Lynxpro
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Posts posted by Lynxpro
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we can thank Rupert Murdoch
That's a policy I generally apply to everything. If there's something wrong in the world, usually it's his fault.
Uh-oh, on the verge of political. Can already guess your leanings.... heh heh
My disdain for Murdoch has nothing to do with his alleged politics. It has to do with him being a complete jerk as a businessman especially when it comes to tech.
First of all, he launched a hostile takeover of Warner Communications which he had no hope of winning. He was emulating Carl Icahn, another jerk. He bought the shares cheap, demanded Warner do certain things and threatened to take them over. When he was unsuccessful, he basically forced Warner to buy his holdings for a tidy profit just to shut him up. His attempted takeover was the reason why Steve Ross had to liquidate Atari Inc. at a firesale price so quickly even though Ross did not want to part with the company because even he saw the writing on the wall and felt the popularity of video games would return.
Example #2. Murdoch grabs a controlling interest in DirecTV. Murdoch forces DirecTV to cancel their agreements with TiVo and forces DirecTV to offer his inferior DVR wares from the Israeli company NDS that he owned. Not only did this hurt TiVo but DirecTV subscribers to this day still have to put up with DVRs with inferior software [although the hardware itself is decent; certainly better than what the cablecos offer]. Murdoch has been gone for a couple of years now but the damage was done.
Example #3. Overpaying for MySpace which nearly triggered another bubble via the Web 2.0 companies. He completely screws up MySpace and now the company has laid off half its work force.
Example #4. Blaming Google for all of News Corp's faults despite the fact Google directs lots of traffic to News Corp websites that probably wouldn't receive it otherwise.
I haven't even mentioned what he's done with the Wall Street Journal, nor anything to do with his politics. [although I despise him for the damage he's directly caused the Royal Family over the past 3 decades].
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This topic is no better or worse than post-game analysis of any sport contest. Should we simply cease from discussion, analysis, speculation, and critique of a coach's (or manager's) moves in a soccer, football, or baseball game? No. It's part of the fun. Or are you one of those that believe that such speculative topics should never be around because, "oh, we weren't in that position so how would we know"? As silly as these topics may be, sillier still is criticism of them based on the idea that we have no right to such things "because we weren't there and weren't in charge".But some of us were at the time writing - and often times, quite often - in to Atari and offering advice and titles for them to license to help out the system sales. So in essence, some of us were there, although rather distantly. And that's just from the consumer standpoint. There's plenty of advice that was given from the press at the time too, whether we are talking about video games or from the computer market.
Lots of things got botched. Does anyone remember the fiasco when Atari Corp. sacked the editors of Atari Explorer - and The Atarian - Magazine? How many of you guys had video game tips published in The Atarian and didn't get your free game from it? I had several published and I finally settled on receiving one Lynx game [Dirty Larry - Renegade Cop] for all of my efforts and that was only because I spoke directly to Gary Tramiel about it at a shareholder's meeting about four years later...
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(At least, that's the way it was if the web page was well-designed. Some of those old high school kid pages from that era were a different story: gigantic pictures of their kittens in BMP format, sparkling rainbow bars, black starfield background, annoying music, a glut of animated GIFs, and centered blinking text in garish neon colors. Ugh!)
You just described MySpace circa 2009.
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Whenever I've talked about it to Leonard Tramiel, he stated that their feeling for lack of success was because they couldn't get the Lynx down cheap enough to compete with the GameBoy. They felt if they could have offered their full color system at the same price, they would have won. Their biggest cost was the color LCD, which they had negotiated with a supplier to provide at a price that would have allowed them to get the price point they wanted on the Lynx. That supplier fell through and they wound up suing him.
I'd imagine this was the reason why the Lynx came to the market at [approximately] $189.99 MSRP instead of $149.99 as originally intended.
The video game press was rather hostile to the Lynx. If I remember correctly, EGM really picked on it over the battery life issue. Even with the Feds on Nintendo's back, it still didn't help the Lynx out in terms of third party support from first tier companies.
