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Lynxpro

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Lynxpro last won the day on May 24 2014

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About Lynxpro

  • Birthday 12/13/1974

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  • Gender
    Male
  • Location
    Sacramento, CA
  • Interests
    Atari!!!
    -Former active Atari Corp shareholder.
    -Formerly published contributor to the "Tips & Tricks" section of Atari Explorer Publications Corp's "The Atarian" magazine.
    -Former member of the Atari Computer Club Encompassing Suburban Sacramento (A.C.C.E.S.S.) users group.
    -Former member of the Sacramento ST Users Group (SST) and Sacramento's Total Atari Resource (STAR) users group.

    ------------
    Outside of Atari, Volkswagen, Doctor Who, Star Wars, Mac OS X, motion pictures and music.
  • Currently Playing
    Gyruss on the Atari 5200.
  • Playing Next
    Xevious on the Atari 7800.

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  1. Most of what the Amiga team said in interviews is/was BS. They [allegedly] defrauded Warner Inc owned Atari Inc by returning the $500K loan - with money Commodore provided them - and claiming they couldn't get the Amiga Lorraine chipset to work. What they were scared of was becoming part of Atari Inc because of defaulting on the $500K loan and thus not profiting off their work. Selling themselves to Commodore gained them cash. They can blame the Tramiels all the want to but they would've ended up part of the remnants of Atari Inc which became the separate Atari Games Inc/Corp that Warner held onto until selling off to Namco awhile later. So the Amiga Lorraine chipset could've ended up with Atari Games as a low-cost chipset option for use in arcade games considering Atari Games already had more powerful chips of their own in the Atari System 1 arcade games [Marble Madness, Road Runner, Gauntlet, etc.]. Warner could've also licensed it or shared the rights with Tramiel's Atari Corp for inclusion in the ST. Personally, I think the Atari Systems 1 graphics chip would've been better since it was capable of 256 colors on-screen at once out of a 1,024 color palette and could generate far more sprites and at higher resolutions than either what Amiga or the ST could natively do. The revision chip upped the resolution and the palette to 4,096 colors. Of course, had original Atari Inc remained in one piece, the plan was to release a 128K RAM version of the Amiga Lorraine chipset as the code-named "Mickey" 16-Bit cartridge based console for Christmas 1985. The original Atari Inc/Amiga Corp agreement stated Atari Inc had to wait 1 full year after the console's release to release a keyboard for it and/or stand-alone computers [this was to give Amiga Corp freedom to license the design to other computer manufacturers] but that would've been nullified by Atari Inc's acquisition of Amiga Corp which would've immediately freed them up to release the Lorraine as the 1800XL/1850XLD once the designs were completed and conditions in the market allowed for it to happen. It would've also finished up much faster since there wouldn't have been any court filings which in our timeline hampered both the ST's and Amiga's development as Commodore and Atari Corp fought each other in court at the same time...
  2. Sounds like a job for the DPC+ ARM chip to do the heavy lifting of tracking the Trak-Ball controller. Obviously, that would need a revised or rewritten kernel. it also means that a 2600 version - and a hypothetical 7800 home-brew version - could be achieved via a cart-based DPC+ chip but an A8/5200 solution would probably require internal expansion [like a socket CPU board] and/or a 65816 to do the heavy lifting. And all of the above would not be simple coding.
  3. That's some serious modding. Throw in an XBOARD and you probably have the ultimate modded 7800. Well...I guess if you added the capacity for PAUSE, SELECT, RESET to the controllers like Pac-Man Plus did to one of his 7800s. Which makes me wonder with all of that serious modding... what would the 7800 do - or not do - if those 2 2K SRAM chips were replaced with larger capacity chips?
