Lynxpro

I'd love to read your storyline proposal. Did it involve the Atari Force? I can't lay claim to knowing who actually owns the rights to those characters...whether it is "Atari" or DC Comics at this point. I really do not like the transformer ship. There's also too much of a lack of traveling freedom with the game either. The vibe is just missing from it. And I wanted to like the game from the get go.

I would love to see some video games incorporate the "Tramiel" as the base unit of damage. While McBride is also funny, only part of the Linux crowd can actually appreciate that injoke... Imagine the next reboot of Atari's Star Raiders... Your ship has just taken 5 Tramiels of damage... That's certainly more damage than an equal number of Kassar scale units... That's not a fair assessment of Apple. Apple didn't want DRM; it was the RIAA that insisted on DRM as part of the online experiment with iTunes Store in the first place. It was Steve Jobs who finally pressured for the end of DRM that made it happen. Lay blame for music DRM right where it belongs, at the feet of Microsoft who seduced the greed of the RIAA with their security and revenue promises. As for the 30% cut for iTunes, that is fair. There's plenty of free apps in the iTunes Marketplace that Apple makes no money on even though they have the fixed costs with their data centers and bandwidth. One could argue that's all at loss leader anyway since it is meant to drive sales of the hardware which is where Apple makes its money on.

I am not giving up my Atari sweatpants. I may quit playing "Star Raiders" on the Xbox but well, that mainly has to do with my lack of enthusiasm for them trashing the storyline and making the ship a transformer. I was under the impression that the Hasbro Interactive regime made all of the Atari OS'es public domain. There should be an online record of their announcement and that would be just as damning in court as Jonathan Schwartz's comments congratulating Android for its Java underpinnings have been in the ongoing court case between Oracle and Google over Android. I could swear Hasbro finally authorized the release of not only the Jaguar security/encryption codes but also that of the 7800. Then again, I've noticed TOS 4.04 alluded to still being an underground and unauthorized release to this day. As for the 8-bit OSes, couldn't the community just piece together an emulator using the third-party OSes [iCD? or am I suffering from a memory error?] and one of the better versions of [ahem, "Atari"] Basic from OSS? Wouldn't that still be 95%-98% compatible with just about everything in existence?

Nolan is at Burning Man this week, FYI... I'm nervous about that because Albert hasn't been contacted (that I'm aware of), but he's certainly not outside the scope of their efforts. Does anyone remember how fan sites prevailed against Viacom/Paramount/CBS in the late 90s when they went after various Star Trek fan websites in order to redirect all of fandom to the "official" MSN page once they signed a fat exclusive contract with Microsoft? I seem to recall Lucasfilm trying the same thing before the release of Episode II... Suffice to say independent fan websites still exist for both of those subjects. Just so you all know, Slashdot just covered this mess again today... http://games.slashdot.org/story/11/09/02/1825230/Atari-CampDs-Emulators-Site-About-Asteroids The funniest two comments - in my opinion - on the thread are here: http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2410528&cid=37290056 The story's probably also been covered on Digg but at this point, who cares about Digg?

No, that OS is inspired and compatible with BeOS but it isn't BeOS. I believe ACCESS Linux owns the rights to both the old PalmOS as well as BeOS and the hybrid that would've been Palm OS 6.x. Although I agree that ARM is the way to go for hardware, I'd say the way to resurrect an "Atari" OS - or Amiga for that matter - is to go Apple's route and use BSD for the underpinnings of the OS.

And "Amiga" is in an even worse situation than "Commodore". I don't understand the thinking behind the guy who owns the rights to the name "Amiga Inc". Why the eff didn't he slap the Amiga name on high end gaming computers in the late 90s/early 00s following Gateway's sale of the trademark? I mean, Alienware started around that time period and they made lots of cash during that period before Dell acquired them and ruined the brand [or Voodoo for that matter suffering an even worse fate at HP's hands]. What did the guy do instead? "Amiga Anywhere" aka "Amiga Nowhere".

I remember the YAC [Yolo Atari Club] guys! If I recall, their base of operations was UC Davis [a few years before I attended]. They wanted their own users group closer to home than what SST/STAR [sacramento ST Users Group, later known as Sacramento's Total Atari Resource, and originally made up of former members of ACCESS - Atari Computer Club Encompassing Suburban Sacramento] provided but they also attended our meetings. They were really hot for the world wide web when it debuted and I recall them being fans of STik and CAB back then. They must've moved away from the area because I've never seen any of them at the last 3 annual Davis Atari Parties... I haven't seen anybody from ACCESS/SST/STAR there either - other than myself - for that matter. Sorry, just had to give a shout out to the former Atari scene from this part of NorCal...

