TOS Legends

Turrican?!!

It's funny the things you find when surfing on the waves of the interweb. Today, I somehow ended up finding TOS Legends by Sébastien Claret. From the moment I booted it up, I was gobsmacked because it's absolutely fantastic and something every Atari ST guy will surely adore. Forgive me jerky recording, as it plays smoothly on my old Mac. The downloads for Mac/PC are best, or you can play inside a web browser.

Check out these screenshots below, then grab the download from Sébastien's website.

This is what happens when Turrican invades Rick's world!

But that damn boulder still chases lol

Hang on, everything changed! Where have I seen her before? Hmm...

EasyAraMiNT

Putting old hardware to good use

Aranym is a piece of software by Petr Stehlik to create a virtual Atari computer capable of running GEM software at lightning speeds. Most find Aranym rather awkward to set up from scratch, so a fella called Philippe Noble has developed something called EasyAraMint. This is a "ready-to-go" installation using EasyMint 1.18, which provides an incredible multitasking environment using the power of the host, be that a Mac or PC.

As you can see in my "expertly recorded" video, I'm using an old Mac Mini that was donated to me (thanks Mum!). My video shows me using unix 'scp', viewing images/PDF, listen to tunes, and playing Doom before ending with web browsing. Yes, this is as geeky as it gets. Love it!! :-)

EasyAraMint can be installed in minutes. It also comes pre-installed with many Atari programs. Philippe has done an outstanding job with this ready-to-go multitasking OS. I cannot recommend it highly enough!

Aranym and EasyAraMiNT can be downloaded and tinkered with, so let me know what you create!

I accessed another Mac via FTP and chatted online with a friend. What a geek!!



The command line might not look much fun, so I jazzed up my screen with PixArt...

Not all websites display perfectly, but what do you expect for free? :o)



Why not read a PDF document and listen to some background tunes too!

double DD

Don't risk it!

Backing up your files can be a pain in the .. neck .. but you'd be gutted if you lost any precious data! So here is a simple method to duplicate your Ultrasatan's SD card, which is not only effective but takes little effort. The requirements are a Mac with an SD slot and a basic knowledge of the Terminal program.

 - IDENTIFICATION -

Firstly, eject your SD card from the Ultrasatan and slide its "lock" switch to write-protect it. Better to be safe than sorry! Insert it into your Mac (if a warning appears, then click on the "ignore" button).

Load up Terminal.app (within the Utilities folder) and type in this command:

diskutil list

This will display information to help identify the SD card - look for the capacity of your card. Mine is 8GB, as you can see in the clipping below. Thus, my card is "/dev/disk1"

/dev/disk1 (internal, physical):
 #:     TYPE     NAME     SIZE     IDENTIFIER
 0:     *                 8.0 GB   disk1

If you would like to verify this information, type in this command :

diskutil info /dev/disk1

Within the output, you will see a line confirming that this is indeed our SD Card :

Device / Media Name:      SD Card Reader

 - BACK IT UP -

Type this command to back up the SD card (enter your password when prompted)

sudo dd if=/dev/disk1 of=~/Desktop/st-backup.img

Leave it to finish, and after a few minutes, you should have a file on your desktop called "st-backup". Now eject the card from the Apple Mac and reinsert it into your Ultrasatan - not forgetting to slide off the lock switch! I recommend zipping your backup file and storing it somewhere safe, like iCloud or Dropbox.

 - RESTORES -

Perhaps you have a spare SD card idly doing nothing? So long as it's the same capacity as the first, we can easily restore our backup file onto this using the command :

sudo dd if=~/Desktop/st-backup.img of=/dev/disk1

 - AND FINALLY -

There are many different methods to secure your data; this was just one. It's the backup method I personally prefer because the dd command is easy and powerful. I hope this is of some use to Mac & Linux users. Sorry, but I wouldn't know about Windows. Any questions, then just gimme a shout and I'll be happy to help.