¶ Technical data
- Manufacturer: Atari
- Year of release: 1989
- CPU: 8-bit 65SC02 @ 4 MHz, alongside the custom Mikey and Suzy chips (16-bit blitter)
- RAM: 64 KB
- Screen: 3.5-inch backlit color LCD, 160x102
- Colors: 16 on screen out of a 4096-color palette
- Sound: 4 channels, 8-bit, stereo
- Media: cartridge
- Network: ComLynx (cable linking several consoles)
¶ Presentation
The Lynx is the world's first handheld console with a backlit color screen. Designed by Epyx under the code name Handy by former Amiga engineers, it was bought by Atari, who released it in 1989, only a few months after Nintendo's Game Boy. Technically there is no comparison: where the Game Boy shows four shades of green, the Lynx offers 16 on-screen colors out of 4096, a hardware blitter able to scale and distort sprites, and four-channel stereo sound.
The console has other ideas ahead of their time: the picture can be flipped 180° for left-handed players, and the ComLynx cable links several machines together for networked play — one of the very first handheld network gaming systems. A second version, the Lynx II, released in 1991, slims down the case and adds a switch to turn the backlight off.
Those qualities came at a price: the Lynx is bulky, expensive and, above all, a battery eater, with three to four hours of life from six AA cells where the Game Boy runs for over twenty on four. The library, some seventy official titles strong, holds real gems — California Games, Chip's Challenge, Blue Lightning, Todd's Adventures in Slime World, Rampart — but stays far too short against Nintendo's. Atari abandoned the machine in the mid-1990s; a homebrew scene still publishes new games for it.
¶ Emulators
New in Recalbox 10.1: the Libretro Holani core moves up to version 0.9.9.
Emulator availability per board:
| Emulator | RPI3/RPI02W | RPI4/400 | RPI5/500 | OGA/OGS/RG351 | PC | RG353 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Libretro Handy | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Libretro Mednafen_Lynx | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Libretro Holani | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
All three emulators are available on every board, with high compatibility and high speed. Handy is the default emulator, Mednafen_Lynx is the second choice and Holani the third. Handy and Holani are flagged as compatible with CRT output, which Mednafen_Lynx is not. Netplay and softpatching are not available on this system — ComLynx network play is therefore not emulated. RetroAchievements are supported.
Holani is a recent Lynx emulator, written in Rust and aimed at accuracy. If a game misbehaves under Handy, it is the first one to try — and it needs no BIOS at all.
¶ BIOS
The Lynx BIOS is optional: games start without it. It is only used by Handy and Mednafen_Lynx, to reproduce the original boot animation; Holani has no use for it.
| File name | Description | MD5 | Emulators |
|---|---|---|---|
lynxboot.img |
Lynx boot ROM (optional) | fcd403db69f54290b51035d82f835e7b | Handy, Mednafen_Lynx |
If you do choose to install it, place it like this:
/recalbox/share/bios/lynx/
└── lynxboot.img
¶ Roms
Put your games in:
/recalbox/share/roms/lynx/
Supported extensions per emulator:
| Emulator | Extensions |
|---|---|
| Handy | .lnx .o .zip .7z |
| Mednafen_Lynx | .lnx .lyx .o .zip .7z |
| Holani | .lnx .lyx .o .zip .7z |
The standard format is
.lnx(cartridge dump with a header), accepted by all three cores..lyx— same content, without the header — is not recognised by Handy: convert it to.lnxor pick Mednafen_Lynx or Holani for those files.