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> Not only could it display in color, but it also supported scaling and rotation effects.

IIRC the Lynx was designed at a time (1986-87) when this was feasible for portable systems but not for consoles, because of its low resolution (160 x 102 - the height seems strange until you realize that it gives you almost exactly 16 * 1024 pixels).

> Sega also ended up lifting a lot of the Lynx's design for the Game Gear after the Handy was pitched to them by Epyx.

The external design, maybe, but the internals of the two machines are very different. The Game Gear uses a Z80 to the Lynx's 6502 and has tile-based graphics where the Lynx uses a bitmapped display. The Game Gear is essentially a portable Sega Master System - a console that predates the design of the Lynx.

> There is also an amusing story about how Epyx's pitch to Nintendo of Japan went terribly wrong, though I can't find it now.

It's here: https://www.retrogamer.net/profiles/hardware/atari-lynx/

“We were the first non-Nintendo people to learn of the existence of the Nintendo Game Boy,” Needle says, recoiling even at the memory. “We were crushed. Joe was infuriated. The Nintendo boss left the room and we just sat there, wondering what to do next.”

Interesting about the resolution, since that was 1/60th the number of pixels as the NES. The Lynx did have a 16 bit graphics chip though.

The Epyx guys claim that Sega lifted their design for the Game Gear some time after their pitch. I think this meant the look and feel of the system-- both the horizontal orientation and idea of using a color display. According to Epyx, Sega still got it wrong and produced a crappy design in comparison. To be fair, the Lynx was a far more capable system.

>Interesting about the resolution, since that was 1/60th the number of pixels as the NES.

surely you mean 1/4

> According to Epyx, Sega still got it wrong and produced a crappy design in comparison. To be fair, the Lynx was a far more capable system.

Making the Game Gear more-or-less a portable Master System was probably the right decision though. It enabled easy porting of existing Master System games, and development of new games to run on both platforms. Although the SMS was dead in Japan and North America before the Game Gear's release, it was still going strong in Europe and other markets.

It also made possible the Game Gear's SMS mode, in which the machine behaves exactly like a Master System. This allowed backwards compatibility with existing SMS games via an adapter (which seems to have been important to Sega - the Genesis has a similar capability), and enabled an even simpler method of porting SMS games: a few Game Gear games [1] are really SMS games with a built-in adapter.

The Game Gear therefore had a stronger software library than the Lynx, despite being technically inferior. And, ultimately, the overwhelming success of the Game Boy showed that it is the games (and battery life) that really matter.

[1] http://www.smspower.org/Tags/SMS-GG

160 x 102 is also the resolution of the Bally Astrocade (1977) and at 2 bits per pixel it takes up almost all of the 4KB of RAM. Luckily, you can adjust the number of visible lines, otherwise you'd have only 16 bytes for your data and stack. Lynx has an 8KB frame buffer (4 bits/pixel) out of 64KB.

That's another interesting thing about the Lynx - it has so much RAM compared to other 8-bit game systems (the Game Boy, Master System, Game Gear and PC Engine all have 8KB, the NES has just 2KB).

Those other systems all work by memory-mapping the ROM cartridge so that it can be seen by the CPU directly, whereas the Lynx requires ROM data to be read into RAM first. In that way, its programming model is more like a system with a disc drive (either magnetic or optical) than one which takes ROM cartridges.

A friend of mine had a Lynx, it was really massive. Bigger than a Game Gear that was already much bigger than the GameBoy.

Apparently the Lynx is even bigger than a Nintendo Switch, despite having a screen not much bigger than the Gameboy.

Well, my friend was proud that you could play it reverse, dpad on the right if you were left handed. Not sure if left handed players really want to play reverse anyway.

Yes, the original Lynx is massive, I have a held one myself.

I have also held the Lynx 2, which is a much smaller system that's around the size of the Game Gear. Though even the Game Gear seems massive by today's standards.

The Game Gear was massive at release, by my own standards (expectations calibrated by Game and Watch and the original Game Boy).

Atari like Commodore didn't market their new systems that much. It was mostly magazines and word of mouth. At least in the USA it was that way. Still they both controlled the home computer market in the 8 bit areas.

Atari's dominance is a major factor of the video game crisis in the 80s. The home console industry almost collapsed because all the consoles were licensing without quality control. Games would be broken or just badly designed for full price.

It's archaic now, but when the NES came that golden "Official Nintendo Seal of Quality" saved the industry. Amazingly, the Nintendo CEO who was granting this seal did not play video games. He would have an employee play the game in front of him and he would decide whether it was a good game or not.

It's also worth noting that this crash was largely North American, as the European gaming market was dominated by home computers.

If you have any experience with home computer games of that era, you'll know that the quality control wasn't actually better, it's just that games came on cassette tapes and floppies, and so were vastly cheaper mistakes when you bought one (plus you could fix the bugs yourself on the ones written in BASIC, fun!!).

Well.. in some countries, games/programs were even broadcasted on public FM radio stations.

Like the United States, where you could download on both AM and FM stations.

PC games took a long while to compete with consoles. Blizzard and Valve built that market in the 2000s.

the Game Gear was awesome! obsessed over the writeup for that in Consumer Reports for Kids until i could save up for one.

The game gear was awesome. When the lynx came out it was pretty neat, sorta. I had one friend with one. But it paled in comparison to even the game boy, which had tons of games.

Jack Tramiel, the founder of Commodore and savior of Atari was a very tough guy to negotiate with, but from this, it sounds like the Epyx management did not have a clue of what they were doing...

That is very likely. They were brilliant engineers, not good businessmen.