18 replies to this topic

[carmel_andrews]

Look at it this way, the 65816 has a 6502 fallback mode (known as 'emulation' mode) which means that that processor can replicate a stock 6502 (a bit like having 2 processors in one)

The Advantage for Atari (or epyx) wuld have been that you could have a 2 in one system (i.e a system that plays both 8bit and 16bit games) and since the 65816 can address more memory (without bankswitching) then a 65C02, you would also have more advanced/sophisticated games due to higher memory req's

Perhaps Atari/Epyx could have done a deal with WDC and got them to wedge a 65816 into mikey and make the 'emulation' mode of the '816 fully compatible with the 65C02 (just incase there are differences between the 'C' version and the stock 6502)

[ACrystal2011]

They still would have needed better marketing, The Lynx was the best handheld at the time just bad marketing stragey.

[so_tough!]

I never understood why most kids in my class picked a game boy over the lynx or game gear, why choose a green screen when you can have colour?

[ACrystal2011]

so_tough!, on Tue Jan 10, 2012 8:46 AM, said:

I never understood why most kids in my class picked a game boy over the lynx or game gear, why choose a green screen when you can have colour?

Better marketing, More Games, Cheaper. But not more advanced

[so_tough!]

ACrystal2011, on Tue Jan 10, 2012 8:56 AM, said:

so_tough!, on Tue Jan 10, 2012 8:46 AM, said:

I never understood why most kids in my class picked a game boy over the lynx or game gear, why choose a green screen when you can have colour?

Better marketing, More Games, Cheaper. But not more advanced

true, I got a game gear at the time, my brothers friend had a lynx though.

[Emehr]

Like others have said, the problem wasn't the games. The games were great. It was the crappy marketing. "Gray matter"? Whose idea was that?

[karri]

carmel_andrews, on Tue Jan 10, 2012 6:49 AM, said:

Look at it this way, the 65816 has a 6502 fallback mode (known as 'emulation' mode) which means that that processor can replicate a stock 6502 (a bit like having 2 processors in one)

The Advantage for Atari (or epyx) wuld have been that you could have a 2 in one system (i.e a system that plays both 8bit and 16bit games) and since the 65816 can address more memory (without bankswitching) then a 65C02, you would also have more advanced/sophisticated games due to higher memory req's

Perhaps Atari/Epyx could have done a deal with WDC and got them to wedge a 65816 into mikey and make the 'emulation' mode of the '816 fully compatible with the 65C02 (just incase there are differences between the 'C' version and the stock 6502)

The 6502 was a secret when the Lynx came out. It was marketed as a 16 bit system. I actually had to sign a NDA to get any kind of hardware info in the early days. As a matter of fact I signed up because I thought it was a 16 bit system. After reading the real specs I decided not to code for the Lynx. It was just too far away from a portable Amiga.

So it would have made no difference to choose another CPU than 65C02.
--
Regards,

Karri

[JohnBuell]

I think the CPU would only have mattered IF it brought down the retail price and increased battery life.

[Austin]

ACrystal2011, on Tue Jan 10, 2012 8:56 AM, said:

so_tough!, on Tue Jan 10, 2012 8:46 AM, said:

I never understood why most kids in my class picked a game boy over the lynx or game gear, why choose a green screen when you can have colour?

Better marketing, More Games, Cheaper. But not more advanced

Can't forget that despite its limitations, the Game Boy arguably had better games, too.

[ThomH]

JohnBuell, on Wed Jan 11, 2012 9:04 PM, said:

I think the CPU would only have mattered IF it brought down the retail price and increased battery life.

It's a safe bet that any other CPU would have decreased battery life. I'm not sure about the SC02 but the original 6502 is notable for using just 3,510 transistors, just a shade more than the 8080 and less than half the 8,500 in the Z80. If all other factors remain constant then more transistors means more power usage.

