The Atari Lynx is a fourth-generation handheld game console made by Atari Corporation. It was released in September 1989 in North America and in 1990 in Europe and Japan. It was the first handheld console with a color liquid-crystal display. The Lynx used a 4 MHz 65C02 8-bit CPU and a special 16-bit blitter, making it more advanced than Nintendo's black-and-white Game Boy, which came out five months earlier. It also competed with Sega's Game Gear and NEC's TurboExpress, which were released the following year.

The system was created by Epyx, a company that had two former designers from the Amiga personal computers. The project was named the Handy Game or simply Handy. In 1991, Atari replaced the Lynx with a smaller version called the Lynx II. Atari released 73 games for the Lynx before stopping production in 1995.

History

The Lynx system was first created by Epyx as the Handy Game. In 1986, two former Amiga designers, RJ Mical and Dave Needle, were asked by Dave Morse, a former Amiga manager now working at Epyx, to design a portable gaming system. Morse’s son had asked him to make a portable system, which led to a meeting with Mical and Needle. Morse convinced them to join Epyx’s design team. Planning and design of the console began in 1986 and was completed in 1987. Epyx first showed the Handy system at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January 1989. Facing financial problems, Epyx sought partners. Nintendo, Sega, and others declined, but Atari and Epyx agreed that Atari would handle production and marketing, while Epyx focused on software development. Epyx declared bankruptcy by the end of the year, so Atari owned the project. Atari and others had to buy Amigas from Commodore, Atari’s competitor, to develop Lynx software.

The Handy was designed to run games from cartridges. Game data had to be copied from ROM to RAM before it could be used, leaving less RAM available and making game loading slower. Some physical parts of the system, like a cassette tape interface, were present but not used. Lynx developers noted that hardware addresses and references to tape support remained in the system. A 2009 interview with Mical confirmed that games were not loaded from tape, though the team briefly considered using a hard disk.

The networking system was originally planned to use infrared links and was called RedEye. This was changed to a cable-based system before release because the infrared beam was too easily interrupted when players moved through it, according to Peter Engelbrite. Engelbrite created the first recordable eight-player co-op game, Todd’s Adventures in Slime World, which was the only eight-player game for the Lynx.

Atari changed the internal speaker and removed the thumb stick on the control pad. At the Summer 1989 CES, Atari’s demonstration included the "Portable Color Entertainment System," which was later renamed "Lynx" when sold to resellers. It initially sold in the U.S. for $179.95 (about $470 in 2025).

The Lynx had a successful launch. Atari reported selling 90% of the 50,000 units shipped in the U.S. during its first month, with a limited launch in New York. Sales in 1990 reached about 500,000 units, according to the Associated Press. By late 1991, Atari estimated sales at 800,000 units, which it said met its goals. By 1995, combined sales of the Lynx and Game Gear totaled fewer than 7 million units. In comparison, the Game Boy sold 16 million units by 1995 due to its better durability, price, battery life, and game library, especially the popular Tetris.

The game cartridge design changed over the first year of the Lynx’s release. Early cartridges were flat and stackable for storage but were hard to remove from the console. A second design, called "tabbed" or "ridged," added tabs for easier removal. The original flat-style cartridges could stack on newer ones, but the newer style was harder to stack. A third design, the "curved lip" style, was later used for all official and third-party cartridges.

In May 1991, Sega launched the Game Gear, a portable handheld with a color screen. Compared to the Lynx, the Game Gear had shorter battery life (3–4 hours vs. 4–5 hours), was slightly smaller, had more games, and cost $30 less at launch.

Retailers like Game and Toys "R" Us continued selling the Lynx into the mid-1990s, partly due to the Atari Jaguar’s launch and magazine coverage.

In July 1991, Atari released a new version of the Lynx, called the "Lynx II," with improved hardware, better battery life, a sleeker design, rubber grips, a clearer backlit screen with a power-saving option, and a stereo headphone jack. It sold for $99 (about $240 in 2025) without accessories.

In 1993, Atari shifted focus to prepare for the Jaguar’s launch. A few games, like Battlezone 2000, were released during this time. Support for the Lynx ended in 1995. After the Jaguar’s failure, Atari stopped game development and hardware production by early 1996 and merged with JTS, Inc. on July 30, 1996.

