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by j45 1234 days ago
Same here. It was like visiting the future a little early.

The IBM XT it sat next to looked depressing in comparison.

And there has never been a game like

Revenge of the Mutant Camels since.

Or a tweener that was as simple and powerful as the one I used then.

And.. I think I’m off to go look for an emulator.
2 comments
chris_j 1234 days ago
Did I hear that you're looking for an emulator? I recommend Hatari [0] if you want to run games and demos. You'll likely need a TOS ROM image [1]; Hatari comes with EmuTOS, which doesn't work with a lot of games that make assumptions about the memory layout of internal OS structures and the like.

If you want to run well written GEM applications then I recommend ARAnyM [2], which is a lot faster, due to not attempting to do a cycle-accurate emulation of all the original hardware.

And if you have any issues with the above, there are still lots of people hanging out in Atari-Forum that might be able to help [3].

[0] https://hatari.tuxfamily.org/

[1] http://www.avtandil.narod.ru/tose.html

[2] https://aranym.github.io/

[3] https://www.atari-forum.com/

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j45 1233 days ago
Hey. Thanks so much. Really for the links and the guidance on how I might want to navigate it.

Help like this makes a passing wish but little time a lot more doable.

I know some HNers don’t like unprovoked longer form content but I have always been appreciative of it like this and try to do it myself cuz you never know who it might reach passively.

Signing up for Atari forum :)

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nuancebydefault 1234 days ago
There were also plenty of drawing apps, very sophisticated for that time, a poor man's mac, i've heard it being called.
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j45 1233 days ago
It was more of a poor man’s Amiga.

It was as capable or more capable than the original Macintosh gui.

If Atari had broken through in North America like they had in Europe as business machines tech adoption would have progressed quickly.

I was randomly lucky that my Canadian 7th grade computer lab was full of them, when everyone else was in the stone ages on IBM XTs. There was a Original Mac lab too and those were archaic in comparison.

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