you've ever taken one apart. It failed because of it's screen. But the hardware had powerful sprite scaling, it was very decent hardware. If they'd released it to work with TVs, it might have done well as a normal console. They'd have to increase the resolution a bit but that's no problem, could still have worked with all the excellent custom hardware. But a colour handheld before the invention of white LED backlights, no chance, never. Not without a backpack and a lead-acid motorbike battery to keep it powered.
I have thought about that as well. A home console that could do those things would have been great in 89 versus the 7800. But....Atari. Ugh. Their name and reputation by that time was in the toilet.
Incandescent lamps were a thing. They are only half as efficient as blue LEDs. You could have played for a long time at night. The reflector even in modern phone directs the light onto the single viewer. With more space behind the LCD even the bulky discharge tube could be focused. I wonder if the passive color LCD flickers like the grey LCD on the original Gameboy. Number of colors seems to match the same 4 levels per subpixel. The back light could be in sync. An initial voltage spike frame opens up the LCD for all but the black pixels. Then sustainer shots keep grey, light grey and white open.
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt Incandescent lamps were WAY less efficient than white LEDs. Consider modern light bulbs, a 5W LED bulb is the equivalent of a 60W tungsten bulb. That's why they used a fluorescent, awful and bulky and inefficient as it was, it was the only option for colour LCDs.
@@greenaum uh, English is not my native language and I trip when I am tired. I wanted to write gas-discharge lamp ( Hg ). White LEDs use fluorescence to generate green and red.
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt I know how white LEDS work, but ta. The key is getting the blue in the first place, it's the highest-energy colour in a white LED. The Japanese guy who invented modern blue LEDs won a Nobel Prize, and certainly deserves it! Pretty much every house and building is lit by his invention! You could get silicon carbide blue LEDs before that, but they were horribly expensive (about 20 times the price of a normal green or red), not bright, and inefficient. Mercury discharge is the key to fluorescent lamps anyway. They use it to generate UV, which stimulates phosphors around the tube. Though I think eventually they got down to either zero mercury, or very little, since it's such a disaster for nature. Still, LED lamps are two or three times as efficient as the compact fluorescents, which were the same technology we'd been using for decades for offices etc, the only trick was making them smaller, and adding an electronic ballast. So mercury discharge wouldn't have helped the Lynx. The ones you're talking about are incredibly bright, I don't know if they could be made low-power.
This is the classic handheld million dollar question. Why didn't better systems do better against the interior Game Boy? Many reasons. Name brand being one. 80's and early 90's were name brand driven. Kids went nuts over anything Nintendo, even if it was inferior. Second, a legacy of games! Nintendo was well established in US markets by 89'. Who wouldn't want to play metriod, Mario on a portable system?, cool! Third) the resilience of the GB was second to none. Kids could beat the crap out of it and it would still work. Consume fewer batteries. There is a Game Boy that survived a blast during Desert Storm in NYC on display that still works. Lol that good old Japanese quality! These in my opinion are the biggest reasons. As I keep on saying, jist because a console "lost" a gaming generation certainly does not mean there aren't great experiences on loser system. The Lynx has plenty of good to decent games, some were real lookers! I was blown away when I got mine in 90' scaling and rotation on a handheld! It was more powerful than my Genesis back home...well in some ways...Lynx is a cool system and deserves more respect than it gets.
Epyx had some really big plans for 1988. They started a "home productivity division". and ere looking at doing animation, 3-D CAD, home buisness type software. Then Christmas 1988 hit. During the year, software chain stores proliferated. They ordered much more software then could ever be sold. After Christmas EA had to take back over 50,000 units of unsold software. Things gradually started to pick up, but Epyx dropped the home productivity stuff to save money. But they were still owed some $4,000,000 from other dealers that got stuck with too much inventory and too few customers. Atari's late payments on the Lynx was just another factor leading to negative cash flow.
Omg... the PS-VITA!... how could I forget that somehow disposable smartphones existed back in the early 90s and took market share away from the Lynx... lmao.
For anyone wondering how the kid in the Lynx TV advert is supposed to plug the unit into a power socket, in a bathroom stall... What's shown is the comLynx cable. They're doing the surfing duel option in Californa Games. Apparently there's a longer version of the commercial out there where more kids are in other stalls playing along,
Actual sales figures for the system will always be a subject of pure conjecture. I think the best approach is that used in Karl Morris's excellent book on the Atari Lynx.. Pete Mortimer of Telegames interviewed. He again makes clear there were never any official total Lynx sales figures given by Atari, he personally thinks sales might of been near the high end 3 million claim, but doesn't even have software sales figures for their own titles on Lynx. Would be difficult to find actual number, but thinks it might be around 200,000.. Sure, we've seen magazines like Retrogamer run figures like 3,000 units sold, as FACT, when it's really just speculation and best guessing from Atari UK's Darryl Still, but as any credible historian will tell you, you never use single sources. It's been documented time and time again, Atari were loathe to release actual sales figures for hardware. The Lynx was no exception.
I use my Atari Lynx with rechargeable Ni-Mh AA batteries. It is the right way to use an Atari Lynx. Amazon Basics rechargeable AA batteries are a good match for Atari Lynx, Sega GameGear, PC Engine GT, Sega Nomad. I use a Duracell charger.
Thanks to many great and hard working enthusiasts of the Lynx out there, modding an actualy Lynx unit to work better and look better are all possible. I saw some videos of users comparing lynx original screens versus the new LCD ones, wow. Good info! Thanks.
I had one as a kid (and still own it) and it was given to me as a xmas present. I only ever saw it advertised once and hardly anyone at school knew about it. So what killed the Lynx? A lack of advertising and there wasn't a game in the catalogue that was similar to Mario or Sonic the Hedgehog. But the biggest killer was the lack of games compared to the Game Boy which everyone at school knew about.
Neo Geo never had an issue of limited games - it was a super premium system with high value games. Each game was like £500. It was not a system you bought many games for like Game Boy. It was for very rich consumers to play literal arcade games at home. The reference to Neo Geo here came across as REALLY ignorant. I can tell you are a kid but you should educate yourself before dropping references in.
@@arostwocents The SNK reference is made from a consumer point of view, such as myself. I was not rich, neither was my family. I had to save a few paychecks to get the system back in the day. In hindsight it's easy to point out what SNK expected from it. Back then, we had no idea, and only went with tidbits that magazines info provided us. We just wanted games to go with that awesome system, regardless of the company's vision. I miss it but I felt it was the right decision to part with it in exchange for the PS1 and the library of games and wide range of genres. Even though games were expensive (i only owned 6-7), I would have liked more variety for my buck. I don't consider my comment as ignorant, but an opinion. Just cause some out there don't agree with it, that doesn't make it arrogant.
I would choose the one with the longer battery life of course. Sure, the Lynx is better specced in most areas, but it's heavy and a battery guzzler. Battery wise... as a kid I got burned by the OG Game Gear experience (my parents found it too expensive to be buying 6 batteries multiple times a week. Ofc I own a Game Gear now as an adult, but it has a IPS screen, USB-C recharging and 15 to 20 hours battery life with a battery mod. Weight wise, I recently went for a Switch, because I seen a lot of complaints about the Steam Deck being big and heavy. And I don't want to be carrying a brick around with me.
The lynx was awesome, but the battery life like the game gear just sucked. Also the original lynx is huge! Handhelds should be small like the GB, GBA, DS, 3DS, PSP, Vita and so on.
@@buckroger6456Ya, When the video showed me the backlight in the Lynx I immediately knew why it guzzled batteries, The GG by default has a very similar looking backlight installed. That early type of backlight coupled with a color display is a nightmare for batteries of that era.
Still, there's the mains adaptor and even 12V for car trips. How often would you really take your Lynx to the park (and not be able to see the screen)? It's not entirely portable cos it's so enormous. I think "self-contained" is a better selling point, has it's own built-in screen. You can play anywhere, but anywhere sensible, usually!
It's wrong to say there were no commercial Adventure Games released on the Lynx. Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure was a Medicore affair, pulling in scores of:40% from Games-X and 14% from ST Format here in the UK. Reviewers found it dull and tedious to play. Dracula The Undead was a slow and plodding, but very atmospheric Point And Click Adventure, but if it's creators are to be believed, suffered badly at the hands of Atari.. Jim Gregory: This is one of life's huge annoyances. Dracula was originally a full interpretation of the book with ALL the story - right up to the end. It was designed to be in a larger cart and have a higher price. A full time team of artists, musicians, and programmers had spent over a year honing a great adventure with many unique aspects. When Atari started to feel the financial pinch, they insisted on us chopping it down to fit in the smallest cart size. That meant stripping down the story to end as he escapes from the castle. The final cart only has about 10% of the game, because it still needed the overhead of the adventure engine that we had written. There were loads of beautiful Victorian street scenes, animations, and interiors that had to be tossed. It was so sad. There were three other adventure games that we had pitched to use the same engine that were abandoned, too. One was based upon zombies, but Atari told us that people were not going to be interested in zombies! Remember, this was WAY before all the zombie stuff came out. We developed many other games that never saw the light of day due to the cutbacks and a new manager that was hired, who was technically and commercially 'stupid'.
Right. Atari Inc. was the one that went through the crash. Jack Tramiel's Atari Corporation was originally named Tramel Technology, Ltd., then it bought out the Atari Inc. consumer division. Sadly, Tramiel's reputation did AC no favors. The XEGS wasn't the brightest idea. Selling a repackaged 65XE against the NES and their own 7800? OMG, what a big mistake. The money they wasted on XEGS could've been put towards Lynx.
Interestingly, the Lynx was originally planned to load games from cassette tape. That's one reason it has so much RAM. If they'd gone with that, games could have been much, much cheaper to make, and independent companies might have chosen to develop for it. Of course fitting in a tape mech, and having it be reliable, would be a challenge in itself. I think both options would have been good together. Carts for travel, but also the option to connect up a tape player, maybe a walkman, to load games up too. Could have allowed for so many more games and much cheaper. That might even have driven sales of the console, having budget games for just a few quid. It's why 8-bit computers did so well in Europe, where for some reason disk drives were horribly over-priced compared to the USA. Even though American computers took 40 minutes to load from tape, British computers did it in 3 or 4 minutes, using ordinary cassette players rather than custom ones made for the computer. That American computers took so long was just laziness by the designers, not imagining that tapes would be an important medium.
Well does not really work out. Loading a game from casette takes 5 minutes + and on top of that without static storage you cannot keep it on the console. The only way this would have worked out would be with an additional sram module as aftermarket device.
@@werpu12 Well, 3 or 4 minutes was typical on British computers at the time, though of course it depends on how big the game is, how much RAM it occupies. Anyway it's not much of a difference. You don't need static RAM, home computers all used DRAM. The Z80 CPU had circuitry included, to refresh DRAM as needed. Other computers had separate refresh circuits, sometimes part of the graphics chip. You keep it on the console as long as it's switched on, and you could use low-power memory that can retain data on very little power when it's "off", but really just sleeping. That might use pseudo-static RAM, PSRAM. It acts like static but internally is cheap dynamic with some support circuitry. The Cambridge Z88, a little laptop that I greatly miss, could keep the internal RAM powered for months on 4xAA's. But you don't _need_ that! You can save games to tape, of course. That's very convenient, a free bonus! Yes, you'd have to reload the game each time you turned the power off, and that might be preferable rather than using low-power RAM. Computer owners for a decade or so re-loaded a game from tape every time to play it. It was fine! Nobody minded. Some of the later games had fun little custom loaders where you'd play a little game during loading! While it loads in front of your eyes. Pac-Loader and Invade-A-Load, you can imagine what they were like. So loading from tape each time is no big deal, you just got used to it and read a comic or something. You'd load an adventure game, a strategy game, or even Elite! Then when you wanted to save, you'd tell the game, and put in your save game tape. Record to empty space (using the tape player's counter was a crucial skill!). Reload that next time round. Viola! The Lynx actually loads from cartridge in a somewhat serial manner! It doesn't directly access it as a ROM chip, or so I've read. It has to load data into it's 64K RAM before it can use it properly. That's a hangover from it's tape-based origin, but means it would have done as well with tape as it did with ROM carts. You'd have to ask homebrewers for details I suppose, perhaps there's a good doc I could find, I do hope so! 64K was enough for so many great games in the 1980s. If you really needed more, you could make it a multi-load. Say, an Olympics game might load each event in new, with it's new graphics and code. Your scores and status would remain in the console's RAM, but the new sport's data would load over the old, now un-needed one. It all worked out. I'd have liked hooking my personal stereo up to my Lynx! If I'd had a Lynx as a kid, which I didn't! But it would have seemed so cool and clever!