So, can we assume they'll go after the bands named the Atari Teenage Riot and The Atari's? And what about Crystal Castles? ATR has been around since...what...1996?

One would have to possess a mind to connect the MindLink Controller to in the first place... I kid, I kid. Sorry, that was a reflexive act from a former Atari Corp. shareholder, and well, much less tame comments were constantly uttered amongst Atarians at user's group meetings...

Not to derail the thread but was Texas Array the same company as Styra Semiconductor? [because the Tramiels bought them as well]...

Now that would be awesome... Are the following included: [?] Atari Hotz keyboard? [gawd, why hasn't Jimmy converted the software for the iPad?]... Falcon040 case? Mickey case? Didn't Atari do manufacturing in Texas as well? Were the 1400XL and 1450XLD manufactured there or in Taiwan [or Hong Kong]? Sounds like they need Curt and an army of trustworthy volunteers to scour through those pallets for them.

The black'ish looking paper with the multi-colored Atari logo to me looks like the cardboard backing that was part of the packaging to the Atari Corp calculators. [mine still works]. Then again, it could be something having to do with the Atari Porfolio line but I don't believe it is for any Atari game systems...

Do you think you'll get any gaming press coverage? Are you going to even bother with trying to contact G4 about a spot on X-Play or AOTS? p.s. And what about "Atari" itself? Have "they" said anything about the project?

I vote for XM only because "the scene" should be conserving the supply of available Pokey chips.. Forgot I posted earlier in this thread...

Because they had brand recognition, a significant market share, etc, etc. (and that market share would have been considerably higher with open 3rd party support without the walls put up by Nintendo) I mean, in spite of the budget/support issues, Atari DID have a substantial brand name at the time and DID sell 3.77 million unite from '86-90. (nearly 3 million in '87 and '88 alone, the best 2 years for the system) They were also well ahead of Sega in the US in spite of Sega's better funding and software resources. Maybe Warner should've just paid GCC off for the 7800, gave it to Atari Games Corp. - which they still owned a 10% stake in during Namco's takeover - and then negotiated with TTL/Atari Corp. to revert home video game console rights to the name "Atari" back to Atari Games. That would've made more sense than giving the home gaming rights to Tramiel when TTL/Atari Corp. did not retain any of the former Atari Inc. programming staff while on the other hand, Atari Games Corp. immediately wanted in on the home video game console action following the split. Game Over in its narrative clearly states Atari Games staff wanted to compete and to beat Nintendo. Had they had their own console [7800], they probably would've been more successful than what Tramiel & Co. had at it...

Agreed in full. However, does anyone know if Namco ever expressed an interest in this? Maybe Warner Atari didn't want Namco getting too big for their britches, so to speak... Japan was the second largest economy in the world behind the US with 120 million'ish consumers... I really liked the NES Advantage. It was a piece of quality. Super Mario was a blast with it compared to the joypads. Too bad the 7800 didn't have a quality arcade joystick like it. Or two fire buttoned Epyx joysticks... I should quantify that as I loved the NES Advantage until the Lynx debuted and then I sold my NES quickly for funds to buy the Lynx...

I enjoyed it [the first edition]. The Atari parts seemed almost like a direct sequel to Zap the Rise and Fall of Atari... Game Over also asserted the theory that Steve Ross at Time Warner was paying for Atari Corp's legal fees in its case against Nintendo... What is missing from the discussion is how hard it was for American companies to penetrate the Japanese consumer market due to the complex and highly nationalistic distribution system Japan had back then. For Atari to have succeeded then marketing the system on their own would have been for Toys R Us to have already been in the market. Toys R Us dealt directly with companies and bypassed the distribution system but that wasn't until the late 80s. The only other choice would've been for Atari to either have a Japanese company distribute their products [i'm assuming Namco only distributed Atari coin-op games in Japan and not the consumer products] or license the hardware to the likes of Sony, Matsushita [Panasonic, JVC, etc.], NEC, Toshiba, Mitsubishi, etc. and/or all of the above. Hell, even today with the break down of the distribution system, Microsoft can barely sell any Xboxes there. Microsoft could change its name to "Atari", have 100% non-defective rate on the Xbox, have exclusive Japanese content on the system, and pay Japanese consumers to purchase it and I'm sure Nintendo and Sony would still outsell them. It's just the nature of their closed market. I'm surprised Apple does so damn well there in spite of all of this... Face it, Atari could've executed everything perfectly in the Japanese consumer market in the late 70s/early 80s and Nintendo probably would've still outsold them once the Japanese consumers understood the Japanese sounding "Atari" was an American company. Others beat me to the punch [sleep, job, and pregnant wife telling me I spend too much time on the net, especially here] about answering the licensing questions regarding NES exclusivity. It should be noted that Technos did not publish for the NES directly so it got to sub-license Double Dragon to all the console platforms via different game publishers. As Kool Kitty has mentioned numerous times, Atari Corp. could've sidestepped console exclusivity by licensing the titles for the Atari 8-bit line - and thus benefiting the XEGS - but the marketing and consumer confusion - along with the actual cost and the cheapness of Jack Tramiel - negated it. Imagine releasing all the games that appeared on the NES for the XEGS via packaging them for the "XE line of Computers". Under those circumstances, Atari probably would've been prevented from attaching a sticker stating "also plays on XEGS" from the packaging because the retailers would've objected out of fear of being sued by Nintendo [or withholding shipments which Nintendo allegedly did], or being prevented from releasing the titles on cartridges and restricting them to 5 1/4 floppy disks which Toys R Us and KB would've threw a fit over [and publishers would've been angered over the piracy potential]. So it's no surprise this didn't transpire, not to mention the fact that the 7800 would've still been boned... Lack of DVD drive and Microsoft forcing Sega to violate their contracts with 3dfx and dumping their chipset in favor of NEC's PowerVR during the development phase of the "Blackbelt" followed by the unwillingness of Microsoft to continue funding Sega when Microsoft had already decided to launch the Xbox...

