Atari introduced the Lynx as, in its own words, “the world’s first color portable hand-held video game system”. It was not designed by Atari. Two of the people who had built the Amiga, R.J. Mical and Dave Needle, designed it at Epyx, which could not afford to launch it and sold it to Atari in 1989. It could shrink and stretch sprites in hardware and link eight machines for one game. Against it stood the Game Boy: smaller, cheaper, black and white, and able to run for a day on four batteries. The Game Boy won.
Fast facts
- Designed by: Dave Needle (hardware) and R.J. Mical (software) at Epyx; bought by Atari in 1989.
- Launched: in America for Christmas 1989, in Britain in the winter of 1989–90.
- Processor: a 65C02 core inside the custom chip Mikey, at up to about 4 MHz; a 16 MHz system clock.
- Memory: 64K of RAM; 512 bytes of boot ROM.
- Screen: backlit colour LCD, 3.5 inches, 160 × 102 pixels, 16 colours at once from 4,096.
- Graphics: the Suzy chip draws sprites into memory, scaling them up or down as it goes.
- Sound: four channels, not stereo.
- Power: six AA batteries.
- Price: $179.95 with California Games in America in 1990; £179.95 in Britain. Cut to $99 for the smaller model of 1991.
Made at Epyx
The Lynx began over a meal. Mical told The Games Machine in January 1990 that he and Needle were at a restaurant with Dave Morse, who had run Amiga before Commodore bought it, “talking about new projects after our stint at Commodore. We came up with the idea of doing a hand-held”. They made it at Epyx. Needle designed the hardware, and Mical wrote the development system, which ran on an Amiga “with multi-tasking windows so you can pop between music and graphics and code at will”, and a debugger that connected to the handheld through a parallel port. The project’s name at Epyx was Handy.
Some ideas did not make it. The pair wanted a tilt sensor, so that “you’d just tilt the entire unit to the left to make the car or plane go in that direction”, and a video output. Both cost too much. The screen was the hardest part. “We tested and busted (all in the name of science, of course) all kinds of glass,” Needle said, and at first none of the Japanese display makers would work with them.
Epyx could not afford to bring the machine to market, and sold it to Atari. Atari showed it at the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago in June 1989, where C&VG found it “completely overshadowing” the Game Boy’s Western launch. Needle put the development cost at about four million dollars, “with some cost errors”. The Epyx entry tells the company’s side of the story.
The launch
Atari announced a price of $150 at the show; American advertisements in 1990 offered it at $179.95 with California Games in the box. It first reached American shops for Christmas 1989. START expected only “a modest pre-holiday release”, and the Italian magazine K reported that Atari had put about 70,000 machines into the New York area that Christmas, all apparently sold. British mail-order firms were taking orders at £199.90 in December 1989. By the summer of 1990 the usual price was £179.95, while the Game Boy launched in Britain that September at £69.99.
Inside the Lynx
Epyx’s own hardware documentation describes the design. There are two custom chips. Mikey “contains all of the non-sprite hardware”: the processor, “a 65C02 cell imbedded in the Mikey IC”, the 512-byte boot ROM, the timers, the sound, the display driver and the serial port. Suzy “is only a sprite generation engine”, with a hardware multiplier and divider added, and handles the joypad and cartridge because Mikey had run out of pins. The system clock runs at 16 MHz, and the processor takes several clock ticks for each memory cycle, which gives it an effective speed of around 4 MHz. Contemporary magazines quoted either figure.
The screen is 160 × 102. Each pixel is a triad of red, green and blue dots, each with 16 levels of brightness, which is where the palette of 4,096 colours comes from. With four bits per pixel the screen needs 160 × 102 ÷ 2 = 8,160 bytes, the figure RAZE gave in 1991. A picture can use 16 colours at once, but a program can reload the palette between lines to show a different 16 on each line. RAZE warned that the trick “slows the Lynx considerably making the mode unsuitable for high speed games”.
Sprites that scale
Suzy is what made the Lynx different. Epyx’s documentation describes “a ‘sprite’ engine that paints pixel information into a bit mapped screen”. Each sprite is described by a control block in RAM, and the blocks are linked together in painter’s order, back to front. Suzy reads each block, fetches the sprite’s data and draws it into the screen buffer, resizing it on the way. Because sprites end up as pixels in a bitmap, there is no hardware count of sprites per line, as there is on the C64 or the NES. In the words of Epyx’s documentation, “sprites are sized as they are painted. They can be reduced or enlarged. Horizontal and vertical sizing rates are independent.” A sprite can also be stretched or skewed line by line as it is drawn, which lets one image become a road that widens towards the viewer or a slanted surface. RAZE told readers that a sprite could be scaled from 1/256 of its size to 256 times it.
The cost is time. Every sprite is drawn afresh into memory each frame, and while Suzy has the memory bus the processor sleeps, so a busy screen slows the whole game. Atari’s arcade conversions made heavy use of the scaling: for the Lynx Hard Drivin’, C&VG reported, “the bizarre sprite scaling abilities of the Lynx have been used to simulate polygons”. The Sprite Scaling entry covers the technique on other machines.
ComLynx
The Lynx’s multiplayer link, ComLynx, “is simply a bidirectional serial communication channel”, RAZE explained, running “at various speeds from 300.5 baud to 62.5 Kbaud (around 7K a second)”; Atari’s developers called it RedEye. Up to eight machines could be linked, each player seeing the game from his or her own position. Mical described it with Gauntlet: “you can easily connect up to 8 players through the system — each seeing his/her own perspective on the game.”
A switch flipped the screen and controls through 180 degrees, so the Lynx could be held either way round by left- or right-handed players, with two sets of fire buttons.