@@greenaum Thanks for the explation, but I dont think loading games from tape for the lynx would have worked out by that time, it would have been doa... Either way the Lynx was a great heavily underrated handheld! Glad that emulation is there nowadays, modern handhelds are the perfect companion to relive some of the Lynx games!
@@TheLairdsLair No it's not, read the Lynx dev documentation online. It has a line to control a cassette motor, and there's mention of it in the docs, though at the time they're written, there's nothing actually about it, just a header. The LYNX ROM is read from an I/O port one byte at a time rather than being part of the memory map. That's because it was patched into the circuitry that was going to read from tape.
4:12 Lmao, wtf did I just watch...? if that teacher had walked in on the kid 30 seconds earlier, that would've been some f'd up sounds he would've heard coming from the bathroom stall...
Even though it failed I still like the Lynx a lot for the graphical style and music/sounds were unique and it had a certain charm. Of course it was much more powerful than the Gameboy but honestly if I had to pick between the two I like the Lynx more
The weakest consoles sold most usually. Gameboy, SNES, PS1, PS2, DS, Wii, Switch. Lynx could run Amiga 500 games portable, but also had that extra "Mode 7 chip". Today we can play Lynx games "portable" on PC handhelds...
I remember when these first came out in Canada back in 1991 when I was 10. They were technically impressive, however, it was very expensive and quickly overtaken by the Game Gear and you never heard about it again.
I used to have a Lynx and several games (about 15 or so), I even had one of the official rechargable battery packs you clipped on your belt (The Gameboy and Game gear also had their own versions). It was a pretty cool system, but I agree lack of software and battery life killed it. I played my Gameboy the most BECAUSE it had the most games and most of those games were pretty FUN. (I did love Xenophobe on the Lynx, and Warbirds though)
Nice! My friend only ever owned maybe 4-5 games. Poor guy was the only one who had a Lynx and was actually annoyed no one else bought one, as he was really looking forward to using that multi-player option with some games.
@gamingquarterly6353 the original arcade was sort of odd since the screen was split into three layers, one for each player. Game had this letter box look for each player. I think I liked the Lynx version more since I owned that 😅
The Lynx has some great sprite scaling and 2D/3D games that were impossible on the gameboy. Battlewheels, Warbirds, Roadblasters, Stunrunner, SteelTalons. Pitfighter was amazingly close to the arcade. A Mortal Kombat port would have looked great. Someone has made a homebrew demo.
I wouldn't say Pitfighter was amazingly close to the arcade. The low resolution screen and limited colours made the Lynx version very brown and murky, the limited cartridge size meant intro screens and speech had to be dropped.
@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 It's still the closest looking console port to the arcade by a long way, and the only version with sprite scaling. And runs the exact arcade code. It looks Far far superior to the SNES and looks and feels more like the arcade than even the Mega Drive version.
I always find it so cool when I hear of moms buying consoles or playing games. My mom use to play super mario Bros when I got my NES and thought she was the coolest. My dad was hooked on that Billiard game on the genesis, side pocket.
@@gamingquarterly6353 She also bought our 1st Atari 2600, & later the Playstation & PS2. I'm the one who paid for my Atari Jaguar. Sadly she passed in 2009 but still played her Lynx. She could beat Rygar like it was nothing.
Had a Lynx 2 back in the day it was a really decent piece of kit, the frustration was the complete lack of games. I think Atari as a brand was dead and 3rd party developers had lost faith. These were the very early years of the internet, you had to rely on the countless magazines for info. It's a shame such a brand went down the pan, it's only now you see where Atari went so wrong
My thoughts exactly. I think the library of games avalaible to you as a consumer can affect sales and decisions. Some have said to me that this is not a factor, but I disagree.
No, the Amiga failed against IBM. Amiga was 10 years ahead, you could do 3DCG animation on the Amiga in 1988, Something that would take 10 years to appear on PC. The amiga was 500$ and the non gaming PC were 2500$. Yet Amiga failed.
I've heard that Nintendo's contracts didn't allow third party developers to also release games on rivalling platforms, so that surely didn't help with the amount of available games.
very true. But how much of those restrictions played a hand with Lynx software is debatable. During that time, I recall the genesis getting some big time third party comapnies jumping over to their side, like Capcom and Konami. I would have loved to see what Capcom and Konami could have done with the lynx back then. But again, who knows.
@@gamingquarterly6353 Good point, it indeed didn't seem to hurt competitors as much. Atari never was very good with third party developers. Also, if more companies would have ported games to the Lynx, how many of them would have been lazy ports, as the way the Lynx handles graphics is completely different from other systems at the time. Personally, I was disappointed with how many Gameboy games turned out to be platformers.
The battery life was the killer. Rechargeable batteries existed but were expensive and not as reliable as they are today 30 years ago. So, for every 4-6 hours of gameplay on the Lynx (if you weren't plugged in) youre looking at a few bucks for 6 new batteries. The GameBoy lasted easily 4-5 times longer on 1/3rd of the batteries. Handhelds were largely marketed to kids back then, and kids dont necessarily have an endless supply of batteries or money for more all the time. Top that off with the Tetris pack in and the price point and it was over before it began.
🤣 I thought I was the only one that caught that. Lynx actually had a huge 6 pack D battery case that plugged into the lynx. I'm sure he had that stuffed in his pants somewhere 😂.
It's not the AC lead, it's the comLynx cable. They're doing the surfing duel option in Californa Games. There apparently is a longer version of the commercial, where more kids are in other stalls playing along,
Like the Jaguar the lynx has a single system bus. CPU code should have come from cartridge and data reside in a huge register file. Some (write) queue to steal the graphics chip (Suzy) some memory cycles.
The Lynx was far superior, except for it's battery life and larger physical size. The idea was more that it's portable and you can take it places, then plug in. And on a longer trip you could splurge and buy batteries and have something to do. I think the main reason the Gameboy did a lot better with greatly inferior hardware was marketing and the lower price. Nintendo since the NES times was all about making games for........little kids. It was mostly parents buying the Gameboy for their kids, not the game players choosing their console. It was cheap, they were all over the place, and Nintendo at that time made lots of games that keep kids busy and out of trouble. The Lynx appealed much more to the older gamer. The young adult that grew up with arcade machines & Atari, or the older teen. But at that time sadly it wasn't enough. Nintendo in their early days through Donkey Kong made the kinds of games (like Space Firebird) that would appeal to arcade fans & those that grew up with Atari, but by the NES, the focus changed to little kids and I found their kind of games very unappealing as an older teen when it came to America. How many games did we really need? Were most people going to buy more than 79 titles? What mattered was.....the tiles available and how good they were. I grew up going to the arcades and still loved them, although that great run was ending as "karate-cades" were starting to take over and I had no interest in them. Awesome titles were made for the Lynx. Many Atari Games arcade hits, which were just awesome games. Sadly that Atari, closer to the original Atari, had nothing to do with the Atari producing & marketing the Lynx, but they did get the rights to a lot of great games. I'd say exactly the ones I wanted, and they'd have been terrible on the Gameboy. One can't blame the Lynx development team for not wanting to do business with that version of Atari. All the original Atari people were long gone, and the ruthless people from the original Commodore were running the company. They didn't care about anyone. The Amiga was incredible when it came out, and to have some of those people working on a portable game system was just amazing, and some of the Amiga game titles. Why play Lynx games on the original hardware when you can play it through emulation? Good question. I'll take......emulation. Sold my original model Lynx just a few years ago. I still have some boxed games for sale. The nostalgia was in the ability to play the games for me, not in the physical console or it's packaging.
Lowest screen resolution out of Lynx, Game Gear and Game Boy and Game Gear hardware far better suited to 2D side scrolling platformer, that's why frame rates on Lynx platform games are far lower than those on the GG, so it's a swings and roundabouts situation.
0:27 Those last 2 stats are the real deal breaker when it comes to handheld. Lynx is DOUBLE+ the weight AND your popping new batteries at least once a day. Not saying your average consumer took that in to consideration. The main reason is G A M E S.
Are you sure about the Lynx's 32-bit DAC for sound? Nobody, not even crazy hifi nuts, use 32 bits for sound, it's completely unnecessary, and the surrounding components wouldn't be able to keep up with the ridiculous Signal to Noise Ratio. Is there some special mode where you can hook up 4 x 8-bit DACs or something? Even then you'd likely hook it into being 2 x 16-bit, not 1 x 32-bit. It's insane, self-defeating, and wouldn't serve a purpose.
I got the info from Wikipedia. It says 4 channels x 8 bits per channel= 32 bits. You are right, I am sure it wasn;t used to full specifications. Maybe this was a situation like the Intellevision, which has a 16 bit CPU but was never fully utilized. thanks for the info. I know nothing about audio specs or underlying technology. 😁
@@gamingquarterly6353 Nah, there's 4 separate channels with an 8-bit DAC each, giving 256 levels of sound. That's all, you can't combine them together to make 16 bits or anything. Their outputs are just mixed together to play at the same time. You could technically do the same with jst one DAC, and combine the values of your 4 channels together in software, just averaging the values out. But that's a lot of maths (well, not THAT much on a 16MHz CPU). So for whatever reason, they put 4 DACs in there. Because it was cheap enough, probably. Later changes apparently gave them volume controls so you could do stereo panning on the Lynx II. So, 4 x 8 bits, it doesn't make any sense to multiply them together, it doesn't correspond to the real hardware. Just 4 DACs, each playing it's own sound, together, independent of each other.
@@greenaum I see your point. Makes a little more sense now. I guess the Lynx placed them there for maybe future use, assuming the handheld got popular, allowing them to do more sophisticated sounds in later games? Who knows.
@@gamingquarterly6353 I think they were there intended for use straight away and probably were used. The N64, for example, claimed hundreds of sound channels, all output through one DAC, mixing them using software like I described earlier. Obviously the N64 had a lot more CPU power than the Lynx, but the Lynx still had plenty. Then again, DOS games used to offer slower sound mixing rates on slower computers, around the time of the 386 and 486, so it's probably more difficult than I gave it credit for. So probably having 4 is an advantage for programmers, you just assign 4 sound channels to their own DAC each. It makes sense, really. Cuts down on processing. Also I've read some more, and the Lynx's sound wasn't just generated in software, it had sound-generating hardware using modified counter circuits, and those could output to the DACs too. Similar to the analogue sound channels on older consoles, but in this case generated entirely digitally, using digital circuits, then only turned to analogue by the DAC at the final stage. So it gives it digital synthesis. Using 4 separate generators would be a reason to have 4 DACs. They still could have mixed it all in the digital domain, then fed it to just one DAC (or two for stereo), but they decided one DAC per channel and do the mixing in analogue, after the DACs, instead. There probably wasn't a lot of advantage in one way over the other, so they chose for their own reasons.
RGB takes 3 times of LCD pixels. They could have gone full RGBRGB ( without gaps ) and have a full resolution frame buffer and then do ClearType on read out. So like color CRT split intensity in an analog way over the trinitron grille.
yup. that was the consensus back then. My friend was annoyed that no one but him had a Lynx and he could not play multiplayer games with others. Not only that, but just more diversed game titles in general.
Atari Uk's Darryl Still joins Telegames Pete Mortimer, pointing out nobody really knew actual Lynx sales figures.. : Q. Do you happen to know what the total sales figures for the Lynx were? There seems to be no other figures quoted other than articles that report Atari selling their one millionth Lynx. A) I probably knew at the time, but cannot put a figure on it now. Less than it should have been, that’s for sure. Definitely more than that the worldwide build was 7 digits and they'd have all been sold into retail. He was then given a suggested number, he simply went along with.. Q. I always guessed at about 2.5 million because I know Batman Returns helped sell a lot of Lynxes. A) Yes, something like that.
