Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Version: 2.1.0 Website: https://hatari.tuxfamily.org/
Reading Richard Adams' handy Dosbox nostalgia, I was overcome with nostalgia myself. My nostalgia, however, was not for the games. Though you can certainly get all the games the platform has to offer and play them too. I missed those amazing intro's and music disks. The days when the “Pirates” were much more skilled than the software houses. You could get a tape or disk that contained music to make your brain bleed. Brilliant scrollers, bouncy text and balls, all fitting in sixteen thousand four-letter words or less.
My first computer was a ZX Spectrum, so I was painfully aware of the sound and music limitations. The fat ugly graphics of the Commodore 64 did not impress me, but that SID chip, oh my! One day I read a magazine article about the music production on the Atari ST. For those of you that do not know what I am referring to, here is a TL;DR refresher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4kf1Wbaruo
Lets re-create some magic!
The easiest way to install Hatari is via the command-line or software centre. However, this will *not* do. That will install a snap that puts things in different locations and does not create the folders you need, nor allow double-clicking playing your disks. Rather get it from here: http://download.tuxfamily.org/hatari/
The second thing you will need is the boot ROM, known as a TOS. Hatari ships with emuTOS, but it is not 100% yet. You can get the whole lot here: http://ae.dhs.nu/tmp/toses.zip
The third thing you need to do is create a “hard drive folder” on your drive, I named mine AtariHDD in my home folder. You may have started up Hatari and found it asks for a TOS in a folder, /usr/share/hatari. To remedy this, extract the 1.6 or 1.62 TOS from the archive and copy it there, renaming it to “tos.img”. The boot ROM version 1.6 was for the Atari ST, and the emulator will switch to that mode. At this stage the emulator is ready to go, but let us add a “hard drive” as well.
Press F12 with the emulator running. This will bring up the configuration. Go to hard disks and add a GEMDOS disk that points to the folder you created in your home folder, eg:
Tick ‘boot from hard drive’ too. Save your configuration file once done. You can further tweak the amount of memory to 4MB if you wish, but if you have issues with some demos, change it back to 2MB.
Now for the fun stuff!
Download some demo disks from here: http://www.creamhq.de/ymrockerz/downloads.php, and unzip them into the AtariHDD folder you created (demozoo is another great site).
Start Hatari and you should be presented with the little green desktop. Open the hard disk folder and you will see the folders you just created. The executable file you are looking for has the .PRG extension. Now bask in the chiptune goodness of mega talented musicians. The music and demo disks are all legal for you to download and share, so don't be shy.
For those of you chomping at the bit for all those games of yesteryear and demoscene goodness, stay tuned for the next issue of Full Circle Magazine. In the meantime, Rock on, “old skool” style!