How many versions are there? It's weird that the label is in b/w if it was from Atari Inc. [i thought that was restricted to cheapo Tramiel Atari Corp.]. Were the 1984 Bay Area test market cartridges also equipped with b/w labels? The boxes certainly weren't...

Will it be ready in time for the Davis Atari Party in May?

I disagree. Atari Corp. sued Nintendo on antitrust grounds because the publishers could not only not publish on other consoles if they were already licensees to the NES but they also couldn't license those games to other platforms for others to publish. That didn't loosen up until 1988/89 because of the Atari Corp./Atari Games lawsuits and the threats of Federal intervention and lawsuits from other companies. Almost all the titles that appeared on the NES were exclusive to the NES until Nintendo got scared. If what you say is true then NEC would've been able to release all of the titles that were released on the PC Engine in Japan to the TurboGrafx-16 here in the US. Nintendo's licensing prevented even NES from sub-licensing those titles directly to NEC to self-publish. Nintendo was a proven hit in Japan, it had money, it had experience, and Atari [Corp.] was a cluster-**** in 1985/86 when the NES launched in the States. After 86, Nintendo had a large installed user base. Nintendo's restrictive policies were also thought to prevent another industry meltdown like 1983-84 from the glut of crummy games that destroyed Atari and its competitors.

No because as already said about a million times here Atari Games (Tengen) and Atari Corp. (Tramiels) were seperate companies so they had to pay to license such games like they would with anyone else. Okay, so then they couldn't afford or they didn't think it was worthwhile to pay to license those games. Makes sense. Thanks. It takes money to make money. How much per cartridge would it have been for Atari to release Paperboy, Gauntlet, etc. on the 7800? Nintendo paid the fees and thus was able to sell more product (consoles and cartridges). While Atari seemed to slink off to the corner, licking its wounds. I know I'm playing armchair CEO here, but if I had been running Atari, I'd have done things way differently -- better gamepads, more titles, etc.. That's not how it worked. Atari Games/Tengen signed up to be an NES licensee because it was the leading console and it was their parent company's [Namco's] wishes. Once you licensed those games for play on the NES, you were locked into the exclusive agreement. Thus Atari Corp. could not license those titles after-the-fact. The licensing agreements didn't loosen up on Nintendo's part until Atari Games and Atari Corp both sued them on antitrust grounds, the Feds were showing signs of interest, and Nintendo was about to loose licensees over to the Sega Genesis if they didn't liberalize their terms...

You mean this? http://www.atariage.com/magazines/atarian.html I haven't downloaded that link but I can tell you I'm probably one of the few people on this board that had tips published in The Atarian back then...

I like the Famicom color scheme mixed with the Atari'ish font... Did Atari Inc. ever do any mockups or art design of what their version of the Famicom would've looked like?

