Lynxpro

Indeed. Or a POKEY, for that matter. What's really sad is that 28-pin SRAMs are only available in 8K or 32K (someone correct me if I'm wrong about this), but Atari's cartridges could only support up to 16K. So if a game needed more than 8K, they had to put a 32K chip in there and then use only half of it. Very wasteful. They probably could have fit more RAM inside the console if they had used larger RAM chips than the pair of 2K SRAMs that they went with. Perhaps two chips were used instead of one because they needed to be scanned independently by the hardware, but even so, larger ones would have been nice. Imagine if there was a slot you could open up the 7800 and drop cartridge style slot RAM [a la the 800] into it to max out its capabilities... That would've been easy enough for Joe Consumer to upgrade the RAM for more intense "pro" and "super" games. Of course, it would be best to encourage it being done at an Atari Authorized Service Center....

I'd jump at it in a second! I love this game! Third'ed. Too bad the 7800 never received a ProLine version of the Trackball controller... So, does that mean the 2600 trakball doesn't work on the 7800? It does but it isn't "pro". The trackball itself isn't that large, unlike the trackballs used by Atari [and Atari Games] in the arcades for Missile Command, Centipede, Millipede, Crystal Castles, Marble Madness, etc. Too bad Atari didn't produce a 7800 themed trackball controller. Even the 5200 got one... I forget...was the Colecovision's "Roller Controller" large?

Agreed. But what I wrote and postulated on was the two companies sharing the platform instead of spending a ton of money battling each other in the courts over it. Even in 1987ish when the two companies finally settled their legal cases, they should've agreed to combine the platforms together. After all, IBM and Apple later decided to try something similar with Taligent, not that that came to much fruition. My point is had the ST and Amiga become a single platform, the combined user base would have been sufficient to keep it going and we might have a viable 3rd platform today in competition with Windows and Mac OS X. [and no, I'm not considering Linux]. The rivalry between Jack Tramiel and Irving Gould made that impossible and the computer industry today is poorer because of it. What I don't get is why the former Atari Inc. Advanced Technologies Group engineers didn't spill the beans about Atari Inc. having designed far more powerful computers than the ST or the Amiga just a couple of years after those two platforms debuted. I can remember in the March 87 issue of Antic Magazine Atari Corp. staff were denying the ST or any other advanced computer had been developed at Atari Inc. The Atari press were wide open back then to explore such a story yet John Palevich apparently didn't say a word. I also don't understand why none of the ATG employees who later worked at DRI didn't mention to Atari Corp. that they had knowledge of the more advanced computers and would help redesign them for a price. Maybe they feared getting hauled off to jail over taking Atari Inc. stuff home with them during the TTL/Atari Corp. reorg; otherwise I can't see why they didn't and preferred working for DRI for salary on GEM... It's just weird to me. And I don't understand why Jack Tramiel & Co. sued Sight & Sound a few years later after selling off the AMY chip to them. It makes no sense to me. Why did they not re-acquire the chip and use it in the STe? Sigh. I was 12 at the time, thank you very much. And at least I had enough common sense to understand how angry Joe Consumer was going to be when JC purchased the Atari 7800 expecting all the cool new "Atari" arcade games to be ported to it, only to discover they were appearing on the NES instead. Oh yeah, I was also the guy in March 1993 at our user's group public computer festival who pointed out to Mike Fulton - of Atari Corp. - that the unreleased-at-the-time STe/Falcon/Panther controllers - the ones that became the standard Jaguar controllers - needed to have 6 fire buttons on them to properly play the popular arcade games like Street Fighter 2. His reaction was "the controller already has enough buttons!" and kept on playing Road Riot 4WD. Of course, I was right and was vindicated when the Pro Controllers were later released...the controllers that should have been released from the very start.