@@gamingquarterly6353my pleasure, Atari would always present estimated sales, be it sold so far or what they hoped to sell in coming year. They'd talk of sales to retailers, but when it came to independently verified, actual sales, there isn't a figure. People asked likes of Pete Mortimer Telegames. Darryl Still, Atari UK they reference documents the late Curt Vendel shared, but it's still best guess stuff. Sadly we have seen a figure of 3 million used in mainstream magazine articles, based on this speculation but reported as FACT 🙄
@@gamingquarterly6353I'd genuinely be delighted to hear, how Darry Still, Marketing Manager of Atari UK, had actual, independently verified sales figures for the Lynx, from USA stores where it was sold. Stores such as Toys 'R' Us Kay-Bee Toys Children's Palace Lionel Playworld Good Guys Babbages Electronic Boutique Montgomery World's. As that would be an absolutely monumental achievement
This video takes a rather simplified approach. You don't mention the Lynx had the lowest screen resolution of the Lynx, Game Gear and Game Boy, nor how the Lynx suffered when it came to 2D platform titles 15-20 fps for games like Toki, Switchblade II, Viking Child VS 60 fps for Game Gear titles like Lion King and Dynamite Headdy You also don't factor in cartridge sizes when talking about software, the Tramiel's only granted larger sizes when prices fell and even then, wouldn't pay developers more for bigger games. Why do you think APB is missing the Prisoner Confession stage? Shadow Of The Beast the flying sequence? Ninja Gaiden the Arcade intro and an entire level? Lynx Californa Games lacks 2 events compared to the C64 version. Lynx Double Dragon is missing moves, weapons etc. Viking Child lacks the in-game music the GB version has.. So much software on Lynx is scaled down. Regarding Software Development : Your talking a company which delayed the first milestone payment to John Carmack for Lynx Wolfienstien 3D, so John killed the project.. A company which didn't want Mortal Kombat on the Lynx as they had Pitfighter.. A company which didn't class the development of KEY titles such as AVP, Cabal, 720,Rolling Thunder and Indicators as a top priority.. A company unwilling to pay for the licence for Elite, after HMS gave them a demo proving the game was possible on the Lynx, who had them hide the solid 3D,more ambitious version of Battlezone 2000 as an Easter Egg.. A company who didn't want Jeff Minter's Defender 2 on the system. If you talk to publishers like Gremlin, the Lynx games they did release (Switchblade 2) sold so badly, they simply dropped the system.
Time and time again do many companies trying to chase a trend fail to realize, great stats and tech don't guarantee great sales, look at the Game Gear from Sega. Great games, is what sell consoles. Companies today still aren't learning from this lesson, like Chris Roberts and his train wreck of a game called Star Citizen, bragging about a $50 million dollar state of the art motion capture studio and over a billions of polygons in a single pebble, and absolutely no fun gameplay to sell it.
Yes! Game companies are throwing so much money into these games and forgetting the fun aspect and going with visuals and pizzaz. I am glad the indie scene is available to pickup that slack from the AAA studios, oh...and the AAAA studio Ubisoft, makers of the onyl AAAA title known to gamers. 😏
I actually had one of those I had a ton of fun with it but I had to rechargeable battery bundle so I didn't have that problem the big problem that I had with it was no games oh and r o g stands for Republic of gamers not whatever you said near the end of the video
😃Yeah, I called it ROG instead of announcing it by letter. I had no idea what ROG stood for before I bought it. I think just by laziness I still call it ROG. I will make sure to correctly pronounce it once I review this cool gaming device.
The Lynx really didn't fare well when it came to RPG Games. Knight Technologies "Storm over Doria" was a victim.. Eye Of The Beholder also.. Imagitec Design's extremely flawed attempt at doing an Ultima-Beater, Daemonsgate was canned, but that might of been for the best, given how it was recieved on PC, falling way short of the hype made the hat trick.
That is awesome!! I guess that is why I am getting tons of feedback on this video. I thought it would barely get noticed since the Lynx (unfortunately) did not get much attention when it was released. Thanks for putting the word out!!
It sold better over here … u must mean South America right…. No wait… Canada… no wait… Vietnam… what country do you mean… you are assuming we know where u live….
They were the biggest culprit in it all. While many people, including myself , would make that generalized statement, we know now that many had a hand in the crash. When we say the industry crash, we usually refer to the whole vibe and outlook towards the gaming landscape back then. Video games were sold pennies on the dollar as retailers scrambled to liquidate and rid themselves of tons of excess stock. I remember seeing them in bargain bins by the boatloads. Many refused to carry gaming consoles and inventory in fear of them being left out to pick up the pieces. Colecovision went belly up due to the crash, as did a few developing studios. Nintendo had to re-desgin their hardware so retailers could even give them a chance to sell their product. Even then, it was only test marketed in very secluded markets, like New York and Dallas among the very few. I would have to respectfully disagree with you. The crash happened. Luckily, it was short lived thanks to the success of Nintendo. Thanks for watching!
@@gamingquarterly6353 People were tired of beep sound and ugly graphics and shallow games. They simply transitioned to computer games and divided the world in 2 : console pesants ans computer master race. Nintendo brought back consoles, but gaming never stopped. ZX Spectrum, C64 and Atari 400 were computers made for gaming. I have friends in their late 50's that never ever played a console, not even the 2600, they only ever played on computers.
Of to a bad start with the thumbnail - that is the wrong Atari logo? I hate it when people do that! That logo was only ever used by Infogrames for a short time in the early noughties. The as soon as the video starts I see more stuff wrong - Mikey and Suzy (correct spelling) are the sound and graphics chips - the CPU is an 8-bit 65C02 running at 4 MHz. The Lynx name had NOTHING to do with the Panther, the fact that the Lynx, Panther and Jaguar are all big cats is pure coincidence. The Lynx is so called because it offers the opportunities for lots of "links" with other machines. The Panther and Jaguar were both named after cars. The original name for the Lynx was the APES (Atari Portable Entertainment System) but the programmers at Epyx pointed out how stupid it sounded and Atari changed it. With regards to sales, there is a good figure out there actually as according to ex-Atari Marketing Manager (and Lynx Product Manager) Daryl Still it sold around 3 million units (500k North America, 1 million UK, 1 Million France and 500k rest of Europe and Australia). You are wrong about the adventure RPG part - both Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and Dracula: The Undead fit this category. But I won't argue that the Lynx is a magical machine and Lynx emulation is still a long way from being perfect, so nothing beats the real experience.
Kieren Hawken is an idiot and has been ejected from every part of the retrogaming community he's infested, so take anything he wrote with a grain of salt. 1. "Of to a bad start" writes Kieren, who can't even construct a sentence without a mistake. And he's already edited his comment. He's no writer, just a retrogaming hack. 2. Who gives a damn about the Atari logo? Only someone like the Layered's Layer would. 3. Kieren himself got the chips wrong on one of his rants trying to be the "big guy" and had to be corrected. He was also wrong about hardware features like rotation, scaling, skewing etc. He knows nothing. 4. The sales figures are complete guesses by a guy that Kieren repeats over and over as gospel. Anyone that gives Kieren the time of day should be avoided as a source because they are clearly stupid. The Layered's Layer seems to think he's required to defend the Lynx's failings at all cost, and try and convince everyone that it wasn't a horrible little low-resolution battery killer and not as amazing as he makes out.
I will have a serious talk with my research guy. Oh wait....that's me. Crap. I blame wikipedia, and atari...to an extent. 😮💨 Good info. Hope you enjoyed the video aside from the (small?) inconsistencies? 😬
@@gamingquarterly6353Darry Still never knew actual sales figures for the Lynx : : Q. Do you happen to know what the total sales figures for the Lynx were? There seems to be no other figures quoted other than articles that report Atari selling their one millionth Lynx. A) I probably knew at the time, but cannot put a figure on it now. Less than it should have been, that’s for sure. Definitely more than that the worldwide build was 7 digits and they'd have all been sold into retail. He was then given a suggested figure he simply went along with. Q. I always guessed at about 2.5 million because I know Batman Returns helped sell a lot of Lynxes. A) Yes, something like that.
@@gamingquarterly6353If we are talking Research, try this little lot.. I'd genuinely be delighted to hear, how Darry Still, Marketing Manager of Atari UK, had actual, independently verified sales figures for the Lynx, from USA stores where it was sold. Stores such as: Toys 'R' Us Kay-Bee Toys Children's Palace Lionel Playworld Good Guys Babbages Electronic Boutique Montgomery World's. As that would be an absolutely monumental achievement. As for the Lynx Custom Chips.. MIKEY incorporated the CPU, sound system, video DMA drivers for the LCD display, system timers, interrupt controller and UART. SUZY is essentially a high-speed Blitter, with numerous intelligent drawing functions and it incorporates a maths Co-processor. Both used CMOS technology for low power consumption and strong temperature stability. It's an over simplification to simply call them the graphics and sound chips. The overall Lynx clock speed is 16 MHz, which provides a basic system cycle of 62.5 nanoseconds. This pulse is divided by 4 to provide a cycle rate for the 65C02,which therefore functions at 4MHz.
Your comparisons are just misinformation and highly arrogantly IGNORANT af and perhaps also somewhat entitled into the delusional belief that seems typical for Atari fanboys to believe that "Atari should have won" and that they "were unfairly denied videogame software support because of Nintendo". I also have a sneaking suspicion that you most likely didn't exist back then or maybe you was a really young child incapable of making work income based purchases or even of shoveling snow, mowing lawns and selling newspapers as most early teenage boys were able to do especially when videogames started becoming far more worthy and worthwhile to be a hobby than even the early 80s. I can see this by your ignorance of bringing SNK's NeoGeo AES into your blog about the Atari Lynx and also relying on using actual Atari Corp television advertising as some type of "legitimate" evidence that Atari and or Atari Lynx was a cool brand to buy or even worth buying. Advertising and television commercials in the early ages of the 80s and even early 90s could give an image of ok this migjt be interesting to a horrible reputation for using a certain type of mindset that could give your product a bad image. Let's remind everyone here that "Atari Games" and "Atari Corp" were two different entities and companies that catered to very different business or markets. Atari Games was specifically an arcade game maker that was not related, didn't have to answer to or bend the knee to and most importantly were not obligated to serve Atari Corp which had a different owner and different mindset the moment said new owners took ownership of that particular company. Next that tv commercial is problematic because a videogame product that just came out and retailed for $179.99 is being advertised as a videogame that you could sneak into what seems like elementary school and rest room to basically skip class with... I'm sure they broadcast this on American television without thinking about consequences because they figured that the parents might not be sitting there also watching television... so that kinda writes it's own story right there and these types of commercials always suffered (as well as the comparison advertising which Sega and Atari desperately tried using) from potentially sparking a feeling or even sentiment in the viewer (target audience kids) that might not really even fit the so called focus group testing and could become a problem for the way the target audience would see the game product in general. In other words, they could have made a more informative TV commercial that didn't rely in calling kids stupid, pretty sure about that. Next is the so called game software support... we have dramatically different prices here... because of the dramatically different specs... Atari Corp in the late 80s and early 90s just had their own line of thinking that was based on how they originally ignored the home videogame system market after they wrecked it with a bad reputation in 1983. In other words Atari Corp was more devoted to selling computers or rather their computers because that's what they believed in so they basically laughed at Nintendo and Sega and when the numbers came out that Nintendo was doing very well then all of a sudden they wanted to be back in that market and undercut the other n00b Sega at the time which they actually succeeded at. The point is that they had a particular mindset and a way they treated the technology and target audience that they never noticed wasn't sitting well... they had the Atari 7800 which also boasted 2600 BC but your TV commercial was about the 2600 Junior... ever wonder why the heck did they ever think that was a good idea? And they had the Atari EXGS with a commercial mocking the Nintendo NES as some silly children toy (calling an audience dumb is a type of condéscending insult) all between 1986 to 1988 so no wonder those Epyx engineers who created the Lynx didn't want to be associated with Atari Corp... I'd even bet that if Coleco or some other company had signed up that they would never have left because they got a bad feeling but let's not curse Atari Corp cause that's not my intention. My point is that no matter how cool the new Atari Lynx would have seemed in 1989 that the way Atari Corp marketed it would give it either an ok image or a slightly negative or suspect image... The battery life is actually irrelevant here btw even when comparing to the Nintendo Gameboy... Atari Corp had it's own brand recognition just as equally as Nintendo had and Sega was developing. As such the ultimate judge of how a game product will do is after all I mentioned that how would the audience respond to it... it was very obvious that the tv commercial did show Atari Lynx had color screen and stereo sound and ehh more buttons while Gameboy didn't. The first two years will sell a certain amount of units, after that the company needs to keep cultivating interest as well as games themselves... therefore it is NOT fair and is highly insulting to compare the entire run of Atari Lynx to the entire run of Gameboy... it's pure misinformation... the only appropriate thing to barely compare is the first three years or even four years... Next you have to put yourself in the shoes of the game developers and publishers... sure the Atari Lynx has higher specs but how many units sold in the first two and three holiday seasons? If say Atari Lynx sold one million units in the first year to actual consumers, then yeah, that looks great regardless of Gameboy selling two or three million because one million units sold means you might sell 1/4, 1/3 or maybe 1/2 of your game software to actual users provided the game was good, people talked about it, etc Did that actually happen? I'm sure it never did and instead they barely scratched 200k units and that's gonna ruin your plans of your third party game. Technically speaking that $180 price isn't a problem back then in U.S.A. alone but if people react a certain way then you aren't getting units sold and it's not cause of "Nintendo" Btw other companies can compete... and that's the nature of the game... Atari Jaguar had horrible marketing messages just like 3DO so it's no surprise that some people may have felt either insulted or mocked and either way not be so positive about buying those systems and not cause of "Nintendo" Nintendo secured an install base, they catered to their customers and for the most part didn't treat them like dumb idiots... something that Sega of America's management staff started doing in the early to mid to even late 90s like they never learned. SNK America or whatever the subsidiary branch was called were confused and didn't really know how to target older age groups well... and unfortunately the American subsidiary branches back then tended to completely ignore the Japanese marketing of showing the whole family both genders, late teens, twenty plus and grandparents playing from FamiCom to the NeoGeo AES... at least that may secure a better sales position than just using dumb advertising.
