Atari Lynx

[Level42]

Hey there. First post here and to be frank.....I'm not into digital musical instruments at all (SHOCK )......BUT....

Well...I was looking for a way to give my Atari Lynx (a portable game console from the late 80's,early 90's) a variable clock frequency and found the Circuitbenders website and in particular the page with the LTC1799 Oscillator PCB.

The reason why I was looking for this was that already back in the late 90's there was a simple schematic to include a second (switchable) crystal to the Lynx. The original crystal is a 16Mhz one and the suggested added one was 24Mhz. I made that hack maybe somewhere in the early 2000's and it worked great on the Lynx that I had back then. Some of the games really benefitted from the extra (50% !) speed and made them much more fun. Others were simply unplayable at that speed though....

Recently I got back into the Lynx because of some recent developments (a brand new LCD screen which gives it modern day display quality and an SD cartridge which makes it possible to easily have every game released on a single cartridge...plus a way to easily try all home-brew stuff) got me back to the platform....I still have a couple of Lynxes around....

So I remembered this hack and thought.....why wouldn't there be a way to have a variable clock speed ? SO Google kindly pointed me to the LTC1799 Circuitbenders page and it looked exactly like what I needed AND it was small enough to easily fit inside the Lynx.

So I ordered one and installed it last night and well....here's a video of the result:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RX3oD8ITMoo

I'm posting this here because, as you notice, the music is (of course) also variable in speed....since there are a lot of people creating chip-tunes with Nintendo Gameboys, it might be cool to use a Lynx for such stuff for a change.

There are a few programs for music on the Lynx but I know nothing at all about them....sorry I'm just a stupid gamer , but here's a thread about it that might give a start: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/238159-making-music-for-lynx/

Anyway, I'm really happy with this nifty little PCB and just wanted to thank the guys behind it !!!

[Circuitbenders]

I completely missed this.

Nice work!

You should be able to get it up to about 31-32mHz with some careful adjustment of the trimmer on the LTC board.

Does the Lynx circuit start getting warm as you clock it up?