Warner paid $28 Million'ish for Atari Inc. From what I've read, Warner was willing to pay $10 million more for the company. If I recall, MOS was acquired by Commodore for far less than $10 million. From what I can gather, the acquisition happened in November 1976. So Al Alcorn's timeline appears to be accurate. And an acquisition by Atari might not have triggered one of MOS's best engineers to immediate part company and set up his own chip design company WDC. I've always wondered how much truth there was to the story that Atari Inc. - and Apple - bankrolled the creation of WDC's 65816 chip which Atari Inc./Corp never even used. [Although Apple and Nintendo certainly did]... Yet another product that apparently Atari Inc. funded yet other companies profited from. [cough, Amiga, cough]. From the "Dad Hacker" blog, it sounds consistent with every trick TTL/Atari Corp pulled during their "start up" phase when it came to creditors. Sorry but I'm not very impressed with what Commodore did, ever. Sure the SID is nice but the C64 was not exactly superior to the A8 line even though the A8s were originally created for 1978, not 1982. I'm also amazed the VIC-20s didn't burn down houses with its cardboard with aluminum sprayed RF shielding. Maybe the PET Jet was made of the same stuff...

Actually, if you watch the Computer History Museum's video of the 25th anniversary of the Commodore 64, you would see Al Alcorn stand up and segway into related topics about what happened at Atari at the time. Al clearly states that he tried to convince the Warner brass to sign off on purchasing MOS for Atari but Warner management wouldn't agree to it. That was obviously before Commodore stepped in and took that company over. It is repeated online often that MOS's financial problems prior to the Commodore acquisition was caused by Commodore deliberately delaying payments to MOS for already accepted product shipments. That's some interesting info on Synertek... 79 would've been favorable. If I recall, Warner [also] nixed creating a $500 million Atari campus around 1980 or so that would've consolidated almost all of Atari's Bay Area operations. Instead, they operated in 75-80'ish separate buildings scattered throughout Silicon Valley. To think Atari bought ROMs from Commodore all the while Commodore was selling the ViC-20 and the C64 in direct competition with Atari's computers and game systems. It just boggles the mind. That would be like supply arms to the Taliban and then fighting them. Oh, wait... In hindsight, Atari really should've stomped Commodore into oblivion. They just weren't bloodthirsty enough; maybe it was due to all the pot...

I just watched a clip of Commando on the A8 and it was terrible. The conspiracist in me is quick to believe the A8/XEGS version was purposefully meant to be weaker than the 7800 version. After all, Sculptured Software did both ports... The developers who did the C64 version seemed to go out of their way with the music although at the cost of it being less faithful to the arcade original. The NES version just looked terrible.

I would think it's all about who is writing the software. Right from the MAME faq: 'Modern MAME has relatively high CPU requirements even for games you might consider to be “simple”.' An eMac from 2003 doesn't have similar problems even though it has a weaker version of the PowerPC processor in it. A 10 year old HP laptop running Linux has less issues with MAME than the Gamecube 1.5, err, excuse me, Wii.

I'd jump at it in a second! I love this game! Third'ed. Too bad the 7800 never received a ProLine version of the Trackball controller...

Ballblazer.

I'm afraid it wouldn't look as good as the PSP version... Seriously, I have a very low opinion of the Wii; it doesn't even seem to have enough power to run most classic arcade ROMs via MAME...

Wow. Now just for the sake of argument, what do you think that artist could do with the same tune using Dual Pokeys?

It's too bad Atari Corp. couldn't get the AMY sound chip working and included in the ST. It [probably] would've cleaned the Amiga's clock in terms of musical abilities. Although several years later, the Motorola DSP in the Falcon ruled. I read somewhere that it was "now" being used in the iPod Shuffle from a few years back...

I thought Commodore/MOS only produced in-house their custom chips [not to mention the 6502 CPU and its variations] and the DRAM was acquired elsewhere. I was under the impression that MOS had tried DRAM after the Commodore takeover but it didn't work out profitably for them. But that still would've given Commodore a leg up since they themselves were manufacturing much of the Amiga's custom chips in-house whereas Atari Corp. had to rely upon other manufacturers to produce their custom chips [as just about any ST owner can give you an earful about the fiascos involved with producing the BLItter and getting it to market]. Can anyone definitively state what Styra Semiconductor did? Maybe they were just a chip engineering company. Atari bought them circa 1989 but never really explained the company in the shareholder's reports and it was eventually closed down like many Atari Corp. acquisitions... *Nevermind*. Just did a Google Search and found some former employees of Styra Semiconductor/Atari Microsystems. They developed chipsets but it sounds like they didn't manufacturer them. A fabless semiconductor design shop.