  4. The Colecovision's graphics aren't better than the 5200's. It's a draw. The TI graphics chip came out after the ANTIC/GTIA and still couldn't outperform it. The TI sound chip isn't better than the POKEY. Your comment about the library is pure revisionism. Speaking as a kid back then, there were plenty of us who wanted to play those very same games that were on the 2600 but with graphics and sound closer to their Atari arcade counterparts. Coleco's library mainly consisted of B arcade titles that Atari, Mattel, and the other 3rd Party companies didn't acquire. Michael Katz was very proud of that strategy. The main exception was paying Nintendo $4+ per cartridge of Donkey Kong - a game most of Atari's programmers hated - and packing it in with the console. But the likes of Slither does not compare to the likes of Centipede. Your point of Atari having "plenty of time" to come out with a successor to the 2600 also fails to address the fact that Coleco sat on the Colecovision for almost the same amount of time. They chose not to release their mom & pop screwdriver shop console back in 1979 because of the price of the chips it required. Of course, had it released back in 1979, the graphics still wouldn't have been great since the cartridges would've been 2K - or 4K max - ROM due to the ROM chip prices back then. You wouldn't have had 8K or 16K ROM carts.
  5. It's an interesting concept but I see a downside in swapping the cartridge connector adapters. That's wear-and tare on that unit itself as well as plugging and unplugging from the systems which is one of the things SD Cart Adapters are meant to reduce. Excellent firmware updates. And quite a solution for the likes of the Intellivision which only had flash carts previously to my knowledge. The Vectrex could still use a solution... not to mention the Atari ST.
  6. Interesting. But why not go for 2 speakers since the 2600 has stereo? Can you split the audio so it can go both to the internally mounted speaker as well as to external at the same time?
  7. I thought the QuadTari doesn't support 2nd Fire Buttons.
  8. The 5200 wasn't meant to compete with the Colecovision. The Colecovision wasn't announced until CES and it took the industry by surprise. The 5200 was meant to compete with Mattel's Intellivision and end their smug superiority marketing campaign with blowhard George Plimpton. Unless we're talking about Coleco's peripheral controllers, there isn't much actual [hardware... or software] innovation from Coleco's part. Aside from the Cabbage Patch Kids, they basically had no IP of their own. Their console's hardware consists of off-the-shelf parts. Their true innovations were their business strategies. They paid top dollar to Nintendo for the rights to Donkey Kong and then bundled the cartridge with the console. [Atari didn't do that at first nor did they want to pay Nintendo top dollar* because a. Nintendo have always been a$$holios and b. most of Atari's programmers disliked the game]. They had the stones to sell a 2600 adapter despite knowing full well they'd be sued over it. And finally thanks to Michael Katz, they effectively acquired the rights to obscure-but-good arcade titles that Atari, Commodore, Mattel, and Parker Bros. had all failed to license first. Katz tried to repeat that same strategy a few years later when he was running [Tramiel's] Atari Corp's Entertainment Electronics Division in charge of console sales. *Manny Gerard in Atari: Game Over personally disputed the claim Atari was unwilling to pay Nintendo a $4 royalty per cartridge for Donkey Kong, although his dispute was based upon his memory. He didn't seem to be fully sure of it though.
  9. What are the chances some of these chips are included in a bunch of old Motorola branded modems that are e-wasted?
  10. Ask him if he needs an existing ST fixed... I'm sensing this would make for a good Control-Alt-Rees YouTube video...
  11. Did ICD have a kit to mount a 2nd HD in there? I remember their print ad for the FA-ST was eye-catching...
  12. Was that the Practical Solutions clock cartridge with the pass-thru cartridge slot?
  13. I don't remember game patches being made available through BBSes or in user group libraries but that would've been great resources back then. I'm not saying it didn't happen; I just don't remember any examples... I know the incompatibility issue scared me away from upgrading to the STe. Hell, I didn't even upgrade TOS versions because of that issue.
  14. There's an active GEOS user group on Facebook. Many of them are using Commodore REUs or GeoRAM carts to go way beyond the standard 64K or 128K RAM... even beyond 1MB... to 2MB+. A lot of them use C128s for its 80-column C128 mode. If I'm not mistaken, GEOS Wheels is the last non-x86 version. GEOS was also available for the Apple II line. They didn't seem to bother with the IIgs since that already came standard with the official Apple GUI. Not sure if it was ever ported to the BBC Micro. We all know it wasn't officially released for Atari 8-Bit but there certainly were rumors over the years that a version was at least considered to some [probably minimal] extent. I wouldn't be surprised if Commodore told them to nix any potential Atari port or kiss the bundling deal with the C64c goodbye...
  15. And yet Ms. Pac-Man was one of the best selling titles for the Sega Genesis. And also on the NES before it. Pac-Man later was added as a pack-in game for the 5200 in 1983. So you got Super Breakout and Pac-Man.
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