Lynxpro

I apologize for not writing the thread title clearer... My bad! Were those actually released? For some reason, I though they were conceived, but then never actually made it into production. I've got this picture... Based on the address from that chart, that mobo was designed by Styra Semiconductor/Atari Microsystems...

A Time Warner owned Atari Corp. combined with Atari Games would've been a force to reckon with. There would have been enough funds to put back into the Lynx and "Atari" could have launched the Panther or ended up doing what they ultimately did...skip it and move onto the Jaguar. I'm rather of the opinion skipping the Panther may have been as big of a blunder as Atari..... Seeing as how the Jaguar had its head cut off by Playstation (et al), I don't see that producing a less-capable console would have been a move in the right direction. A complete "Atari" with Time Warner's money could've acquired more game publishers and incidents such as Rayman getting delayed by Sony's manipulations might not have occurred.

Let's refer to it as the MOS 6509. Wikipedia reports it supported 1MB via bank switching but it apparently had a reputation for being difficult to program. I'm surprised Commodore didn't sign up for MOS to have a second-source license on the Motorola 680x0 series of CPUs. All the animosity between MOS and Motorola should've been paved over by then...

Very true, but as you stated, its a 16-bit CPU. I'm surprised MOS didn't change the memory limitations in the 6510...

A few portable DVD player makers have tried that, but the licensing, extra parts, firmware/coding for the volume done in TV's would be way to cost prohibitive and not a real selling point for today's televisions. The fact it'd be just another bullet on a list of specs is exactly why it's not worth the money when you're talking about the intended target audience of that kind of consumer device. Portable TV's possibly. I'm actually surprised Vizio hasn't tried this for their more expensive televisions as a way to distinguish themselves from the cheap Chinese/Korean competitors sold through the likes of Sam's Club and Costco. But what we really need is an "Atari" branded flat screen with these capabilities.

Does any AtariAge users own one of the reported ST models with a socket on the motherboard for installing an Intel 8086/286 CPU? Back in the day, I read about some models being offered as such but never had a confirmation they truly existed. If they did, I believe they were prior to the introduction of the STe models but I could be mistaken...

A Time Warner owned Atari Corp. combined with Atari Games would've been a force to reckon with. There would have been enough funds to put back into the Lynx and "Atari" could have launched the Panther or ended up doing what they ultimately did...skip it and move onto the Jaguar. I'm rather of the opinion skipping the Panther may have been as big of a blunder as Atari having skipped using the Motorola 68020 in the ST line [for a mid range system, EST, whatever] and waiting to use the 68030 in the TT which was too little to late. Under such scenarios, it calls for speculation whether Time Warner would've pushed for 3D0 to merge into their reunified "Atari" company [TW owned a 25% stake in 3D0 as well] and whether they would've pursued a merger/sale with Williams-Midway as did occur in 1996 in our timeline. And had Time Warner continued owning "Atari", there may have been enough tech people inside Time Warner to side with what AOL wanted to do with the warring Time Warner properties following the AOL Time Warner "merger" and it might have been the roaring success people expected it to have been instead of the giant cluster**** it ended up as. Interestingly enough, Warner Bros Interactive - owners of the Atari Games Corp/Midway IP - is an investor in OnLive's nonconsole platform.

I dunno. Audio from the Amiga Paula chip seems "warmer" to me. The Yamaha just sounds "synth" in comparison. I can't imagine the Yamaha chip doing as good of a job with the music from, say, Shadow of the Beast. It would make me chuckle if someone wedged a SID or a Paula chip into a 7800 homebrew title. And while I didn't care for TI back in the day, I did like their speech synthesizer module for the TI99/4A. Which reminds me, I'd love to see a port of Parsec to the 7800... Are any programmers planning on using the YM chip for music and the Pokey for sound effects? It amazes me nobody [MOS, Atari, Synertek, Rockwell, etc.] didn't produce a modified version of the 6502 that allowed for more memory without bank switching. Don't stone me if the Lynx's version of the CPU actually accomplished this... Well, I brought up 512K ROM images as optional of that era since the SMS did have them. Oh, in Sega talk, that would be "4 Mega"!

