Atari Lynx was superior over GameBoy.

[mcjakeqcool]

I would say that the Atari Lynx was superior over the gameboy, infact I would go as far to say that it is only slightly less powerful to the gameboy color, games such as Blue Lightning, Checkered Flag, Hard Drivin and Double Dragon stand out on the Lynx, and show just how impressive the Atari Lynx was as a handheld in the late 80s, early 90s. Anyone agree with me?

[NE146]

Well yeah of course it was. We all know that here

 

That being said, it's games not hardware that make the difference and the GB just had more and better ones. It's just the way it went.

 

I bought a Lynx right at launch as well as a Gameboy at it's launch, and although I bought every Lynx game I could find, my Gameboy library just easily dwarfed it in a very short time.

Edited May 26, 2009 by NE146

[GroovyBee]

Oh dear! The Lynx came out in '89. The Game Boy Colour came out 9 years later. By that time the Lynx was very, very dead commercially.

[Mark Wolfe]

The same could be said for the Neo Geo Pocket... much stronger hardware, and certainly battery life that rivaled the GBC unlike the battery hoggish Lynx, but a lackluster game library. You simply can not argue with the vast GB/GBC game library. There is something for everyone and while there were god-awful games, the games that were good were very often REALLY good.

 

I think I play my gameboy mono and color more than any other system in my collection. I just keep finding "new" games for it that I never knew about.

[Ninjabba]

Maybe if we create a few games like The Adventures of Melda and Super Zario Brother we can get the lynx into business again

[Mark Wolfe]

Maybe if we create a few games like The Adventures of Melda and Super Zario Brother we can get the lynx into business again

 

 

I'd settle for more dead-on arcade ports like XYBOTS. I'm sure the lynx could handle dozens if not hundreds of old arcade games if ported properly.

[mcjakeqcool]

If Atari had the money and 3rd party support of Nintendo, it would have been a sucsess as the Lynx, like the Jaguar, had a lot of potential as a console, of coarse, It was'ent marketed properally. Of coarse if Atari could convince Nintendo to port there games on to Atari's console, the Lynx would have probally of been a sucsess just for Mario. Of coarse on the other hand you have got the CD-i, being $700s, even Mario could'ent sell it.

[Catsmasher]

Remember, even though we are a bunch of grown up geeks with paychecks, most of the handhelds were bought by parents for thier kids. So mom and dad get to make part of the call. Mom and dad didn't care about screen size, refresh rates, memory, color vs B&W - they cared about cost and battery life. As a parent, I can relate. You start a roadtrip to grandma's house with a lynx and two hours on the road, jr is scrambling for extra batteries, or (worse yet) demanding that you pull over somewhere to buy some more battteries. With the Gameboy, the little dude can sit in the backseat and beep away all day long. The size was a killer, too. It just looked scary and possibly a weapon when little tommy decided to throw it at his sister.

The Lynz was designed by technonerds for technonerds and they missed the practical aspects. IE Nintendo's marketing daprtment did a much better job defining the key product attributes that the customers valued and then thier engineering department worked hard to make sure they set targets that delivered those attributes.

[Crazy Climber]

I bought both at launch, honestly the battery life killed the Lynx for me. They seemed to last for ever in my GB, seemed like every time I wanted to play the Lynx it was the same problem, dead batteries. AC adapter did help but that did nothing for "on the go" gaming

[Video]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the lynx actually have a lower resolution screen than the gameboy?

 

What kills it for me, is the library is simply to small, there are more games I love on the gameboy, than there ARE games on the lynx.

 

Second, the battery life (or lack of) the Lynx is hand in hand with the likes of Virtual boy in this reguard.

 

Still, the lynx is a superior hardware in most ways, just look at the same game for both systems Lemmings (10 sprites on GB/GG vs 80 on Lyx) Fighting games ran far smoother, and faster on Lynx, and lets not forget the Lynx did better by far on 3D (always wished it had a Faceball 3/D, I played the hell out of it on Gameboy)

[Tom-Lynx]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the lynx actually have a lower resolution screen than the gameboy?

 

Original GameBoy resolution: 140x102 pixels x 4 shades of gray

 

Lynx resolution: 160 x 102 x 16 colors per scan line

 

Don't forget the 4 channel sound on the Lynx....it beat the GameBoy hands down for sound until the GamBoy Advance came along.

[roland p]

Wiki says the gameboy has a 160x144 resolution.

[akator]

I like them all. Game Boy, Lynx, and Game Gear

[roland p]

I like them all. Game Boy, Lynx, and Game Gear

Turbo Express?

[nonner242]

I like them all. Game Boy, Lynx, and Game Gear

Turbo Express?

 

 

Best hand held back in the day...then the Lynx.

Plus it had best screen back then too.

Oh I miss mine alot!

Im going to hunt down a TG Express now..Damn you!

[atarian63]

I never understood the popularity of gameboy. So what that after time it had some good games. You can't see the darn game. I did have one but it was always a frustrating experience.

Lynx color easily made it the better system. Never cared about the batter life issue. Just plug it in or use the car charger.

