Amiga and Atari Lynx - Separated at Birth.

[amigakidd]

Does anyone notice that the games for Amiga and Atari Lynx look alike. Amiga has better graphics than Lynx, but Lynx outdid Gameboy and Game Gear in the techie dept.

The Lynx never had cutesy games like Nintendo did. It always had moody and dark themes like Shadow OTB, Todds Slime, Dirty Harry.

Are they related? I know for sure Epyx was a major developer of Lynx. Both were not successful in the mainstream culture of things.

[beller]

Actually they weren't separated at birth but they did have the same parents this is from Websters Online:

"The machine was developed by Epyx as the "Handy" and completed in 1987, at which point Atari bought the rights to it. Atari changed the internal speaker and removed the thumb-stick on the control pad before releasing it as the Lynx two years later, initially retailing in the US at US$189.95. Two creators of the system, Dave Needle and R.J. Mical, were also members of the Amiga design team and much to the frustration of Atari, the Amiga was used as the software development platform."

Bob

[cv643d]

Actually Lynx has better graphics than an Amiga 500. For example the game Blue Lightning, an awesome game that I do not think could run well on a stock 1 MB Amiga.

The development system for the Lynx was an A2000 IIRC.

[coldfish]

The Lynx has hardware scaling and "unlimited" sprites, hence games like Blue Lightning.

Most games only have 16 colours on screen at once, making them look a bit dull compared to GameGear titles, the hardware can display more, (16 per scanline) but that was rarely used.

I'd place the Lynx between C64 and A500.

[Egg-Chen]

Sure, the Lynx offers interesting hardware features like scaling, but the games (at least the games I have) are not very smooth nor that fast, worse, sometimes they are almost unplayable because of terrible slowdowns (Xenophobe in some levels for example).

Actually I was a bit disappointed by this system. Don't forget it has 2 dedicated 16 bit chips, (one of which is the graphics chip) operating at a "blazing" 16 Mhz... I don't think the Amiga 500 had any of its chipset running at 16 Mhz ;-)
And the Amiga has 4x more pixels to deal with, too (Lynx screen size is 160x102) ! :-P

[pVC]

But in any case, Lynx was way cooler than that black&white screen (yuck!) GameBoy, which was released at the same time and sadly got more popular.

[Speelgoedmannetje]

cv643d wrote:
Actually Lynx has better graphics than an Amiga 500. For example the game Blue Lightning, an awesome game that I do not think could run well on a stock 1 MB Amiga.

Of course it could. Just look at Unreal.

[Speelgoedmannetje]

pVC wrote:
But in any case, Lynx was way cooler than that black&white screen (yuck!) GameBoy, which was released at the same time and sadly got more popular.

No wonder, the Gameboy could do with just 2 batteries, compared to the 6(!) batteries of the Lynx, and it was a lot smaller than the Lynx.

[LoadWB]

It's sad that advanced hardware rarely saw full use.  There are a number of examples, the Atari Lynx, Epyx TurboGrafx 16, Sega Genesis CD, Sega Saturn, and more.

In particular, the Sega Genesis CD had a second 12MHz 68000 running parallel to the 68000 in the Genesis, as well as a 3D graphics engine, which IIRC only two games ever used.

Nintendo hit the nail on the head: addictive games on simplistic portable hardware with simple presentation.  Whereas others did what they could to squeeze console performance into portables (eg Lynx, Nomad, etc.)

We're only just recently into the age of demanding the same performance in our portables as our consoles and desktops, and now we have the technology to support it.  Along the lines of the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP.

And on minimal battery consumption :-)

I love my Nomad, though toting full-sized Genesis carts around is a little cumbersome, and my NeoGeo Pocket.  I never got into the Gameboys because I was always attracted to the better hardware, then disappointed when it went away (think, Amiga.)  The Lynx is nice and has some cool games, but I only have a Lynx I, and it's a tad awkward for portability (aside from the fact that I've boxed and lost it somehow.)  Batteries can be a problem for all, unless you build a nice custom NiMH pack with outputs for all.  Handy.


EDIT: I also understand that programming the Saturn was a bear and-a-half, something akin to programming two 2600's in parallel (timing, and what-not.)

[adolescent]

Speelgoedmannetje wrote:

pVC wrote:
But in any case, Lynx was way cooler than that black&white screen (yuck!) GameBoy, which was released at the same time and sadly got more popular.

No wonder, the Gameboy could do with just 2 batteries, compared to the 6(!) batteries of the Lynx, and it was a lot smaller than the Lynx.

Original Gameboy used 4 AA batteries, and wasn't exactly pocket sized either.  (Of course the batteries in the Nintendo would last 5x longer though since powering the small (4 shade) green-scale screen probably doesn't take much...)