Microsoft is an arrogant organization that is in love with their own tarnished brand name. I'd like to see a shareholder revolt that sacks Ballmer and then has the guts to split up the company [into 4 different pieces: Windows OS, Office, Xbox, and Live/Bing]. In that situation, I would totally support the Xbox division buying up Atari/Infogrames and christening themselves "Atari". Just imagine what "Atari" could do with some of that monopoly cash Microsoft has accumulated... If only CalPERS would demand a split of Microsoft, it could happen...

I was a staunch ST owner back then but perhaps in hindsight Atari and Commodore should've settled their lawsuits and divided the Amiga up between the two of them. They could've had a deal where Atari had "home" computer market exclusivity on the Amiga for a good 2 years while Commodore had an exclusivity in the pro market for that same time period. That would've technically worked since Atari bolted out the gate with the 520ST at the lower price point while Commodore went with the Amiga 1000 at a considerably higher price point at the start. Imagine what could have been done had the talents of both companies had essentially worked together on this. The eventual end users would have been on a single platform and they could've better devoted their combined bile against Apple and the PC cloners. The demo scene certainly would've been different!

I bought Impossible Mission for the 7800 at Federated so it's on-topic. Interesting. Looking back, I'd say one of the downfalls of the chain was the wasted floor space. Most of the Federated stores here in the Sacramento region had huge floor plans and you'd walk from one department - basically a station - to another and it was empty space. It reminds me of the difference between the Incredible Universe store we had here in town and what Fry's did to it after they took over. In that comparison, Incredible Universe wasted about 70% of the floor space compared to Fry's. Granted, their customer service was much better. As for Federated, one thing that differentiated them from their competition was "Fred Rated" in their crazy commercials which the Tramiels foolishly ended and replaced with boring commercials. The massively expanding Circuit City steamrolled them along with Silo and other regional consumer electronics retailer "super stores". Federated was one of the few stores where I actually saw one of the all-in-one Atari monitors with a disk drive built into it. None of the local Atari specific computer dealers around here ever had them, and I'm talking right after the 520ST was released, not after the Tramiel takeover of the chain... Does anyone else have any ideas on improving Impossible Mission for the 7800? What else can we do to help?

Has anyone ever tried adding the Maria chip to an Atari 8-bit computer?

How it was portrayed in the media in the States was the DRAM price increases were caused by the Reagan Administration's tariffs imposed on the Japanese for dumping DRAM and wrecking the domestic DRAM biz. I can remember Antic/STart lamenting that Atari was choosing to shift supplies of the ST/Mega ST over to the European countries to evade the tariff increases and maximize their sales. That was circa 87. Around the same time, the US Supreme Court ruled that IBM's "US Memories" plan was illegal which was the final nail in the coffin of serious domestic DRAM production outside of IBM producing it for themselves and Micron's manufacturing. That must've been one of the stupidest rulings the Supremes made in the 80s. How they concluded that yet allowed for organizations like the MPAA and the RIAA to continue is beyond me. Also around this time, Atari sued Micron for allegedly violating an oral contract made between Jack Tramiel and their company over DRAM pricing... It was all a giant cluster****. Add to that the various DRAM plant fires in Taiwan and South Korea nearly each time DRAM hit incredibly low prices. Of course, this also tends to happen in the fuel business when oil hits lows and guess what? An oil refinery catches fire in California or Texas, always conveniently.

B&C sell them for $10. You could ask them. Good point. A while back, I came across an aftermarket arcade game business selling arcade parts for refurbishing projects and they too had a stash of Pokey chips. Too funny. But Ballblazer is one of the 7800's best games - IMHO - so every 7800 enthusiast physically collecting it and the games should have a copy. It should be a 1-to-1 statistic. Too bad the 2600 ET game didn't include a Pokey chip; nobody would cry over the destruction of those carts to get to that chip...

Man, that PISSED ME OFF that Sky Fox never came out. Come to think of it, the 7800 box was a bit traumatic for me! I remember looking at the back of the 7800 box and being particularly grabbed by Sky Fox, Impossible Mission, Winter Games, Desert Falcon and Karateka. Sky Fox never arrived. Grrr! Desert Falcon was a bit disappointing to me, though I liked the graphics. Impossible Mission never seemed to be in stock in Atari Canada. When I got it from the US during a trip to Florida, I couldn't actually finish it. Thankfully, Art is on the case. And Karateka (which I loved on my friend's computers) was probably my biggest disappointment in gaming history when I played it on the 7800. If I knew how to code like Bob or Mark, that would be the first game I'd fix on the 7800, with Double Dragon being second. Strangely, the one 'super game' I had about zip interest in was Ballblazer. It looked goofy on the back of the box and I'd never seen it in action on another machine. When I did, my opinion did a complete 180! Karateka was responsible for the destruction of one Pro Line controller but I beat that game. That damn bird, I still detest it... Here in California, you had to cover all the bases to find 7800 carts. They were at Toys R Us, KB Toys, and Atari's own Federated. It was haphazard to say the least. Even Federated didn't get some of the titles. I'm still kicking myself for not buying Ballblazer and ROF for the 5200 in the Atari/Lucasfilm packaging during the time Atari was using Federated to clear out their warehouse inventories.

