97 karma · joined May 28, 2016
> This is one of my favorite sites on the internet: https://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html
Yes - I also enjoyed the book "Hacker's Delight", but haven't got round to reading the second edition yet.
Even if the voltages had been evenly spaced, would it have been correct to use evenly-spaced values (0, 85, 170 and 255) for each of r, g and b in an emulator? I believe this would be correct, assuming that the gamma curve of a modern monitor matches that of a 1980s/90s TV - which should be the case for a monitor calibrated to sRGB?
Other manufacturers may have stopped building them, but that's because (with the exception of Sony's PSP) Nintendo's handhelds are the only ones that have ever really been successful.
Those other systems all work by memory-mapping the ROM cartridge so that it can be seen by the CPU directly, whereas the Lynx requires ROM data to be read into RAM first. In that way, its programming model is more like a system with a disc drive (either magnetic or optical) than one which takes ROM cartridges.
Making the Game Gear more-or-less a portable Master System was probably the right decision though. It enabled easy porting of existing Master System games, and development of new games to run on both platforms. Although the SMS was dead in Japan and North America before the Game Gear's release, it was still going strong in Europe and other markets.
It also made possible the Game Gear's SMS mode, in which the machine behaves exactly like a Master System. This allowed backwards compatibility with existing SMS games via an adapter (which seems to have been important to Sega - the Genesis has a similar capability), and enabled an even simpler method of porting SMS games: a few Game Gear games [1] are really SMS games with a built-in adapter.
The Game Gear therefore had a stronger software library than the Lynx, despite being technically inferior. And, ultimately, the overwhelming success of the Game Boy showed that it is the games (and battery life) that really matter.
IIRC the Lynx was designed at a time (1986-87) when this was feasible for portable systems but not for consoles, because of its low resolution (160 x 102 - the height seems strange until you realize that it gives you almost exactly 16 * 1024 pixels).
> Sega also ended up lifting a lot of the Lynx's design for the Game Gear after the Handy was pitched to them by Epyx.
The external design, maybe, but the internals of the two machines are very different. The Game Gear uses a Z80 to the Lynx's 6502 and has tile-based graphics where the Lynx uses a bitmapped display. The Game Gear is essentially a portable Sega Master System - a console that predates the design of the Lynx.
> There is also an amusing story about how Epyx's pitch to Nintendo of Japan went terribly wrong, though I can't find it now.
It's here: https://www.retrogamer.net/profiles/hardware/atari-lynx/
“We were the first non-Nintendo people to learn of the existence of the Nintendo Game Boy,” Needle says, recoiling even at the memory. “We were crushed. Joe was infuriated. The Nintendo boss left the room and we just sat there, wondering what to do next.”
http://www.smspower.org/maxim/forumstuff/gamegenie.html
(This was designed for the Sega Game Gear version, but the Game Boy algorithm is the same.)