Lamer Deluxe tm

Dirty Larry also supports stereo. The cool thing about stereo on the Lynx is that you have variable stereo panning per channel, while the Amiga had hardcoded full left and right panning for all channels.

You have to press down on the battery cover pretty hard to open it. Closing it is even trickier, I'm always afraid I won't close it properly and part of the cover will break under the pressure.

Taking off the display cover is kind of a nightmare. The cover is really stiff, so you have to apply a lot of pressure to the tabs on the inside. Broke two parts of my housing that were holding the tabs because the cover gave very suddenly. Still seems to be on there tightly enough because it clicks down on the sides of the cover as well. That's a procedure I wouldn't really like to do again :^(

I have the connector with the notches already in my Lynx. Still need to make the cable. The heat shrink looks like a good solution to make the cable sturdy. Thanks for the detailed explanation.

I've just received my replacement screen cover from techbabe. It came packaged in a small envelope with no bubble wrap, loosely wrapped in a barely fitting piece of rough torn off packaging paper. I was surprised it didn't get damaged. Apart from some very small scratches at the edges of the display, it looks as good as new.

I ordered one from techbabe a week ago, because on of my Lynxes has one that has been badly manufactured, causing rainbow interference effects on the display. The replacement one isn't new, but was described as 'as good as new'. I haven't received it yet.

Thanks for the detailed guide! This should clear up some confusion and greatly reduce the amount of problems people have been having with this modification.

I have no idea what could be wrong with your Lynx, but I wish you the best of luck and I hope you get it working again. EDIT: have you been trying both batteries and external power?

I know the old display is slow, I've made a couple of demos taking advantage of that effect. The new display sure is massively more clear. I wonder how many games are using non-60-hertz refresh rates, it might be possible to find that out using the handy debugger.

I just noticed something with the new screen; in the second level of Ninja Gaiden, when the background scrolls, high contrast details flicker a lot. I'm not sure what is causing this, it might be large changes between color values, but it is strange that I haven't noticed it in other games yet. EDIT: Just noticed it in the red details of the first level of Zarlor Mercenary as wel. Just like Ninja Gaiden this game has scrolling that is pretty slow and not very smooth, maybe that is causing the effect. EDIT2: I just checked Zarlor Mercenary on the original display and there the scrolling does look smooth. I wonder if this is purely caused by the slowness of the display, or if it is using a non-standard display refresh rate. Is the new screen able to do variable refresh rates?

I finished adding the edge connector for the VGA out in the space of the brightness dial today. With the ridges I filed into the sides of the connector it feels completely tight without the need for further reinforcement, which is great. I still need to make the edge connector to VGA connector cable and am wondering how to close up the edge connector part of that, I wonder if shrink tube alone would be sturdy enough. I bought a magnifying lamp with an arm to help me solder small parts with insufficient ambient light. Looking through the glass I cannot see the shaft of my soldering iron and it melted part of my display ribbon. Luckily it only melted the isolation of one wire and everything still worked. Is the backlight wire supposed to be soldered to the chip directly? Because I wasn't able to solder it to the round solder pad (via) at the end of the trace. Lynx games are so much more fun with the new display, really great. My batteries seem to last a long time now as well.

All the graphics you see on the Lynx are sprites (of almost unlimited size and amount, only limited by memory and performance), there are no tiles or backgrounds, it is all just one big list of hardware scalable and compressable sprites. So in theory the amount of parallax layers on the Lynx is endless, just limited by the target framerate.

Now that I've installed my new screen I notice I need a new speaker and probably a recap and a proper voltage converter. The one from best electronics will probably get too expensive for me as I read they use the most expensive kind of shipping.

Recapping before adding McWill's display seems like a good idea anyway, because after the mod, the display is not detachable anymore, which makes recapping slightly more complicated. IIRC it can also improve the audio quality.

Have been working on installing this mod over the weekend after receiving it on Saturday. Bought a cheap new soldering station for it that turned out to work great. Reading this forum I decided to desolder the LCD connector, that was a lot of work, I had to keep checking if all the solder was gone using a magnifier (I used desoldering braid). Then it turned out the colored wires I bought (they didn't have the rainbow ribbon cable I wanted) were too thick to fit through the holes. So I went searching through my spare parts and found an IDE-style ribbon cable and also an edge connector that could be used as a VGA connector, as shown here in the thread. Cut off six connections then made the grooves on the side too deep, so I had to do that all over again and then there wasn't enough light to properly solder the connections (might have melted the connector as well), so the VGA out will have to wait. One of those lit magnifiers with an arm would probably have been a good investment. I agree that a black VGA connector would have looked nicer than the white one. Installed the screen yesterday evening and luckily it worked the first time, the difference is incredible. A lot of games look really fantastic on the new screen and are a lot easier to play as well. The small demos I've made for the Lynx won't work on it because they all use flicker-transparency tricks. I noticed I need a new speaker as well, maintenance of this Lynx will be slightly harder now that the display cannot be disconnected anymore. I replaced the display of this Lynx unit because it had a rainbow interference effect that moved when moving the display, it now turns out the lens over the display is causing this, because the effect is still there, if only I had known. So now I need a new lens as well. All in all a fantastic product, looks more professionally done than many commercial products and McWill was a lot faster than most companies as well. Thank you for making this McWill, it is like having a new model Lynx, I'm interested in the GameGear display as well.

