
Hatari: An Atari ST/STE/TT/Falcon Emulator - njn
http://hatari.tuxfamily.org/
======
mambodog
If you're interested in playing with an Atari ST but don't want to install
anything, there's an in-browser emulator on my website here:
[https://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/atari-st/](https://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-
js/atari-st/)

~~~
TomVDB
Was the high resolution screen that I remember really that low?

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bewo001
Monochrome was that insanely high 640x400 resolution.

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hyc_symas
You could do a hardware overscan tweak and get over 800x480. I seem to recall
I ran at 832x600 most of the time.

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bdamm
That's so cool. There's a few old programs I'd love to see but since it's been
over 30 years I can't recall their names.

\- A music composer that took advantage of the MIDI ports. Connecting the
software to synths etc would allow the Atari ST to not only control the synth,
but also to record the music in note form as it was played.

\- A BASIC interpreting environment. Noteworthy for no reason other than this
was the place where I wrote my first program ever.

\- A desktop publishing application with similar functions to the early
Pagemaker.

~~~
t0mek
> A music composer that took advantage of the MIDI ports.

Cubase or C-Lab Notator.

> A BASIC interpreting environment.

GFA BASIC.

> A desktop publishing application

This may be Calamus. Interesting fact: "an Atari Desktop Publishing system
consisting of an Atari Mega ST computer, mono hi-res monitor, SLM804 printer
and desktop publishing software cost less then an IBM or Apple laser printer
alone." [1]

[http://www.atarimuseum.com/computers/16bits/printers/laser/s...](http://www.atarimuseum.com/computers/16bits/printers/laser/slm804.html)

~~~
aidenn0
Timeworks Publisher ST was another desktop publishing app for the ST.

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thomasfl
I remember going through lengths to make my old Atari ST look like a Mac. I
installed the Monaco font and wrote a program, in assembly, to draw rounded
corners on the screen like the Mac had. Now I sit on a MacBook Pro and I am
trying to run Atari ST on it. Full circle.

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renegadus
Nice, had an Atari 800XL, then a 512STfm, and then I was one of the 3 people
who purchased a Falcon 030.

Learned Atari basic from a 2 page leaflet that came with my 800XL when I was
8, then progressed through True Basic and GFA Basic.

~~~
matt2000
This sounds exactly like me, except I didn't make it to the Falcon. I always
wonder if I should have gone C64 > Amiga, there just always seemed to be more
stuff available for them. I did love the ST though.

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j45
This is awesome! I wish I had kept my old ST disks haha.

Apps I remember:

Revenge of the Mutant Camels remains one of the best games ever.

Calamus was also a great piece of software that predated Pagemaker for many
years.

Heroes quest, police quest series of games.

There was an animation/tweenijg app for animation that blew me away.

These machines were great substitutes for amigas of the day.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
While Calamus was indeed a great piece of software (IIRC, Linotype-Hell
actually sold a very high-end printing system using an Atari ST and Calamus as
the control system for a Linotype Imagesetter), it did not predate PageMaker.
Aldus PageMaker came out in July 1985; Calamus DTP came out two years later,
in July 1987.

Calamus -- at least as a brand -- _outlived_ PageMaker, though! Invers
Software, the owners of Calamus, shut their doors only last year, but the web
site is still up; a macOS descendant of Calamus called "iCalamus" appears to
still be in active development, under relatively new owners (who are longtime
Macintosh developers).

[https://calamus.net](https://calamus.net)

[https://www.lemkesoft.de/en/products/icalamus/](https://www.lemkesoft.de/en/products/icalamus/)

~~~
Fins
There was also for a while a native Windows NT version of Calamus (they even
had Alpha et al versions, if I remember correctly) that was quite good; I used
it to make money for quite a long time, and although by now I guess there must
be something that approaches its functionality (haven't followed DTP world in
years), at the time it had features that Quark or Adobe couldn't touch.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
I think the NT -- well, later Windows in general, I guess -- version is the
one that kept going until 2018. I'd always heard good things about it, but was
over on the Mac side of the world with PageMaker and later InDesign. (While
I'm still over in Macworld, when I need to do DTP-ish things these days, they
tend to be in LaTeX, so I never actually looked up iCalamus, although I feel
like I should give it a test drive sometime.)

~~~
Fins
It well might have been. I was beta-testing it the North American publisher
(and got it for free, although they made quite a bit off me on Calamus SL and
plugins for Atari TT030 I had before), even for a while after they sold to...
Roxio was it? I can't even recall by now, but development was done in Europe.

They did some really nice things with virtual objects, being able to zoom in
down to a printer dot, stochastic rasterization and all that.

There were some other very high-end packages for Atari as well --Didot,
Retouche Pro, TMS Cranach. For some reason European developers really went
wild developing professional-level DTP software for Atari with some very
impressive results. Too bad Tramiels didn't do much to support them...

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nynyny7
Note that you can have a fully open-source retro experience by using EmuTOS (a
free operating system for Atari computers) with Hatari:
[https://github.com/emutos/emutos](https://github.com/emutos/emutos)

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bassrattle
I have a box of about 200 disks for this, and I've been keeping that old Atari
ST alive and in use. Looks like it's time to convert once and for all. Just
added a floppy disk drive to my Amazon list, here we go.

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itomato
Hatari was also the starting point for "Previous", the NeXT Computer emulator,
and some code has been submitted and included from that project for 68030/040
MMU functionality.

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zandorg
I remember running Ultima 6 and installing - using the hard disk option - to a
RAM disk. My friend had a 4MB RAM expansion. I was basically having a 2MB hard
disk in RAM!

I'd load the whole of U6 from 4 floppy disks, then fire it up and play, and
when done, I'd save my position and copy it all back to the 4 floppy disks!

What helped were 2 things:

    
    
        *Utility to format disks to high capacity
        *Fast shareware disk copy utility

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hyc_symas
Wow, brings back memories. All the software I wrote for the ST, the voicemail
system I wrote for the Falcon, working on MiNT / MultiTOS. Fun times.

I'd really love to boot up Spectrum Holobyte's Falcon again, but with the CPU
clock goosed up so it could get higher framerates...

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snvzz
I wish the Amiga had a similar development community.

Unlike EmuTOS, AmigaOS is still closed, proprietary code.

Unlike Hatari, we've got winuae (windows-only) and a bunch of feature-cut,
special purpose and/or abandoned ports to other platforms.

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zozbot123
Wouldn't it make more sense to add support for this machine family to QEMU?
68k cpu emulation is already included in QEMU, all it needs is general support
for the platform itself.

~~~
myrandomcomment
Systems like the ST and Amiga used custom HW chip sets for things like
graphics and sound. It is not just about emulating the CPU.

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vardump
Yes. More importantly, for game and demo compatibility you need to tie HW chip
emulation on cycle level with the CPU. QEMU would get more on the way than
help.

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sneakernets
Nice!

I never had an Atari ST (stayed with Commodore to the bitter end, plus Tandy
happened soon after) but I am glad someone out there is dedicated to keeping
these 16/32-bit computers alive.

~~~
GordonS
Heh, I had a similar path, starting with a Commodore 64 (where I learned Basic
out of a magazine), moved on to an Atari STE, then onto an Olivetti (Tandy was
big around the same time). Makes me feel very nostalgic :`)

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wazoox
I long for the ability to increment/decrement values with the left and right
mouse buttons, particularly in Cubase.