The Lynx was a really interesting piece of hardware, as a kid I really wanted it. It just released during a time where Nintendo was absolutely dominating the gaming space at least in the states, and it was maybe too ambitious for its own good. The Nintendo strategy of using lesser tech to its full potential converted to really great portable games on par w/ the NES, much better battery life, and lower costs. And as stated when you have SHELVES of Gameboy stuff and a small Lynx section, you're gonna naturally drift to the one with more games. On top of that, by the late 80s, Atari was kind of a tainted brand name after the crash and TWO failed 2600 follow ups. Its similar to Sega by the late 90s where they went from being a powerhouse with arcade stuff and the Genesis to spending the rest of the 90s tripping over their own dicks with the Sega CD, 32X and Saturn. By the time the Dreamcast hit, no one had faith in the brand anymore, so a legit good product died.
You hit the nail on the coffin. I agree 100%. Good stuff. Thanks for watching.
Atari Lynx uses a 65C02 CPU which is an 8 bit processor. Atari Lynx model 2 also last around an hour extra on batteries. I bought two Atari Lynx model 2 handheld consoles. Not long after release in the UK. One of my then workmates had brought an Atari Lynx model 1, into work to show me it working. I liked what i saw mostly but thought it was a bit large. I also saw the Nintendo Game Boy working ,and was far less impressed with that handheld console. Yes the Atari Lynx was pretty expensive to run on just batteries. But having bought two, i was prepared to buy several sets of AA NiCad batteries. And four AA chargers, i had 24 rechargeable batteries in all. Which took 2 hours to charge a set of 4.
The Atari Lynx was a darn good piece of hardware for its time. I have very good memories of my days with my Atari Lynx 2 models.
The Lynx 2, as well as being slightly, slightly, less ginormous, had an extra option to turn the backlight off. Intended for when the game was paused, since you couldn't see anything otherwise. Just to stretch that bit more energy, for people who paused a lot!
It wasn't in software, since it wouldn't be backward-compatible, it was a combo of the function buttons around the screen.
God it was an amazing system! I kinda want one, even though I could probably emulate one on my wristwatch! It's just so cool to be running advanced hardware, of the time. I got one second-hand for a while and a load of games, it was very impressive.
I went from a Gameboy to an Atari Lynx 2 as a kid and never looked back. The Lynx was so powerful and looked and sounded much better. The gameboy felt like a toy. The people who attack it never owned/played it and just followed the gameboy is better narrative like sheep.
Too bad the games sucked. That was Gameboys saving grace. Game gear and tg-16 were the only others with good games but lacked the battery power.
Atari proved themselves the kings of shooting themselves in the foot with their terrible decisions.
Big ups including our hometown hero and the ribbons of shame scene as well! I had a lynx, loved it. never took it out much but was always plugged into the wall.
Did your power supply start to mess up? Mine did when I was a kid and found if I moved some, it would move the plug on the lynx and the power would shut off. I stuck to rechargeable batteries off begging mom
Hey bro!
So one of the reasons that the old handhelds like the game gear, nomad, or Lynx have abysmal battery life is the backlight. Those old consoles use a mini fluorescent bulb behind the screen, and it kills the battery. White LED's hadn't been invented til the mid 90's, and doing a modern mod with led's gives them triple the battery.
Friend of mine had a lynx, I couldn't stand playing it. It had the same issue the GB had, a screen that had ghosting issues. Now we have better screens. Terrible back then though.
As a Gameboy owner of the 90’s, and knowing the history of the Atari Lynx, it came down to Ataris bad marketing and high price point of the system, $179.99 was a lot of money to throw at a device like this when in the early 90’s there weren’t any cell phones to buy and home computers were still fairly new on the market, and the most expensive electronics in homes in the 90’s were usually a TV and VCR, and not much else.
So a pricey gaming handheld for a kid was a hard pill to swallow for parents to consider buying plus the price of games. A Gameboy was far more affordable even a Sega Game Gear.
And for $179 that would easily buy a Super Nintendo or a Sega Genesis, so it was far more reasonable to put the money towards those than the Lynx.
It was over before it began. Tetris was pretty much the ultimate pack-in game for a gaming system.
It’s one of those games that came out at exactly the right time. The ongoing collapse of the Soviet Union and a receptive market made it huge deal.
I personally never found Tetris that interesting and the Nintendo Game Boy. I wasn't ever going to buy not with that awful garish screen. Bought Atari Lynx model 2 instead and was happy I did so.
@@peterpereira3653 I didn't buy a Game Boy until the GB Color came out and I instantly regretted it. It was a pain in the arse to see anything on that screen. I ended up getting rid of it about 6 or so months later. Still, it's hard to deny that one of the greatest selling game franchises didn't push the sales of the OG Game Boy.
I have a model 1 Lynx, btw. Sadly, I fried a VRM in it about a year ago, when I was messing around with the shorted power cord from the power brick. I need to get another one, or get around to fixing it.
Yeah but so what? Chip's Challenge is a fun puzzle game, so's Klax. They're not as addictive as Tetris, sure. Nintendo made one of their best deals ever, in getting Elorg to license it exclusively. They ought not to have, for one thing it's hardly good communism!
There's Zelda too, also an awesome game and already re-made and ported half a dozen times, just the one game, solely on Nintendo platforms.
But still, one game doesn't sell a console. Tetris _almost_ did. You might choose a Gameboy over no handheld console, it might convince you of the fun just by itself and you find the rest of the fun later. But comparing one console against another, nah mate! Just a different experience.
There were very few shooters or arcade games on the Gameboy. Not just the CPU but the LCD in particular was REALLY, REALLY slow! You couldn't animate anything at any sort of speed and still be able to see what it was! Slow animation was required. 4 colours looked poor. A lot of devs did their best and pulled off some great tricks, but you can't optimise around a rubbish slow 1989 LCD.
It was price and battery life, and I think mainly battery life, that decided it. Software library too I suppose, back then Nintendo wrote some _very_ good games, and always exclusive. But the machines were in different categories, price wise. Lynx had all the tricks, but really wasn't optimised for battery life or portability. The GB was the opposite and designed completely around it's portableness. Lynx was more compromised by it, than designed for itt.
This day and age you can get clever game carts that take SD-cards with the entire machine's library on. If that had been possible and easy to get, back then, I think Lynx would have done much better. With modern lithium batteries, too. And of _course_ if it had an LED backlight that used 1/4 the power and wasn't gigantic! Battery life would have at least doubled.
Also some people here have mentioned the belt-worn battery pack that powers the Lynx by a cable. Not sure if they used C or D batteries, but D have more than twice the capacity, and usually the same price! Always design D cells into your toys, in future, future toy designers. Or else just lithium like everybody.
You could make those fun! Have them wrap around your shoulders maybe, like grenade holders! Or a little backpack. All sorts of stuff! Lead-acid rechargable, or Ni-Cad, back then.
The Lynx was a much better machine, admittedly the GB had better games. The Game Gear was a portable Master System (you could get an adaptor to play SMS games!). A bit underpowered, no special amazing video chips. But decent versions of the games of the time, and in full colour, not that awful 4-colour thing the NES was stuck with! The Master System just looked so much better! Then, with competent hardware, an outdated Z80 CPU but enough RAM and whatnot to run games without needing endless expansion chips inside each cartridge. Providing the stuff the console out to have had to start with!
But yeah... Lynx wins, baby! Now let me go find someone who cares!
@@greenaum Excellent type up by you, I don't like many puzzle type video games. But to me Chip's Challenge is a better video game than Tetris. I just don't find falling blocks as interesting as most people seem to do.
I'm among those who appreciate this underrated console. I ended up finding one at a local Charity Shop a decade ago. It was in good condition, in a carrying case with two games. And for $5AU, that's money well spent, given the price it goes for nowadays.
I applaud you for being one of those few that bought one and at least gave it a chance. Not a bad deal!
Good video. I like Lynx, specially Ninja Gaiden port. The shmups are good with the vertical screen mode. Greetings from Brazil, friend!
Crying shame they weren't given a bigger cartridge, so they could of included the missing level and arcade intro.
@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 I agree. Rounds 2 (the street) and 4 (wilderness) are missing from the arcade. 256KB wasn't quite enough... management shouldve given them 384 (3 megabit).
STUN Runner is another great port. All the stages, the voice, and a good simulation of the 3D effect using the Lynx's scaling... pretty much everything. While the computer ports blew it, Lynx got it right.
True, the vertical mode was something special! Body of the console designed round it, and even an unprecedented left-handed flip mode! On your iratA XNYL!
AFAIK, the 4 fire buttons were wired in parallel so there really only were 2 buttons, like it said. The machine couldn't detect them as different. Shame cos 2 more buttons are always handy, and a game could handle swapping them about in it's software.
@@JudgmentStorm Could they make 512K carts back then? I don't think 384K ROMs were ever manufactured by anyone, so that'd need 2 ROM chips together. Would they have fit into the needlessly thin carts?
Incidentally it's funny putting the Mr Creosote "it is only waffer-thin" cart into a console the size of a shoebox. Really wouldn't have killed them to allow the carts a bit bigger, stick stuff like battery-backed RAM for game saves, in more complex games that were never made because you can't fit a battery in, and they'd be unplayable without saving. So nobody ever wrote one for the Lynx.
Hm for some reason I'm pondering a Pokemon port to the Game Gear. Not gonna write one, just thought it'd be a cool idea to see how Gen 1 turns out on Sega's hardware, and exploiting it's better features. 12-bit, 4096 colours for one!
@@greenaumGood chance they could make higher ROM cards. Densha de GO! on the Game Boy Color was a 1024K cart (8 megabit). GB/GBC carts are fairly small as well.
Was the Lynx a wasted opportunity for Atari, or was the market just not ready for another Atari product?
The complaint of lacking software is nonsense. People act like they're gonna buy EVERY game and not getting a 100 titles ruined console. NO. A typical person had twelve or so games, and a console supporting OPTIONS had different niches of customers, who had nothing in common.
All sorts of consoles that DID succeed, did so on core gamers like SNES players with SFII and Mortal Combat, or Genesis shooters. N64 didn't do great but its small library is absolutely iconic.
When a console sells a LOT, it can still be a console that barely makes it even with hardwre sales like PS1 or Wii, but every actual GAME is a relative disappointment because the options have people dilute their purchasing power so wide. The console sells, sure, but in actually buying games, it just sinks into the salaries of 100x more devs working on the games.
@@sboinkthelegday3892 I partially agree with you. You are correct, not everyone will buy a ton of games, regardless of hardware specs. But you have to agree that having a vast library will affect your purchase somewhat.
I went with a PS1 over the N64 and to this day do not regret it. The amount of games available to not only buy, but RENT, really made a difference in the long run. Plus if many of your friends owned the same console(s), your library of games just went up via trading and borrowing.
thanks for the feedback and thanks for watching!
I did buy a good amount of games for Atari Lynx. And I bought all of them through mail order. So I wasn't ever going to a shop to buy my Atari Lynx games. Bought many through Tele games in the UK.
Definitely a bit of both. I owned a lynx as a kid and loved the handheld and its games. I owned around 20 games for the lynx. Battery life was terrible for sure, but the system had some great games. I think the problem is as another person said, the price was just stupid high, you could pretty much buy a Genesis or Super Nintendo for the price of a Lynx.
I remember. I was a teen. Lynx looked.great. Price was nuts though. A lot of us wanted one.
By the early mid 90s an Atari Lynx 2 was cheap
@@alexojideagu it came out in the early 90s. By the time it was 99 bucks (still pricey back then) no one wanted it. Playstation was out and Atari was done.
@@allgood5140it came out in 1989 at 180 but was half that by 93/94. I got a Lynx 2 and it blew the gameboy away. I sold my gameboy to get a Megadrive around 92
The short lifespan of the Lynx? The Atari Lynx is still alive and and kickin' at the ripe old age of 35 years. Long Live the Lynx, especially if yours has a BennVenn IPS LCD upgrade like mine! I also bought a brand new screen lens, upgraded speaker, and USB 9v adapter for my model 2 from K-Retro.
