The Atari Lynx is a h and-held cartridge game console released by the Atari Corporation in September of 1989 in the US. Europe and Japan customers could buy the console a few months later in early 1990. The Atari Lynx display was a liquid-crystal color screen. The device was a 8/16-bit hybrid architecture, powered by a 65C02 8-bit CPU running at 16MHz and a custom 16-bit blitter that took the graphics to a whole other level compared to the monochrome Gameboy from Nintendo that was released earlier in 1989.

The Lynx started as the Handy Game project and was developed at Epyx by two former Commodore Amiga designers. Even though the machine was technically superior to the Gameboy, there were only 73 games published for the Lynx. Atari released an upgraded model of the Lynx, called the Lynx II, in 1991. This was a smaller model, but ultimately the console was discontinued in 1995.

Also in 1991, Sega released the Game Gear handheld, also with a color screen, but for $30 less and with a longer battery life. But ultimately the Gameboy was more rugged, half the price of the lynx, and had a much longer battery life, which is what really counts for a portable game console.

Technical Specifications

• Mikey 8-bit custom CMOS chip containing:
  • 8-bit 65SC02 CPU @4MHz
  • Sound Engine: 4 channels each with an 8-bit DAC
  • Video DMA driver for the Color LCD:
    • 160x102 pixels
    • 4096 colors
    16 colors per scanline
    • variable framerate up to 75 fps
  • Eight system timers (2 reserved for the LCD, one for the UART)
  • Interrupt controller
  • UART
  • 512 bytes of bootstrap and game-load ROM
• Suzy 16-bit custom CMOS chip Containing:
  • 'Unlimited' number of blitter sprites with collision detection
  • Hardware sprite scaling, distortion and tilting
  • Hardware decoding of compressed sprite data
  • Hardware clipping and multi-directional scrolling
  • Math engine (16bit x 16bit multiplication, 32-bit by 16-bit division, parallel processing)
• 64KByte of RAM
• Port for 128K, 256K, 512K, or 1M ROM cartridges with bank-switching
• 3.5" diagonal LCD screen for horizontal and vertical play
• Battery holder for 6 AA batteries

The 6502 is an 8-bit MicroProcessor designed by MOS Technology. The team was led by Chuck Peddle and had also worked on the Motorola 6800. The 6502 is a simplified, but faster and cheaper design than the 6800.

The 6502 was introduced in 1975 and was the cheapest microprocessor on the market. Together with the Zilog Z80, the 6502 helped start the home computer revolution of the 1980s. The 6502 was used in a wide range of devices: the Atari 2600, the 8-bit Atari home computers, the Apple II, the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Commodore 64, the BBC Micro and many others. All used the 6502 or a variation of it.

The 6502 is a 1MHz design, while the 6502A is designed for 2MHz. The 6502A is 100% compatible with the original 6502.

Commodore soon bought MOS Technology, but conitnued to sell the microprocessor to competitors and licensed the design to other manufacturers.