The games
The first six games were all written at Epyx: California Games, which came in the box, Blue Lightning, a 3D flying game, and The Gates of Zendocon among them. Mical said that others had been renamed on the way: “Time Quest and Treasure Chests is now Gauntlet 3, ElectroCop and Rampage are new names also”. Chip’s Challenge was finished too. Later the library leaned on arcade conversions, many from Atari Games’ Tengen label. In October 1990 ACE found Lynx software “very scarce” and called Tengen “the only software developer really supporting the Lynx”. Other publishers’ games reached it too, among them Lemmings.
Why it lost
Compute! compared the portable machines in August 1991, and the Lynx came off badly. By then Atari had cut the price, and the Lynx was “only ten bucks more than Game Boy”. “Many thought it on its deathbed” before the cut, the magazine said. The screen, it thought, “looks washed out. Even in a darkened airplane, Lynx’s screen can’t match that of Game Gear or TurboExpress.” And the library was thin: “you’d think a system sold since 1989 would offer more than 16 games.” The Game Boy had “over 60 titles”, came with Tetris, ran for “24 or more hours” on four AA batteries and had sold over three million units in its first 18 months.
Batteries were the Lynx’s great weakness. C&VG gave it “a battery life of only three hours” in 1990, and a year later noted that the batteries on the new model “still only last two hours or” so. It was also big: C&VG put the first model at about 12 inches long, and K measured it at 26 × 11 × 3 cm.
| Lynx | Game Boy | |
|---|---|---|
| Screen | Backlit colour, 16 colours from 4,096 | Monochrome, no backlight |
| Batteries | Six AA, two to three hours | Four AA, “24 or more hours” |
| Price, mid-1991 | About $100, after cuts | About $90 |
| Games, mid-1991 | 16, by Compute!’s count | “over 60 titles”, Tetris in the box |
The Lynx II and the end
In 1991 Atari launched a smaller, lighter model. C&VG reported it in March 1991 at “Only $99”, though “for that price you don’t get a game, link-up cable or power adaptor”. By that Christmas American buyers could get a Deluxe package with the new model, a mains adaptor, the ComLynx cable, California Games and a pouch for $125. At a computer show in Chicago in November 1991, Atari’s national sales director told AtariUser that one million Lynx systems had been sold worldwide. That is Atari’s own figure.
Atari launched its next console, the Jaguar, in 1993. By May 1995 a British mail-order firm had cut the Lynx from £49.99 to £29.99, with a copy of Batman Returns, and later accounts say Atari formally ended support for it that year.
After Atari
Hobbyists kept writing games for the Lynx after Atari stopped, and still do. Atari itself brought some of its Lynx games back in 2022, in the Atari 50 anniversary collection.
Sources
- The Games Machine issue 26, January 1990: interview with R.J. Mical and Dave Needle (the restaurant meeting with Dave Morse, the Amiga development system and debugger, the tilt sensor and video output, the display, the $4 million cost, four-channel sound without stereo, the flip mode, eight-player link, the renamed games and Chip’s Challenge).
- Computer & Video Games issue 93, August 1989: report from the June 1989 Consumer Electronics Show.
- A.N.A.L.O.G. Computing issue 77, October 1989: CES report, quoting Atari (“the world’s first color portable hand-held video game system”). ST Format issue 2, September 1989, and ACE issue 35, August 1990, repeat the claim.
- A.N.A.L.O.G. Computing issue 79, December 1989: CES report (the $150 price, 16 colours from 4,096, 64K RAM, AA batteries, the 180-degree screen flip, linking up to eight units, the first games).
- START, January 1990: editorial (“a modest pre-holiday release”).
- K (Italy), issue 15, March 1990: the hardware, p. 12 (custom 6502 at 4 MHz, 64K RAM, 3.5-inch 160 × 102 screen, the Mikey and Suzy chips, four sound channels, six AA batteries, 26 × 11 × 3 cm); news from the Las Vegas CES (about 70,000 machines in the New York area at Christmas).
- Computer & Video Games issue 97, December 1989: mail-order advertisement (£199.90 with California Games).
- Antic, June 1990, and START, July 1990: advertisements (“Lynx w/California Games $179.95”).
- The Games Machine issue 33, August 1990: the Lynx at £179.95 and the Game Boy’s British launch. ACE issue 37, October 1990: Tengen and the Lynx; the Game Boy at £69.99.
- Epyx, “Handy” hardware documentation (1987), HTML edition by M. Domin and B. Schick (web): Hardware Overview (64K RAM, 480 × 102 LCD as 160 triads, 4,096 colours, the roles of Mikey and Suzy); CPU/ROM (“a 65C02 cell imbedded in the Mikey IC”, 512-byte ROM); Sprites (sizing, stretch and tilt). https://www.monlynx.de/lynx/lynxdoc.html
- RAZE issue 10, August 1991, pp. 20–21: “Ten Unessential Things You Probably Never Wanted To Know About Your Lynx” (the palette, the 8,160-byte screen, 16 colours per line, scaling from 1/256 to 256 times, no stereo output, ComLynx and RedEye, cartridges up to 256K).
- GO!, supplement to Computer & Video Games issue 121, December 1991: Hard Drivin’ on the Lynx.
- Computer & Video Games issue 101, April 1990, pp. 76–77: Paul Rand’s handheld history (length, three-hour battery life). Issue 112, March 1991: “Cheap Lynx”.
- Gregg Keizer, “The Fingertip Arcade”, Compute! issue 132, August 1991, pp. 103–104.
- AtariUser issue 9, January 1992: Chicago Computerfest report (the Deluxe Lynx at $125; one million sold, according to Atari).
- Amiga User International, May 1995: “Lynx Goes Cheep!”
- Wikipedia, “Atari Lynx” (web, secondary): the project name Handy, the end of support in 1995, homebrew games and the Atari 50 collection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Lynx