In addition to their wonderful magazines, Compute! also published books. The Compute! books for the Atari 8-bit series, such as Mapping the Atari and the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Books of Atari, are highly regarded.

Compute!’s first Atari ST book was Compute!’s ST Programmer’s Guide. Released in 1986, it was not highly regarded. It only covers BASIC and Logo with a rudimentary overview of GEM and TOS. ST information was scarce at the time, so it was probably better than nothing, but I think most people stuck with the Abacus books that were also available.

Computes St Programmers Guide

19.1MB ∙ PDF file

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However, in 1987 Compute! released their Atari ST Technical Reference Guide series, which consisted of three books covering VDI, AES and TOS. Written by Sheldon Leemon, who was relatively well-known in the Commodore and Atari world at the time, these books were excellent and a tremendous improvement over the Abacus ST reference books.

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Writing programs and saving them on cassette was an exercise in patience that I didn’t have as a young teenager.

One of the first programs of a decent size that I actually completed was something I called DOSBOS. It was a “utility” that let you view disk contents (and a few other things) from BASIC. It was not very elegant as it was a BASIC program itself, but I worked on it for many weeks each day after school.

Still, I remember that my Dad was very impressed with it and encouraged me to submit it to a magazine. Magazine submissions required an accompanying printout, but we didn’t yet have a printer. As I recall, he was able to print my docs and the program listing at his work (on green bar paper) so that I could submit it.

My favorite Atari magazine back then was ANALOG, so that was the one I decided to submit it to. Alas, it was rejected, which shouldn’t have been too surprising. ANALOG published some high-quality programs and this first program of mine was just not good enough.

I still have a rejection letter for it, though! I really like this rejection letter, because it is personal with hand-written comments:

Looking at the dates on the printout and the letter, it took me about 2 months to hear back from ANALOG. I guess compared to that, waiting a couple days for something to get approved for the Apple App Store is nothing!

The docs for DOSBOS spanned 6 pages and were longer than the program itself which was only 2 pages!

Like I said, I’m not surprised DOSBOS was rejected. Being a BASIC program greatly limited its usefulness. To use it you had to LIST it to disk so it could be ENTERed. It used high line numbers so it would have less of a chance of overwriting a BASIC program you were working on, but if any lines were the same you could lose your code.

With Atari BASIC you could SAVE or LIST programs to disk. Saving was faster, but LOADing a SAVEd program erased what was in memory. LISTing was slower because it was writing the plain text to disk (instead of the tokenized version), which made the files bigger. But you could ENTER it which would act as if it were typed in and thus not erase what was in memory, unless the line numbers overlapped.

This meant the process to use DOSBOS when working on a BASIC program was:

ENTER “D:DOSBOS.LST”
GOTO 32000

This started running it and then you could use it how you wanted.

Since you didn’t want it to stick around when saving your actual program, you would manually remove it by doing this:

GOTO DELETE

That command makes use of Atari BASIC’s ability to use variables at GOTO locations as I described in Programming the Atari with BASIC.

Frankly, it was probably just easier to save your program and type DOS to get to the actual DOS menu. Nevertheless, it was fun to create and it always feels good to finish something. And I have to say, I still really like the name DOSBOS!

Here is the original program listing, printed on that green bar paper that was so common at the time.

I actually still have this on a 5.25” floppy disk:

Here is the BASIC source code, although the inverse characters I used for text and comments do not display properly:

32000 REM DOSBOS VERSION 3.8                  5-2-85 by Paul Lefebvre
32005 REM THIS PROGRAM USES LESS THAN       5K OF RAM !!!!
32010 REM ƒ…Õ†÷¡“…¡¬Ã≈”¨†œ–≈Œ†…œ√¬ß”
32015 CLR :DIM FL$(28),FL2$(28),FL3$(15):CLOSE #1:CLOSE #3
32020 OPEN #1,4,0,"E:":OPEN #3,4,0,"K:"
32025 POKE 54286,64:? "}":POKE 65,0:POKE 702,64:POKE 694,0:GOSUB 32300
32030 CLOSE #2:POSITION 0,(X+2)/2:? "††™™™™†ƒœ”¬œ”†≥Æ∏†‚˘†–·ıφÃÂÊ‚ˆÚ†™™™™†":POSITION 2,(X+4)/2
32035 ? "A. Enter File      G. Unlock File":? "B. Exit DOSBOS     H. Write Dos":? "C. Copy File       ";
32040 ? "I. Format Disk":? "D. Delete File     J. Load File":? "E. Rename File     K. Save File":? "F. Lock";
32045 ? " File       L. List File"
32050 POSITION 2,(X+16)/2:? "CHOICE?";:GET #3,CH:? CHR$(CH):IF CH=155 THEN GOTO 32025
32055 REM «œ‘œ†ƒ≈”…“≈ƒ†∆’Œ√‘…œŒ
32060 ON CH-64 GOTO 32155,32075,32120,32140,32235,32165,32175,32220,32205,32185,32085,32100
32065 ? "˝":POSITION 9,(X+16)/2:? " ":GOTO 32050
32070 REM ≈ÿ…‘†–“œ«“¡Õ
32075 CLOSE #1:CLOSE #3:? "}":CLR :POKE 65,3:LET DOSBOS=32000:DELETE=32480:TRAP 40000:? "∆“≈≈†“¡ÕΩ";FRE(0):END 
32080 REM ”¡÷≈†∆…Ã≈
32085 ? "Save under what name?";:GOSUB 32450
32090 ? "Saving ";FL2$;" ...";:TRAP 32280:SAVE FL2$:GOTO 32025
32095 REM Ã…”‘†∆…Ã≈
32100 ? "List under what name?";:GOSUB 32450
32105 ? "Listing ";FL2$;" to disk ...";
32110 TRAP 32280:LIST FL2$,0,31999:GOTO 32025
32115 REM √œ–Ÿ†∆…Ã≈†®±©
32120 ? "Copy what file?";:GOSUB 32450
32125 ? "Insert source disk,press “≈‘’“Œ?";:GET #3,R:IF R<>155 THEN 32025
32130 MEM=FRE(0):GOTO 32390
32135 REM ƒ≈Ã≈‘≈†∆…Ã≈
32140 ? "Delete what file?";:GOSUB 32450
32145 ? "Deleting ";FL2$;" ...";:CMD=33:GOTO 32440
32150 REM ≈Œ‘≈“†∆…Ã≈†®±©
32155 ? "Enter what file?";:GOSUB 32450:GOTO 32375
32160 REM Ãœ√À†∆…Ã≈
32165 ? "Lock what file?";:GOSUB 32450:? "Locking ";FL2$;" ...";:CMD=35:GOTO 32440
32170 REM ’ŒÃœ√À†∆…Ã≈
32175 ? "Unlock what file?";:GOSUB 32450:? "Unlocking ";FL2$;" ...";:CMD=36:GOTO 32440
32180 REM Ãœ¡ƒ†ÔÚ†“’Œ†∆…Ã≈
32185 ? "Load what file?";:GOSUB 32450:TRAP 32275
32190 ? "Run this file also?";:GET #3,R:IF R=ASC("Y") THEN ? :? "Running ";FL2$;" ...";:RUN FL2$
32195 ? :? "Loading ";FL2$;" ...";:LOAD FL2$
32200 REM ∆œ“Õ¡‘†ƒ…”À†ƒ“…÷≈†£±
32205 ? "Press 'Y' to format disk ":? "in drive #1?";:GET #3,R:IF R<>89 THEN 32025
32210 ? :? "Formating disk in drive one ...";:CMD=254:FL2$="D1:":GOTO 32440
