One of this Atarian’s dreams has come true, though it took almost 14 years.

Last week, Deuce (Stephen Hurd) released SyncTerm v1.6, which adds initial support for the Atari ST’s VT52 emulation mode, as well as the three ST screen resolutions and color palettes.

Today, I made a short new VT-52 text animation to celebrate:

(Keep reading to see six old animations I collected recently which I haven’t seen published elsewhere!)

Though I was an Atari ST BBSer as a teenager in the 1990s, I didn’t really use VT52 emulation very much. Most of the BBSes I called were PC based, and so my favorite terminal quickly became ANSIterm. Decades later, as I thought back to those times, I wondered what I had missed. What did door games on Atari ST BBSes look like in their native terminal emulations? Did ST folks make VT-52 animations the same way PC people made ANSImations?

In 2011, I didn’t have a way to answer that question, because I no longer owned any Atari ST hardware, and no modern terminal programs supported VT-52 emulation along with the ST’s unique character set and color palette.

So I reached out to Deuce by email to request he add VT52 to SyncTerm. He told me that adding VT52 was “absolutely doable,” but he needed several things first, including “evidence that real BBSs actually use this mode for something interesting.”

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Interesting all along

It took Deuce a while to make it happen, but yes, there certainly were real BBSes using VT52 in “interesting” ways all along.

Dark Force BBS is one of the oldest and best. It’s chock-full of VT52 menus, plus it boasts dozens of door games, some of which have interesting VT52 title screens or special effects. Thieves’ Guild, Assassin, and DDST are a few notable examples.

Still ST-less in 2012, I figured out how to telnet to BBSes from within the Hatari emulator, which enabled me to see the VT-52 version of the title screen for Space Empire Elite for the first time.

The next year, I learned about Synergy’s “Beat Nick Part 2” demo, a VT52 text animation using the Atari ST’s 16-color low-resolution, and later tracked down three more animations, including one by Tim, a prolific maker of (often violent) ATASCII animations.

Newly-found animations

Over the last few weeks I’ve been hunting again for new old VT-52 art and animations, and I managed to find a handful. They’re all very short, but intriguing.

COLORTTL.MSG

COLORTTL.MSG is an example of a VT-52 text animation for the Atari ST, created by Jinfu Chen as an advertisement for his “Maniac BBS”, based in Westbrook, Maine. This file was included with VT52BBS.TXT, a tutorial Chen wrote about the VT-52 escape codes to help fellow Michtron BBS sysops to create similar screens. The file may have been created in 1986.

WELCOME1.V52 and WELCOME2.V52

WELCOME1.V52 and WELCOME2.V52 were advertisements for the “Disk Bank ST” BBS, likely created in 1987 or 1988 by Jonathan Taylor, to include as examples with his “VT-52 PRO” editor for the Atari ST. VT-52 PRO was released on Feb. 14, 1988.

DEMO1.TXT and DEMO2.TXT

DEMO1.TXT and DEMO2.TXT were created by Jason J. Railton in April 1997, and published in issue 46 of ICTARI User Group magazine, issue 46. Railton wrote STOS BASIC programs to generate each text file. DEMO2.TXT is particularly interesting — it’s a Sierpinski triangle fractal in VT52 text. Railton was interested in fractals, and his graphical, multi-form fractal-generating program “FORMERS” was also included in the same issue of the magazine.

VISIONIK.V52

I reached out to Jonathan Taylor, author of the “VT-52 PRO” editor for the Atari ST earlier this year. He was excited to hear from me, and after I sent him a copy of his old software, he fired it up in an emulator and created short animation of his handle/signature “Visionik.”