OMG i had no idea!!! (Atari LYNX related)

ophion · Post by **ophion** » Fri Jul 15, 2005 6:59 pm 0

corrosive wrote: Or even better a history from the 2600 to the 3DO or wherever the Amiga guys finally all disappeared (hardware wise - I know at least R.J.Mical was involved in games for a bit longer - including Fathammer briefly I think)?

He's at Sony now, apparently.

Kronos · Post by **Kronos** » Fri Jul 15, 2005 7:13 pm 0

corrosive wrote: I thought it was kidney failure? He had kidney problems for a lot of his life, AFAIK.

wasnt sure but i know it wasnt very nice. he reminded me of bounty bob for some reason when i saw his pic for the first time! old father jay

corrosive wrote: I'm 99.9 recurring % sure he didn't work on the Lynx, but I really can't imagine that he wasn't an influence on those guys who did design the Lynx that worked at Amiga with him.

im sure he would have had support from jay if not official involvement, the antics of those guys at the time were pretty mad im sure they kept in touch afterwards

corrosive wrote: Yes, yes, I do, sounds like quite a good idea that - the magazine is in storage at the mo (at my parents), but I'll grab it and do some scanning as soon as possible. Not sure how I'll manage to fold the magazine open enough, and I'm loathe to cut it, but I'll do something

if you have a steady hand and a 3m pixel digicam works just aswell really, thats how i got some of my old a3 posters into my pc

corrosive wrote: Strangely enough I didn't really become familiar with the 8-bit Ataris until after my Amiga days, and it was quite funny seeing how similar the ideas behind it seemed to be in places.

See, I definitely disagree with you there. I don't think the PS2 is technically that bad at all. It was certainly an interesting attempt. Pity about the Sony hype machine though.

ps2 wasnt anywhere near as revolutionary i guess compared to ps1 but funnyly enough the people at polyphony etc who wring out every last drop from the ps2 remind me of the class amiga coders squeezin the blitter n copper to their limits! WRC4 is the best rally game in my opinion regardless of what its running on

Kronos · Post by **Kronos** » Fri Jul 15, 2005 7:14 pm 0

ophion wrote:
corrosive wrote: Or even better a history from the 2600 to the 3DO or wherever the Amiga guys finally all disappeared (hardware wise - I know at least R.J.Mical was involved in games for a bit longer - including Fathammer briefly I think)?
He's at Sony now, apparently.

R J Mical was also involved in Defender of the Crown...the miggys killer app along with The Pawn

Dio · Post by **Dio** » Sat Jul 16, 2005 12:36 am 0

Naaah. Both were identical on the ST (they shared the same codebase).

First killer app on the Amiga was Shadow Of The Beast.

guythp · Post by **guythp** » Sat Jul 16, 2005 12:42 am 0

Dio wrote:Naaah. Both were identical on the ST (they shared the same codebase).

First killer app on the Amiga was Shadow Of The Beast.

Agreed.

The mistake psygnosis made was releasing such a shit conversion on the ST around five bloody years AFTER the amiga version. Why? All it did was draw everyone's attention to the fact that the game had no real gameplay!

Mind you, nitro was a real corker, on both platforms (for a change)

ophion · Post by **ophion** » Sat Jul 16, 2005 3:03 pm 0

guythp wrote:
Dio wrote:Naaah. Both were identical on the ST (they shared the same codebase).

First killer app on the Amiga was Shadow Of The Beast.
Agreed.

The mistake psygnosis made was releasing such a shit conversion on the ST around five bloody years AFTER the amiga version. Why? All it did was draw everyone's attention to the fact that the game had no real gameplay!

Mind you, nitro was a real corker, on both platforms (for a change)

Yes, but (coming full circle) the Lynx version of Beast is lovely.

MegaZoid · Post by **MegaZoid** » Sat Jul 16, 2005 3:10 pm 0

The surfing on california games on the Lynx was the nuts much better than on anyother of the consoles/computers

noodles · Post by **noodles** » Sat Jul 16, 2005 6:43 pm 0

corrosive wrote:
ophion wrote:You are right, of course--he did Intuition. I spelled his name incorrectly, too (no "h").
I noticed, but I thought I'd get punched if I became even more pedantic

Edit :
You know what really annoys me? Go and look how many books there are about Apple and the Macintosh. There's tons. Absolutely loads. I've got most of them. So where is the history of the Amiga? Or even better a history from the 2600 to the 3DO or wherever the Amiga guys finally all disappeared (hardware wise - I know at least R.J.Mical was involved in games for a bit longer - including Fathammer briefly I think)?

I know. I'm sad.