Does anyone have a count of how many Pokey chips are available to source outside of recycling Ballblazer carts?

Weird, I was prohibited from editing my comment above that got posted accidentally before I finished it... No, you'd have to go back to 1976 and tell Nolan to hold out for $38 million or more for the buyout offer and/or call up Michael Milken and finance Atari Inc. through junk bonds and remain independent. Either way, you take those extra monies and buy MOS Technology thereby c-blocking Tramiel from purchasing the company and thus preventing his later price war at Commodore. Actually, Commodore may not have existed for long w/o MOS because the PET design came from Chuck Peddle [if I'm not mistaken] at MOS. You'd take the PET design and offer to trade it to Philips in order to settle the patent infringement lawsuits and for that intellectual property to be transferred to Atari. Philips later crashes and burns with the PET now known as the Odyssey 2 or 3. If Atari is still sold to Warners, you "create" the Activision spin-off as a cover - much like Key Games was before - and then license "Puck Man" from Namco and run with it in every territory outside of Japan and use the huge cash infusion to launch a takeover of Warner Communications itself. Of course, there's still other side projects to accomplish. You expose that Microsoft BASIC is actually DEC BASIC and have DEC sue Microsoft and Bill Gates personally into oblivion. You invest in VisiCALC and you convince them to copyright the code thereby preventing Lotus from stealing spreadsheet software later. You do the same with DRI so when IBM decides to launch the PC, it is CP/M that is selected as the OS. That would lead to a much better time line tech-wise. Now where's that chap with the Jelly Babies so I can whack him upside his head and steal his TARDIS to complete this mission... ?

Again, nobody is mentioning the reason why Warner was trying to get Atari off the books. It was solely due to Rupert Murdoch's hostile takeover attempts that fueled the need to part with the majority of Atari quickly. Steve Ross didn't want to get rid of the company. That was evident in the biographies written of the man. He was the master of the deal and the architect of Time Warner Inc. which his replacements [Levin, in particular] - per his untimely death - screwed up. After all, Warner's point man on Atari, Manny Gerard, has done very well for himself in the video game industry since then... Basically, Atari in its diminished state was still not a screwup acquisition on Warner's part like Knickerbocker was. Jack's accomplishments with "Atari" are rather diminished when one considers he used the Atari assets and our Atari fandom - and with it our Dollars, Sterling, Marks, and Francs - to fuel his personal vendetta against Irving Gould and the company he founded [Commodore]. Had Atari Corp and Commodore not tried to destroy each other in their tit-for-tat struggle and had actually come to terms in their settlement of the Amiga lawsuits and combined the platforms, we might possibly have a viable [and commercial] third computer platform to this day. Then there's also Jack's viewpoint. While Jobs & Woz was motivated to put an Apple computer on every student's desktop and thus change the world for the better [and Atari's was to innovate and have lots of fun], Jack's famous motto was "basically, I'm here to make money". As for Gil and Apple, wasn't the iMac started under Gil's reign yet Jobs receives all the credit for it? Loved that documentary. Are they still trying to sell it or has it all ended up on YouTube? I want GEM back. I wish the owners of DRI would create a community foundation to get GEM up and running as a viable environment so the clowns behind KDE and Gnome can be pushed to the backburner on all other *nix platforms besides OS X. And Ubuntu's colors remind me of 70s shag carpet. Utterly terrible. Then again, I didn't think DRI's GEM was as nice to look at as Atari's versions... Has anyone interviewed Morgan in the past few years? I'd like to know if he wishes he could've remained at Atari and revived it instead of going back to RJR and giving his infamous testimony to Congress about how tobacco wasn't so bad... I'd imagine he'd switch places with even John Sculley at this point... Offer to write the Tramiels accounts if they'll part with the holy Sword Quest sword. I'm with the Angry Video Game Nerd on that one, the contest must continue! Atari Corp. did outlast Commodore but when it comes to platforms surviving to this day, it looks like development on Amiga OS 4.x seems to be much further along than any work being done with TOS at this point...