The tragic thing about the Lynx to me is that those specs, and what it could do with them, still put many later handhelds to shame, such as the Game Gear, Neo Geo Pocket and Gameboy Color. If the Lynx had been given another chance with the NGPC's screen and size, I wouldn't have hesitated to get one.
I'm not surprised that the Lynx did a bit better in Europe. The video game crash was a US-only thing, and at that time Atari and especially Sega were better known than Nintendo here. But the GameBoy did quickly change that.
For me the question is, even as a Sega fan at the time, how did the Lynx get beaten by the Game Gear, even though the Game Gear had the same weight and battery consumption problems and was noticeably weaker on the graphics and audio side?
Game Gear had a far superior library, Atari didn't want Mortal Kombat for example, as they had Pitfighter, they turned down HMS offering them a conversion of Elite.
Sega had third part development support Atari could only dream of.
From what I heave read online, the Game Gear actually had worse battery life. I have no way to confirm this of course. The Lynx, like the Vita, are tragic stories of how not to market a handheld console.
@@gamingquarterly6353at the time, I owned a Lynx, Mk 1 and MK II, also a Sega Game Gear, they all ate through batteries to the point of not much in it.
I was extremely fortunate with my Game Gear screen, it didn't suffer the chronic ghosting my friends units did.
In the UK I went from a Gameboy to an Atari Lynx 2 as a kid and never looked back. The Lynx was so powerful and looked and sounded much better.
They should have sold the console at cost or less... Arguably, the US Government should have subsidized it so America didn't lose the video game wars to Japan.
I think the biggest hurdles for it was the battery life and most likely the nintendo lockdown on 3rd party publishers and developers. Even as kid back then, I was totally amazed on how such an amazing piece of harware could fall to the very limited gameboy (which I never liked).
@@gamingquarterly6353 Yeah but it could have still kept going .. It was impressive.. They could have kept making games but Atari decided to put all their eggs into the Jaguar.
As a kid, I wanted one too, because through magazines seeing the graphics 😂 , but personaly much years later, I tried several games and the gameplay...meuh
Yeah, unfortunately, the vast library are arcade ports (great for their time) and arcade like games. Arcade games are great, in short spurts. Although some have stated here on postings that Bill and Ted is an actual full fledge RPG.
My brother had one. IMO it was a great gaming platform, but it had few decent games available. It also was too big for portable gaming and the screen was too small to make best use of the hardware.
The Lynx 2 was about the same price as a Gameboy by 1992/93
Atari Corp in 1989 was not Atari Inc from 1983. Also, Atari didn’t create any crash. And in Europe or Japan this crash never happened.
Atari did not cause the crash, but they had a huge part in it. You are also correct in stating the crash did not happen across the pond. This was a north american thing.
However, companies did take notice of what had happened. In Japan, they call it the Atari Shock. I go into some detail on this on my Nintendo video and the 10NES system.
I forgot how massive the handheld was. That kid in the bathroom looked like he was pulling out a sawed-off shotgun.
I heard he got bit by a spider and became spiderman a few years later.
Why is it that everyone that comes up with an idea, started out drawing it on a napkin?
Bars.
@@JetScreamer_YTI was gonna say the same thing lol good ole booze
People discuss ideas in restaurants, which have tables, but no stationery.
Beat me to it. At the bars talking to the cocktail waitresses. The 80’s were a better time.
@@traphousegamer1906 A bunch of drunk nerds start brain storming in a bar.
I had the Lynx growing up. I have some fond memories but honestly? Was only really Chips Challenge which stands out in my mind, that game was really great and easily the best version. The Lynx had the same issue as the Game Gear really. The screen was blurry as heck making it really hard to see, and it used far too many batteries. The Gameboy succeeding despite being worse spec wise seems quite the norm for Nintendo in hindsight.
since you owned one, what, in your opinion, caused the lynx to fail?
@@gamingquarterly6353 Probably the same reason as most rival handhelds failed in comparison, Nintendo just dominated the market and had a much more robust library of games / affordability. I don't recall ever seeing Atari Lynx advertised but seeing Gameboy ads was common. It was just pure chance I even knew the Lynx existed at all. I never knew anyone else who owned one. But in regards to the Game Gear, whenever mentioned back then it was usually met with discussions about how bad the battery life was. I'd presume a similar discussion surrounded the Lynx.
So in short, lack of marketing, lack of games, and excessive battery use.
The power of Lynx is crazy. Going back to it now blows your mind, being superior in a lot of ways to home systems of the time.
Blue Lightning shown in this video is stunning for an 80s handheld. It's actually fun too, and I'm not a fan of flight games.
The thing was huge. It was the Steamdeck of its day rather than the Game Boy and sadly the market was not developed enough for such a system to thrive, with batteries being an insurmountable problem when it's pitched as a kids system.
The library really is underrated though (although many tentpole releases are WAY too hard) and it's worth going back and playing through a romset.
I went from a Gameboy to an Atari Lynx 2 as a kid and never looked back. The Lynx was so powerful and looked and sounded much better. The gameboy felt like a toy. The people who attack it never owned/played it and just followed the gameboy is better narrative like sheep.
Battlewheels was an awesome multiplayer game.
and the develop platform for the lynx was an Amiga not Atari ST
From the Time Extension interview..
Lawrence Siegel: The Lynx was a fabulous little handheld. The problem was Nintendo wouldn’t let any of their third-party people come and do software. If you made software for the Game Boy or the Nintendo system you couldn’t put it on anybody else’s system. Sega had some of the Japanese publishers. Nintendo had the rest. And we had none. And in those days, the Japanese publishers ran the roost.
So we had this really cool colour item that was just a vastly superior item and it was relatively inexpensive. But I just couldn’t get any software for it and the Lynx failed because almost every piece of software for the Lynx I made in my office in Chicago. I don’t think we had half a dozen third-party publishers that might have made a few titles here and a few titles there. Nobody was able to make any titles for it. Every single one of those games I executive produced and it’s terrible
Game Boy was a garbage system that unfortunately got all the 3rd party support. I was a kid back then, and thought the game boy screen was trash. Had I known the Lynx, or GG existed in the early 90's, I would have wanted them instead. Jack Tramiel was hated in the industry, so maybe developers didn't want to deal with him.
I was given one some years after owning both the Lynx and Game Gear, my God, that screen.
No matter how many adjustments i made, I couldn't see a damn thing and my eyesight was 20-20 back then.
Simply horrendous
@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 I still would have taken it over the GB. As bad as the screens for the Lynx, and GG were, the GB was 1000 times worse lol
The Tramiels were hard to negatiate with, from what I have read. I never got into the original gameboy. The lack of colors and super blurry screen didn't entice me. My first handheld was the nomad...unfortunately.
It's the weight and battery life that got it. 4 - 6 hours is optimistic. Colour LCDs require a white backlight, and the only white lights back then were incandescent or fluorescent. No white LEDs. The backlight is also why the Lynx is so thick, if you've ever taken one apart. It failed because of it's screen.
But the hardware had powerful sprite scaling, it was very decent hardware. If they'd released it to work with TVs, it might have done well as a normal console. They'd have to increase the resolution a bit but that's no problem, could still have worked with all the excellent custom hardware. But a colour handheld before the invention of white LED backlights, no chance, never. Not without a backpack and a lead-acid motorbike battery to keep it powered.
I have thought about that as well. A home console that could do those things would have been great in 89 versus the 7800. But....Atari. Ugh.
Their name and reputation by that time was in the toilet.
Incandescent lamps were a thing. They are only half as efficient as blue LEDs. You could have played for a long time at night. The reflector even in modern phone directs the light onto the single viewer. With more space behind the LCD even the bulky discharge tube could be focused.
I wonder if the passive color LCD flickers like the grey LCD on the original Gameboy. Number of colors seems to match the same 4 levels per subpixel. The back light could be in sync. An initial voltage spike frame opens up the LCD for all but the black pixels. Then sustainer shots keep grey, light grey and white open.
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt Incandescent lamps were WAY less efficient than white LEDs. Consider modern light bulbs, a 5W LED bulb is the equivalent of a 60W tungsten bulb.
That's why they used a fluorescent, awful and bulky and inefficient as it was, it was the only option for colour LCDs.
@@greenaum uh, English is not my native language and I trip when I am tired. I wanted to write gas-discharge lamp ( Hg ). White LEDs use fluorescence to generate green and red.
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt I know how white LEDS work, but ta. The key is getting the blue in the first place, it's the highest-energy colour in a white LED. The Japanese guy who invented modern blue LEDs won a Nobel Prize, and certainly deserves it! Pretty much every house and building is lit by his invention!
You could get silicon carbide blue LEDs before that, but they were horribly expensive (about 20 times the price of a normal green or red), not bright, and inefficient.
Mercury discharge is the key to fluorescent lamps anyway. They use it to generate UV, which stimulates phosphors around the tube. Though I think eventually they got down to either zero mercury, or very little, since it's such a disaster for nature.
Still, LED lamps are two or three times as efficient as the compact fluorescents, which were the same technology we'd been using for decades for offices etc, the only trick was making them smaller, and adding an electronic ballast.
So mercury discharge wouldn't have helped the Lynx. The ones you're talking about are incredibly bright, I don't know if they could be made low-power.
This is the classic handheld million dollar question. Why didn't better systems do better against the interior Game Boy? Many reasons. Name brand being one. 80's and early 90's were name brand driven. Kids went nuts over anything Nintendo, even if it was inferior. Second, a legacy of games! Nintendo was well established in US markets by 89'. Who wouldn't want to play metriod, Mario on a portable system?, cool! Third) the resilience of the GB was second to none. Kids could beat the crap out of it and it would still work. Consume fewer batteries. There is a Game Boy that survived a blast during Desert Storm in NYC on display that still works. Lol that good old Japanese quality! These in my opinion are the biggest reasons. As I keep on saying, jist because a console "lost" a gaming generation certainly does not mean there aren't great experiences on loser system. The Lynx has plenty of good to decent games, some were real lookers! I was blown away when I got mine in 90' scaling and rotation on a handheld! It was more powerful than my Genesis back home...well in some ways...Lynx is a cool system and deserves more respect than it gets.
Epyx had some really big plans for 1988. They started
a "home productivity division". and ere looking at doing animation,
3-D CAD, home buisness type software. Then Christmas 1988 hit.
During the year, software chain stores proliferated.
They ordered much more software then could ever be sold. After Christmas
EA had to take back over 50,000 units of unsold software. Things gradually started to pick up,
but Epyx dropped the home
productivity stuff to save money. But they were still owed some
$4,000,000 from other dealers that got stuck with too much inventory and too few customers.
Atari's late payments on the Lynx
was just another factor leading to negative cash flow.
Omg... the PS-VITA!... how could I forget that somehow disposable smartphones existed back in the early 90s and took market share away from the Lynx... lmao.
For anyone wondering how the kid in the Lynx TV advert is supposed to plug the unit into a power socket, in a bathroom stall...
What's shown is the comLynx cable. They're doing the surfing duel option in Californa Games.
Apparently there's a longer version of the commercial out there where more kids are in other stalls playing along,
Also, is that kid Tobey Maguire?
@@cl1ck99yes it is
Actual sales figures for the system will always be a subject of pure conjecture.
I think the best approach is that used in Karl Morris's excellent book on the Atari Lynx..
Pete Mortimer of Telegames interviewed.
He again makes clear there were never any official total Lynx sales figures given by Atari, he personally thinks sales might of been near the high end 3 million claim, but doesn't even have software sales figures for their own titles on Lynx.
Would be difficult to find actual number, but thinks it might be around 200,000..
Sure, we've seen magazines like Retrogamer run figures like 3,000 units sold, as FACT, when it's really just speculation and best guessing from Atari UK's Darryl Still, but as any credible historian will tell you, you never use single sources.
It's been documented time and time again, Atari were loathe to release actual sales figures for hardware.
The Lynx was no exception.
I'd first fix the specs because Mikey divides the 16MHz clock down to 4MHz, and Mikey is only 8 bit. The DACs are only 8 bit.
The tramiels could run anything into the ground
I use my Atari Lynx with rechargeable Ni-Mh AA batteries. It is the right way to use an Atari Lynx. Amazon Basics rechargeable AA batteries are a good match for Atari Lynx, Sega GameGear, PC Engine GT, Sega Nomad. I use a Duracell charger.
Thanks to many great and hard working enthusiasts of the Lynx out there, modding an actualy Lynx unit to work better and look better are all possible. I saw some videos of users comparing lynx original screens versus the new LCD ones, wow.