It's such a damn shame because the Gameboy was such a POS in comparison. How many years was it until the GBA came out when the Gameboy line finally eclipsed the capabilities of the Lynx in 1989?
I'd like to see someone unseat Nintendo in hand helds. I've always felt the PSP was the spiritual heir to the Lynx but even with Sony's money, they still have been unable to beat Nintendo there.
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Madaracs, don't beat yourself up over it.
I am probably just going to try buying one from eBay - again. A few months back, I bought a "tested/working" drive. Not. I will be looking around for one, and if I find one I'll let you know so you can all off the search patrol ...
It's been ages since I played the game on the 7800. Was there any sort of score to it?
I just watched a video of it from YouTube. It sounds like the audio effect of being zapped by the security robots came from Parker Bros's Star Wars - Jedi Arena for the 2600. Some of the other sound effects sound exactly like the blasters in Atari's Vanguard for the 2600...
Is there a specific type of internal 360k 5 1/4 drive that you need? There's sometimes swap meets in town for old computer hardware...
Here's a video of allegedly all versions of Impossible Mission:
Who knew the game had been ported to the PSP and the DS? Not me!
As for the C64 version, the sound effects don't sound like they are too complex for a Pokey chip. And with a larger ROM image, I'd imagine the digitized voice sample could be added to the 7800 version if the community were inclined to do so...
Aside from the audio, I'm not too impressed with what I see in the SMS version...
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It's still VERY unclear what games are coming for the XM that uses the features of the XM. For many the High Score feature is not that exciting.
Tell that to my 12 year old self from 1987 who had to turn off his 7800 when he was on Level 56 of Galaga so he could attend a church service with his family. For that, I blame the Tramiels!
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I see this "nintendo snatched up the hot arcade licenses" argument a lot, but I can recall very few exclusive arcade titles on the early NES. I'm probably just unaware of them, but what titles are we even talking about here? Seems to me that the games that really pushed the NES forward were original, and could have been created for any system by anybody.
Any game that was licensed for the NES was exclusive to it for 2 years per the contracts with Nintendo of America. The game could've appeared on various computer platforms but not on another console.
I'm pretty sure the contract also stated that not only was it exclusive to the NES console but that they could only appear on computer platforms if they were disk based. This would explain why Atari didn't go around this by licensing the games for the XE computer line, converting them to cartridge format, and then providing them to all the retailers that stocked the XEGS. It was either that or the Tramiels didn't think about that or it possibly being a marketing nightmare explaining how the cartridge was for the XE computer line but omitting the XEGS from the packaging and still assuming Joe Consumer could understand this without receiving misinformation from the retail zombies at Toys R Us and the like...
Licensing only became more loose after both Ataris took Nintendo to the courts over antitrust allegations. It still baffles me how Atari Corp. lost that case...
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Commando on the 7800 uses both Tia and Pokey at the same time.
That's right! I totally forgot about that.
Separate question...does anyone here have a heatsink installed on the Maria chip?
There's plans to use the Yamaha chip for the 7800 version Xevious with sounds ported from the MSX version of the game. That will have to wait until the guy finishes adding the Yamaha sounds for Dig Dug.
Nice. Just imagine if Curt had done a blasphemous deed like adding a SID chip to the XM adapter... Impossible Mission could have the C64* audio ported to it.
Added bonus, making Timbaland shed a tear over each C64 parted out for the SID chip to go into an Atari enthusiast's device.
*Mentioning the C64 as a source since I do not recall the game having been ported to the Atari 8-bits...
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Fired this up on the Wii over the long weekend. Wow...it was a great game to begin with, but the POKEY sound just kills it. Great job
Wait... does the 7800 emulator available on the Wii Homebrew Channel actually emulate the Pokey too? *EDIT* That was rather stupid of me since I've played Ballblazer on it. I guess what I meant to ask is whether there are any issues with it emulating modified games with Pokey support that did not originally include it...
I think he did. He was going to work Millipede but the powers that be decided that DK should be done. Still, there are other 7800 title that could've used better sound like Dig Dug or Xevious.
