Episode Transcript
Atari ST LOG Magazine #2 May 1986: An Action RPG Point and Click and More
The history of the Atari ST in the USA #1.
We continue taking a look at Atari after the Warner Sale specifically focusing on ST Log magazine which is still an insert into American Atari 8bit Computer Magazine, Analog at this point in history. Our focus is the ST and as entertainment machine, but it was such a great general purpose computer that we will stop along the way to look at some of the more interesting applications especially if they have an entertainment focus or if we used the applications when we had an ST in the 80’s and early 90’s while stopping briefly to look at some of the more interesting magazine articles.
Let’s get started.
The cover is Black with orange writing. The tagline is The Atari ST Operator’s Magazine and there is what looks like an Atari ST created picture of a shaded blue knight weiding the gold handle of a sword on the cover. The Orange Promo text says “ST sound Waves. C-Manship. Word Processing on the Atari.
First up is the Abacus book ad form last month. I still keep that internals one hand for when I am doing research or looking up a call that might work from GFA, or even STOS.
The Table of contents, is next, it’s not a very extensive issue, with only the news section not being mentioned on the cover and no specific game reviews, As this is mostly a game-related retrospective, we will look for any game mentions in the magazine as we go forward in this issue and but applications for the ST are very interesting to us too, especially the early efforts. So we will see if there is anything else we can dig into.
One such item comes up on the next Page, the Graphic Artist. This full page ad was also in the April issue and it looks like it is a desktop publishing piece of software. When looking at Atari Mania, I found an entry for The Graphic Artist, the Graphic Artist 1.5 preview and the graphic artist font editor, Only the 1.5 preview has a runnable disk image. Let’s take a look at booting that one up in STEAM Right now.
I have no idea what to do with it, it kind of looks like it might function with vi or VIM style key pressed and not be very friendly
If you use the arrow keys along the bottom you can choose a function. Here I am pl;aying around wei it a bit, but I do eventually figure out how to select a font and then annotate to the screen a message. It’s not very user friendly at all unfortunately.
http://www.atarimania.com/utility-atari-st-graphic-artist-_33310.html
The next section is a Modula 2 by TDI SOFTWARE INC, in Texas programming language review by Sol Gruber. The low-down is that Sol likes it, but the missing documentation of the GEM routines makes him still want to use DRI’s C compiler.
NEWS
On the game front, Penguin Software, which will become Polarware soon, had three new $39.99 priced interactive Novels for the ST. including The Coveted Mirror,
Frank and Ernest and Oo-Topos. They also have a fun action RPG, not what they called it back then, but what I would call it now, called Sword of Kadash which we’ll take a little look at right now:
http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-st-sword-of-kadash_11484.html
Hold down Control and J for Joystick Control. This game is a little bit of a hidden Gem.
Sword of Kadash is a true action RPG set in the Persian desert. IT will need to be explored more, The instructions are at Atari mania, so possibly a deep dive is in the future.
Let take a look at one of those adventure game als by Polarware, Oo-Topos
http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-st-oo-topos_10131.html
Ootopos is an ear mix of graphics,and mouse style adventure where you still need to type in most of your commands. It’s a graphic update of a 1981 Apple II game. This updated version was one of the better first examples of a traditional text and graphics adventure with added mouse controls to make it a point and click adventure but not the Sierra kind.
It’s a port of an Apple II game and was released on these systems
1986 (Apple II)
1986 (Commodore 64)
1986 (DOS)
1986 (Atari ST)
1986 (Amiga)
Supra Already has 10, 20,30 and 60 meg hard drivers getting ready for the ST with prices ranging from $799 to just under $2000 for the 60MB version. No wonder they took a while to become popular for ST owners.
One really interesting bit, at least for Steve and I was that the local ST shop advertised a 520 ST upgrade
Lamar Micro offers a 1-megabyte 520ST upgrade for $300, giving the user over 750K or RAM. In conjunction with their RAM Overdrive, the upgrade lets you set aside the upper 512K of RAM as a ramdisk. RAM Overdrive retails for $34.95, from Lamar Micro, 2107 Artesia Boulevard, Redondo Beach, CA 90278. CIRCLE #176 ON
This store was about 1 mile from our house, but never sold any game software at all, and turned back into a vacuum cleaner store when the ST became less popular.