Good info! Thanks.
I had one as a kid (and still own it) and it was given to me as a xmas present. I only ever saw it advertised once and hardly anyone at school knew about it.
So what killed the Lynx? A lack of advertising and there wasn't a game in the catalogue that was similar to Mario or Sonic the Hedgehog. But the biggest killer was the lack of games compared to the Game Boy which everyone at school knew about.
I agree. That thrid party support was not good, and the battery life didn't help!
Neo Geo never had an issue of limited games - it was a super premium system with high value games. Each game was like £500. It was not a system you bought many games for like Game Boy. It was for very rich consumers to play literal arcade games at home. The reference to Neo Geo here came across as REALLY ignorant. I can tell you are a kid but you should educate yourself before dropping references in.
Neo Geo was never designed to be a mass market system. You cannot say the system failed by comparing it to business goals that SNK did not have.
@@arostwocents The SNK reference is made from a consumer point of view, such as myself. I was not rich, neither was my family. I had to save a few paychecks to get the system back in the day. In hindsight it's easy to point out what SNK expected from it. Back then, we had no idea, and only went with tidbits that magazines info provided us. We just wanted games to go with that awesome system, regardless of the company's vision. I miss it but I felt it was the right decision to part with it in exchange for the PS1 and the library of games and wide range of genres. Even though games were expensive (i only owned 6-7), I would have liked more variety for my buck. I don't consider my comment as ignorant, but an opinion. Just cause some out there don't agree with it, that doesn't make it arrogant.
As always, extremely high-quality video with lots of interesting historical facts! Congrats!
Glad you enjoyed it. Thanks for watching!
I would choose the one with the longer battery life of course. Sure, the Lynx is better specced in most areas, but it's heavy and a battery guzzler.
Battery wise... as a kid I got burned by the OG Game Gear experience (my parents found it too expensive to be buying 6 batteries multiple times a week. Ofc I own a Game Gear now as an adult, but it has a IPS screen, USB-C recharging and 15 to 20 hours battery life with a battery mod.
Weight wise, I recently went for a Switch, because I seen a lot of complaints about the Steam Deck being big and heavy. And I don't want to be carrying a brick around with me.
The lynx was awesome, but the battery life like the game gear just sucked. Also the original lynx is huge! Handhelds should be small like the GB, GBA, DS, 3DS, PSP, Vita and so on.
@@buckroger6456Ya, When the video showed me the backlight in the Lynx I immediately knew why it guzzled batteries, The GG by default has a very similar looking backlight installed. That early type of backlight coupled with a color display is a nightmare for batteries of that era.
Still, there's the mains adaptor and even 12V for car trips. How often would you really take your Lynx to the park (and not be able to see the screen)? It's not entirely portable cos it's so enormous. I think "self-contained" is a better selling point, has it's own built-in screen. You can play anywhere, but anywhere sensible, usually!
It's wrong to say there were no commercial Adventure Games released on the Lynx.
Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure was a Medicore affair, pulling in scores of:40% from Games-X and 14% from
ST Format here in the UK.
Reviewers found it dull and tedious to play.
Dracula The Undead was a slow and plodding, but very atmospheric Point And Click Adventure, but if it's creators are to be believed, suffered badly at the hands of Atari..
Jim Gregory: This is one of life's huge annoyances. Dracula was originally a full interpretation of the book with ALL the story - right up to the end.
It was designed to be in a larger cart and have a higher price. A full time team of artists, musicians, and programmers had spent over a year honing a great adventure with many unique aspects.
When Atari started to feel the financial pinch, they insisted on us chopping it down to fit in the smallest cart size. That meant stripping down the story to end as he escapes from the castle.
The final cart only has about 10% of the game, because it still needed the overhead of the adventure engine that we had written. There were loads of beautiful Victorian street scenes, animations, and interiors that had to be tossed. It was so sad.
There were three other adventure games that we had pitched to use the same engine that were abandoned, too. One was based upon zombies, but Atari told us that people were not going to be interested in zombies! Remember, this was WAY before all the zombie stuff came out.
We developed many other games that never saw the light of day due to the cutbacks and a new manager that was hired, who was technically and commercially 'stupid'.
Jack Tramiel's Atari was not the same Atari that went through the crash of '83-'84. Most consumer's never even knew there was a crash.
Right. Atari Inc. was the one that went through the crash. Jack Tramiel's Atari Corporation was originally named Tramel Technology, Ltd., then it bought out the Atari Inc. consumer division. Sadly, Tramiel's reputation did AC no favors.
The XEGS wasn't the brightest idea. Selling a repackaged 65XE against the NES and their own 7800? OMG, what a big mistake. The money they wasted on XEGS could've been put towards Lynx.
I bought an Atari lynx 2 years ago and daaang that thing is so fun! I wish the library is larger
Hopefully the homebrew community will keep making new titles for it.
Interestingly, the Lynx was originally planned to load games from cassette tape. That's one reason it has so much RAM. If they'd gone with that, games could have been much, much cheaper to make, and independent companies might have chosen to develop for it. Of course fitting in a tape mech, and having it be reliable, would be a challenge in itself.
I think both options would have been good together. Carts for travel, but also the option to connect up a tape player, maybe a walkman, to load games up too. Could have allowed for so many more games and much cheaper. That might even have driven sales of the console, having budget games for just a few quid. It's why 8-bit computers did so well in Europe, where for some reason disk drives were horribly over-priced compared to the USA. Even though American computers took 40 minutes to load from tape, British computers did it in 3 or 4 minutes, using ordinary cassette players rather than custom ones made for the computer. That American computers took so long was just laziness by the designers, not imagining that tapes would be an important medium.
Well does not really work out. Loading a game from casette takes 5 minutes + and on top of that without static storage you cannot keep it on the console. The only way this would have worked out would be with an additional sram module as aftermarket device.
@@werpu12
Well, 3 or 4 minutes was typical on British computers at the time, though of course it depends on how big the game is, how much RAM it occupies. Anyway it's not much of a difference. You don't need static RAM, home computers all used DRAM. The Z80 CPU had circuitry included, to refresh DRAM as needed. Other computers had separate refresh circuits, sometimes part of the graphics chip. You keep it on the console as long as it's switched on, and you could use low-power memory that can retain data on very little power when it's "off", but really just sleeping. That might use pseudo-static RAM, PSRAM. It acts like static but internally is cheap dynamic with some support circuitry. The Cambridge Z88, a little laptop that I greatly miss, could keep the internal RAM powered for months on 4xAA's.
But you don't _need_ that! You can save games to tape, of course. That's very convenient, a free bonus! Yes, you'd have to reload the game each time you turned the power off, and that might be preferable rather than using low-power RAM. Computer owners for a decade or so re-loaded a game from tape every time to play it. It was fine! Nobody minded. Some of the later games had fun little custom loaders where you'd play a little game during loading! While it loads in front of your eyes. Pac-Loader and Invade-A-Load, you can imagine what they were like. So loading from tape each time is no big deal, you just got used to it and read a comic or something.
You'd load an adventure game, a strategy game, or even Elite! Then when you wanted to save, you'd tell the game, and put in your save game tape. Record to empty space (using the tape player's counter was a crucial skill!). Reload that next time round. Viola!
The Lynx actually loads from cartridge in a somewhat serial manner! It doesn't directly access it as a ROM chip, or so I've read. It has to load data into it's 64K RAM before it can use it properly. That's a hangover from it's tape-based origin, but means it would have done as well with tape as it did with ROM carts. You'd have to ask homebrewers for details I suppose, perhaps there's a good doc I could find, I do hope so!
64K was enough for so many great games in the 1980s. If you really needed more, you could make it a multi-load. Say, an Olympics game might load each event in new, with it's new graphics and code. Your scores and status would remain in the console's RAM, but the new sport's data would load over the old, now un-needed one. It all worked out.
I'd have liked hooking my personal stereo up to my Lynx! If I'd had a Lynx as a kid, which I didn't! But it would have seemed so cool and clever!
@@greenaum Thanks for the explation, but I dont think loading games from tape for the lynx would have worked out by that time, it would have been doa... Either way the Lynx was a great heavily underrated handheld!
Glad that emulation is there nowadays, modern handhelds are the perfect companion to relive some of the Lynx games!
This is an urban myth, I have interviewed most of the people behind the Lynx who all stated this is wrong and they don't know where it came from.
@@TheLairdsLair No it's not, read the Lynx dev documentation online. It has a line to control a cassette motor, and there's mention of it in the docs, though at the time they're written, there's nothing actually about it, just a header. The LYNX ROM is read from an I/O port one byte at a time rather than being part of the memory map. That's because it was patched into the circuitry that was going to read from tape.
4:12 Lmao, wtf did I just watch...? if that teacher had walked in on the kid 30 seconds earlier, that would've been some f'd up sounds he would've heard coming from the bathroom stall...
notice how the lynx has a power cord attached to it. I would hate to see what he has it plugged into.
Even though it failed I still like the Lynx a lot for the graphical style and music/sounds were unique and it had a certain charm. Of course it was much more powerful than the Gameboy but honestly if I had to pick between the two I like the Lynx more
same here.
That ending was *chef kiss*
The weakest consoles sold most usually.
Gameboy, SNES, PS1, PS2, DS, Wii, Switch.
Lynx could run Amiga 500 games portable, but also had that extra "Mode 7 chip".
Today we can play Lynx games "portable" on PC handhelds...
the power at our fingertips on handheld devices today is something we could have only dreamed of back then.
I would buy the Nintendo Virtual Boy for best intentions, right? :)
If you hate your eyesight and like headaches, yes. I would not be surprised if Nintendo gave 3D another shot with their next console.
Amazing for the time, but size was a problem; you could go surfing with the Lynx.
😆
I remember when these first came out in Canada back in 1991 when I was 10. They were technically impressive, however, it was very expensive and quickly overtaken by the Game Gear and you never heard about it again.
A shame indeed.
I used to have a Lynx and several games (about 15 or so), I even had one of the official rechargable battery packs you clipped on your belt (The Gameboy and Game gear also had their own versions). It was a pretty cool system, but I agree lack of software and battery life killed it. I played my Gameboy the most BECAUSE it had the most games and most of those games were pretty FUN. (I did love Xenophobe on the Lynx, and Warbirds though)
Nice! My friend only ever owned maybe 4-5 games. Poor guy was the only one who had a Lynx and was actually annoyed no one else bought one, as he was really looking forward to using that multi-player option with some games.
Xenophobe was one of my favorites. Found crouch walking to be the only way to play and rarely get hit.
@@buckroger6456 I still play xenophobe from time to time (the arcade version) and find it fun.
@gamingquarterly6353 the original arcade was sort of odd since the screen was split into three layers, one for each player. Game had this letter box look for each player. I think I liked the Lynx version more since I owned that 😅
Excellent content as always.
The Lynx has some great sprite scaling and 2D/3D games that were impossible on the gameboy. Battlewheels, Warbirds, Roadblasters, Stunrunner, SteelTalons. Pitfighter was amazingly close to the arcade. A Mortal Kombat port would have looked great. Someone has made a homebrew demo.
I gotta check it out. Interesting. Thanks for the heads up!
I wouldn't say Pitfighter was amazingly close to the arcade. The low resolution screen and limited colours made the Lynx version very brown and murky, the limited cartridge size meant intro screens and speech had to be dropped.
@@thefurthestmanfromhome1148 It's still the closest looking console port to the arcade by a long way, and the only version with sprite scaling. And runs the exact arcade code. It looks Far far superior to the SNES and looks and feels more like the arcade than even the Mega Drive version.
Doesn't have a 32bit DAC. four 8bit DACs does not equate to 32bit. It equates to 10bits.
Me, my mom, & 2 best friends all bought Atari Lynx units. My mom played hers a lot.
I always find it so cool when I hear of moms buying consoles or playing games. My mom use to play super mario Bros when I got my NES and thought she was the coolest. My dad was hooked on that Billiard game on the genesis, side pocket.
@@gamingquarterly6353 She also bought our 1st Atari 2600, & later the Playstation & PS2. I'm the one who paid for my Atari Jaguar. Sadly she passed in 2009 but still played her Lynx. She could beat Rygar like it was nothing.
@@Mrshoujo I am sorry for your loss. Your mom sounded like she was awesome!
Had a Lynx 2 back in the day it was a really decent piece of kit, the frustration was the complete lack of games. I think Atari as a brand was dead and 3rd party developers had lost faith. These were the very early years of the internet, you had to rely on the countless magazines for info. It's a shame such a brand went down the pan, it's only now you see where Atari went so wrong
My thoughts exactly. I think the library of games avalaible to you as a consumer can affect sales and decisions. Some have said to me that this is not a factor, but I disagree.
