Bootsie

A boot sector program that's useful

Bootsie is a utility by Stefan Krey that writes a boot sector on a floppy to perform system init functions. These are useful for Atari's with a hard drive or those fortunate enough to own a MSTE, TT, or Falcon. By default, my Mega STe boots up in an 8MHz "compatibility mode", which is great for gaming but lame for everything else. Also, the boot process from start to end will be slower than if it were running at 16MHz.

Enter Bootsie to set the processor speed to steroid mode! And it can do more cool stuff, such as CPU caching, activating the Blitter chip, 60Hz display, etc. What a fantastic utility that helps make a computer as ultra-zippy as possible. Download it right now from Atari ST Essential Software List.

Ballerburg

Artillery gaming

Whilst enjoying my cuppa this morning (in my Atari ST mug), I stumbled upon a tweet about Ballerburg, a turn-based artillery game by Eckhard Kruse. It's an ST classic and offers addictive, strategic gameplay, blasting enemies into smithereens using basic maths to calculate our weaponry's speed & direction.

Ballerburg requires the ability to read German and a monochrome hi-res monitor. Let's be honest, as ST users, we are familiar with language translation on-the-fly. And there are programs to emulate the ST's high-resolution mode for those using real hardware. As I type, my Atari STe is running Ballerburg, and I'm (trying) to teach our 6-year-old daughter the basics. Sadly, that ain't going well, so I know she will be an easy victim!

Yes, I am father of the year. I'm going to destroy her. Muwhahaha!!

• A download is available on Eckhard Kruse's website.
• Ballerburg has a wiki page.
• I use MonoPack to enable ST High Res on my colour monitor. It's excellent.
• So you didn't believe me about my Atari ST mug, uh? Slurp... Slurp...