The Atari Lynx, released in 1989 was Atari’s first and only handheld system. The Atari Lynx holds the honor of having many innovative features, such as being the first colored, backlit handheld system, first system with a switchable layout for left and right handed players, first system with the ability to next work and the first system with hardware support for zooming and distorting sprites to create 3D effects.
Originally created by Epyx in 1987 the Atari Lynx was a powerful handheld for its time with two customs 16-bit chips that housed separate processors for sound, graphics and math. The Lynx was capable of displaying 4,096 colors, had 64K RAM and 4-channel sound. The Lynx had a 3.5-inch screen, which displayed in 160 X 102 resolution.
With the custom 16-bit chips and the sprite zooming, the Atari Lynx was able to create 3D effects for great games such as Blue Lightning. Other Classics included Shanghai, Xy-Bots, Slime World, Checkered Flag and Warbirds; the latter two included a networking feature to link up to 8 Atari Lynxs.
While the Lynx was discontinued and support for it was dropped not long after its released, there are still new games released for this system by homebrew programmers.
