I’m going in on it. Going to play through the entire Atari Lynx library. Post screenshots, all the classic things. Going to use the Handy emulator, though if you are playing along at home annd want to use an on chip emulator, awesome. I’m looking to see if there was a catalog number thing I can go by or if it’ll just be alphabetical order.
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Oh wow, what a mission. I love the chunky resolution on that thing. Although I think the only Lynx game I’ve played was the Lynx version of Basketbrawl in Atari 50 and that was a bit rough. ^_ ^
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posting this for future reference:
https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Atari_Lynx_emulators
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I owned a Lynx! I had the 2nd rev model. Barely took it anywhere and just played games in bed with the AC adapter. Mostly played Rampart on it because the rest of the games I owned sucked, and I never got more because my birthday money went to other consoles instead. Never knew where to rent Lynx games or had any friends whose games I could borrow, either.
I wish I could have owned Joust, or Chip’s Challenge, or Todd’s Adventures in Slime World. Tim Cain talks about playing the multiplayer for that one in one of his recent vlog posts.
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I owned a Lynx too. Mine didn’t work with batteries for some reason so I pretty much just played it in my room with the AC adapter as well. I initially had bought it with Rampage, but after a couple days the screen stopped working so took it back to the shop and they sent it away for repairs. It took them so long that my dad went in there and did … something … and they apparently gave him another one, I assume just to make him go away.
I lost Rampage because we had refunded it thinking the game was faulty, rather than the console, but the other games I ended up getting were Desert Strike, Gauntlet, Toki and STUN Runner. Gauntlet was notable for being one of the games that required you to hold the system sideways, which was always kinda awkward.
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Oh yes, Ms Pac Man on Lynx is a delight, almost perfect for a 1989 LCD screen, and I’m really looking forward to playing that one again.
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California Games is probably the very best Lynx game. Also keen on the S.T.U.N. Runner port which never had a proper console port in its day (I believe it eventually showed up in Midway Arcade Treasures)
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Okay, so this week I’m going to go in on the 1989 releases
- California Games
- Chip’s Challenge
- Gates of Zendocon
- Electrocop
- Blue Lightning
Not many titles available for launch. I’m going to be trying retroarch for my emulation needs. This should be fun for at least a decent number of the titles.
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The Lynx version of California Games has the best rendition of Louie Louie. Always loved how crunchy the Lynx soundchip was.
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Good good. While I still think chronogaming is criminal behavior looking at the library by year really reveals trends.
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Thanks, your vote of confidence is filling me with the determination I’m sure I will need to do this
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I am having a hell of a time getting emulation set up on my machine. Handy works but the sound is bad. MAME is not opening them. I have never figured out retroarch. Going to try finding a front end for mednafen and trying that. This is miserable. I dn’t rememmber it being this hard.
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yeah it’s an extremely crabwise field of tech
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In Mednafen, I got Ms. Pac-Man working in Windows without a front end, using a shortcut with this command line
C:\downloaded\mednafen\mednafen.exe -video.driver softfb -md.stretch aspect -md.videoip 0 roms\msp.zip
(I had the game in a folder called “roms” in the Mednafen folder.")
And once in game, Alt+Shift+1 to map the controller.
It took the third google hit for “ms pac man lynx rom” to get one that worked; that one had a zipped “.gg” file; the others had zipped “.lnx” files and Mednafen reported “Unrecognized file format” with those.
Mednafen’s Lynx documentation is Mednafen Atari Lynx Documentation ; they say their implementation is based on Handy. It also says you need “the 512-byte Lynx boot ROM image, named as “lynxboot.img”, and placed in the Mednafen base directory”–but I was able to launch Ms. P without it, so I dunno about that.
btw you can just drag and drop a .lnx rom onto the Mednafen .exe and run games that way.
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Ok, I’m in. California Games. This is a weird choice for a pack in. It’s already plenty old when the Lynx came out. We’ve seen it before on pretty much every platform by the time the Lynx hit. This version looks great. I kind of think the Mega Drive version looks prettier, but it does not get the vibe right like the Lynx does. The music is probably best here too. Check out this tune which is barely distinct from Wipeout.
The roller skating and flying disk games are missing from the Lynx port. The flying disk is no big loss, and the roller skating is just a sort of runner minigame. Again, no big loss but putting the roller skater in the high score screen kind of makes it feel like an oversight.
Overall, Cali Games is fun but kind of pointless.
Gates of Zendocon was just tedium. Very euroshmup jank and looking up details about it online says there are over a hundred levels. Why?
I’ll play the rest this weekend.
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(I still get “Unrecognized file format” when I try that with the ones I downloaded. But they may not be correctly headered for all I know.)
you need lynxboot.img in mednafen’s firmware folder for lynx games to run
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