No its an original game by Doug Neubauer who was the creator of Star Raiders and originally the game of the Last Starfighter. The game still blows my mind today, never thought the 2600 could pull off a game like that. It looks a lot like Buck Rogers Planet of Zoom. Granted, the graphics are incredible for the 2600...

I'm glad someone else is well aware of Timbaland's fondness for chiptunes/SID music. I remember I got ripped a new one over suggesting creating a collector's edition of an A8 or ST anniversary computer with an AMY chip last year based upon how popular such an item would be with not only chiptunes enthusiasts and professional music producers such as Timbaland...

Is there any chance of any homebrew games getting onto Xbox Live and PSN if they begin offering emulated console titles? I'm still cheesed off that XBox Live offers what reports to be the arcade version of Gyruss but was actually the NES version... And have any homebrewers tried to gain the attention of Chris Hardwick [nerdist.com] and his crew at G4? Yes, I know G4 sucks in comparison to the old TechTV channel they murdered, but it is still publicity...

That's because it's not the same. You need to look beyond the form factor of it plugging in. This is more akin to taking hardware intended for a cartridge (ie. sound chip, RAM, mappers) typical of the day and putting it in one unit instead of multiple cartridges. 32X was VERY different: - It transformed the 16-bit Genesis into a machine capable of about 1 million instructions per second to a 32-bit console capable of running 40 million instructions a second. This doesn't give the 7800 additional CPUs - It enabled a console that couldn't do scaling, rotation and 3D texture mapping to do so in hardware, typical of other 32 bit machines. This does not jump the 7800 up a tier into 16-bit or 32 bit consoles. - It increased the 64 colors onscreen out of 512 colors to 32,768 on screen colors out of 16.7 million! This does not increase the color palette of the 7800. The XM does: - Adds RAM, much like cartridges back in the day did. See IMPOSSIBLE MISSION, WINTER GAMES, TOWER TOPPLER, JINKS - It adds sound hardware, just like COMMANDO and BALLBLAZER did with the POKEY. Atari also originally intended to offer other sound chips (see GUMBY) than POKEY. This chip was used in arcades of the day. While I tend to agree that this one aspect may be overkill, the idea has precendence. - It adds mapper hardware that enable the existing MARIA to do a bit more, in a way that's similar to the NES mapper chips did with the PPU. See Castlevania 3 or Super Mario 3 Mike Tyson's Punch Out for examples. - It saves high scores, similar to the intended 7800 HIGH SCORE cart. See Curt's reproduction from a few years ago. - It allows connection of peripherals, similar to the initial 7800s with expansion ports (removed from most 7800s) If this were like the 32X, it would transform the 7800 into a SUPER NINTENDO or something. It doesn't. What it does do is enhance the 7800 in a way that would have been how Atari intended and/or how Nintendo enhanced the NES in cartridge ... but without the expense of building invidivual carts to do so. I'm in total agreement but wouldn't it have been more plausible for Atari Inc. to have offered a Dual POKEY option over bundling a Yamaha sound chip? My wish list would be all of the Atari Games Corp/Namco titles of that era that should've been made available for the 7800 in the first place... Having finally played - via emulator - Mat Mania Challenge on the 7800, I feel a bit guilty having pestered Atari Corp often back then to license the two original arcade games [Mat Mania and Mania Challenge]. The port is terrible while the original arcade games were awesome. Wasn't STUN Runner's [arcade version] graphics made possible by a very special and expensive TI graphics chip? To do it justice, you'd need a Trakball controller. With that in mind, I also suggest Marble Madness. The C64 was able to do the title decently, so it should be well within the XM's abilities. Isn't Solaris basically a port of Buck Rogers? I think you just wrote the scriptment to the greatest stoner action film ever. Pick of Destiny what? Ever notice the music from Vindicators is taken from the soundtrack to Futureworld? You could play Realsports Zen Buddhism with the Mindlink controller. Hey, what's Jake Gylennhal (sic) doing in your avatar? That would certainly be a way to get free publicity for the XM via the traditional media. Then just use 32K of the allotted RAM, a 256K/512K ROM image, and use of the Pokey... That's more than enough to show off the power of the 7800 to the NES weenies. I had a 128K 6502 machine growing up too ... an Atari 130XE. Ramdisk was handy when I was writing papers and does but otherwise didn't make much of a difference vs. the XEGS I got later. Well, in fairness, what was the lowest common denominator of RAM most A8 games were written for? 16K? 32K? 48K? I mean, how many games for the ST were written for machines with 1MB RAM or greater? Most were written for the 520ST's 512K RAM...

