I rescued “Mom and Me” for the Atari ST! (though I guess I’m about a month late for Mother’s Day)

You may recall that two years ago I blogged about two old Atari ST programs I remembered from my youth — “Mom and Me” and “Murray and Me” by the cartoonist Yaakov Kirschen.

The programs were published by Antic Magazine, and billed as the first “biotoons,” a sort of artificial intelligence cartoon. They were even reviewed in both the New York Times and and the Los Angeles Times in 1985.

Anyway, two years ago I assumed someone out there had archived disk images of these programs. But I was completely unable to find any.

I had copies on old floppies myself, but those floppies stopped working reliably in the 1990s on my Atari 1040 STe. I assumed they were still no good.

Tonight I pulled them out, dusted them off, and gave them a try in my Mega STe. I had mixed success!

I was able to load “Mom and Me” and play the simulation. Even better, afterwards I successfully duplicated the disk and transferred a copy to my Mac.

Want to try it yourself? Download “Mom and Me” as a ZIP file.

As for “Murray”, I got the title screen to load, but couldn’t get him to actually play.

I tried copying the disk, but at least one file (“CSFACE.RAS”) failed. After a few more minutes, the Atari wouldn’t read the disk at all anymore. Oh well. I’ll have to try again later.