#Atari Xe Emulator Mac Back In

Atari Xe Emulator Mac Back In

IвЂ™ve been down an Atari rabbit hole lately, organizing and documenting my old Atari files and programs, which I originallyВ transferred to my Mac back in the вЂ™90s. In theВ early вЂ™80s,В before I had a Mac, and before I was making fonts, I was an Atari home computer user. Since its original release several people have joined the development team to port Stella to other operating systems such as. Mott , and is currently maintained by Stephen Anthony. Stella was originally developed for Linux by Bradford W. Stella is a multi-platform Atari 2600 VCS emulator released under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

I wasnвЂ™t all that interested until I read Ted NelsonвЂ™s self-published, Whole Earth Catalog-styleВ book Computer Lib/Dream Machines in 1980. In the late вЂ™70s, microcomputers like the Apple II and Commodore Pet were getting a lot of attention. The SDrive-MAX can load executable XEX files as if they were on read-only bootable.

There were no moving parts, not even a power switchвЂ”just some connectors in the back to plug in the power supply, a standard cassette recorder, and a black and white TV. And it looked cheap.В The case was two sheets ofВ vacuum-formed white plastic held together with plastic rivets. With OpenEmu, it is extremely easy to add, browse, organize and with a compatible gamepad, play those favorite games (ROMs) you already own.It was much smaller than I expected, about 7 by 9В inches and a little over an inch thick, with a flat membrane keyboard. But when I saw an ad for the Sinclair ZX80, which sold for only $199 (plus $5 shipping), IвЂ™d found a less expensive way in.For the first time, the 'It just works' philosophy now extends to open source video game emulation on the Mac. A basic Apple II setup cost over $2,000 (over $6,000 in 2020 dollars).

I was 26 years oldВ with a full-time job, but those machines were beyond my means. It tookВ most of the availableВ memory just to do that.But IвЂ™d gotten a taste of what you could do with a computer and started looking for something better.The Apple II was the most popularВ at the time, and the first IBM PC had just been introduced. Trying to see what I could do with it graphically, I wrote a program to display a bitmap-style lowercase вЂњaвЂќ using graphics characters and simple PRINT statements.

It only had 16K of memory, but that seemed like plenty compared the ZX80.AtariвЂ™s line of home computers is remembered mainly for games. The sound and graphics were amazing for the timeвЂ”better than the Apple IIвЂ”and theВ AtariВ 400В was a lot cheaper, so I bought one (along withВ a Star Raiders cartridge). You would вЂњhyperwarpвЂќ from sector to sector and thenВ fly around shooting downВ enemy ships using a joystick. It was a first-person shooter (as they call them now) with a three-dimensional view of stars and space ships. IвЂ™d never seen anything like it. On display was an Atari 400 running a game called Star Raiders.

A program like Micro-Painter would let youВ change them whenever you wanted while creating your artwork, but you were still stuck with only four at a time.But knowing that this new GTIA chip was in my computer, I wanted to figure outВ a way to use it. The way color worked on the Atari was that you had a certain number of colors to work with in each graphic mode, and each of these colors could be set toВ any of 128 possible shades and hues. The GTIA was exciting since it added more graphic modes and up to 256 different colors.But all the existingВ drawing programs on the Atari used its older four-color graphic modes, including the first one I bought,В Micro-Painter. I also went withВ the cheaper option for storage with the Atari 410 Program RecorderвЂ”which let you load and store programs and dataВ (very slowly) on audiocassettes.Soon after I bought it, there wasВ a free upgrade to a new graphics chipвЂ”the GTIA. As a touch typist, it wasnвЂ™t great, but it worked, and I typed in programs from computer books and magazines to learn what the machine could do.

