VIDEO GAME CONSOLES

ATARIAN WEB 2000

ATARI Inc. last updated Feb. 2002

VIDEO GAME CONSOLES

click images for photo galleries

*Image of Atari's SUPER PONG from 1975

The first popular computer for the home, Atari's 2600 VIDEO COMPUTER SYSTEM was released in 1977. It proved it's power without even having a keyboard and gave a new direction to video games for entertainment, problem solving, and educational use.

Unlike earlier consoles, the 2600 is expandable with games on removable cartridges. The heavy plastic cases had a latch to protect the pins inside. The removable controllers also improved to 2600's potentials.

Click Image...the Atari 2600 story and photos of it's change from the big wood grain box to a tiny rainbow one.

ATARI 5200 --1982--

To improve Atari's position in the gaming console market comes the 5200, designed with the 8-bit computer technology. It's large case had internal space for the controllers at the back. It even looked like Atari's 1200XL computer (also released in 1982) without a keyboard.

Atari put the keyboard in these complex controllers. With newly designed stick control that gave 360° movement and speed response with twin fire buttons (duplicated on each side) and a 12-key number pad. Early model 5200s had 4 controller ports but later ones had only 2.

*** click image for see 5200 cartridge boxes

Atari 7800

This was the most powerful 8-bit system for it's time and many years following. This was ready for release in 1984 but the new Atari Corporation's change of ownership stopped it for a "Serious Computing Business" image. That is, until the system was released anyway in 1987 to compete with new Japanese designed systems Nintendo NES and Sega Master System for another space in console gaming. There was no longer licenses to arcade titles to support it, even from Atari Games, Inc. (still owned by Warner Communications.)

click image for game photos

LYNX

Portable Color Entertainment System ^{(pre-Lynx
image from mid-1989)}

The world's first color LCD on the market, but seen only as the world's first COLOR PORTABLE GAME SYSTEM. Two version were released, the first in 1989 and an even smaller version in 1991. It used ROM cards in it's back for the game program, as seen with Lynx II here.

The custom-built LCD screen is 3½" diagonal and could create up to 16 colors at once from a pallet of 4096. It's 16-bit CPU was faster than GameBoy and Game Gear, and was the only to offer hardware assisted sprite scaling and rotation for realistic 3-D action.

Lynx could link up consoles for multiplayer with an included cable. The released games offer from 1 to 8 players simultaneously.

Rare advertisement page for the LYNX II system from Atari

screenshots; see what this 12 year old color liquid-crystal screen could do !!

JAGUAR

JAGUAR VR helmet

The last console from Atari; offered 16 Million+ colors, displayed millions of polygons in a vast 3-D environment, plus texture mapping - shading - and light sources abilities, to name a few.

There was a CD-ROM add-on shown as early as '93, which wasn't released until late '95. The virtual helmet project was due for 1995 but was cancelled, the Missile Command 3-D was the first and only Pro-Controller -- 6 buttons & 2 triggers title designed around it and released anyway. An improved controller was released called the Pro-Controller. The modem project was cancelled but there was third party modems available, the only games I can think of to use it are Doom and Ultra Vortek.

Jaguar was the first console with real-time 3D rendering, however there were too few developers experienced to utilize this.

from the Jaguar FAQ:

The Jaguar has five processors, which are contained in three chips. Two of the chips are proprietary designs, nicknamed "Tom" and "Jerry". The third chip is a standard Motorola 68000 used as a coprocessor. Tom and Jerry are built using an 0.5 micron silicon process. With proper programming, all five processors can run in parallel. - "Tom" - 750,000 transistors, 208 pins - Graphics Processing Unit (processor #1) - 32-bit RISC architecture (32/64 processor) - 64 registers of 32 bits wide - Has access to all 64 bits of the system bus - Can read 64 bits of data in one instruction - Rated at 26.591 MIPS (million instructions per second) - Runs at 26.591 MHz - 4K bytes of zero wait-state internal SRAM - Performs a wide range of high-speed graphic effects - Programmable - Object processor (processor #2) - 64-bit RISC architecture - 64-bit wide registers - Programmable processor that can act as a variety of different video architectures, such as a sprite engine, a pixel-mapped display, a character-mapped system, and others. - Blitter (processor #3) - 64-bit RISC architecture - 64-bit wide registers - Performs high-speed logical operations - Hardware support for Z-buffering and Gouraud shading - DRAM memory controller - 64 bits - Accesses the DRAM directly - "Jerry" - 600,000 transistors, 144 pins - Digital Signal Processor (processor #4) - 32 bits (32-bit registers) - Rated at 26.6 MIPS (million instructions per second) - Runs at 26.6 MHz - Same RISC core as the Graphics Processing Unit - Not limited to sound generation - 8K bytes of zero wait-state internal SRAM - CD-quality sound (16-bit stereo) - Number of sound channels limited by software - Two DACs (stereo) convert digital data to analog sound signals - Full stereo capabilities - Wavetable synthesis, FM synthesis, FM Sample synthesis, and AM synthesis - A clock control block, incorporating timers, and a UART - Joystick control - Motorola 68000 (processor #5) - Runs at 13.295MHz - General purpose control processor

Atari Jaguar technology was shared in some coin-op games too