Hmm. I'm not a fan of the Xevious intro tune - via the Pokey - on the 5200 from what I've seen/heard. Some of the actual effects - such as blasting enemy aircraft - do sound better on the Pokey version though. Even though it isn't very faithful to the arcade, I do prefer the Mothership's effects via the TIA in the 7800 version...
Which brings me to the following question... can you run TIA and Pokey audio at the same time or was the 7800 specifically designed to shut off the internal audio if it did detect a Pokey chip in the cartridge? Forgive me if this has been answered over and over again; just trying to figure out if 6 channel sound was possible... It appears that AtariNerd's later post states that with the XM, you can use the Pokey and the Yamaha chip at the same time, but no word if you could use both of them with the TIA at the same time...
To give an appreciation of the difference between an envelope generator like the SID (or with a pokey with special programming) and a true synthesizer chip like the YM2151, here are two versions of the end-title theme to Portal, 'Still Alive' coded by the same person and played back on an 8080- based computer.
Those were impressive. Wait...that person installed a SID and a Yamaha sound chip in an old CP/M machine? Impressive.
Kinda makes me teary eyed that the ST didn't have the same Yamaha sound chip included...
One feature I'd like to see on all versions of Pac-Man - including authorized releases from Namco - would be the addition of the "Zoom" button feature. It was probably an unauthorized mod created by GCC but I vividly remember a lot of arcades here in Sacramento having it installed on their Pac-Man/Ms. Pac-Man units. It was like a super turbo boost to the game. If GCC actually created it, it's a shame they didn't include it by default in the 7800 version.
I've found very little info about it on the web but I know I didn't imagine it! -
Speaking of Gauntlet, I was just reading the entries for it and Dandy on Wikipedia and the Dandy entry reports that John Palevich worked on both the OS for the unreleased "Atari Rainbow" computer as well as on the AMY sound chip. Seems I'm going to have to hit up the Atari History Museum and one of the few websites devoted to the AMY chip that I've found in the past to see if Palevich is listed on those sites too...
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The ST version is 4-player and arcade perfect. Its also widely regarded as better than the Amiga version. It was very popular indeed at Jagfest UK last year.
I'm curious about what computer platform Atari Games used to create the actual arcade game on...
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The problem with this thread - and so many similar ones.....is that everybody is an armchair CEO with 25-years of hindsight, and they think the answer is SOOOOOO SIMPLE that they just figured out exactly where the Tramiels went wrong, and that it was all their fault. Is that even possible?
It wasn't just the Tramiels; after all, the decision to omit the Pokey chip from the console was Atari Inc.'s decision. I still don't understand how they thought omitting the Pokey chip from the console but shipping it with certain titles would be a cost reduction. I guess they figured that there was no way all 7800 owners would purchase every title that was to have a Pokey [or the other low-cost chip] included in it.
I think the decision to omit a cartridge bay door off the unit was Atari Inc's as well. Why they chose to do that while the 600XL and 800XL had them is beyond me. Oh right, reduced costs at the user's expense of getting dust into the cartridge port.
The decision to use the same cartridge slot as the 2600 carts was also Atari Inc's decision. I don't know about the rest of you guys but I always had problems with Super Game Cartridges with both 7800s I had to play with. It always felt like you had to force the cartridge in and there's no way that was good for the cartridge connector. In hindsight, its too bad they didn't use a [near zero force] connector like the 5200 and included the 2600 slot just for backwards compatibility but that would've cost extra.
But we can fault the Tramiels for getting rid of the Expansion port on later 7800s; using black & white on the cartridge stickers, boxes, and program manuals; failing to secure a licensing agreement with Atari Games until right before the release of the Lynx; not using the Pokey chip in more titles; "firing" crucial Atari Inc. staff and never discovering how to use the AMY sound chip which could have been used on the 7800 [as well as the XE and ST computer lines]; canceling various titles due to ROM sizes or reducing the memory on released titles, etc.
Now, with all the talk about the Pokey, I have to admit the sound on the 7800's version of Xevious to me sounds better than the 5200/XL/XE version. Sure, the Pokey audio does sound closer to the arcade version on some of the effects but in other areas it sounds inferior. The Xevious intro "tune" to my ears sounds better on the 7800 but then again, it appears the 5200 version was rushed and possibly a rough-cut. I actually prefer the inferior sound of the Mothership on the 7800. And man, the 5200's graphics for Xevious does suck...
