RH100156
Atari
Lynx
PAG-0201
Serial No
Description: The 'Lynx I' suffered with severe weathering of it's painted finish. Finding one today which looks nice is very difficult. Paint would wear away very quickly around the corners, battery compartment and hand grip revealing the material underneath. The later released Lynx II has a far superior all plastic finish.
The Atari Lynx is a hand-held cartridge based games console with a colour LCD screen. It was originally designed by San Francisco based software company Epyx, Inc. in 1986 and includes 2 custom chips, an 8-bit MOS 6502 based CPU called 'Mikey' and a 16-bit GPU called 'Suzy'.
Epyx unveiled their "Handy Game" console at the at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January 1989 and facing financial difficulties Epyx sought out partners. Atari showed an interest in their console and eventually agreed that Atari would handle production and marketing, while Epyx would handle software development. Despite Atari's initial investment, Epyx were unable to fulfill its contract with Atari and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection at the end of 1989. As a result Atari essentially owned the entire project. After a few hardware modifications and a re-branding the 'Atari Lynx' was launched in September 1989 in North America. After a severe downsizing from over 165 employees to a mere 8, Epyx continued to develop software exclusively for the Lynx console, but finally closed it's doors and sold it's remaining assets to the Bridgestone Media Group in 1993.
Lynx games came on cartridge. The first generation of cartridges were in flat plastic enclosures and were reported to be difficult to remove from the console. Subsequently Atari redesigned the cartridge to have a ridge along the top edge making it easier to push in and out of the console.
The console design was quite revolutionary for the time. It was a very high specification with a powerful custom CPU / GPU design combo and the first to feature a backlit colour LCD screen. It also has a switchable right-handed/left-handed configuration and has the ability to network with other units via its Comlynx system for multi-player gaming.
In May 1991, Sega launched its Game Gear which was a direct competitor to the Lynx, also with a colour LCD screen. Atari responded by releasing the 'Lynx II', which was an improved design with better battery life, improved display and stereo sound.
However, this was not enough for the highly competitive hand-held gaming market. Although initial sales of over 500,000 units looked promising, by late 1991 only a further 300,000 units had been sold. Neither Atari, or Sega could compete against the massively popular Nintendo Gameboy with it's cheap price, long battery life (due to it's mono LCD display) and massive games catalogue. It is reported that by 1995 Atari and Sega sold only 7 million units combined against Nintendo's 16 million Gameboy's.
Specifications:
» C301719 custom 16MHz CPU (Mikey) with 8-bit 65SC02 running at up to 4 MHz, 512 bytes boot ROM, 4 channel sound engine with 8-bit DAC, Video DMA LCD driver, 8 system timers, interrupt controller and ComLynx UART
» C302284 custom 16MHz 16-bit GPU (Suzy) with blitter "sprites", collision detection, hardware sprite scaling - distortion - and tilting effects, hardware decoding of compressed sprite data, hardware clipping and multi-directional scrolling and math engine
» 64KB 120ns DRAM
» 128, 256, 512KiB or 1MiB (with bank-switching) ROM Cartridges
» 3.5" Colour LCD Screen, 160×102 pixels, 4096 colour (12-bit) palette
» 3.5mm mono Headphone Port
» ComLynx Port (multiple unit communications, serial)
» 6x AAA battery power for 4-5 hours gameplay
» 9V DC 1A power supply input
» Size: 27.3cm x 10.8cm x 3.8cm
» Weight: 530g (without batteries), approx 650g with batteries
This exhibit is in very good working condition and includes an original power supply, ComLynx cable and carry case.
Condition:
  |
- Hardware fully functional.
- NOT in original packaging!
- NO Manuals or Instructions!
Notes:
Links & Media:
 Old Computers Website |
Related Items:
 | Atari Lynx |