I think I also read that the 65SC02 was selected because it was available as an IP core — much like ARM processors are nowadays — allowing you to embed it within a chip alongside a bunch of further logic. In the Lynx it sits in Mikey, along with bits like the video repaint stuff (i.e., the systems that collect, encode and transmit bytes from memory to the LCD; Suzy does the hardware drawing), audio and timers. So a switch to any other CPU would have added an extra discrete chip to the board, at the very least. And if you want more RAM too then obviously you're going to have to pay for that — though if the address space were large enough then completely dumping the tape metaphor and just putting the ROM into normal address space would solve that problem.

That all being said, the 65816 is in any case a horrid fudge. If you're allowed any '16bit' processor then the 68000 is the smart choice. If it needs to be 8bit then the 65SC02 is actually probably the smartest choice; for programmer convenience the 68008 would probably be the way to go.

[in the dark]

I think anything that would have improved the battery life of the system would have increased the appeal and the likely hood of being more successful at the time. If a different chip would have done that and not increased the cost, or reduced the power of the system it would have helped.

But I think mainly if the company would have focused on porting Atari arcade and 2600 games to the system, this would have made the system a roaring success against the other competitors at that period in portable gaming. This is what I wanted from the system back then. I like what I have, just wanted more.

[ThomH]

The big difference between the early-90s battery munchers (the Game Gear, the PC Engine GT and the Lynx) and the Gameboy seems only to be the screens — and especially the backlight. I would imagine that once you've thrown a backlight in, everything else is pretty much just tinkering around the edges. Though CPU sleep that worked properly would have been nice...

Anyway, I don't accept that Atari's big problem was hardware. Like in the dark, I think think it was software, though I'd be more likely to cite a failure to attract (and possibly even to court?) third parties. If you look at the international trajectory of the Mega Drive, it was initially the EA titles that supported it and then Sonic that launched it into the stratosphere. Given that Atari was owned by Tramiel at the time and the Lynx hardware follows a lot of the Amiga conventions, I think the smart thing would have been to do whatever it took to get the European Amiga-oriented houses on board. Competing with Nintendo for the Japanese console game houses probably wouldn't have worked and if you look at the work of Psygnosis (the only third party house outside of the US?) it's really very good.

Of course, it's always easy to pick a strategy in retrospect.

EDIT: I found this page, which clocks a Lynx 2 at drawing 280mA in total, of which 200mA is the backlight. So that's more than 70% of the power being drawn by the backlight. He makes an unsuccessful attempt to switch the original unit with more modern lower power white LEDs; presumably someone could manage this successfully?

Edited by ThomH, Sat Jan 14, 2012 9:54 AM.

[ThomH]

As a follow-up thought, two screenshots are below. One is from an 8-bit machine, the other is from a 16-bit machine. Arbitrary bit counts mean nothing.

Edited by ThomH, Sat Jan 14, 2012 11:51 AM.

[Jay]

ThomH, on Sat Jan 14, 2012 11:51 AM, said:

As a follow-up thought, two screenshots are below. One is from an 8-bit machine, the other is from a 16-bit machine. Arbitrary bit counts mean nothing.

Sorry just found it ironic you happened to pick a Lemmings shot from the Sam Coupe version, which is a 8-bit machine

[ThomH]

Jay, on Sat Jan 14, 2012 5:09 PM, said:

Sorry just found it ironic you happened to pick a Lemmings shot from the Sam Coupe version, which is a 8-bit machine

That was deliberate. Car Wars is running on the TI-99/4A, a 16-bit machine!

[Jay]

ThomH, on Sat Jan 14, 2012 5:11 PM, said:

That was deliberate. Car Wars is running on the TI-99/4A, a 16-bit machine!

Ah yeah i see now! though to be fair it did come out in 1979 compared to 1989 of the coupe, 10 years is a long time in computing and the Texas machine wasnt build for gaming, plus the coupe was a late comer in the 8-bit life being more powerful than most, same for the PC Engine, remembered for being 8-bit but is16-bit in reality.