It doesn't need to alter the sprite in the horizontal interrupt, as it alters the definition of the sprite itself, so it will work at any time before being drawn. I don't think the Lynx draws sprites in sync with the raster lines anyway. It's a while ago, but if I remember correctly that was indeed a transparent pixel.

Sorry to necro-bump this thread, just came across it. Quite some time ago I put some Lynx games through the debugger of the Handy emulator (a really awesome debugger). And I noticed that Road Blasters used a really neat trick to draw the road. The whole road is just a single sprite. The Lynx is capable of using run-length compression with sprites, which means you give it a pixel value and how many times it should be repeated (drawing a horizontal line of that length), great for compressing sprites with lots of flat-colored areas. For each horizontal line of the road, Road Blasters alters the repeat amount of the first pixel, to shift that line left or right, which is used to bend the road. The Lynx then draws the road very quickly, as it is just a single sprite. By comparison, checkered flag uses a sprite for each horizontal line of the road, which draws much more slowly, resulting in a choppy framerate. I also looked at the amazing way games like STUN RUNNER and Blue Lightning draw their levels, which you can see being drawn sprite-by-sprite by using the step function of the debugger. Blue Lightning uses the taper and skew capabilities of the sprites to build the landscapes in perspective. The debugger is also really neat for watching code modify itself.

The PocketPC version of Handy (PocketLynx) also runs very well (fast and compatible). I can't exit it in any normal way though, too bad it's not being developed anymore. Also the buttons of most PocketPC's make it a bit hard to control some of the games.

Both my Lynx I and Lynx IIs work fine with NiMH batteries. Though they can be a tight fit inside the Lynx I's battery compartment and therefore hard to remove. Lynx II should have the better batterylife, IIRC Atari claims five hours for the first and six for the second version. Apart from the advantages of stereo sound, backlight switch (it also doesn't time out and switch off when you pause a game) and handier cartridge port, I much prefer the IMO awesome design of the Lynx II. The Built-in speaker of the Lynx-I has a louder volume BTW and the Lynx I has two versions with different d-pads.

One idea that some games use is to utilise the horizontal blanking interrupt to feed the audio system with digital samples. Depending on the display frequency this gives you a samplerate of about 6KHz. The advantage is that you won't have a seperate audio interrupt slowing the system down if you're already using the horizontal blanking interrupt for something. Roadblasters does it this way, for example. What's very cool about the Lynx II is that it gives you full stereo panning for each of the four voices.

There's a topic here about multiplayer games. I like Slimeworld, Xenophobe and Rampage. There's also a topic about the worst games for the Lynx. I find the majority of Lynx games enjoyable. Favorites include Shadow of the Beast, Roadblasters, Robotron, APB and STUN Runner. My wife likes Rygar, Super Skweek and Crystal Mines II. My dad likes Chip's Challenge a lot. Most people dislike Hard Drivin'. Like the name says it's quite hard, mostly because the framerate is low and collisions sometimes seem unfair. I persisted with this game and I like it. When the car speeds up the framerate gets a lot more smooth and the physics are nice.

Barely better than the NES? Let me see the NES do something similar to: STUN Runner, Blue Lightning, Shadow of the Beast, Steel Talons, Hard Drivin', Battlezone 2000, Electrocop, Warbirds etc. And I'd really like to see the SNES or GBA do STUN Runner or Blue Lightning. A major part of the look of a game is art direction. You can get really good looking graphics on a limited system with good art direction and talented artists. Look at games like Shadow of the Beast and Metroid for instance. Or the Kirby screenshot you posted. TailChao mentioned that the Lynx can do much more than what most of the commercial releases show. Many of them are underutilizing the capabilities of the Lynx. And a smaller display means that a low resolution is less apparent. People are noticing this now with the Gameboy Micro. My PSOne games also look a lot better on a small 5" TFT display. Don't forget viewing distance though, you usually don't sit as close to a TV screen as you are to the display of a handheld. Only that way the size of the display doesn't make a lot of difference.

English is the preferred language at this board. I'll translate your question: "If I play the Atari Lynx II, how long do the batteries last, or do I need a powersupply?" The Lynx works about five hours on regular Alkalines. Though you can also use NiMH batteries, which might last longer. Anyone notice a difference? (Ongeveer vijf uur op Alkaline batterijen, misschien langer met goeie NiMH batterijen)

Hahahahaahaahahahaa ROTFLOL That is the funniest post I've read in a while. My muscles ar hurting now heheheh.

Wow, great improvements! The ship controls very nicely. The deformable landscape works really well and is a very cool effect. The anti-aliasing on the ship is a nice touch. I'm looking forward to seeing this turn into a real game. It's very interesting to be able to follow it's progress.