Atari Lynx

Summary

The development of the Lynx begins under the project name Handy by the company Epyx, but the product fails due to the development costs. Atari takes over the project and markets it from 1990.

Graphically, the Lynx is far superior to Game Boy, which appears only five months earlier, and is revolutionary for its time. It has a resolution of 160 x 102 pixels, can represent 16 different colors from a total of 4096 possible colors and has a separate backlight. By today’s standards, however, the contrast is weak and the viewing angle is very narrow. Up to eight different Lynx devices can be combined for multiplayer games. With a dimension of 27.3 x 10.8 x 3.8 cm, it is significantly larger than the Game Boy.

Most games are implementations of the Atari arcade and computer games, such as Lemmings or Qix. Due to the high start price and low battery life of up to 5 hours, the Lynx will not succeed.