There is something very bizarre in the way certain people bought out the
rights to the Amiga and then... just sat on them. Especially a PC maker
like Gateway. It's as if (/tin foil hat mode on) they wanted it to die.
Or were paid to bury it by some other entity that wished to remain in
the shadows. Or it's just human lazyness/incompetence.
It's just so sad, such a waste of brilliant engineering.

corrosive · Post by **corrosive** » Sat Jul 16, 2005 8:02 pm 0

noodles wrote: There is something very bizarre in the way certain people bought out the
rights to the Amiga and then... just sat on them. Especially a PC maker
like Gateway. It's as if (/tin foil hat mode on) they wanted it to die.
Or were paid to bury it by some other entity that wished to remain in
the shadows. Or it's just human lazyness/incompetence.
It's just so sad, such a waste of brilliant engineering.

Yup, but I suspect it's more about wanting to own the technology & patents, and then realising they didn't know what the hell to do with them/realising how bloody expensive it would be to do anything with them.

guythp · Post by **guythp** » Sat Jul 16, 2005 9:39 pm 0

MegaZoid wrote:The surfing on california games on the Lynx was the nuts much better than on anyother of the consoles/computers

Absolutely! It was the dogs' danglies. I was disappointed when I played other versions of the surfing (master system, C64 and possibly ST version) to find out they weren't really very good at all.

Roadblasters on the lynx was the best version evah, well except for the arcade.

Slimeworld, xybots, toki, warbirds (i never knew you could land), xenophobe, gauntlet, gates of zendacon.. All fantastic games... Damn, I want a go on my lynx now and it's in the attic... emulation just isn't the same.

phattslagg · Post by **phattslagg** » Sun Jul 17, 2005 12:15 am 0

Rampart, Shanghai, Awesome Golf, Chips Challenge and Rygar are among my faves on the Lynx. I've dabbled with Battlewheels, which is pretty good, and was pretty tempted by Alpine Games, but then I got my DS, which has taken over my gaming budget completely.

venusian · Post by **venusian** » Sun Jul 17, 2005 12:26 am 0

corrosive wrote:
noodles wrote: There is something very bizarre in the way certain people bought out the
rights to the Amiga and then... just sat on them. Especially a PC maker
like Gateway. It's as if (/tin foil hat mode on) they wanted it to die.
Or were paid to bury it by some other entity that wished to remain in
the shadows. Or it's just human lazyness/incompetence.
It's just so sad, such a waste of brilliant engineering.
Yup, but I suspect it's more about wanting to own the technology & patents, and then realising they didn't know what the hell to do with them/realising how bloody expensive it would be to do anything with them.

By the time they got them it was much, much too late.

One of the hardware designers (name escapes me - might have been Dave Hainie(sp?)) who was involved with the last of the C= work (AAA, Hombre etc) commented that soon after Amiga was bought out, an off-the-shelf PC graphics card could do more, faster, and at a much reduced cost. Even a VirgeDX would have shat all over anything the last Amiga designs could do.

fdave · Post by **fdave** » Sun Jul 17, 2005 1:19 am 0

guythp wrote:
MegaZoid wrote:The surfing on california games on the Lynx was the nuts much better than on anyother of the consoles/computers
Absolutely! It was the dogs' danglies. I was disappointed when I played other versions of the surfing (master system, C64 and possibly ST version) to find out they weren't really very good at all.

Roadblasters on the lynx was the best version evah, well except for the arcade.

Slimeworld, xybots, toki, warbirds (i never knew you could land), xenophobe, gauntlet, gates of zendacon.. All fantastic games... Damn, I want a go on my lynx now and it's in the attic... emulation just isn't the same.

That's weird because I fired up Handy the other day, played Slime world, Gate of Zendocon, Blue Lightening, et al, all the games I used to have for my Lynx and it because painfully obvious why the Lynx was such a disaster....:

The games were rubbish! :-/ Sorry, but they just look so bad in retrospect!

Give me Mario Land on the GB any day. Now Gargoyles Quest - that's a classic game - black and white graphics, 4 grey shades, 160x144 pixels, no sprite scaling. Genius.

skip · Post by **skip** » Sun Jul 17, 2005 8:42 am 0

STUN Runner

mmmmmmm, scaley sprites.

Still need a decent emulated version

corrosive · Post by **corrosive** » Sun Jul 17, 2005 10:03 am 0

venusian wrote: By the time they got them it was much, much too late.

One of the hardware designers (name escapes me - might have been Dave Hainie(sp?)) who was involved with the last of the C= work (AAA, Hombre etc) commented that soon after Amiga was bought out, an off-the-shelf PC graphics card could do more, faster, and at a much reduced cost. Even a VirgeDX would have shat all over anything the last Amiga designs could do.

Yup, that was Haynie; I posted a link to some of the documents he made available from the laters days of the Amiga (including some on AAA & Hombre) back on page 2 : http://www.thule.no/haynie/ - well worth a read if you've never seen them

I'm not sure I'd say a VirgeDX could shit all over AA/AAA - it may have been faster (probably much faster) and have higher resolutions but I don't think it was anywhere near as flexible?