I thought it might be "interesting" to provide some background information about myself for you folk living on the remote island of TOS. If you didn't know already, my name is Steve and I've been an Atari ST nutter since 1987. Of course, I had also spent 1985-87 closely following the Atari ST and drooled over the magazine game adverts that would show the ST pic alongside the 8Bit screenshots. (so much colour and detail!!)
Christmas 1987 was the year to be gobsmacked when my parents treating me to my first Atari STfm. Heck, it even came with a ton of exciting games: Xenon, Buggy Boy and Beyond The Ice Palace and none of them had colour clash nor bleeper sound effects which I was used too!!
I still regard the Atari ST as my first real computer. It wasn't just something to play games, it could do so much more and it even had a wonderful new GUI that just blew me away! This amazing machine helped me during my college years and I learned boring skills, like word processing, pixel art, a little Pascal programming, DTP, and networking. I owned it for a couple of years before replacing it with a 1mb Atari STe. The first thing I did was hook up my speakers and play MOD files in stereo using a tracker player, I forget the name...
Later on, I got a job which meant I could afford to venture deeper into paradise. Yes, I bought myself a brand new Mega 1 ST and also second-hand Falcon and a TT - happy days!! However, as the 90s evolved, I eventually reached the end and by 1997 I left for the Apple Mac. Don't get me wrong, I loved my Atari computers but it had been hard seeing all my mates leave behind their 16-Bit computers for the PC to play classics like Doom and Duke Nukem!
The following years were spent running Atari software under emulation but I admit this lessened over time and I was sucked deeper into the Mac world. I still get called an Apple fanboy, usually anonymously over social media! Yep, that's the place those brave people hide behind their keyboards... Look, I love the Mac and it's a belting computer. Like it or lump it :)
In the early noughties, I ran a Mac gaming website which was dedicated to third-party mods and singleplayer maps for my all my favourite FPS games and I also ran a file server for downloads. Mod compatibility was rare back then for the Mac gamer so I started to convert these and also wrote instructions. I also had to write AppleScripts and the odd shell script to create a Mac launcher program. Fun times!
Later, I began contacting developers of mods that were incompatible on the Mac because of compiled code. It wasn't long before many kindly sent me their source code to recompile for the Mac PPC platform. Busy days back then but I helped convert a LOT of mods for Doom 3 mainly. AppleCrypt (yes, I'm sure you guessed that) supported lots of other FPS games like : the AMAZING Battlefield 1942, Quake 4, Call Of Duty, Soldier Of Fortun 2, and loads more!
The following years were spent running Atari software under emulation but I admit this lessened over time and I was sucked deeper into the Mac world. I still get called an Apple fanboy, usually anonymously over social media! Yep, that's the place those brave people hide behind their keyboards... Look, I love the Mac and it's a belting computer. Like it or lump it :)In the early noughties, I ran a Mac gaming website which was dedicated to third-party mods and singleplayer maps for my all my favourite FPS games and I also ran a file server for downloads. Mod compatibility was rare back then for the Mac gamer so I started to convert these and also wrote instructions. I also had to write AppleScripts and the odd shell script to create a Mac launcher program. Fun times!
Later, I began contacting developers of mods that were incompatible on the Mac because of compiled code. It wasn't long before many kindly sent me their source code to recompile for the Mac PPC platform. Busy days back then but I helped convert a LOT of mods for Doom 3 mainly. AppleCrypt (yes, I'm sure you guessed that) supported lots of other FPS games like : the AMAZING Battlefield 1942, Quake 4, Call Of Duty, Soldier Of Fortun 2, and loads more!
It wasn't all work and no play, for years I was addicted to Doom (of course) and I remember first running it (1997?) on my Power Mac at 640x480 a jaw-dropping moment in time. There was another game I was addicted to since 1998 and it wasn't even a first-person shooter! This is a bewitching real-time adventure called Myth The Fallen Lords, long before Bungie sold out. Probably the last game that kept me up until the early hours - I'm too old these days and need lots of sleep!! But this is such an amazing game.
Fast forward and I met my better half, we bought our first house and most homeowners know what's coming next... Yes, something has to give and I ended up selling all my old Atari hardware. I shall always regret doing that because I know how great my machines were and I'll probably never be able to afford another Falcon or TT ever again... Okay, let's fast forward one last time to 2013 when something silly happened - I begin to take an interest in Atari ST games, demos and was even digging out old programs which I fondly remembered. A spark ignited inside me and I was suddenly back on the Atari ST waggon. Pretty soon I was making videos for my YouTube channel and then started to write reviews embedded into the video's description - these eventually got copied over to a blogger website and .... well, here we are!
Are you still awake? Well, I hope this hasn't bored too much? Okay, I'm probably just talking to myself now but I will say that I think it's superb to see the scene so alive and kicking. Thank you to everyone that stops by - I'm always interested in comments and suggestions so leave your comments on any article posting, even if it's just to say hello!
. . . . . . . stay Atari ST/e . . . . . . . . it's time to WRRRAAAAAAAAAP!!!! :-)