Is it just me or do the audio samples not sound much better than the often maligned Yamaha sound chip found in the Atari ST? Other than Haunted Castle, the music isn't that great. I guess my flawed memory that makes me think the Atari Games titles that used the same chip sounded less "Yamaha'ie" - and more "Atari'ie" - than those examples...

Atari Age and Analog both did full articles on the 7800 before its scheduled release in 1984. The best article I could remember on the 7800 right before its 1986 release was done by Electronic Game Player which shortly thereafter became EGM.

Was the court case dismissed or settled? Similarly, Atari Corp. always traded upon the past history of Atari Inc. and portrayed it as one-in-the-same company to the public. After all, there were plenty of Atari Corp. press releases reading ad naseum (sic) that the company was founded in 1972. After all, GM went bankrupt a little over a year ago. It was re-organized. Do we consider GM a new company? And under a strict definition, once Warner had Atari Inc. re-incorporated in Delaware, it was not the same company as the one Dabney and Bushnell founded in 1972... I also would not be surprised if Atari Holdings Inc. still exists. It still existed on the books in the late 90s the last time I read a Time Warner annual shareholder's report.

How is TOS/GEM not intuitive? It doesn't do anything as asinine as dragging a disk icon to the trash can in order to eject it like Mac OS/Mac OS X. If anything, I've always found TOS/GEM far more intuitive than Windows or Macs. And I'm not even going to dignify the GUIs of Linux in the discussion...

Sam Tramiel is involved with companies that fund Israeli tech startups and help them peddle their wares to the US market. You have to do some deep Google searches and use LinkedIn to find that info. Leonard has his science textbook crusade. The family has a real estate business. Hopefully for them, their data isn't backed up on JTS hard drives...

Kassar at least had the brains to license Space Invaders. He also had the brains to jump into the home computer market albeit his "appliance" computer idea hampered the top end of the A8 line. As for Warner's WEA Distribution system, it was the best but WEA itself bitched about Atari. WEA didn't want to distribute games and they weren't forced to do so until after the crash. Even then, the various divisions of Warner Communications - except for Atari - were run like private fiefdoms that Steve Ross had to put his foot down at times. The merger/reverse acquisition that he thought up with Time Inc in 1988/89 was meant to put an end to the fiefdoms by bringing in outsiders but it didn't stop it. Warner Communications and Time Warner have a history of squandering synergies. Ross's successors then thought the Time Warner/Turner merger would accomplish it and when that didn't work, they dreamed up the AOL merger. Yet even AOL couldn't get Time Warner's mess together. Time Warner Cable resisted rebranding their cable modem service as AOL [and also tried to stop reselling AOL], Warner Music wouldn't cooperate with AOL's plans for digital song distribution in fear of wiping out CD sales, you name it. Basically AOL Time Warner was a repeat of the lessons not learned from the Atari days at Warner Communications. Apple's modern success can be said to be due to the failures of AOL Time Warner who could've done everything Apple later accomplished if they forced their divisions to work together. The independent Atari distributors were directly responsible for the flawed sales data that led to the glut of product in 1982. Had WEA cooperated and handled Atari cartridge distribution, "1982" would not have happened. As far as I remember, Warner retained a 10% stake in Atari Games Corp. after Namco acquired it. Namco didn't own it for long though... Electronic Gaming Monthly made a big deal about it back in 1991. Time Warner was distributing EGM and EGM said Time Warner had informed the Tramiels of their intent to reacquire the assets of Atari Corp. following their (re) acquisition of Atari Games Corp. The way the story has been told is Manny/Warner didn't want to sell the 2600 at cost because they didn't want the system to appear "cheap". They did think of it as a "luxury" as opposed to Atari's "knock off" competition from the earlier days of the Pong knock-offs. Nolan allegedly wanted to sell the 2600 at cost mimicking the Gillette business model. Nolan was also pissed over the cancellation of the hot tub strategy sessions. Although for all of Warner's alleged "lock downs", they never were able to clamp down on marijuana consumption or hookers from the stories told by others. You know, I bet there wasn't a lot of pot smoking at Atari Corp, just a big exec supposedly snorting a bunch of coke.* *Ironic that Jack Tramiel put a stop to Shadoe Stevens's "Fred Rated" mascot of the Federated Group upon Atari Corp's acquisition of the troubled retailer... Shadoe was rumored to have drug problems back then... That's not what the lawsuit alleges. The lawsuit alleges the "sale" of Atari assets was fraudulent/illegal and thus the employees still worked for the [according to them] still operational NATCO [aka "Atari Inc"] that Warner was allowing Jack Tramiel to administer via his "Atari Corp/TTL company. From their viewpoint and assertions, Jack was indeed firing the NATCO staff and thus Warner was in breach of their oral and written contracts with the NATCO employees who they cheated out of the severance packages they were dissuaded from accepting.