32215 REM ◊“…‘≈†ƒœ”Æ”Ÿ”†‘œ†ƒ“…÷≈†£±
32220 ? "Press 'Y' to write DOS.SYS ":? "to drive #1?";:GET #3,R:IF R<>89 THEN 32025
32225 ? :? "Writing DOS.SYS to drive one ...";:TRAP 32280:OPEN #2,8,0,"D:DOS.SYS":GOTO 32025
32230 REM “≈Œ¡Õ≈†∆…Ã≈
32235 ? "Old Filename?";:GOSUB 32450
32240 ? "New Filename?";:INPUT #1,FL3$:FL$=FL2$:FL$(LEN(FL$)+1)=",":FL$(LEN(FL$)+1)=FL3$
32245 ? "Renaming ";FL2$;" ...";:TRAP 32280:FL2$=FL$:CMD=32:GOTO 32440
32250 REM –’‘†ƒ≈÷…√≈†ßƒ±∫߆…Œ†∆…Ã≈Œ¡Õ≈
32255 IF FL$="" THEN GOTO 32025
32260 IF FL$(1,2)="D:" THEN FL2$=FL$:RETURN 
32265 FL2$(1,3)="D1:":FL2$(4)=FL$:RETURN 
32270 REM ≈““œ“†»¡ŒƒÃ≈“†®±©
32275 POKE 842,12:POKE 54286,64
32280 ? :? "ERROR-";:GOSUB 32350
32285 ? "Press any key to continue ";:GET #3,R
32290 GOTO 32015
32295 REM ƒ…“≈√‘œ“Ÿ†“œ’‘…Œ≈
32300 POKE 752,1:CLOSE #4:OPEN #4,6,0,"D:*.*":X=-1
32305 TRAP 32280:X=X+1:IF X=29 THEN 32340
32310 INPUT #4,FL$
32315 IF FL$(5,16)="FREE SECTORS" THEN POSITION 2,(X)/2:? FL$:POSITION 21,(X)/2:? "FREE RAM=";FRE(0):GOTO 32340
32320 FL2$=FL$(11):FL3$=FL$(1,10):FL$(11,11)=".":FL$(12)=FL2$:FL$(1,10)=FL3$
32325 IF X/2=INT(X/2) THEN POSITION 2,(X)/2:? FL$:GOTO 32305
32330 POSITION 21,(X-1)/2:? FL$
32335 GOTO 32305
32340 CLOSE #4:POKE 752,0:RETURN 
32345 REM ≈““œ“†»¡ŒƒÃ≈“†®≤©
32350 IF PEEK(195)=170 THEN ? "∆ÈφŒÔÙ†∆ÔıÓ‰":RETURN 
32355 IF PEEK(195)=144 THEN ? "ƒÈÛΆ…Û†–ÚÔلى":RETURN 
32360 IF PEEK(195)=167 THEN ? "∆Èφ–ÚÔلى":RETURN 
32365 ? PEEK(195):RETURN 
32370 REM ≈Œ‘≈“†∆…Ã≈†®≤©
32375 ? "}":TRAP 32275:POKE 54286,0:POKE 54272,0:POSITION 2,15:? "POKE 842,12:GOTO 32025"
32380 POSITION 2,10:POKE 842,13:ENTER FL2$
32385 REM √œ–Ÿ†∆…Ã≈†®≤©
32390 CLOSE #1:LGTH=0:BYTE=0:SAV=0:DIM PROG(INT(MEM/8)):? :? "Copying ";FL2$;" ...";
32395 OPEN #1,4,0,FL2$:TRAP 32415
32400 GET #1,BYTE:LGTH=LGTH+1:PROG(LGTH)=BYTE
32405 IF LGTH>INT(MEM/8) THEN ? "Œœ‘†≈Œœ’«»†“¡Õ°˝":FOR DELAY=1 TO 500:NEXT DELAY:GOTO 32430
32410 GOTO 32400
32415 ? :? "˝Insert dest'n disk,press “≈‘’“Œ?";:GET #3,R
32420 OPEN #2,8,0,FL2$:TRAP 32280
32425 FOR SAV=1 TO LGTH:PUT #2,PROG(SAV):NEXT SAV
32430 CLOSE #1:CLOSE #3:GOTO 32015
32435 REM ÿ…œ†√œÕÕ¡Œƒ†
32440 TRAP 32280:XIO CMD,#2,0,0,FL2$:GOTO 32025
32445 REM …Œ–’‘†”’¬≠“œ’‘…Œ≈
32450 INPUT #1,FL$:GOSUB 32255:RETURN 
32455 ? "}":? "ƒœ”¬œ”†ƒ≈Ã≈‘≈“†–“œ«“¡Õ":FOR ERASE=32000 TO 32475 STEP 5
32460 POSITION 2,5:? ERASE:? "POKE 842,12:NEXT ERASE"
32465 POSITION 0,3:POKE 842,13:STOP 