There is one lesson tech history has taught us the past 50 years. The platforms that succeeded had a killer app.
No, the Amiga failed against IBM. Amiga was 10 years ahead, you could do 3DCG animation on the Amiga in 1988, Something that would take 10 years to appear on PC. The amiga was 500$ and the non gaming PC were 2500$. Yet Amiga failed.
@@MarquisDeSang The Amiga didn't fail. It might not have been very popular in the US, but it didn't fail.
@@evertonshorts9376 But we are running shit PC todays with the worst OS ever made. Althought, I use Linux.
@@MarquisDeSang We are here on TH-cam, so does that mean broadcast television failed?
@@evertonshorts9376 They turned against their customers.
I've heard that Nintendo's contracts didn't allow third party developers to also release games on rivalling platforms, so that surely didn't help with the amount of available games.
very true. But how much of those restrictions played a hand with Lynx software is debatable. During that time, I recall the genesis getting some big time third party comapnies jumping over to their side, like Capcom and Konami. I would have loved to see what Capcom and Konami could have done with the lynx back then. But again, who knows.
@@gamingquarterly6353 Good point, it indeed didn't seem to hurt competitors as much. Atari never was very good with third party developers.
Also, if more companies would have ported games to the Lynx, how many of them would have been lazy ports, as the way the Lynx handles graphics is completely different from other systems at the time.
Personally, I was disappointed with how many Gameboy games turned out to be platformers.
The battery life was the killer. Rechargeable batteries existed but were expensive and not as reliable as they are today 30 years ago. So, for every 4-6 hours of gameplay on the Lynx (if you weren't plugged in) youre looking at a few bucks for 6 new batteries. The GameBoy lasted easily 4-5 times longer on 1/3rd of the batteries. Handhelds were largely marketed to kids back then, and kids dont necessarily have an endless supply of batteries or money for more all the time.
Top that off with the Tetris pack in and the price point and it was over before it began.
Tetris and the battery life were definitely deal breakers.
Don't forget the size. Lynx is a monster and not easily carried around like a Gameboy.
4:16 - where did he plug this in, in a toilet?
🤣 I thought I was the only one that caught that. Lynx actually had a huge 6 pack D battery case that plugged into the lynx. I'm sure he had that stuffed in his pants somewhere 😂.
It's not the AC lead, it's the comLynx cable.
They're doing the surfing duel option in Californa Games.
There apparently is a longer version of the commercial, where more kids are in other stalls playing along,
Bummer!
A lot more could've been done with the hardware especially the powerful sprite engine.
indeed!
Like the Jaguar the lynx has a single system bus. CPU code should have come from cartridge and data reside in a huge register file. Some (write) queue to steal the graphics chip (Suzy) some memory cycles.
The Lynx was far superior, except for it's battery life and larger physical size. The idea was more that it's portable and you can take it places, then plug in. And on a longer trip you could splurge and buy batteries and have something to do.
I think the main reason the Gameboy did a lot better with greatly inferior hardware was marketing and the lower price. Nintendo since the NES times was all about making games for........little kids. It was mostly parents buying the Gameboy for their kids, not the game players choosing their console. It was cheap, they were all over the place, and Nintendo at that time made lots of games that keep kids busy and out of trouble.
The Lynx appealed much more to the older gamer. The young adult that grew up with arcade machines & Atari, or the older teen. But at that time sadly it wasn't enough. Nintendo in their early days through Donkey Kong made the kinds of games (like Space Firebird) that would appeal to arcade fans & those that grew up with Atari, but by the NES, the focus changed to little kids and I found their kind of games very unappealing as an older teen when it came to America.
How many games did we really need? Were most people going to buy more than 79 titles? What mattered was.....the tiles available and how good they were. I grew up going to the arcades and still loved them, although that great run was ending as "karate-cades" were starting to take over and I had no interest in them.
Awesome titles were made for the Lynx. Many Atari Games arcade hits, which were just awesome games. Sadly that Atari, closer to the original Atari, had nothing to do with the Atari producing & marketing the Lynx, but they did get the rights to a lot of great games. I'd say exactly the ones I wanted, and they'd have been terrible on the Gameboy.
One can't blame the Lynx development team for not wanting to do business with that version of Atari. All the original Atari people were long gone, and the ruthless people from the original Commodore were running the company. They didn't care about anyone. The Amiga was incredible when it came out, and to have some of those people working on a portable game system was just amazing, and some of the Amiga game titles.
Why play Lynx games on the original hardware when you can play it through emulation? Good question. I'll take......emulation. Sold my original model Lynx just a few years ago. I still have some boxed games for sale. The nostalgia was in the ability to play the games for me, not in the physical console or it's packaging.
Lowest screen resolution out of Lynx, Game Gear and Game Boy and Game Gear hardware far better suited to 2D side scrolling platformer, that's why frame rates on Lynx platform games are far lower than those on the GG, so it's a swings and roundabouts situation.
Terrific video, the only reason any console or handheld fails is because of the lack of good games
I would say the Lynx has good games, it's the price that killed it.
0:27 Those last 2 stats are the real deal breaker when it comes to handheld. Lynx is DOUBLE+ the weight AND your popping new batteries at least once a day. Not saying your average consumer took that in to consideration. The main reason is G A M E S.
atari had no money. no games i owned one and a great handheld. but same as jaguar atari had burned all bridges by then
nintendo also had exclusivity with game makers and i am sure that went for the game boy as well so that's how the software dominated.
that too. You are correct. Nintendo really had a stranglehold.
Are you sure about the Lynx's 32-bit DAC for sound? Nobody, not even crazy hifi nuts, use 32 bits for sound, it's completely unnecessary, and the surrounding components wouldn't be able to keep up with the ridiculous Signal to Noise Ratio. Is there some special mode where you can hook up 4 x 8-bit DACs or something? Even then you'd likely hook it into being 2 x 16-bit, not 1 x 32-bit. It's insane, self-defeating, and wouldn't serve a purpose.
I got the info from Wikipedia. It says 4 channels x 8 bits per channel= 32 bits. You are right, I am sure it wasn;t used to full specifications.
Maybe this was a situation like the Intellevision, which has a 16 bit CPU but was never fully utilized.
thanks for the info. I know nothing about audio specs or underlying technology. 😁
@@gamingquarterly6353 Nah, there's 4 separate channels with an 8-bit DAC each, giving 256 levels of sound. That's all, you can't combine them together to make 16 bits or anything. Their outputs are just mixed together to play at the same time.
You could technically do the same with jst one DAC, and combine the values of your 4 channels together in software, just averaging the values out. But that's a lot of maths (well, not THAT much on a 16MHz CPU). So for whatever reason, they put 4 DACs in there. Because it was cheap enough, probably. Later changes apparently gave them volume controls so you could do stereo panning on the Lynx II.
So, 4 x 8 bits, it doesn't make any sense to multiply them together, it doesn't correspond to the real hardware. Just 4 DACs, each playing it's own sound, together, independent of each other.
@@greenaum I see your point. Makes a little more sense now. I guess the Lynx placed them there for maybe future use, assuming the handheld got popular, allowing them to do more sophisticated sounds in later games? Who knows.
@@gamingquarterly6353 I think they were there intended for use straight away and probably were used.
The N64, for example, claimed hundreds of sound channels, all output through one DAC, mixing them using software like I described earlier. Obviously the N64 had a lot more CPU power than the Lynx, but the Lynx still had plenty.
Then again, DOS games used to offer slower sound mixing rates on slower computers, around the time of the 386 and 486, so it's probably more difficult than I gave it credit for. So probably having 4 is an advantage for programmers, you just assign 4 sound channels to their own DAC each. It makes sense, really. Cuts down on processing.
Also I've read some more, and the Lynx's sound wasn't just generated in software, it had sound-generating hardware using modified counter circuits, and those could output to the DACs too. Similar to the analogue sound channels on older consoles, but in this case generated entirely digitally, using digital circuits, then only turned to analogue by the DAC at the final stage. So it gives it digital synthesis. Using 4 separate generators would be a reason to have 4 DACs.
They still could have mixed it all in the digital domain, then fed it to just one DAC (or two for stereo), but they decided one DAC per channel and do the mixing in analogue, after the DACs, instead. There probably wasn't a lot of advantage in one way over the other, so they chose for their own reasons.
If the Atari Lynx had a better screen it would have been a perfect handheld.
Higher Resolution?
Agreed the screen display could have done with a higher resolution.
RGB takes 3 times of LCD pixels. They could have gone full RGBRGB ( without gaps ) and have a full resolution frame buffer and then do ClearType on read out. So like color CRT split intensity in an analog way over the trinitron grille.
I remember my friend had the lynx, it was ok but no games so.....
Thanks for the video 👍🏼
yup. that was the consensus back then. My friend was annoyed that no one but him had a Lynx and he could not play multiplayer games with others. Not only that, but just more diversed game titles in general.
Atari Uk's Darryl Still joins Telegames Pete Mortimer, pointing out nobody really knew actual Lynx sales figures..
:
Q. Do you happen to know what the total sales figures for the Lynx were? There seems to be no other figures quoted other than articles that report Atari selling their one millionth Lynx.
A) I probably knew at the time, but cannot put a figure on it now. Less than it should have been, that’s for sure. Definitely more than that the worldwide build was 7 digits and they'd have all been sold into retail.
He was then given a suggested number, he simply went along with..
Q. I always guessed at about 2.5 million because I know Batman Returns helped sell a lot of Lynxes.
A) Yes, something like that.
Good stuff. Thanks for sharing.
@@gamingquarterly6353my pleasure, Atari would always present estimated sales, be it sold so far or what they hoped to sell in coming year. They'd talk of sales to retailers, but when it came to independently verified, actual sales, there isn't a figure.
People asked likes of Pete Mortimer Telegames. Darryl Still, Atari UK they reference documents the late Curt Vendel shared, but it's still best guess stuff.
Sadly we have seen a figure of 3 million used in mainstream magazine articles, based on this speculation but reported as FACT 🙄
@@gamingquarterly6353I'd genuinely be delighted to hear, how Darry Still, Marketing Manager of Atari UK, had actual, independently verified sales figures for the Lynx, from USA stores where it was sold.
Stores such as
Toys 'R' Us
Kay-Bee Toys
Children's Palace
Lionel Playworld
Good Guys
Babbages
Electronic Boutique
Montgomery World's.
As that would be an absolutely monumental achievement
This video takes a rather simplified approach.
You don't mention the Lynx had the lowest screen resolution of the Lynx, Game Gear and Game Boy, nor how the Lynx suffered when it came to 2D platform titles 15-20 fps for games like Toki, Switchblade II, Viking Child VS 60 fps for Game Gear titles like Lion King and Dynamite Headdy
You also don't factor in cartridge sizes when talking about software, the Tramiel's only granted larger sizes when prices fell and even then, wouldn't pay developers more for bigger games.
Why do you think APB is missing the Prisoner Confession stage? Shadow Of The Beast the flying sequence? Ninja Gaiden the Arcade intro and an entire level?
Lynx Californa Games lacks 2 events compared to the C64 version.
Lynx Double Dragon is missing moves, weapons etc.
Viking Child lacks the in-game music the GB version has..
So much software on Lynx is scaled down.
Regarding Software Development :
Your talking a company which delayed the first milestone payment to John Carmack for Lynx Wolfienstien 3D, so John killed the project..
A company which didn't want Mortal Kombat on the Lynx as they had Pitfighter..
A company which didn't class the development of KEY titles such as AVP, Cabal, 720,Rolling Thunder and Indicators as a top priority..
A company unwilling to pay for the licence for Elite, after HMS gave them a demo proving the game was possible on the Lynx, who had them hide the solid 3D,more ambitious version of Battlezone 2000 as an Easter Egg..
A company who didn't want Jeff Minter's Defender 2 on the system.
If you talk to publishers like Gremlin, the Lynx games they did release (Switchblade 2) sold so badly, they simply dropped the system.
You can't get blood from a rock on the ground.
Atari is the company that places an oil rig on a rock field and calls you out on your challenge.
@@gamingquarterly6353
That's funny man!
Time and time again do many companies trying to chase a trend fail to realize, great stats and tech don't guarantee great sales, look at the Game Gear from Sega.
Great games, is what sell consoles.
Companies today still aren't learning from this lesson, like Chris Roberts and his train wreck of a game called Star Citizen, bragging about a $50 million dollar state of the art motion capture studio and over a billions of polygons in a single pebble, and absolutely no fun gameplay to sell it.
