31 replies to this topic

[108 Stars]

I find it awesome that you still care about Atari. You know, you can tell stories about the development of Lynx games, and you actively participate in this fan-community. That´s great, not like so many people for whom game development was a job and they don´t really care about their stuff from back then anymore.

[Isgoed]

I agree!!

Edited by Isgoed, Sun Oct 30, 2011 3:36 AM.

[Ninjabba]

Great to see old developers hanging out on this forum! I'm really enjoying reading this topic. Back in the days when I first got my Lynx it was magic to me. Never could've imagined that ~15 years later I'd share forums with those very devs!

It's funny how the advanced graphics of the lynx couldn't excite people back then, while nowadays its all about them.

[solidcorp]

Aw shucks!
<blush>

I was an Atari zealot since about 7th grade - I even wore an Atari windbreaker in high school. Maybe I shouldn't be so proud of that, heh. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is I was a fan before it was a [dream] job, I'm still really into it which is why I made Star Castle for the 2600.

[solidcorp]

Ninjabba, on Sun Oct 30, 2011 7:35 AM, said:

It's funny how the advanced graphics of the lynx couldn't excite people back then, while nowadays its all about them.

The Lynx was just great tech*. What I mean is an Xbox360, PS3, or Wii is just a fancy computer until someone makes a Halo, Drakes Fortune, or Zelda for it. The Lynx suffered from too many coin op style games and ports and no truly GREAT games, no platform sellers. I don't think we (I want to say "they" but I was there too) understood the value of the killer app, even though titles like Super Mario Brothers (1985) and Zelda (1986) were already driving NES sales like crazy. The Lynx was also not distributed as well as the GameBoy. Nintendo got into all the retailers, and from what I remember Atari couldn't keep manufacturing up with demand. The result was that retailers made better deals with Nintendo than Atari and the vastly inferior** GameBoy "won". The marketing was also anemic.

Anyway, that's my two cents on how the superior Lynx didn't come out on top.

*Man those guys at Epyx were really technical geniouses, Dave Needle, RJ Michael, (both credited for the creation of the Amiga, and later 3DO) Stephen Landrum... they not only made the extraordinarily innovative platform, they wrote the best set of manuals, examples, and libraries I had seen to date. The development material blew anything Atari had done clean out of the water.

** I wrote BattleZone & Super Breakout on the GameBoy for THQ so I know exactly the features and shortcomings of both platforms. I think it's funny, that even when I wrote for the GameBoy, I was porting Atari games

Edited by solidcorp, Sun Oct 30, 2011 11:28 AM.

[108 Stars]

solidcorp, on Sun Oct 30, 2011 11:28 AM, said:

The Lynx was just great tech*. What I mean is an Xbox360, PS3, or Wii is just a fancy computer until someone makes a Halo, Drakes Fortune, or Zelda for it. The Lynx suffered from too many coin op style games and ports and no truly GREAT games, no platform sellers. I don't think we (I want to say "they" but I was there too) understood the value of the killer app, even though titles like Super Mario Brothers (1985) and Zelda (1986) were already driving NES sales like crazy. The Lynx was also not distributed as well as the GameBoy. Nintendo got into all the retailers, and from what I remember Atari couldn't keep manufacturing up with demand. The result was that retailers made better deals with Nintendo than Atari and the vastly inferior** GameBoy "won". The marketing was also anemic. Anyway, that's my two cents on how the superior Lynx didn't come out on top.

Were there any guidelines from the higher ups at Atari as to what kind of games were to be made, or were they pretty much open to any ideas a dev would present them? I could imagine that the plan was to have the Lynx as a portable arcade system, kind of relying on the kind of games the Atari-brand was associated with.

One thing that I think may have helped the Lynx somewhat would have been to actively approach European developers. While there are not nearly as many hits coming from Europe as from the US and Japan, there were great devs here... and unlike the US where third parties were very tied up with Nintendo, Europe was mostly into homecomputers throughout the 80ies. Meaning that they were stil free to support any console or handheld they wanted. The restrictive policies and high fees of Nintendo or Sega could have given Atari a chance to gain lots of support around here if they had actively approached them and made them a good deal. Imagine guys like Factor 5 bringing Turrican to the system. Or things like Another World and later Flashback or Rayman. Let alone all the games that could have been designed but never were because developers were too small and could not afford the licensing for other systems. The Lynx could have been a great playground for up- and-coming devs.

I don´t say this would have made the Lynx the winner, but I do think that maybe there would have been a bigger supply of original software, and possibly some really good games that would have been exclusive. This could have helped sales, and in turn drawn the attention of more well-known developers.

Of course it´s easy to say such things today, and the idea may have not been as easy to pull off as it sounds.

solidcorp, on Sun Oct 30, 2011 11:28 AM, said:

*Man those guys at Epyx were really technical geniouses, Dave Needle, RJ Michael, (both credited for the creation of the Amiga, and later 3DO) Stephen Landrum... they not only made the extraordinarily innovative platform, they wrote the best set of manuals, examples, and libraries I had seen to date. The development material blew anything Atari had done clean out of the water. ** I wrote BattleZone & Super Breakout on the GameBoy for THQ so I know exactly the features and shortcomings of both platforms. I think it's funny, that even when I wrote for the GameBoy, I was porting Atari games

Hehe, must have been a big difference to switch from developing Lynx-games to doing stuff for the GameBoy. I would think that you get used to the luxury of the more powerful Lynx-hardware and then working with the GB posed a serious challenge. I am no coder myself, but I do find the GB port of Battlezone quite impressive. Wouldn´t have thought that the GB could handle vector graphics so well.

[solidcorp]

108 Stars, on Sun Oct 30, 2011 3:27 PM, said:

Hehe, must have been a big difference to switch from developing Lynx-games to doing stuff for the GameBoy. I would think that you get used to the luxury of the more powerful Lynx-hardware and then working with the GB posed a serious challenge. I am no coder myself, but I do find the GB port of Battlezone quite impressive. Wouldn´t have thought that the GB could handle vector graphics so well.

Lynx development on the Amiga was the first multitasking development environment I worked with. You could have your editor open in a window, another command window for builds, and a third debugging window open for your Howard board. The Amiga editor CED was very capable, and the debugger was quite advanced too. The GameBoy development environment also had dedicated hardware but the interface was almost exactly that of DOS Debug. Command line debugging, very difficult, er cumbersome.

BattleZone on the GB is all character graphics by the way, no vectors. I wrote a 3D editor and wireframe renderer in QBASIC. I modeled all the game assets (tank, super tank, saucer, buzz bomb, cube, pyramid, and bullet), and then code would render all the rotations at each scale. For each frame It generated source code for the graphics in GameBoy format. It only stored the 8x8 characters that had pixels in them and created a map of where to draw them for the frame. The graphics could be flipped left to right too to save room in the ROM. The background was scrolling character graphics, and the tanks and obstacles were multiplexed, or as you would say now "temporially dithered" (they flashed) and they were composed of all the available sprites.