[ThomH]

Jay, on Sun Jan 15, 2012 3:34 AM, said:

Ah yeah i see now! though to be fair it did come out in 1979 compared to 1989 of the coupe, 10 years is a long time in computing and the Texas machine wasnt build for gaming, plus the coupe was a late comer in the 8-bit life being more powerful than most, same for the PC Engine, remembered for being 8-bit but is16-bit in reality.

The point I'm making is that bit count is irrelevant to judging the power of a computer or console. It's largely just a question of launch date and price point — bit counts are often a bit arbitrary as per the PC Engine example, and collapsing the question down to the number of data lines running to different components doesn't really achieve much. USB is a serial bus with two data lines. So by the standards of the early-90s gaming press, all your USB peripherals are 2-bit devices. Does that really mean anything? To the extent that we count bits nowadays, we look at the natural data size of the central programmable component and by that standard the 68000 is a 32-bit device. Is it helpful retroactively to label the ST, Amiga and Mega Drive 32 bit?

Not really related, but I have the rare distinction of having owned a Sam Coupe, direct from MGT, during its natural lifetime. It's not a very well designed machine in my opinion; they put this huge frame buffer on the thing but with Spectrum-style contended access across all RAM (so RAM is unavailable for 7 of 8 cycles during pixel periods, eating into your processing time) and no hardware graphics help whatsoever — not even a hardware scroll. That's why Lemmings chugs along and almost nothing else even attempts scrolling.

Edited by ThomH, Sun Jan 15, 2012 8:26 AM.

[BillyHW]

in the dark, on Sat Jan 14, 2012 8:06 AM, said:

I think anything that would have improved the battery life of the system would have increased the appeal and the likely hood of being more successful at the time. If a different chip would have done that and not increased the cost, or reduced the power of the system it would have helped.

But I think mainly if the company would have focused on porting Atari arcade and 2600 games to the system, this would have made the system a roaring success against the other competitors at that period in portable gaming. This is what I wanted from the system back then. I like what I have, just wanted more.

But Atari just doing lame 2600 rehashes for the 5200 and 7800 are what destroyed their reputation. They ended up getting slaughtered because their competitors were making original games. A combined collection type cartridge with some old favourites might have been a good idea, but the focus really needed to be the future, not the past.

[in the dark]

BillyHW, on Sat Jan 21, 2012 6:03 PM, said:

in the dark, on Sat Jan 14, 2012 8:06 AM, said:

I think anything that would have improved the battery life of the system would have increased the appeal and the likely hood of being more successful at the time. If a different chip would have done that and not increased the cost, or reduced the power of the system it would have helped.

But I think mainly if the company would have focused on porting Atari arcade and 2600 games to the system, this would have made the system a roaring success against the other competitors at that period in portable gaming. This is what I wanted from the system back then. I like what I have, just wanted more.

But Atari just doing lame 2600 rehashes for the 5200 and 7800 are what destroyed their reputation. They ended up getting slaughtered because their competitors were making original games. A combined collection type cartridge with some old favourites might have been a good idea, but the focus really needed to be the future, not the past.

Need to remember that the atmosphere of gaming had changed due the the revival started by Nintendo. At the time, a portable system giving you the best of the Atari 2600 would have been a blast. A portable is not the same as a console. And the strength of the system was its ability to do arcade ports well. And this is where the system shined. Consoles of that time period got off the ground running doing arcade ports, things of the past. Some of those games were from the Atari 2600. You had the NES (which started with a lot of, "things from the past"), Genesis, and even the SNES pulling out things from the past, (arcade ports). Robotron and Stun Runner are excellent examples of the Lynx ability in arcade gaming. I'm not against future stuff, it is needed. But the gaming climate back then would have been ripe for it. This is something that would not have survived in the present generation. Today It would have been more of a niche market.