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The Commodore Amiga and Atari ST both reached buyers in 1985 with 16-bit processors, dedicated graphics and sound hardware and windowed operating systems, and they became Europe's leading game machines for the rest of the decade.
These machines put capabilities previously found in expensive workstations into ordinary homes: sampled audio, animation, video overlay and multitasking. For games they raised expectations of what a computer should look and sound like, and they trained a European generation of programmers, artists and musicians.
Designed by engineers who had worked on the Amiga and then picked up by Atari, the Lynx shipped with a backlit color display, hardware sprite scaling and cable multiplayer, but battery drain and a thin library kept it marginal.
The handheld contest of 1989 produced something close to a natural experiment. Better hardware lost to cheaper hardware with a stronger library and longer battery life, and the outcome is still used to argue that portable design is governed by price, power and software rather than by raw capability.