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It was games and Nintendo was locking in all of the hottest licenses and putting software companies in exclusive 2 years agreements to publish games. Atari essentially got locked out of having developers to do games for the 7800 and licenses for hot new titles... though I have always wondered why Atari didn't license games from Atari Games Corp. They could've had Marble Madness, Peter Pack Rat, Skull & Crossbones just to start with.
Sega on the other hand had Afterburner, Outrun, Altered Beast, Golden Axe and so many more titles of its own that had not been brought to the home console market yet, so its Master System had plenty of games available initially.
I was so mad when I learned Atari Corp. hadn't acquired Atari Games prior to the release of the 7800. My friends and I thought for sure that Atari would clean Nintendo's clock with games like Gauntlet. We were so disappointed when Gauntlet appeared on the NES by the "mysterious" company named Tengen. It made the rest of them so mad that they had their parents buy the NES for them and I was the only one who had the 7800. It was so disappointing because we all had had 2600s for years and we had borrowed each others games for years.
Once I learned that Atari Games was still a separate company, I began pestering Atari Corp. to license the Atari Games Corp. titles. I think I sent them a letter once a week requesting them to do so.
As for the Atari Games Corp., had they lived up to the contractual agreement with Nintendo, they would've been restricted from publishing their titles for the 7800 regardless since most of their titles were already licensed for the NES.
Actually Tramiel crutched quite a bit on Warner for additional cash and reworking of its debt, he actually threatened publicly many times that if he couldn't make Atari profittable, he'd just walk away and that scared the heck out of Warner. So while Games Corp was by that time bought by Namco, Warner still held some stock and also Games had to license the Atari name and Logo from Atari Corporation, so Tramiel would've had leverage to get some sweetheart licensing deals from Games for some of the arcade titles and who knows, maybe he could've nudged a bit on some Namco titles as well, but who knows...
That doesn't seem right about Atari Games Corp. having to license the "Atari" name and logo. I thought they had worldwide exclusive rights to the name and logo for use solely in arcades and Atari Corp. had worldwide exclusive rights for computers and home video games... [not counting Ataritel]. That's how it was always explained after the Tramiel acquisition. I guess it complicates matters if one wanted to market "Atari Games" t-shirts. I'd assume you'd only have to secure a licensing deal with Warner Bros. Interactive...
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In my next homebrew I'll try and work a whistle in there just for Atari Joe
.How about interactivity with the ROB? Just because Nintendo never found anything useful for it doesn't mean the Atari homebrew community couldn't...
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If you happen to own a Wii you can hack the thing in 5 minutes and be playing Robotron via Wii7800 with a classic controller (which has 2 sticks). Great way to play this game. Especially if you don't have a coupler.
I'm really disappointed in the Wii. My friend hacked his and while it is decent playing 7800 games it seems to really suck at arcade ROMS via MAME.
The Wiimote is terrible when it comes to playing the old games. The buttons are too slow [i gave up on level 26 on Galaga because of it; I got up to level 52 when I was 12...I could've really used the High Score Cartridge back then!].
I'm trying to convince him to buy one of Nintendo's retro SNES controllers for the Wii.
I used to play Robotron on the 7800 in dual stick mode; I wish I would've had a joystick holder for it.
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Iggy*SJB' date='Sat Jan 29, 2011 8:25 PM' timestamp='1296361512' post='2196669']If it could be done on NES then there is no good reason it could not have been done better on 7800.
I should hope so, the NES version sucked. I can't tell you how disappointed I was when I bought the NES and that game, took it home grinning from ear to ear, and plugged it in to find out how crappy it was. I came very close to taking it back.
Much later, I was very satisfied with Gauntlet II for the Amiga. It was arcade perfect, up to the ability for 4 players(players 3&4 required a special adapter for the parallel port).