Don't forget retrieving the Sword Quest sword from Tramiel's house... To get to the final boss [Jack], you gotta defeat Leonard by shaving off his shaggy beard* and you thwart Sam by throwing a bag of white powder at him. Then you borrow Woz's Segway and run over Jack with it before crushing him with millions of ET cartridges. *or you throw a bunch of science books at him with erroneous errors for him to correct...

Is Mr. Zalewski on Atariage?

There are few long games, but they came later. Scrapyard Dog, Midnight Mutants, Commando and Dark Chambers are all pretty long. Also, Fatal Run and Meltdown have password saves. But yeah, would have been cool to have a Zelda. According the lore, there was supposed to be a Zelda-like game called Time Lords of Xantac. It was Tramiel-ized. Here's the details from Digital Press: Silly programmer... Time Lords are from Gallifrey!

Thanks. I forgot it was Philip Morris and not RJR. I came across an old article the other night speculating on what Tramiel would do with "Atari". It was written after the "takeover" in 1984. In it, Tramiel mocked Morgan's background. Funny how Morgan despite a lack of a tech background seemed more capable than Tramiel [not counting Morgan's initial freeze on Atari's plans so he could analyze them]. Morgan would've been like the real deal that John Sculley was supposed to have been for Apple. We do live in the sucky universe. The speculative alt.universe would be a lot more fun. Except in both sales, Warner retained stakes in "Atari Corp" and "Atari Games Corp". A lot of the stories I read during the time - although they may be fabrications - was that Steve Ross was sure that gaming was not a fad and it would be back and he wanted a piece of it when it returned. Manny seems to have stayed active in the game biz, separate from Warner. For such a level headed guy, it amazes me he seemed to butt heads with Nolan so much in the early days. Was he the person from Warner who insisted Atari make a profit on each VCS sold [and that if it was too "cheap" consumers would think it was of low quality] while Nolan wanted to sell it at cost [or less]? Perhaps there's a lot more to that story... True. But they could've been tracked down and rehired. Even the limited resources Atari Corp. tracked down the AMY engineers. Which means circa 1986, NATCO and Commodore could've been marketing computers based on Amiga's IP. However, they probably would've had different operating systems still. So you have tried contacting him for an interview? I'd imagine he'd be up for a conversation on what could have been with Atari as long as you didn't ask him about gummi bears. Except the Atarian responsible for Star Raiders worked extensively on the ST's operating system. That's about as Atari Inc. as you can get. Sure, Amiga Inc. had Jay Miner but they also had RJ Mical from Williams and people from other companies. Miner is basically the Amiga's only lineage link to Atari Inc. Granted, that is a major one but even Apple itself has a much closer lineage link to Atari. Because the sale to Tramiel according to their assertions was a violation of their written and oral contracts. Warner persuaded them to sign up for NATCO and as reasonably prudent persons they relied on Warner's assurances. Because of these reliances, they opted not to take the severance packages offered by Warner/NATCO to Atari Inc. employees who didn't wish to remain; instead, they remained and effectively were improperly terminated by TTL/fake Atari Corp. who according to the Atari Inc. employees were illegally running the formerly legal entity NATCO. I can't see how they would've lost the case. I hope they settled for a pretty penny although reading the PDF, I wish they would've won outright and kicked the Tramiels to the curb. It's a great read.

