PC Ditto

Ugh, Winblows!!

I thought I'd have a quick play with PC-Ditto, an old emulator by Avant-Garde Systems. Now, please do note that I've never owned a PC in my life, but I remember tinkering with the one (and only) Amstrad PC that our college had in 1987. So, I figured this would be a nostalgic trip down memory lane. Well, maybe!

For anyone interested, AtariCrypt has an emulator section with lots more :)

A stock Atari ST is more than capable of running this emulator. Many DOS programs will also run fine. However, you should forget it for games. I used my own Mega STe, which barely had the horsepower to handle numerous games. So, in my video recording, Hatari is running at 16Mhz to simulate my computer.

The idea of using DOS for gaming or home computing makes me shudder. Terrible idea, but read on...

Serpentine ran very well indeed.

I had little luck with Castle Wolfenstein (a bad copy?)

How did it go with this DOS malarkey?

Surprisingly, I did have some success as you can see in the video, which shows me booting DOS 3.3 and then loading a selection of rubbish games. The first is Serpentine, which was definitely the best of the bad bunch, and I enjoyed eating the other slo-mo snakes. I then rebooted to try something called David's Kong. Ugh, this is absolutely laughable, so please don't waste your time!

Next up was Bird-Brain, which didn't seem to work very well because the keys specified on the main menu didn't work for me. Instead, I suffered a rapid beeping sound, which was annoying!! So yet another reboot was called for so I could try Castle Wolfenstein. Ohh, I had such high hopes for this game, but alas, it didn't appear to run properly and then, got itself caught in a loop?

I then loaded Space Commanders, which slowed my Mega STe down to the speed of a Casio calculator for some reason. In the recording, I could cheat by pressing CMD+X to speed up Hatari, but it didn't really. No loss anyhow because this is a ludicrously bad shoot 'em up!!

I was beginning to lose the will to live and had only one game left: Buck Rogers Planet Of Zoom, which is one of my favourite ZX Spectrum games. Sadly, it wasn't (umm) really playable, but I managed a couple of minutes before PC-Ditto disappointingly froze for some reason!

Oh boy, how did the PC win the computer war?

The worst Kong and Invaders I've ever played!!

The CryptO'pinion?

This was fun, and I enjoyed turning my ST into an Intel paperweight. Games will generally require more CPU grunt, but I doubt anyone would abandon the ST's archive for these horrendous DOS equivalents? Of course, not being a hardware product meant performance was always sluggish, even on my 16MHz Mega STe.

PC Ditto did a grand job running DOS and its programs and utilities. However, I wouldn't bother using this for games - unless I had something beefy like a TT or Falcon. This is a good product, depending on your needs. But I'll stick with my Atari ST. So, with that in mind, we are left with one thing to do: del *.*  😇

You can find PC-Ditto on AtariMania or by using Old Games Finder. You will also need the operating system, and DOS 3.3 is downloadable from Atari-Forum thanks to Jake/Depression. I found many compatible DOS games on various websites - I liked My Abandonware. Enjoy yourself!