How did Atari Lynx have portable hardware better than home consoles for only $179?

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asta62
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How did Atari Lynx have portable hardware better than home consoles for only $179?

Post by asta62 »

If you look at the Atari Lynx, while the resolution and sound sucks, it has scaling better than any home console game. In fact some of the games look more impressive than on the $649 Neo Geo AES in 1991! And this was a portable, not a home console! What happened? $199 SNES's CPU was even worse than the Genesis and Turbografx! So how did Atari get much stronger hardware for similar price in a handheld than Nintendo and SEGA in their home consoles?
tepples
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Re: How did Atari Lynx have portable hardware better than home consoles for only $179?

Post by tepples »

Unlike the Game Boy and Game Gear, which use the tiles and sprites paradigm inherited from the TMS9918, Lynx uses a blitter and frame buffer. This lets devs sacrifice frame rate to increase object count and coverage, which may have been a wise choice given the slow response of the LCDs of the time. Its 160x102-pixel screen res is also smaller than the 160x144 of the Game Boy and Game Gear, and the blitter lets games compensate by drawing smaller text without having to do a software VWF routine.
Oziphantom
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Re: How did Atari Lynx have portable hardware better than home consoles for only $179?

Post by Oziphantom »

Because it was made by the Amiga Developers. So it's a mini Amiga.
It has very strong bitmap based power, its low resolution allows it to compensate. Its horrible LCD also means you want want to update at high FPS so the games look better at 7.5~15fps then they do 30, allowing you to get away with more. Which is "handy" because doing scrolling eats a lot of clocks as you have to use the blitter to draw the whole scene again.

However in a general case the SNES will destroy it, but for instances where bitmap "wins" the lynx will have the advantage, but then if you limit the SNES to the same resolution with its DMA engine and sprites and frame rate, I would expect it to take the lynx pretty easily.
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