Well, the arcades are dead. The only true way to revive the spirit of these formerly great "arcade" companies would be to somehow revive the arcade scene. And that can't be done unless "arcade" machines somehow leapfrog the tech found in modern consoles and computers for at least a full cycle. Short of full holographics, I don't see it happening. Even the Dave & Buster's atmosphere isn't like the old arcade vibe, especially since most of the games at D&B aren't truly arcade style games... As for Atari Games, all its IP is in the hands of modern day Warner Bros. Interactive. I'd love to see WBI buy up Infogrames/Atari Interactive Inc. and then we'd finally have all the Atari IP under a single entity again. I wonder if Nolan would stick around considering the suits would again be the seemingly undying "Warner"...

Not true at all. The Dreamcast had great games for it. However, Sega was being manipulated by Microsoft [a la dropping 3dfx for NEC's PowerVR at NEC's behest], a lot of gamers held out for the PS2 because of hype, and at the end, Microsoft pushed Sega under the bus in order to make way for Microsoft's own Xbox. While I didn't own any Sega consoles, I had much respect for them; of course, I really respected Sega in the arcade and being my second favorite arcade company behind Atari Games in terms of pushing the envelope while operating in a sea of mediocrity for the most part...

That gives credence to the argument that Tramiel's early success with Atari had more to do with selling Atari Inc. inventory without the actual overhead Atari Inc. actually accrued... [such as the actual costs of building those items; the warehouses full of Atari 800XLs, for example] and not so much the Atari Corp. designed products... The NATCO deal would have gone through, and Warner would just have had to eaten it's stock and debt losses. NATCO would've been successful. If Warner couldn't divest themselves through an outright sale, they could've spun off the company to the Warner shareholders tax free. For the life of me, I don't understand why they opted to sell out to Tramiel for promissory notes. It makes no sense. Since Rupert Murdoch had been satisfied/neutralized from his hostile takeover of Warner by that time, maybe Steve Ross was worried the Warner shareholders would vote him and the board out or perhaps get shaken down by yet another corporate raider [icahn, for example] if any vestige of Atari remained in their hands. Or maybe Ross thought the Tramiels would fail spectacularly and their "Atari" would go bankrupt and Warner could buy the pieces up dirt cheap and debt free. NATCO would've retained the "talent" of Atari Inc. and there wouldn't have been a continuity break that ultimately cost Atari dearly [such as delaying the 7800's release by nearly 2 years, etc.]. Maybe they would've retained the Amiga, or maybe not. Commodore might've cratered then if they didn't get 100% of Amiga Inc. under the scenario. They wouldn't have had a next-gen platform and would've been stuck with the C64 owners expecting another $100 computer as a follow-up. They certainly would've remained suing TTL. TTL would've been SOL without Atari Inc.'s manufacturing facilities and distribution network. Which means they would've had to have bought Mindset or the leftover assets of Colecovision/Adam or sold out their computer platform to some other company and exited the market indefinitely. Had this all happened, NATCO might still be a player in the computer and video game industries today... I bet James Morgan thinks about this quite often since his legacy via RJR is rather tainted thanks to his infamous testimony to Congress over tobacco from the mid 90s...