It is true Atari did not license some of the better games however they did get some great Atari Arcade titles. Klax,STUN Runner etc.

As someone else mentioned Turbo Express was the only thing better,I bought a new one when they came out and later bought the TV tuner.

Game gear was decent also. Nomad is still a favorite.Any of these was a better choice.

Battery life is just not really and issue for me but I guess it was for cheap parents.

[akator]

I like them all. Game Boy, Lynx, and Game Gear

Turbo Express?

 

DOH

 

Yeah, I like Turbo Express, too. I like almost all systems prior to the current generation, and even those I kinda like just not as much. I guess that makes me a video game whore...

[Tom-Lynx]

Wiki says the gameboy has a 160x144 resolution.

This article could be wrong then

[Video]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the lynx actually have a lower resolution screen than the gameboy?

 

Original GameBoy resolution: 140x102 pixels x 4 shades of gray

 

Lynx resolution: 160 x 102 x 16 colors per scan line

 

Don't forget the 4 channel sound on the Lynx....it beat the GameBoy hands down for sound until the GamBoy Advance came along.

 

 

Wiki says the gameboy has a 160x144 resolution.

I've counted the pixels, they are 144x160, and that matched Nintendo's official specs, though I always hear people say that the GB could push more, I think that's bullshit, why push more than what the built in screen can handle? tht arguement floats with laptops of modern times, not so much with handhelds from the 80's.

 

And yeah, battery life is very important for the one paying for the batteries, they aren't exactly free now days, and good ones back in the 80's were hella expensive. Even as a kid, I took GB as a real handheld and Lynx as a cripled console (since it's not really portable, without a mobile external power supply, then why not hook it to the TV and be done with it?)

 

Wiki says the gameboy has a 160x144 resolution.

This article could be wrong then

f

Yeah, that article is pretty far off on a LOT of things (has the same processor as the super nintendo? even the most jaded fanboy's I've heard don't claim that kinda outrageous crap )

 

Still, It's a lot closer to right on res (160x140) than whoever said 140x102...

Edited May 30, 2009 by Video

[roland p]

tht arguement floats with laptops of modern times, not so much with handhelds from the 80's.

 

One could do the same trick done on modern laptops (addressing the individual rgb elements), on the lynx. But it would only work with black/white pictures. You would have to use 8 colors (rgb= 000,001,010,011,100,101,110,111)

 

The Turbo Express exploited this feature to the max. Every white pixel would at least address one r,g or b element on the lcd. and the rgb elements where shifted one element each line. So white texts on black backgrounds where, although colorful , always readable on the screen. I think the Turbo Express was lightyears ahead of its time as the next handheld that uses a backlit tft lcd was the psp/ds/gb micro. Together with the fm sound this was for my the superior handheld. I was always showing off at school playing Street Fighter on the turbo express. That was a really faithful port.

 

The only thing I don't like about the gameboy is the screen. If it had a high contrast screen with some sort of backlight you see on those iluminator casio watches, it would be a much greater machine. That's just my opinion.

Edited May 31, 2009 by roland p

[Video]

tht arguement floats with laptops of modern times, not so much with handhelds from the 80's.

 

One could do the same trick done on modern laptops (addressing the individual rgb elements), on the lynx. But it would only work with black/white pictures. You would have to use 8 colors (rgb= 000,001,010,011,100,101,110,111)

 

The Turbo Express exploited this feature to the max. Every white pixel would at least address one r,g or b element on the lcd. and the rgb elements where shifted one element each line. So white texts on black backgrounds where, although colorful , always readable on the screen. I think the Turbo Express was lightyears ahead of its time as the next handheld that uses a backlit tft lcd was the psp/ds/gb micro. Together with the fm sound this was for my the superior handheld. I was always showing off at school playing Street Fighter on the turbo express. That was a really faithful port.

 

The only thing I don't like about the gameboy is the screen. If it had a high contrast screen with some sort of backlight you see on those iluminator casio watches, it would be a much greater machine. That's just my opinion.

Cool, yeah I always heard the Lynx could cheat some high color modes or something (atari products are actually notorious for their openendedness in the video department) Great system...

 

Oh yeah, Turbo Express, yeah, I always wanted one, but never had the $$$, though being able to play actual console games made it really cool IMO, kinda like the Nomad, only more portable due to the already small medai format. To bad it didn't catch on, wonder what happened? I mean it had everything in the world, but just seemed to never get beyond the "unknown in the background" area.

[Catsmasher]

I have the Lynx, Gamegear, Nomad, and NeoGeo Pocket color - like I said, geek with a real paycheck.. Got most of them cheap except the Nomad. I had to shell out 75 sheckels for that bad boy.

I like the Lynx most of all due to the games. Xybot, Chipschallenge, T-triz, Battlewheels are all great. New rechargeable batteries help too.

I am not a big "fighter game" fan or side scrolling game fan - so the Gamegear and Nomad just hang in the museum.

I like the Neogeo system itself most- great size, great screen, great controls, but the games really suck! It seems stuck in the Japanese market and never really was targeted at US customers.

