..the way forward for ATARI ???

WARNING-- DANGER--- ALERT--- BE PREPARED

As our Ataris get older and less reliable one day we will find that when we switch on they won't work and worse still no spare parts or anyone willing to repair them, so before all those hundreds of thousands of lines of programming code goes to waste think up, do you wish you had a 100mhz Atari? Or even faster?, there are a few dedicated programmers left who are determined to keep the simple user friendly platform alive, after buying my first PC I was faced with task of spending weeks trying to reproduce all sorts of databases, DTP documents and trying to get and learn how to use lots of little utilities that were second nature to me on Ataris With emulation I found I could learn the PC programs at my own speed while continuing to work and swap documents with my Ataris that I still use every day

You may have hung up your Atari boots years ago, never even had a hard drive on it, why not get a CD full of programs take a break from the Windoze force fed Os, and have the odd night running this Classic Operating System.

One way of making the transition to the PC platform or running the Atari programs you love, have paid good money for and are used to at fantastic speed is to emulate, there are several programs ranging from the free to the very expensive, as far as I have found so far only one Steem Engine can run midi sequencers and editors which is real boon as many people like myself were first drawn to Atari because of the two little midi ports and spent quite a bit of time and money on some of these programs also built up big libraries of sounds, the hardware dongle problem for the likes of the genuine Notator program still remains, I have no time for, or interest in games so all I've tried is serious stuff .

Because these programs are very small , you can install them all and even several different configurations of the same one for compatibility situations, and with the right files on a few floppies you can take these "systems" around with you and run them on any PC you have access to.

Like the other pages on this site this will be added to from time to time, my first experiments have been with magic PC, Tosbox, Gemulator, Steem Engine and pacifist, so far this is what I've found.

My main Atari is a falcon and Magic PC will run almost everything that runs on the real thing apart from hardware specific programs like Apex, despite lots of help and suggestions I never managed to surf with it but others have with their PC' s this must be something to do with mine, there is no real benefit being able to do this as the PC surfs a lot faster anyway, I just wanted to see Cab running very fast online. Magic PC is a full commercial program and the most expensive route, for extra capability it can run a tos image instead of the magic shell .Application Systems Heidelberg - Einfach gute Software a German demo is available from this site

STEEM ENGINE freeware

http://www.pyridine.co.uk/steem/  The only one I have fount to handle MIDI, this really is a boon for people with old Atari synth editing programs and utils that will never be written for the PC

PACIFIST The Little Green Desktop Mainly for games I never managed to get this to run, if anyone reading this can help please mail me.

GEMULATOR Atari only version is quite slick and there is now a free version . Emulators Online It can run quite a lot of stuff, but has a few odd quirks and surprises like not doing \ read the online help regarding the name you give your your tos image, there is no tos extraction program on this site so here is one for download. ROMIMAGE.TOS To save you realizing that you need one after you have got started.

TOSBOX TOSBOX homepage Shareware by Mark Slagel the author of silkmouse that I'm sure many of us know and use (I do on every Atari I have) not as fast at some things as the others but written in a different way with the advantage of running some things the others won't and in high rez 16 colour, drives can be assigned to folders which means with a bit of planning, you can share those big font folders, just for the fun of it I have surfed with this one and Pagestream works like a dream.

With the exception of magic PC when running its own O.S, all these programs require a "tos image" that is a file of the original Atari operating system, most come with a small program to extract the required data from your real Atari. Tos image files may be found here TOS IMAGES

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