That's good to know about the Amiga version. The ST version was also arcade perfect - from my recollection - but I don't recall if it worked with a 4 player adapter. I do know that there was a 4 player hardware adapter marketed for the ST; the game Leatherneck used it...
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wouldn't acquiring the games division solved a lot of issues? would the 10mil dept made atari corp suffer? and i realize that this has been addressed but would it have made any impact on the 7800's release? i bet in terms of launch titles it would have!!!
Once Tramiel passed it up, it would've been too difficult. Namco bought an 80% stake in Atari Games shortly thereafter but apparently they allowed the employees to buy it back during the turbulent time period where Atari Games/Tengen was suing [and being countersued by] Nintendo. Time Warner then re-acquired them circa 91. During a time of shareholders demanding Time Warner reduce its corporate debt, Time Warner again decided to sell off Atari Games/Tengen/Time Warner Interactive to WMS Industries [owners of Williams and the former Bally-Midway library, not to mention the Tradewest IP] in 1996. WMS spun that division off later and it became known simply as "Midway". Midway later went bankrupt in 2009 and most of it was sold to - yep, you guessed it - Time Warner through its newly created "Warner Bros. Interactive" gaming division. So apparently Warner Bros. Interactive owns all the IP for Atari Games Corp. arcade games from 1984-1996.
Many of the Atari Games Corp. titles eventually were licensed for the Lynx. That was after animosity between the two companies [Atari Corp. and Atari Games Corp.] was settled during their many lawsuits against Nintendo and also at the behest of the company that was the largest [minority in the case of Tramiel's Atari Corp.] shareholder of them both, Time Warner. That still didn't settle all the feelings; I can remember Sam Tramiel complaining at the 1992 Atari Corp. shareholder's meeting about the waning popularity of Atari Games Corp. titles in the arcades [this was during the whole Street Fighter 2 craze] and of course later Time Warner had Atari Games Corp. settle for actual shares in Atari Corp. in order to forgive debts from the licensing deals...
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Two way off-topic things:
1. I always post on my iPhone
2. Can those old atari machines go online (serious question!)
Which Atari computers? Are you asking about the 8-bits [400/800/XL/XE] or the 16/32 bits [sT/Mega/STe/MegaSTE/TT/Falcon]?
The STs and up had early web browsers. I'll let someone else from the "scene" tell whether ethernet has been enabled on them via expansion.
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I'm rather curious if anyone believes the AMY chip could have been added to the 7800 via either the Expansion port or via the cartridges themselves [a la the Pokey]...
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here is an interesting scenario: sega lived for a long time in the face of nintendo's third party publisher dominance partially because they had their own games division. would the outcome have been different for atari corp had jack acquired atari games in 1984? was that a realistic option for him?
According to the book "Game Over", Atari Games would've cost Jack $10 million more in 1984. And Warner would've sold it so long as they retained a 25% stake in the combined company. That was the one thing Steve Ross insisted on; he wanted someone else to revive Atari while Atari's woes were no longer dragging down Warner's stock price - which had triggered Rupert Murdoch's hostile takeover attempt - and then he wanted to buy back the company on-the-cheap once it was turned around. This is why Ross wouldn't sell Atari to Philips because Philips insisted on owning 100% of the company; Tramiel agreed and Warner owned a 25% stake in Atari Corp. for most of that company's life. EGM back in 1991 reported that [Time] Warner approached the Tramiels about selling their stake in Atari Corp back - and this was right after Time Warner had reacquired Atari Games - but they passed on the golden opportunity.
While I'm a big fan of Apple stuff (typing this on an iMac), let's get back on topic.
I only type this from my MacBook because neither Atari nor the Amiga have a modern platform as a realistic alternative.
Perhaps had Jack Tramiel and Irving Gould put away their sharp weapons when the Atari/Commodore lawsuits were settled and agreed to combine the ST and Amiga into a single shared platform, we would have a viable third computer platform to this day [and I don't mean Linux]...
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The 7800 got old arcade ports because that's what Atari thought people wanted. The best early Nintendo games weren't arcade ports, they were original. There was no Metroid or Zelda franchise at the time for Nintendo to "snatch up"; they came up with them & Atari's developers could have done the same if the company would've encouraged it.