I wonder how much time was squandered by Atari & Co. before you were contracted for your work... Impossible Mission [not to mention Sky Fox] was one of the titles that was shown the 7800's box as a "Super Game" and if I recall, it was chronically delayed. Wasn't it mid 87 or 88 when it finally was released? I ended up getting Sky Fox on my ST. And unlike with Gauntlet, Xevious was terrible on the ST, IMHO. quote name='peedenmark7' date='Fri Feb 4, 2011 4:33 PM' timestamp='1296866001' post='2201766'] IM for 7800 with the C64 sounds would be killer ! Heck, at this point, might as well just grab the digitized voices off the PSP/DS versions. Granted, that particular publisher might not be "happy" about that but as a PSP owner, I can honestly say I've never seen that game on Best Buy's shelves. And from all my experience as an owner of Atari consoles in their non-popular years, I have extensive experience searching for titles misplaced on store shelves as PSP titles commonly are treated these days... Sweet! At least yours isn't from a second source like mine was. It's amazing that 5.25" drive mechs of any kind are becoming so rare, isn't it? It doesn't seem all that long ago that I saw a stack of used ones on clearance at my local Computer City for something like $5 each, but now that I think back, that was in 1998. I'll try to remember to pull the drives this evening. If I can get one working with one of my Pentium motherboards and my own 360K diskettes, I'm sure it will work for krewat. When I hear about community e-waste collections, it makes me wonder how much useful classic computer items are being discarded and recycled. Forgive me if I can't really shed a tear over generic PCs being recycled, but the thought of [Atari] 8-bit computers recycled doesn't make me happy. I'm sure there's a lot of Atari STe and Amiga fans who could put to use pre-1997 SIMM memory chips in some of those recycled PCs... I miss dot matrix printers. The only institution I see them still in use at is Kaiser...

I was a big time Atari fan as a kid. That and Star Wars. After its publication, I was checking out Infoworld's Guide to the Atari book weekly from the local library and from that I became rather fixated on the nearly-unreleased 7800 and the Mindlink system. I also had Zap the Rise and Fall of Atari. Since my parents were looking at buying a computer for me, I was doing research on it so we were purchasing the Antic, Analog, and Atari Explorer magazines in order to keep up with news about what Atari was doing and especially with the ST. Sending letters to Atari Customer Service prior to the re-launch of the 7800 would land you a letter response stating Atari Corp. had no plans of releasing it. Imagine my surprise when the Sears catalog came with the 7800 prominently featured in it. I learned the shocking news of Atari Games still being a separate company when Analog magazine had a write-up of some of the issues that had been going on there and some clashes with Namco's management. That and the fact that "Tengen" was releasing Atari Games arcade titles on the NES and none of them were heading to "Atari's" own console. I also joined the local Atari computer user's group after my parents bought me the 1040ST after it was released. When my group of friends learned that Atari Games was still a separate company and thus our favorite arcade games were heading to the NES, they all got NES systems. I had my trusty 7800 but I also bought a used NES with Christmas money which I later sold in order to buy the Lynx when it first debuted. I should note that in the rocky 1984 period, most of my friends families bought Commodore 64s since they were receiving better support from the mass merchants than the Atari 8-bit line at the time. I had tried to get my parents [and my grandmother] to go to one of the real estate/vacation/time share seminars in order to get a free 800XL in 84 but they didn't go. It seemed like every one of those time share companies were giving away "free" computers back then. My aunt went to one and got a TI 99/4A for my cousins. When my grandmother finally decided to go to one, instead of the 800XL, she got the Commodore Plus4. That was terrible. My dad opted to skip the 8-bits and hold out for the 16-bit computers. The 1040ST was ideal especially since at the time it appeared Commodore was in a downward spiral and the Amiga 1000 wasn't really selling well due to its rather high price in comparison to the ST line; they didn't turn around until the Amiga 500 the following year. So yeah, I guess you could say I wasn't the usual pre-teen Atari user back then...