Mike

The Lynx 48K only has about 14k of useable RAM - the rest is mainly graphics ram. This isn't so unusual - back in the day, the Spectrum originally only had 16k (although they dropped that version fairly quickly). One of the selling points of the Lynx was that it could be upgraded (albeit by returning it, to be factory upgraded). So the "48k" label was creative marketing! The lynx had four 8k colour banks, which was rather generous at the time. But it did raise the question "where's all my ram gone?" as soon as you got it home.

My version is 96k only. When they upgraded the Lynx 48k to 96k, they also upgraded a few rom routines, which means it won't even load on a 48k (you get a "not yet implemented" error message). It's no problem these days, because most Lynx enthusiasts will upgrade to 96k anyway. My favourite for simplicity is "Jynx". It's very robust and well written, by Jonathan Markland. Its seems to run *almost* all Lynx software. "Pale" lacks polish, and can be overly complicated (although very feature rich for hardcore enthusiasts/developers). Both are PC mainly, although you may find a linux variant. As you say, neither are actively maintained. I occasionally use Mame, but it can be confusing to configure. I have had fun using it's inbuilt debugger though, to step through the Lynx ROM code, etc.

Thank you. Pleased to be among fellow retro enthusiasts!

Hi, I am Mike who posted the JSW tap file on the other forum. I stumbled across this thread by accident, and thought I'd share my knowledge on the provenance of the JSW software for the Lynx. The JSW software actually came from a disk image, which a retro/lynx enthusiast had uploaded to the internet for the community. But disk images aren't very emulator friendly or accessible to users, and so I altered the loading program - which was written in Basic - to make it load as a single tap file. At the time, I had been writing a utility to create tap files for the Lynx, and so I had the necessary knowledge. The version that I uploaded had a menu screen that allowed you to choose infinite lives. So I suspect it was hacked version. Hacked versions were inevitably made "back in the day" to help with playground distribution. But whether this was hacked more recently, I don't know. The software does show a "by Tim Titchmarsh for Phoenixx Software" message. Why I originally thought it was by "Tynesoft" is unclear. This is probably just my mistake when I was trying find attributions for the software titles. I've done some investigation and found a copy of an original advertisement for JSW (by Phoenixx Software) - which proves it was definitely of the era and not a later conversion (see attached). The magazine is the Lynx User Group's publication (Volume 1, issue 3, page 15) - which is available online. UKScone's Camputers Lynx Archive Whether JSW was licensed to Phoenixx, is anyone's guess. But I am confident it is "of the era". I think Richard is right about those other software titles, which were probably later conversions by hobbyists. There are a lot of similarities (hardware-wise) between the Lynx and Spectrum, and so software conversions wouldn't have been *that* challenging, relatively speaking. But the Lynx market was tiny, so hardly anyone bothered. The graphics were actually better on the Lynx (no colour clash!), but slow, and no good for gaming. The sound was just a simple beeper - like the spectrum. Mike.