Features

The Atari Lynx has a color screen with lights behind it to make it easier to see, can be set up to be used with the right or left hand (even upside down), and can connect to other units using a special cable called a Comlynx. The most stable connection allows up to eight players. Each Lynx requires its own copy of the game, and one cable can link two machines. Multiple cables can be connected in a line to link more units.

The screen was the most expensive part of the Lynx, so the color choices were made to save costs. If cheaper materials could have supported a million colors, that would have been done.

The Lynx was the first gaming console with hardware that could zoom in or distort images on the screen. It had 4,096 different colors and special parts that helped with math and graphics, including a unit that handled moving images. Its colorful display was a major advantage over Nintendo's black-and-white Game Boy. The fast 3D-like graphics were possible because of an inventor named Dave Needle, who created a method to expand or shrink images on the screen using stretched triangles instead of full 3D shapes.

Technical specifications

• Mikey (8-bit VLSI custom CMOS chip running at 16 MHz) On Lynx I, a VLSI 8-bit VL65NC02 processor (based on the MOS 6502) runs at up to 4 MHz (3.6 MHz average). In the stereo version of Lynx II, a 65C02 processor with all instructions is used. The sound engine has four sound channels, each with an 8-bit digital-to-analog converter (DAC). These channels can also switch to an analog mode to create PSG sound, which uses a special method involving pulse waves or pseudo-random noise. The video system includes a DMA driver for a liquid-crystal display, custom built by Jay Miner and Dave Morse. It has a resolution of 160×102 pixels, a 12-bit color palette (4,096 colors), and can display 16 colors per scanline. The frame rate can vary up to 75 frames per second. There are eight system timers (two for LCD timing, one for UART), and an interrupt controller. The UART supports ComLynx communication with a fixed format (8E1) and speeds up to 625,000 bits per second or 1,000,000 bits per second in TurboMode. The system includes 512 bytes of bootstrap and game-card loading ROM.
• Suzy (16-bit VLSI custom CMOS chip running at 16 MHz) Supports an unlimited number of blitter "sprites" with collision detection. It includes hardware for scaling, distorting, and tilting sprites, as well as hardware decoding of compressed sprite data and hardware clipping for multi-directional scrolling. The math engine performs hardware 16-bit × 16-bit → 32-bit multiplication with optional accumulation and 32-bit ÷ 16-bit → 16-bit division. The system allows parallel processing of the CPU.
• RAM: 64 KB of 120ns DRAM
• Cartridges: Available in 128, 256, 512 KB sizes, and (with bank-switching) 1 MB
• Ports: Headphone port (3.5 mm stereo; originally wired for mono) and ComLynx (for multiple unit communication, serial)
• LCD Screen: 3.5-inch diagonal
• Battery holder: Six AA batteries, providing 4–5 hours of use on Lynx I and 5–6 hours on Lynx II.

Legacy

Telegames released several games in the late 1990s, including a version of Raiden and a platformer called Fat Bobby in 1997, and an action sports game called Hyperdrome in 1999.

On March 13, 1998, almost three years after the Lynx stopped being made, JTS Corporation sold all Atari properties to Hasbro Interactive for $5 million. On May 14, 1999, Hasbro, which kept those properties until selling Hasbro Interactive to Infogrames in 2001, gave up all rights to the Jaguar, allowing anyone to create and publish software for the platform without Hasbro’s approval. Some online sources suggest the Lynx’s rights may have been released at the same time as the Jaguar, but this is not confirmed. Despite being discontinued, the Lynx, like the Jaguar, has continued to receive support from a group of fans who created many homebrew games, such as T-Tris (the first Lynx game with a save feature), Alpine Games, and Zaku.

In 2008, Atari was recognized at the 59th Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards for helping create the first handheld games with the Lynx.

In 2022, the collection Atari 50 was released, featuring several popular Lynx games, marking the first time classic Lynx software was officially rereleased by Atari. A selection of Lynx games has also been released as separate titles on other platforms, such as Steam and the Evercade.