Category: Atari

  • Unearthed: My Atari 8-bit cassette tape

    Unearthed: My Atari 8-bit cassette tape

    Last weekend, I was rummaging through my old Atari ST disks when I came across something I hadn’t noticed in 30 years: A cassette tape for my Atari 8-bit. As I have recounted before, I used hand-me-down Atari 800s, a 130XE, a 410 program recorder, and lots of other equipment and disks from family members…

  • Using high res on my Atari ST with the CosmosEx and a wire

    Using high res on my Atari ST with the CosmosEx and a wire

    Throughout my Atari ST-owning life, I have only ever owned Atari’s color monitor, the SC1224. It can display two of the ST’s video modes: low resolution (320×200, 16 colors) and medium resolution (640×200, 4 colors). The Atari also had a 640×400 high resolution mode, but it required a different monochrome monitor. I never had a…

  • Web browsing on the Atari ST with a CosmosEx

    Web browsing on the Atari ST with a CosmosEx

    Probably the best retrocomputing purchase I’ve made in recent years is the CosmosEx, a cool peripheral for Atari ST, STe, TT, and Falcon computers. Soon after I bought it, creator Jookie added “screencasting”, a feature which lets you control your Atari remotely through a web browser. Amazing! Around that time, Jookie was also working on…

  • Jon Radoff, creator of “Space Empire Elite” and “Final Frontier”

    Jon Radoff, creator of “Space Empire Elite” and “Final Frontier”

    Jon Radoff is an internet entrepreneur whose career has gone from dial-up to “Beam me up.” Radoff broke into the gaming business as a teen, writing the BBS door games Space Empire Elite and Final Frontier for the Atari ST in the late 1980s. He built one of the original commercial games on the internet,…

  • Merry Christmas … Atari STyle

    Merry Christmas … Atari STyle

    One of the Atari ST’s unique features was its MIDI interface. I never learned to play any instruments as a kid, but I have a feeling that if I had had an electronic keyboard to hook up to the Atari, things might have turned out differently.

  • Hatari, Lantronix, and CosmosEx: My quixotic quest to play “Thieves Guild”

    Hatari, Lantronix, and CosmosEx: My quixotic quest to play “Thieves Guild”

    Allow me introduce you to the “Thieves Guild Emulator,” a graphical front-end client for the Atari ST BBS game “Thieves Guild.” (Update: I have replaced the original video I posted with a new version that includes the game’s sound effects, as well as some gory combat) It took me a long time to reach the…