gravitone

It's a great idea indeed. I had an old 19" panel lying around with a crack in it, and im thinking, why not? I've cut a lynx screen + 1 inch on the side size piece out of the plexi diffuser, drilled holes for the led's, glued them in and now im left thinking. Problem 1: I'm entirely modding this lynx to begin with. Not even leaving the original lynx2 casing. So in an effort to come up with a less bulky design, the original frame that holds the CCFL is going out the window. Sadly my LCD panel lacks the nice diffuser and inverter foil sheets that the original poster used. Anyone here have some lying around? Problem 2: The backlight inverter has to be desoldered, as well as any stray components part of that circuit. The 2 LED's i used need to be wired up to a solder point that has a: the right voltage, and b: is wired into the brightness dial. Anyone here with some experience with the lynx hardware have any ideas about what can be removed and what solder points could be picked?

Great stuff, any chance you could make me one? I hereby welcome myself back in action btw. Had a couple of rough months with uni, relationship, etc.

We offered it to everyone on the planet! Why they all turned it down, I don't know. Atari was our last choice. I think the only reason nintendo decided to agree to a meeting is to see what they were up against. Japanese business culture is a pretty one way street where things have to be designed, developed, and produced in Japan. Besides, sega didnt want to take the risk at this point of entering the market with a system their own developers knew nothing about. I'm pretty sure plans were already underway of handheldizing their mark 3 hardware at this point. As for other potential buyers, handheld games were an upexplored market that could prove potentially risky with the rumours of nintendo's dominationboy undoubtetly already circulating around the office.

I've been quite bussy with my studies over the lasr few weeks but hopefully I'll find some time to do some coding in the comming weeks. I actually managed to bid and win 2 lynx game auctions on ebay. Blue lightning and chess will prove nice additions to my library. The flash cart sounds like an excellent plan and I would like to construct one as soon as you start/finish the PCB design I'll keep an eye out for dead lynxes to harvest for cart connectors just in case you/we are going to need some in the future. Hopefully I'll find some time too to add some content to classicgamedev.com. I'd like to start a blog but i'm not familiar enough with the wiki content system to add one (more stuff to read I guess). Hopefully this hotbed of activity going on at the moment will produce some neat little projects in the next few months. Hopefully enough to be recognized as an active "scene".

sourcecode would be great. I know there is already a tetris clone out there, but I'ts a good start for my to familiarize myself with a lot of the inner workings of the lynx, particulary the sprite hardware, and in the meantime, improve on the tetris clone out there. I'll have something to show after the weekend hopefully.

Hi, I'm new to 8-bit programming, the 6502, and 64kb ram to work with!, Right now im trying to code a tetris clone for the atari Lynx (great little machine), and if I could be so bold, would like to hear from you about some pointers when it comes to datastructures you used to handle the board, piece rotation, pieces, etc. I'll list what I have so far and tell me what you think if you have some time. It would be great to hear some thoughts on what I've come up with. I thought about using a 10x18 byte "board". This array hold values of either 0 (no piece), 1 (fixed piece), 2 (falling piece). Each piece consist of: 4 blocks, each containing 2 bytes (x,y) for coordinates. The First piece always serving as the rotation point. I've thought about making a 224 byte datablock that holds the x,y coordinates for all 7 pieces for each of the 4 rotation "states" a block can be in. Collision detection will kick in after each movement is issues. Checking adjecent blocks on the board for every block in a tetris piece. I want to make 2 detection routines. 1 for vertical and 1 for horizontal movement. As soon as a solid block is detected below the falling piece it will turn into a fixed value, the piece variables will be cleared in memory, and a new piece will be created by my piece generation code. I seem to be going off track with irrelevant specifics so I'll leave it at that for now. I still have the collision detection for my rotation routine to work out (existing pieces on the board and board edges) but that Shouldnt be too much of a problem. Most of it is down in pseudo code right now that I'll work out over the weekend if I have the time for it. Hope to hear your thoughts on this. Best regards, Richard Visser

I grabbed the current source using mercurial, Once I have a GCC toolchain running on this box I'll compile and give it a try. As there's many users still using windows here, I'm considering cleaning up the visual studio project files from the original NESHLA and making a build. It's just not really on my priority list right now so it might take a while.

You'd think so, but he said: "Your playfield is actually the full 16 bit pixel range (65535 by 65535 pixels). This means that you can write your sprite anywhere and let your 160x102 viewport smoothly scroll over the playfield. "

Maybe it would be better to create a cross-platform liblynx project that packages up a lynx emulator as a library that can be used by other applications. That way it could be embedded in other IDE's as plugins. I personally use vim for all of my coding, so supporting Code::Blocks is not really interesting to me. I will however take patches against NESHLA for that purpose. --Wookie Focussing on NESHLA sounds like a good idea to me after having a quick look at it.

Karri informed me that I can use the full range (16-bit) for the virtual display where you place the sprites in. However, glancing through the lynx docs I see an example that mentions that only the first 9 bits (512) are available for use. Can someone clarify this suzy related question for me?

Wow, great to see such a usefull piece of hardware out in the wild. Is this flashcart still available? Im looking into starting some lynx dev with the cold days of winter comming and this would be really usefull.