Other highlights include that Telecommunications was heating up on the ST
There are some interesting new products like IS Talk, as Batters Included Telecom piece of software including a spell checker and the IS time and billing system. As well, FoRem ST and ST-Term from Commnet were released.
The next page has an Ad for VIP Professional, a Lotus 1-2-3 integrated business suite that Steve and I actually purchased and used for school and some basic databases. The list price for the lite version was $99.99 so that’s the one we most likely had.
Let’s take a quick look at this. Steve and I used the SpreadSheet and DB early on to make lists of words to import into GFA for a sentence generator, mostly a naughty sentence generator. We also used it for some of our business classedin College.
Next Up is the James Luczak Sound Waves article about accessing ST sound from basic. Here is an interesting quote from James:
I've owned an Atari since 1979 and have watched sound routines progress, from simple one-voice melodies to the truly amazing sound productions now possible on the
Atari 8-bit line of computers.
It may seem hard to believe, but the 520ST is capable of producing sound as good as, if not better than the 8-bit computers. However, there's one problem-a lack of information concerning the 520ST's sound
Capabilities.
I found this program listed in OCR format on Archive.org, but it needs major fixes before it will work and is out of the scope of this video.
I looked through all of the on-line Public Domain libraries and could not find a disk labeled with ST Log Type-ins or ST Sound Waves. If anyone knows of a source of these on disk please let me know.
As we proceed through these issues I will continue to find some non-game focused items to demonstrate, but just not this one.
The Dragon group has a for a forth programming language for the ST called 4X forth and also ST Coloring book, which they claim to be the future of coloring books
Megasoft,a large Commodore utility publisher, is looking for unique ST utilities. To publish, but I did not find any under their name on Atari Mania.
Like last month, Haba is advertising their Habawriter, Haba Phone Book and Habamodem software as well as their Haba Hard drive, which at $699 or $100 less than the 10 MB Supra
There is an interesting ad on the next page for a $300 Shanner SPC-700CI color printer that can be purchased with VIP Professional from Gumball express. I’m not 100% sure if Gumball is the maker of the printer or just a 3rd party that is packaging the two up to sell together.
I was able to boot up VIP professionals and use the spreadsheet to create some example data for the type of random sentence generator we might have used the software for. In reality, we would have just input the data here and then exported it if that was possible to text files that we would have used in GFA to create the random sentences.
The latest C-manship article by Clayton Walnum tackles making a simple Craps dice simulation.
The first real mention of Regent Base in a ¼ page ad comes this month as one of the first real relational database products for the ST line of computers.
Arthur Leyenberger column on Word Processors on the Atari 520ST is up next and he starts out with this interesting paragraph
“The 16-bit Atari ST has been available to the public for nine months now, and there's no denying its success. The reason for its popularity is largely due to the amount of software available for the machine. There's no category of software more widely used than word processing programs, regardless of which computer we talk about. This applies to the Atari ST, as well. Fortunately, there are plenty of programs to choose from, as you'll soon discover”
The moves on to review 1st Word, Regent Word, Habba Writer and Final Word. Already 4 commercial word processors for the ST really just about one year (given magazine lead-time) after the ST was introduced.
There are a few very small ads for some programming tools and mail order houses along with one more game ad, a ¼ pager for Wod 4 Word, which looks a little like Scrabble.
We have it right here to take a little look at:
http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-st-word-for-word_39861.html
The Atari Mania STX Dump of Word for Word is copy protected so it just comes up asking mewfor the original disk. I was able to get the board designer to work a little bit though.
AThe final ad we will take a little look at is for the Shanner Duel Disk drive drive, which is a replacement for the 520 ST exeter 720K drives, giving 2 1 MB drives from about ⅔ the cost - $399 as opposed to $599 for two Atari drives.
And that’s it for this time.
ST Log #3 will be coming up in a few weeks