(Until I figured out a a way to save files, I had to takeВ Polaroid photos of the screen, as you can see above.)Mode 10 was also interesting since it let you use up toВ nine arbitraryВ hues and shades at once. The pixels in this mode were four timesВ wider than they were tall, so the screen resolution was higher vertically thanВ horizontally, a trade-off for getting more colors. This let me draw 16-shade grayscale images. You could change brushes and colors as you were drawing, but there was no way to вЂњpick upвЂќ your brush to move it to a different part of the screen, and there wasnвЂ™t any way to save or open picture files.So I modified it to work in the newВ graphicВ mode 9, which allowed up to 16 shades of a single hue. It was little more than a demo that let you draw pictures using a joystick in one of the four-color graphic modes.

They gave me a photo of Bushnell as reference, which I enlarged and traced onto a sheet of clear acetate. Because TV screensВ are вЂњlandscapeвЂќ orientation, I had to work sideways. I used my mode 10 paint program to do it.The image needed to be in вЂњportraitвЂќ orientation for the magazine. The new art director at Ambassador, Barb Koster, knew I had an AtariВ computer, so when they did an article about Atari in 1982, they hired me to make a digital portrait of AtariвЂ™s founder, Nolan Bushnell. NextВ I changed it so you could move the brush around without painting.Since I was getting more serious about all this, I got an 810 floppy disk drive and an Atari 800, which had more memory (48K), a real keyboard, and better video output.Right around this time, I had left my job as assistant art director at TWA Ambassador magazine and had gone to work atВ Minnesota Public Radio.

I used its screen capture feature so I could bring the models into paint programs to add color and shading.Over the next two years, I did illustrations with my Atari for other magazines, including Credit Union Advantage, where I was design consultant in my spare time, two illustrations for The Farmer, a magazine that shared the same publisher as Ambassador,В and a вЂњdigital driverвЂ™s licenseвЂќ for AAA Magazine.When I went toВ MPR, I became art director of Minnesota Monthly magazine. It used the same great Micro Illustrator software.I also had a program called Atari World in which you couldВ create 3D wireframe models. Atari introduced its Atari Touch Pad not long after, which was larger and matched the aspect ratio of the screen. Unfortunately, the Koala Pad surface was square, unlike the TV screen, so you had to adjust to the difference in aspect ratio when drawing. It had a great drawing program called Micro Illustrator. It allowed me to work at the AtariвЂ™s highest resolution, though in black and white only.В Fun With Art came on a cartridge and used the same four-color mode as Micro-Painter, but used an Atari graphics trick that let it display up to 128 colors at a time, but no more than four per row.I had two different graphics tablets for the Atari, which worked more or less like a modern Wacom tablet.

There were 128 possible characters, and you could also display any of them in reverse.The fonts I made were mostly for fun, since there wasnвЂ™t any easyВ way to use them normally. The screenВ could fit 40 characters across and 24 characters down in the normal text mode. You couldnвЂ™t use them in off-the-shelf word processors or text editors.Each character in an Atari font had to fit into an 8 by 8 pixel square. You could use a custom font in your ownВ programs, but, unless you did some tricky programming, only one font was active at any time. It didnвЂ™t support fonts the wayВ modern computers do. I did the cover illustration using Fun With Art and headline type inside using Graphic Master, recreating our house typeface, Alternate Gothic, in bitmap form.I also made someВ fonts on the Atari.

But by 1986, I was barely using it. The prices of Atari computers had dropped so low that I could afford a third oneвЂ”an Atari 800XL. Although the Atari was better for games and it was fun to write programs for it, I could see the Atari 8-bit platform didnвЂ™t have much of a future. I was even writing articles for my local Atari user group newsletter on my Mac. It didnвЂ™t have color, but it had a high-res screen and was much faster, with a mouse and graphical user interface.В You could do a lot more with it, like use multiple fonts in a word processor or graphics program.It felt like the futureвЂ”and it was the future, as it turned out.I still did stuff with my Atari after I got my first Mac, and had them side by side on my desk. As much fun as the Atari was, the Mac was much more advanced.