Super Mario Bros., Excite Bike, Duck Hunt, Hogan's Alley, and even the original version of Punch Out! were all Nintendo arcade ports.
Yes, but the 7800 could do everything a 2600 could do. They should have axed the 2600 -console- and made sure that people knew that the 7800 was backwards compatible. At that point anyone who needed a replacement 2600 would have picked up the 7800 because it would have been the only option. With the 7800 having a pack-in game that at least showed the 7800 could do a lot more than the 2600, it might have set more people up to look for actual 7800 games. (Although they definitely should have avoided the "For the 2600 and 7800" garbage, although to be fair I saw that coming more from the unlicensed 3rd parties like Activision, which they probably couldn't do much about.)
When I was playing the emulator on my friend's Wii, I couldn't believe how bad Rampage and Double Dragon were on the 7800. I don't remember them being that bad back in the day but the sound was atrocious [due to the lack of the Pokey chip] and I can't imagine the graphics were better than the NES versions [although in fairness, there was no 2 player mode on the NES for DD]. Even Xenophobe was a rather bad port too [i don't remember the Lynx version being bad]. If I recall, Xenophobe was published by Atari but DD and Rampage were published by Activision.
Anyone notice anything strange here?
7800 splash screen (I forgot what the XEGS looks like at boot) and/or is that a Commodore 1702 monitor? Too bad Atari didn't have their own composite monitors. Or monitors that supported both RGB and composite. Surprised they didn't!
BTW: they sure do have that XEGS parked unnaturally close to the monitors. Where are the cables?? My money says a different Atari system is responsible for that display. lol
You mean XEGS carts didn't have the same splash screen as the 7800 titles? If that's the case, I'm rather surprised the Tramiels didn't "recycle" it.
Wasn't there an Atari [Corp.] branded composite monitor in Europe? That's actually something that surprised me about Atari Inc. during the 400/800/XL days...why they were so content to have Atari 8-bit owners buy composite monitors from Commodore and Philips which were both competitors [Commodore computers and Magnavox Odyssey, etc.]. To think Atari Corp. later discussed marketing Atari branded television sets around the time they started selling Atari branded calculators.
As for the 2600 vs. 7800 argument, I think it would be fitting to suggest that Atari should've continued selling the 2600 as long as they could but not allocate precious development dollars on titles for it at the expense of the 7800. As for 7800 vs. XEGS development dollars, unless I am mistaken, there wasn't much development dollars necessary to take already existing Atari 8-bit disk based games and "convert" them to cartridge versions. In fact, that might be one of the reasons why Atari was gung-ho about the XEGS; they got to recycle and repackage content whereas converting those very same titles to the 7800 would have been another expense. Furthermore, this is probably why the Tramiels opted to cancel the 7800's expansion port...they probably concluded that if a consumer wanted a computer keyboard they should just buy the XEGS. That seems like a sure fit considering their hyped - at the time - logic of color coding anything with the 8-bit computer line in red and products related to the Atari ST line were to be colored blue. They actually thought this would differentiate products successfully in mass market outlets and they actually bragged about this in Atari Explorer magazine [although I think Antic/STart ridiculed it] that such retailers wouldn't need to have knowledgeable sales staff because of it.
Regarding left over 8-bit parts as the reason for the XEGS, perhaps Atari had leftover custom and RAM chips that had been allocated for the 65XE that wasn't selling so well at the time and they opted to repackage that with the redesigned mobo for the XEGS. The other reason for the XEGS was to shore up the Atari 8-bit line to increase the user base since software publishers were looking for any excuse to dump the Atari 8-bit line because of the alleged rampant piracy on the platform [even if there were far more C64 owners who were software pirates]...
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Yeah, it's all the Tramiels' fault.
I meant the actual takeover of the company. Had Warner retained the company and James Morgan as CEO, the 7800 would've been released much sooner, all the later "Atari Games" arcade titles would've been exclusive, and Atari Inc. would've been more eager to include the Pokey chip in the 7800 carts and would've been more liberal about memory size in them. But for all of that, we can thank Rupert Murdoch and his hostile takeover attempts of Warner Communications which caused Warner to panic and sell Atari for a fire sale in order to take the pressure off Warner's stock price.
