Atari Lynx
First colour handheld
The 1989 Atari handheld that was the first with a colour backlit display and hardware scaling, technically superior to Game Boy but defeated by battery life and price.
The Atari Lynx was the first handheld with a backlit colour display, released in 1989 alongside the Game Boy. Featuring hardware sprite scaling and impressive graphics, it was technically superior but its size, battery consumption, and price prevented success against Nintendo’s simpler, cheaper device.
Fast facts
- Released: 1989
- CPU: 65C02 @ 4 MHz + custom chips
- Screen: 160×102, 16 colours on screen from a palette of 4096
- Innovation: First colour handheld, hardware scaling
- Price: $179 at launch (unverified); cut to $100 by mid-1991
Specifications
| Component | Detail |
|---|---|
| Display | Backlit colour LCD |
| Resolution | 160×102 |
| Colours | 4096 palette, 16 on screen |
| Sprites | Hardware scaling/rotation |
| Battery | 4-5 hours (6 AA) |
4096 colours, sixteen at a time
The palette figure was the Lynx’s headline and it is the one most often misreported. RAZE put the correction in print in 1991: the machine “has a 4096 colour palette and can display 16 colours onscreen.”
Sixteen is four bits, and the arithmetic closes. The same page gives the screen as “160 [pixels] wide by 102 lines high” and the framebuffer as “8160 bytes” — and 160 × 102 ÷ 2 is exactly 8,160. Two figures printed a paragraph apart confirm each other, and confirm four bits per pixel.
There was a way past sixteen. “It can do better than that and display 16 colours on every horizontal line” — reload the palette between scanlines and each row gets its own sixteen. The cost is the reason nobody shipped action games using it: the trick “slows the Lynx considerably making the mode unsuitable for high speed games.”
This is the same bargain the Copper strikes on the Amiga and badlines strike on the C64 — more colour bought with time the display was going to spend anyway — except that on a handheld running a 4 MHz CPU there is no spare time to spend.
ComLynx is a serial port called RedEye
The networking feature has a plainer description than its marketing suggests. It “is simply a bidirectional serial communication channel”, running “at various speeds from 300.5 baud to 62.5 Kbaud (around 7K a second)” — and inside Atari it was called RedEye, which says what it physically is.
Cartridges of the period held “up to 256K of information. Paltry really.” Adding save RAM was possible and priced out of reach: a cartridge with “a save game option (that is, built in RAM) would cost at least £50.”
Technical innovations
| Feature | Significance |
|---|---|
| Hardware scaling | First handheld with this |
| Rotation | Screen flip for left-handed |
| ComLynx | Up to 18-player networking |
| Ambidextrous | Left or right-handed play |
Why it failed
Compute! ran the three colour handhelds against the Game Boy in August 1991, and the comparison is unkind in a specific way. By then Atari had “dropped the price to $100. That’s only ten bucks more than Game Boy” — the price gap the Lynx is usually said to have lost on had already closed, and it still lost.
What had not closed was everything else. The screen “looks washed out”: “even in a darkened airplane, Lynx’s screen can’t match that of Game Gear or TurboExpress.” The Game Boy managed “24 or more hours before you need to replace the four AA cell batteries”, against a Lynx that ran a colour backlight. And the library had not arrived: “you’d think a system sold since 1989 would offer more than 16 games”, set against a Game Boy roster of “over 60 titles” with Tetris in the box.
Three million Game Boys sold in eighteen months. The Lynx was better hardware being beaten on every axis a person actually holds.
| Lynx | Game Boy | |
|---|---|---|
| Battery | Colour backlight, hours | “24 or more hours” on four AAs |
| Price, mid-1991 | $100, after a cut | about $90 |
| Size | Two-handed, wide body | “fits snugly in one hand” |
| Library, mid-1991 | “more than 16 games” | “over 60 titles”, Tetris included |
Figures from Compute!, August 1991. The Lynx’s launch price of $179 is widely repeated but is not established from a source held here.
Notable games
| Game | Notes |
|---|---|
| California Games | Excellent port |
| Chip’s Challenge | Puzzle classic |
| Blue Lightning | Flight action |
| Klax | Puzzle game |
Legacy
The Lynx demonstrated that technical excellence doesn’t win markets. However, its hardware innovations—scaling, rotation, networking—influenced future handheld design.