[mcjakeqcool]

The Lynx was only $60s more expensive then the GameBoy in 1989, so I think the reason the GameBoy was more sucsessful then the Lynx was a matter of Nintendo over Atari rather then battery life alone.

[kool kitty89]

I've counted the pixels, they are 144x160, and that matched Nintendo's official specs, though I always hear people say that the GB could push more, I think that's bullshit, why push more than what the built in screen can handle? tht arguement floats with laptops of modern times, not so much with handhelds from the 80's.

 

And yeah, battery life is very important for the one paying for the batteries, they aren't exactly free now days, and good ones back in the 80's were hella expensive. Even as a kid, I took GB as a real handheld and Lynx as a cripled console (since it's not really portable, without a mobile external power supply, then why not hook it to the TV and be done with it?)

 

It very well could be capable of higher res, the Game Gear (granted a different case), was basicly a handheld Master System with larger master palette (4,096 colors instead of 64), but the display was forced down to 160x144 instead of the native 256x224/192 (NTSC) of the Master System. (effectively meaning any direct ports from the SMS would have a lot of the normally visible screen cut off)

 

Hmm, hooking it to the TV... Well I've thought about this before, but I don't think the Lynx would have done well as a home console compared to the TG-16 SNES and Genesis (technically, this is excluding the Nintendo and Sega marketing storm). The on screen color (max 16 per scanline) and resolution is far too low for this, this is part of the reason the Lynx could do some of that scaling/rotation stuff fairly easily with the custom chips. (higher color and especially resolution would have required a lot more processing power for those effects)

 

Wiki says the gameboy has a 160x144 resolution.

This article could be wrong then

f

Yeah, that article is pretty far off on a LOT of things (has the same processor as the super nintendo? even the most jaded fanboy's I've heard don't claim that kinda outrageous crap )

 

Still, It's a lot closer to right on res (160x140) than whoever said 140x102...

Wow that article is wrong a bout a LOT of stuff, even more on the CPU, why the hell would the GB pocket have a faster CPU than the old GB (they had to run the same games after all...) All ran at 4.19 MHz (up to the GBC, and the super gameboy ran very slightly fast iirc) THough I didn't see a claim that the SNES CPU was the same. (they mention the GBC's is faster than the SNES's, though it's only an 8-bit chip rather than the SNES's 16-bit one; and of course the 650x series is a lot more clock efficient than the Z80 series)

 

 

Overall the Lynx was certailny in a bad position behind Nintendo and (to a lesser extent Sega's) marketing power, and Tramiel didn't help this at all... However, besides that there are some other issues, like the software. Now obviously a less popular system is less likely to get support, but the Lynx is a special case whare thate are other factors that could have mitigated that. The development kit is awesome for the Lynx and the architecture is extremely freindly for programmers, but apparenty getting support from developers was handled extremely poorly, I'm not sure wat Jack did, but I've read several other discussions on this that critisized heavily on it. (I can't quite remember but it may be been similar to issues with payment for developers like with the Jaguar)

 

Now technically speaking there were some issues, it was big, fairly expensive, and battery hungry (which additionally results in further expense). Size wise it was worse than the Game Gear, supposedly due to some dumb ass focus group saying making it bigger gave them "more" for their money.... Yeah, great idea, it's a portable system, so whay not make it as bulky and cumbersome as possible.

 

Now the Lynx 2 improved a lot, more compact, less expensive, better battery life, and the option to turn of the light fore ven better battery life. (in this mode, competitive with the Bameboy, without I think it was still better than the GameGear) Though it was still a bit bulky, moreso than the game gear, still used 6 batteries, and like other tre backlit systems, it looks much worse unlit, same problem with the DS when unlit; this being due to the lack of reflective backing of unlit and side-lit (SP) displays. The Gameboy being the only practical pocket sized handheld on the market. (other than those game & watch/Tiger style cheap-o ones)

 

One thing they should have done (this would hold true for Sega too) is release an even more compact version, with no backlighting at all, use a reflective screen so it looks good unlit and now you've got a nice system that's color that Nintendo still won't be doing for many years to come and a system lasting far longer than the current Game Gear, possibly more compact as well. Switching to 4 batteries micht work too (certainly get it smaller), granted some of the components would need to be modified for the change in voltage, but this is no different than Nintendo's switch to the Pocket. Battery life would be more limited, but still cheaper (in overall design too), allow it to be more compact, and makes it easier to carry spare batteries (or possibly a rechargeable pack) than it is with 6x AA's.

[shadow460]

Hmm, hooking it to the TV... Well I've thought about this before, but I don't think the Lynx would have done well as a home console compared to the TG-16 SNES and Genesis (technically, this is excluding the Nintendo and Sega marketing storm). The on screen color (max 16 per scanline) and resolution is far too low for this, this is part of the reason the Lynx could do some of that scaling/rotation stuff fairly easily with the custom chips. (higher color and especially resolution would have required a lot more processing power for those effects)

 

Lynx games look terrible when played on a large screen due to the low resolution. The same is true of any handheld whose games I've played on a big screen.

 

No diss to the system, though--when played as it was meant to be played it looks good.