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Now the Tramiel haters really have little left to bash them with.
Now they'll just write off what Marty and others have been saying as "revisionist history."
This is why the internet is actually a step backwards in human evolution. The original view of the Tramiels (that they wanted to focus on computers only, that they released the 7800 too late because they didn't like consoles, etc) was based on nothing at all. No fact checking, no documentation, etc. In fact, it wasn't even based on logic (why would a businessman buy a company known for videogame consoles, with three consoles ready to be sold, with games ready to be produced, and with stock of some of it sitting in warehouses) and then plan to not sell consoles for no reason? It defies logic that the idea has persisted so long when you think about it.
The new view that Marty and Curt have demonstrated is based on hours of interviews, checking company business and sales reports, and internal communications within Atari. Because the internet breeds stupidity, this new view is called "revisionist," while the illogical one based on nothing at all is believed to be the truth. I think our species is about two decades away from climbing back into the trees.
The "computers only" perception came from the press. All during the ST's launch, the press kept on stressing that Atari Corp. was "now a computer company" and supposedly directly coming from Jack's mouth. The coverage didn't change until 1986 after the NES was considered a success and then you have magazines like Compute! stating that the Tramiels then decided to get back into video games. The Tramiels themselves didn't seem to do much to correct this "narrative" that the press created and us owners latched onto since it conveniently explained all the missteps that Atari Corp. took over the years.
It also doesn't help that even in interviews today, Jack Tramiel seems rather dismissive of video games. That was evident in the Computer History Museum's session on the Commodore 64's anniversary from a few years back, not to mention Commodore's own advertising campaigns for the 64 back in the day.
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See above, the Jaguar may have been a market failure, but it wasn't a business failure. (in fact it was a critical success for Atari Corp at the time)
For failures the Falcon probably does apply and the Transputer Workstation, not sure if the TT030 turned a profit either. (though it didn't make the impact desired)
Maybe I'm not looking at it with enough detail, but it seems like Atari Corp sort of screwed up with the ST at the end of the 80s and early 90s with rather limited upgrades that were a bit late (the STe came out at a point where it was really behind both mid-range PCs and still behind the Amiga -the latter mattering more for Europe) and then pushing more high-end with the TT without a lower-end /mid-range counterpart with similar video enhancement. (no lower end 68020/030 models prior to the Falcon or 16 MHz 68k models until the MEGA STE in '91 -it seems something like an STe with 16 MHz 68k with optional FPU and added TT SHIFTER video would have been good alongside the TT in '90 though more so if the STe had video upgrades in the first place -not all the TT modes, but a 320x200 256 color mode at least and probably a 640x200 16-color mode if not expanded 640x400/480 modes -obviously for dedicated RGB/VGA monitors only)
As an ST owner, I think the biggest screw up they committed was skipping the 68020. I remember Sig Hartmann commenting on how disappointed they [Atari Corp.] were in the chip's multitasking abilities circa 1986/87 and even saying as much not only in Atari Explorer but also at the user's group meetings he'd appear at. Even then, that was startling to me since Motorola finished the 68020 back in 1984. Regardless, their "disappointment" delayed them releasing a high-end line and the TT030 was shipped too late in the ballgame against the Amiga wares and the creeping cheap PC clone onslaught.
The STe came out way too late and it still did not match the Amiga's graphics abilities. Even as a staunch ST owner at the time, that was pretty embarrassing.
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7800 Atari Corp. Revival
in Atari 7800
Posted
I despise Microsoft although I own a 360 [in addition to my PS3]. At this point, Sony is just as much an American company - if not more - than Microsoft.
Microsoft's underhanded dealings in the video game industry is the reason why 3dfx went under, not to mention Sega as a hardware company. I won't forgive them for either of those acts. With that having been said, I despise Nintendo even more. I hope the 3Ds is an even bigger flop than the VirtualBoy [or Windows Phone 7]...