Great stuff. I just got some new lynx games in the mail as well. These are all boxed in good condition. Bill & ted, Todd's adventures in slime world, hockey, Zarlor Mercenary. Dirty larry renegade cop, Rampage, Basketbarwl, and turbo sub. Also a very good condition lynx2. Best one I have so far. Does anyone here have any experience using some scratch removing substance on the lynx plastic?

Its actually only worth as much as WE are willing to pay for it. Given that most people who buy atari lynx games can be found here.

I really have to look at the epyx documentation closely sometime. The whole suzy chip functions and driving that baby properly are really not clear in my head yet. I was already thinking of creating some gradients in the background by having 1 or two palette colors used exclusively for background graphics/gradients or something like animated water by cycling colors, and creating the gradient by changing the palette during the H-blank period after a certain number of lines. Im sure things will fall into place in my mind eventually. Great to see that you respond so quickly, and confirm some of my own thoughts. If I ever have any specific questions I'll drop you a line. Im sure I'll run into a few quircks once I start coding.

The lynx community really needs initiatives like this to keep the scene alive. This game is looking very impressive. As for other development, we have to make the threshold as low as possible for people joining in. Would you mind sharing some code bits that I would like to take a peek at like the drawing and scrolling code? prettymuch anything that interfaces with suzy would be welcome and very helpfull. If not, could you at least outline your strategy at tackling the drawing code? what decisions you made, and why? Keep up the great work.

Bidding by these ridiculous merchants makes me irritated as well. They never seem to get the final bid anyways. Right now im just shocked by the latest great offer showing up on the site. A lynx 1 with a broken screen (there's a seriously large hole in it), a lynx II in unknown condition, and 11 games. Just carts. And of course the ultra deluxe carying case. All for the wonderfull minimum price of 100 euros. Which comes down to about $130 US right now. Wonderfull how people expect to get that much for their crap.

I carefully sanded down the unit with 600 grit sandpaper, and finished with a slightly finer grit. I used 2 layers of primer made for soft plastics and did 3 layers of paint. I used a spraycan. I sanded in between the layers with ultra fine sandpaper to create as smooth a surface as possible. As this was my first experience with spraycans some areas got more pain then others, while some small patches werent sanded as well as others. Overall it was a good learning experience and im sure I can do a better job in the future.

Sorry, no macro function. But my gf has a real digicam. Its only 2mpixel but it will do the job. I'll post some once I actually find it.

The lynx never did particulary well over here in Europe. Somewhere in the 90's I remember there being a clearance sale at intertoys which is to my recollection the only major retailer who actually still sold the system. They cleared them out for like 50 guilders, which is about $25. That was for the lynx II with the batman pack-in. A stood there with one of the those boxes in my hands for about 15 minutes thinking about whether or not to buy a system. I wish I would have back then. Games were still available back then going at discount prices. I remember crystal mines, chips challenge, and blue lightning being the most prominent titles still available back then. This year I bought my first lynx unit, which really made me wish I would have bought one back in the day. Of course I was one of those kids that got a gameboy instead, and got into pc gaming later. I dont regret getting the gameboy though, gave me a lot of great gaming. Its was just different. A lot of games had that unique japanese touch to them. The lynx is all in all a completely different experience. Playing this system now, and looking at its capabilities, has made me wonder what some of those (Early) gameboy games would have been like had they been released on the atari in color. And who am I not to pick up a good challenge. For a good fun project I have decided to port super mario land to the lynx. Most of this afternoon has been spent converting sprites, and adjusting everything to a 16 color palette, trying to figure out how to divide the palette usage between player, enemies, other sprites, and backgrounds. So much could have been done with this little system, and most of it never happend. I think as a community we can still make part of that come true.

Looks like I ran into one of the people bidding with/against me on marktplaats Its relatively easy and cheap here now to build up a nice atari lynx collection. Given that its europe where we pay all the dollarprices in euros, and given that its holland which means +20-30% because everyone here is stingy. I've just won a decent condition lynx with 13 games, including a boxed lemmings which I intend to sell to make up for some of the cost. Good to see there are more people interested in the lynx in this country. This Mehmet guy is also buying or at least bidding on almost every lynx console that shows up.

Here's 2 close-ups.

Smoothing the battery cover took me quite a whilte. It also created a lot of plastic dust. I filled up the back of the lynx as well to make it flat & smooth. Used some random filler material that works on plastics. Didnt come out as good as I hoped, but it was a first time try at filling & painting plastic, so I really cant complain. I'll take some more close-up shots once I have some decent light in my room, which is essential since I have to take pictures with my phone.

During these dark days in November I decided to have some fun with a spare lynx II lying around. It gave me a chance to practice using my dremel and various bits as well as spray painting plastic. It worked out pretty well, but is definitly up for improvement. But im happy with the results for a first try. Just thought id share some pictures here. I removed some of those ugly ridges on the lynx 2. Smoothed out the back, and painted the whole unit with an ivory white glossy finish. The 6 buttons in the black frame still have to be painted, so dont mind that mess right now. Let me know what you think.