Yes! Game companies are throwing so much money into these games and forgetting the fun aspect and going with visuals and pizzaz. I am glad the indie scene is available to pickup that slack from the AAA studios, oh...and the AAAA studio Ubisoft, makers of the onyl AAAA title known to gamers. 😏
I actually had one of those I had a ton of fun with it but I had to rechargeable battery bundle so I didn't have that problem the big problem that I had with it was no games oh and r o g stands for Republic of gamers not whatever you said near the end of the video
😃Yeah, I called it ROG instead of announcing it by letter. I had no idea what ROG stood for before I bought it. I think just by laziness I still call it ROG. I will make sure to correctly pronounce it once I review this cool gaming device.
The Lynx really didn't fare well when it came to RPG Games.
Knight Technologies "Storm over Doria" was a victim..
Eye Of The Beholder also..
Imagitec Design's extremely flawed attempt at doing an Ultima-Beater, Daemonsgate was canned, but that might of been for the best, given how it was recieved on PC, falling way short of the hype made the hat trick.
lots of good info. thank you for sharing.
I am concerned about your background music, not sure if Nintendo will be pleased
I would say let them come. I don't fear them. But that is a lie.
I do fear them.
Nice ending!
Great video, I shared it with The Atari Network community discord server.
That is awesome!! I guess that is why I am getting tons of feedback on this video. I thought it would barely get noticed since the Lynx (unfortunately) did not get much attention when it was released.
Thanks for putting the word out!!
Did anyone get a handy from their mum for Christmas? 😂
Toby McGwire fan of the lynx
It sold better over here … u must mean South America right…. No wait… Canada… no wait… Vietnam… what country do you mean… you are assuming we know where u live….
I guess I should have made that more clear in the video. Fair enough. USA.
Hobrew home grown games are saving atari lynx!!!
indeed, and I do hope they continue to support this amazing system, especially for the die hard Lynx owners out there.
Haha low battery!
Atari did not crash the industry, in fact the industry did not really crash at all.
That's the least of what he got wrong here!
They were the biggest culprit in it all. While many people, including myself , would make that generalized statement, we know now that many had a hand in the crash.
When we say the industry crash, we usually refer to the whole vibe and outlook towards the gaming landscape back then. Video games were sold pennies on the dollar as retailers scrambled to liquidate and rid themselves of tons of excess stock. I remember seeing them in bargain bins by the boatloads.
Many refused to carry gaming consoles and inventory in fear of them being left out to pick up the pieces. Colecovision went belly up due to the crash, as did a few developing studios. Nintendo had to re-desgin their hardware so retailers could even give them a chance to sell their product. Even then, it was only test marketed in very secluded markets, like New York and Dallas among the very few.
I would have to respectfully disagree with you. The crash happened. Luckily, it was short lived thanks to the success of Nintendo.
Thanks for watching!
@@gamingquarterly6353 People were tired of beep sound and ugly graphics and shallow games. They simply transitioned to computer games and divided the world in 2 : console pesants ans computer master race. Nintendo brought back consoles, but gaming never stopped. ZX Spectrum, C64 and Atari 400 were computers made for gaming. I have friends in their late 50's that never ever played a console, not even the 2600, they only ever played on computers.
@@MarquisDeSang for sure. You got the computer side of it as well.
Is that Toby maguire playing the lynx in the bathroom
Sure is!
I’m glad someone else caught this 😅
Yup. Seems a few movie stars did some gaming commercials back then, like Jack Black on Pitfall (2600) and Paul Rudd for the launch of the SNES.
Of to a bad start with the thumbnail - that is the wrong Atari logo? I hate it when people do that! That logo was only ever used by Infogrames for a short time in the early noughties.
The as soon as the video starts I see more stuff wrong - Mikey and Suzy (correct spelling) are the sound and graphics chips - the CPU is an 8-bit 65C02 running at 4 MHz. The Lynx name had NOTHING to do with the Panther, the fact that the Lynx, Panther and Jaguar are all big cats is pure coincidence. The Lynx is so called because it offers the opportunities for lots of "links" with other machines. The Panther and Jaguar were both named after cars. The original name for the Lynx was the APES (Atari Portable Entertainment System) but the programmers at Epyx pointed out how stupid it sounded and Atari changed it. With regards to sales, there is a good figure out there actually as according to ex-Atari Marketing Manager (and Lynx Product Manager) Daryl Still it sold around 3 million units (500k North America, 1 million UK, 1 Million France and 500k rest of Europe and Australia). You are wrong about the adventure RPG part - both Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and Dracula: The Undead fit this category.
But I won't argue that the Lynx is a magical machine and Lynx emulation is still a long way from being perfect, so nothing beats the real experience.
Kieren Hawken is an idiot and has been ejected from every part of the retrogaming community he's infested, so take anything he wrote with a grain of salt.
1. "Of to a bad start" writes Kieren, who can't even construct a sentence without a mistake. And he's already edited his comment. He's no writer, just a retrogaming hack.
2. Who gives a damn about the Atari logo? Only someone like the Layered's Layer would.
3. Kieren himself got the chips wrong on one of his rants trying to be the "big guy" and had to be corrected. He was also wrong about hardware features like rotation, scaling, skewing etc. He knows nothing.
4. The sales figures are complete guesses by a guy that Kieren repeats over and over as gospel. Anyone that gives Kieren the time of day should be avoided as a source because they are clearly stupid.
The Layered's Layer seems to think he's required to defend the Lynx's failings at all cost, and try and convince everyone that it wasn't a horrible little low-resolution battery killer and not as amazing as he makes out.
I will have a serious talk with my research guy. Oh wait....that's me. Crap. I blame wikipedia, and atari...to an extent. 😮💨
Good info. Hope you enjoyed the video aside from the (small?) inconsistencies?
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@@gamingquarterly6353 What a cowardly simp you are for shadow blocking my comment about Kieren Hawken. You two deserve each other.
@@gamingquarterly6353Darry Still never knew actual sales figures for the Lynx :
:
Q. Do you happen to know what the total sales figures for the Lynx were? There seems to be no other figures quoted other than articles that report Atari selling their one millionth Lynx.
A) I probably knew at the time, but cannot put a figure on it now. Less than it should have been, that’s for sure. Definitely more than that the worldwide build was 7 digits and they'd have all been sold into retail.
He was then given a suggested figure he simply went along with.
Q. I always guessed at about 2.5 million because I know Batman Returns helped sell a lot of Lynxes.
A) Yes, something like that.
@@gamingquarterly6353If we are talking Research, try this little lot..
I'd genuinely be delighted to hear, how Darry Still, Marketing Manager of Atari UK, had actual, independently verified sales figures for the Lynx, from USA stores where it was sold.
Stores such as:
Toys 'R' Us
Kay-Bee Toys
Children's Palace
Lionel Playworld
Good Guys
Babbages
Electronic Boutique
Montgomery World's.
As that would be an absolutely monumental achievement.
As for the Lynx Custom Chips..
MIKEY incorporated the CPU, sound system, video DMA drivers for the LCD display, system timers, interrupt controller and UART.
SUZY is essentially a high-speed Blitter, with numerous intelligent drawing functions and it incorporates a maths Co-processor.
Both used CMOS technology for low power consumption and strong temperature stability.
It's an over simplification to simply call them the graphics and sound chips.
The overall Lynx clock speed is 16 MHz, which provides a basic system cycle of 62.5 nanoseconds. This pulse is divided by 4 to provide a cycle rate for the 65C02,which therefore functions at 4MHz.
Your comparisons are just misinformation and highly arrogantly IGNORANT af and perhaps also somewhat entitled into the delusional belief that seems typical for Atari fanboys to believe that "Atari should have won" and that they "were unfairly denied videogame software support because of Nintendo".
I also have a sneaking suspicion that you most likely didn't exist back then or maybe you was a really young child incapable of making work income based purchases or even of shoveling snow, mowing lawns and selling newspapers as most early teenage boys were able to do especially when videogames started becoming far more worthy and worthwhile to be a hobby than even the early 80s.
I can see this by your ignorance of bringing SNK's NeoGeo AES into your blog about the Atari Lynx and also relying on using actual Atari Corp television advertising as some type of "legitimate" evidence that Atari and or Atari Lynx was a cool brand to buy or even worth buying.
Advertising and television commercials in the early ages of the 80s and even early 90s could give an image of ok this migjt be interesting to a horrible reputation for using a certain type of mindset that could give your product a bad image.
Let's remind everyone here that "Atari Games" and "Atari Corp" were two different entities and companies that catered to very different business or markets. Atari Games was specifically an arcade game maker that was not related, didn't have to answer to or bend the knee to and most importantly were not obligated to serve Atari Corp which had a different owner and different mindset the moment said new owners took ownership of that particular company.
Next that tv commercial is problematic because a videogame product that just came out and retailed for $179.99 is being advertised as a videogame that you could sneak into what seems like elementary school and rest room to basically skip class with... I'm sure they broadcast this on American television without thinking about consequences because they figured that the parents might not be sitting there also watching television... so that kinda writes it's own story right there and these types of commercials always suffered (as well as the comparison advertising which Sega and Atari desperately tried using) from potentially sparking a feeling or even sentiment in the viewer (target audience kids) that might not really even fit the so called focus group testing and could become a problem for the way the target audience would see the game product in general. In other words, they could have made a more informative TV commercial that didn't rely in calling kids stupid, pretty sure about that.
Next is the so called game software support... we have dramatically different prices here... because of the dramatically different specs... Atari Corp in the late 80s and early 90s just had their own line of thinking that was based on how they originally ignored the home videogame system market after they wrecked it with a bad reputation in 1983. In other words Atari Corp was more devoted to selling computers or rather their computers because that's what they believed in so they basically laughed at Nintendo and Sega and when the numbers came out that Nintendo was doing very well then all of a sudden they wanted to be back in that market and undercut the other n00b Sega at the time which they actually succeeded at.
The point is that they had a particular mindset and a way they treated the technology and target audience that they never noticed wasn't sitting well... they had the Atari 7800 which also boasted 2600 BC but your TV commercial was about the 2600 Junior... ever wonder why the heck did they ever think that was a good idea? And they had the Atari EXGS with a commercial mocking the Nintendo NES as some silly children toy (calling an audience dumb is a type of condéscending insult) all between 1986 to 1988 so no wonder those Epyx engineers who created the Lynx didn't want to be associated with Atari Corp... I'd even bet that if Coleco or some other company had signed up that they would never have left because they got a bad feeling but let's not curse Atari Corp cause that's not my intention.
My point is that no matter how cool the new Atari Lynx would have seemed in 1989 that the way Atari Corp marketed it would give it either an ok image or a slightly negative or suspect image...
The battery life is actually irrelevant here btw even when comparing to the Nintendo Gameboy... Atari Corp had it's own brand recognition just as equally as Nintendo had and Sega was developing.
As such the ultimate judge of how a game product will do is after all I mentioned that how would the audience respond to it... it was very obvious that the tv commercial did show Atari Lynx had color screen and stereo sound and ehh more buttons while Gameboy didn't.
The first two years will sell a certain amount of units, after that the company needs to keep cultivating interest as well as games themselves... therefore it is NOT fair and is highly insulting to compare the entire run of Atari Lynx to the entire run of Gameboy... it's pure misinformation... the only appropriate thing to barely compare is the first three years or even four years...
Next you have to put yourself in the shoes of the game developers and publishers... sure the Atari Lynx has higher specs but how many units sold in the first two and three holiday seasons?
If say Atari Lynx sold one million units in the first year to actual consumers, then yeah, that looks great regardless of Gameboy selling two or three million because one million units sold means you might sell 1/4, 1/3 or maybe 1/2 of your game software to actual users provided the game was good, people talked about it, etc
Did that actually happen? I'm sure it never did and instead they barely scratched 200k units and that's gonna ruin your plans of your third party game. Technically speaking that $180 price isn't a problem back then in U.S.A. alone but if people react a certain way then you aren't getting units sold and it's not cause of "Nintendo"
Btw other companies can compete... and that's the nature of the game... Atari Jaguar had horrible marketing messages just like 3DO so it's no surprise that some people may have felt either insulted or mocked and either way not be so positive about buying those systems and not cause of "Nintendo"
Nintendo secured an install base, they catered to their customers and for the most part didn't treat them like dumb idiots... something that Sega of America's management staff started doing in the early to mid to even late 90s like they never learned.
SNK America or whatever the subsidiary branch was called were confused and didn't really know how to target older age groups well... and unfortunately the American subsidiary branches back then tended to completely ignore the Japanese marketing of showing the whole family both genders, late teens, twenty plus and grandparents playing from FamiCom to the NeoGeo AES... at least that may secure a better sales position than just using dumb advertising.