stefan@spcc386.UUCP (Stefan Posthuma) (10/02/89)
I've been to the PCW show in London, and it was BUSY! On Friday, I barged into the Atari stand and saw Jeff Minter playing with the Lynx handheld. Since I know him, he handed me the wonderful device when he saw me "Hey Stefan, check it out, it is really awesome". The Atari officials became immediately nervous when some stranger held one of the two working handhelds, and after a few moments it was gently taken from me. The thing that struck me about it is the incredible crisp display. You can almost distinguish each pixel on it. It was playing the California Games, and they were very colorful. The sprite scaling is indeed awesome, but I couldn't hear any sounds. (Just felt some vibrations at the left of the machine, I guess that's where the speaker is at). It is roughly as wide as an A4 piece of paper and it really doesn't weigh much. The controls on it is one of those 8-way movable crosses you often find on handheld consoles, and need getting used to. I asked Atari when it was going to be for sale and the guy told me that it would be in the shops before Christmas. Also, in November you are supposed to be able to buy it in the tax-free areas of some airports (including Schiphol, I don't know the others), but that's just one of the many rumors. The STE was nowhere to be seen, but a friend of mine has seen a developers document for it and this is was he told me: DMA sampled sounds at frequencies from 9 to 50 Khz. The fact that it uses DMA means (in theory) that it doesn't take any processor time to play samples. The screen base vector now has a low byte (finally) and the width of a scanline can be specified in bytes, while the offset to the next scanline can also be given in bytes, so scrolling is a piece of cake. Together with the blitter and the increased color palette (too bad about the four planes still) this machine could do some breathtaking games. The leisure part of the show was a total turmoil of noise and vision. Every stand had huge displays of the latest games, all speakers were turned up loud and long arrays of coinops and computers allowed people to play videogames, much to the delight of the hordes of teenagers who flooded the show on Saturday and Sunday. Of course, the Batman rage was very present, everywhere they sold posters, caps and stuff. A bit of a chaotic report, but it is Monday morning and my brains aren't in gear yet. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Oh my God, it is the attack of the Half-Crazed Mutant Teenage Alien Computer Junkies!!" +------------------------------------ "Relax! It are just some SPCC employees" | uunet!mcvax!spcc386!stefan