I'm very interested in Amiga, but their fandom is massively split into multiple factions... There's the folks that are following what Hyperion is doing [the owners of AmigaOS], versus the MorphOS guys, versus the AROS guys. The AROS guys want to go Intel x86 - and their distribution runs on x86 - while MorphOS is sticking to PowerPC and Hyperion is also stuck with PowerPC. And only some of their fandom sees the value in switching to ARM which is funny because that's where all of personal computing is heading to no matter how much Intel and AMD scream about it. AmigaOS 4.1 is pretty awesome for its own limitations. IMHO, what really needs to be done with "Amiga" - and this goes for any of us crazy Atarians and what we might do if we won PowerBall or MegaMillions [bah ha ha, that'll be me this Friday] - is that not only does it need to switch to ARM but the OS itself needs to do what Apple did 10 years ago and switch to using some version of BSD as the basis and going all "Amiga'ish" as the GUI and top layer. But a lot in the Amiga community think that's blasphemous [or some would say that they'd support switching over to Dragonfly BSD because it is "Amiga'ish"]. Nothing short of that will make it an actual viable contender. Heck, if Amiga did that, it would be rather easy to port software over from Mac OS X to it. And then there's the butthead rights holder issue, which is far worse than any Atarian complaining about Infogrames owning the "Atari" brand. There's the much hated single guy [former Gateway/Amiga exec] whose name I won't mention who owns the "Amiga Inc" name, and then there's Hyperion who owns all rights to "AmigaOS" beyond 3.x. The Amiga Inc. rights holder hasn't even figured out how he could've at least made "Amiga" a brand name for high end Windows PCs even though all the while he's been asleep at the wheel since the Gateway selloff, other upstart PC manufacturers - such as Alienware - popped up onto the scene and became rather successful. So needless to say, it is a nightmare, even if one won MegaMillions and decided to create a viable 3rd consumer computing platform again. As it stands, HP is going to enter the fray and try to fragment the PC OS industry with their WebOS next year. Good luck to them and good riddance to Microsoft's default Windows monopoly... Now if a crazy Atarian wanted to bring back TOS/GEM, then going the BSD route would also be the smart thing to do... DRI's version GEM has gone open source but there's no reason to believe Atari's version technically has... Most Mac fans have transitioned from 680x0 over to PowerPC to x86 and also went from the original Mac OS to BSD based NeXTStep/Mac OS X. How's that any crazier other than Apple still exists and is billions of dollars successful? [thanks to the iPod, not the Mac line if truth be told]. Wouldn't a modern Atari ST or Amiga - if either company had actually survived - have transitioned the same way as what we've seen from the Mac side of things? My friend and I almost went to it but it was raining and he wanted to spend his time-away-from-his-kid playing Halo Reach. Glad to hear the show was good. The Atari scene - unlike the Mac and Amiga scenes - is basically dead here in Sac. Shame since we had ACCESS, SST/STAR, and YAC in the greater Sac metropolitan area during the 80s and up to the later mid 90s... This year will be the 3rd "Davis Atari Party" in nearby Davis CA but I've yet to see any of the other old user group members attend... I know one of the former Atari dealers is still alive and nearby but he got really burnt out of it at the end, especially from his dealings with the Tramiels but that's a totally different story...

Do you know if Katz or anyone else at Atari Corp. ever approached the programmers at INTV about developing for the 7800? Seems that was a missed opportunity since INTV was busy beating the dead horse that was the Intellivision I/II/II for several more years. Then again, INTV did make money via mail order so perhaps Atari Corp could've actually learned a trick from them... And more childish nonsense. Atari Corp. had no internal game developers. Atari Corp. was once again a different company than Atari Inc. - the company with all the developers, which was closed down in '84. You keep saying "Atari, Atari" like it's one continuous company with the same staff, etc. While I hate Nintendo probably more than any other Atari fanboy, there is a point to be made. Atari Corp. could've went through the old Atari inc. rosters and hired back a lot of the old 2600/5200 programmers and or sang koombaiya (sic) with GCC and got them to program again for them, but they didn't. Nintendo beat Atari Corp's lawsuit basically by asserting Sam Tramiel was an incompetent CEO who inherited 100% of the video game industry post-1984 and squandered it. Although that white washes Nintendo's monopolistic practices, there was a certain truth to it. Regardless, Nintendo still sucks, IMHO That relatively small percentage is what made them popular, at least in my neighborhoods. And I listed Ninja Gaiden specifically because of the reason you mentioned, to show that Atari didn't have to say "we're ****ed, they got ___ license, that's it for ninjas/beat 'em ups/sidescrolling action". Atari Corp. got to finally license Ninja Gaiden for the Lynx because by that time, Nintendo had relaxed their restrictive contracts due to all the pressure they were receiving from both the Atari Corp. and Atari Games Corp. antitrust lawsuits against them. Had they not relaxed the terms of their contracts, other companies would've started suing them as well and the Feds would've also stepped in even more than they had done with a different lawsuit against Nintendo at the time. No matter what you say, there is much historical evidence that Nintendo played dirty, nearly as dirty as Microsoft has done throughout their history...