If for some weird reason you really want to give DOSBOS a try, here is an ATR disk image you can download and boot from with your favorite hardware or emulator:

DOSBOS ATR

At the BASIC prompt, you can load DOSBOS with this command:

LOAD “D:DOSBOS.BAS”

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You control “Bounty Bob” as he climbs ladders and walks on the framework. Use the special equipment like the transporters, the lift, and the cannon to help Bob claim the mine. Collect the various possessions left by previous explorers, but watch out for mutant organisms that lurk everywhere and try to waste you!

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I was very fond of this Mega STE and missed it so much that I purchased another one in April 2023, which now sits behind me in my office.

I used my original Mega STE in college and while I was Current Notes ST editor. This photo is from the off-campus apartment I lived in.

Does that just scream 90s or what? And that chair! Apparently I wasn’t worried about ergonomics as much as I am now! That desk was a Service Merchandise special that I had first bought for my 1040ST back in 1989. Hutches were all the rage back then. Although I gave the desk away in 1996, I still have the printer stand!

Let’s go through what we’re looking at here, to the best of my recollection.

On the far left is the printer. As I recall it was 24-pin and, rather unusually, serial instead of parallel. At the time I was in college and working part-time at Radio Shack. This printer had been used to print nightly reports, but was replaced with something nicer so they let me buy it cheap. Of course since most printers were parallel back then, it meant it didn’t always work with every program. I believe this was the Tandy DMP300 (#4 in the catalog page below).

I mostly used this for printing program listings and it worked great for that.

Below the printer are some printouts and a floppy storage container. I still have a lot of those kinds of floppy containers.

Moving to the right there is a monitor and some manuals to the left. Zooming in, I believe those are my Prospero Pascal manuals. The monitor is the Atari SC1224 RGB monitor. I bought this used from someone on the Delphi forum. It worked fine, but the cable was sensitive and the picture would go out if you wiggled it the wrong way so I got it cheap (sense a pattern?). Fortunately I never had to move it, so it worked fine for me.

This monitor was only used for games, which at that time would have primarily been Civilization, Populous and Llamatron.

On the floor beneath the monitor you can see a box that I believe is for STalker 3, the terminal program I used to create my Oracle shareware app for communicating with Delphi and GEnie.

Moving along, we get to the centerpiece of this setup, which is the Mega STE itself. I bought the Mega STE in 1992 so I had it about a year when this photo was taken. I had it upgraded to its maximum 4MB of RAM. It had an internal 105MB Quantum SCSI hard drive.

Sitting on top of the Mega STE is my Hayes 1200 smartmodem that I used to go online with Genie, Delphi and the school’s Unix systems (via VT-100 emulator). Next to that is a Monitor Master that allowed me to switch between the Atari SM124 monochrome monitor and the SC1224 RGB monitor without having to touch any cables.

Today I also own an SM124, SC1224 and Monitor Master, but I instead have a Dell LCD monitor hooked up to my Mega STE as it is more convenient and takes up much less space, at a cost of losing that retro CRT coolness.

Seeing the pocket watch on the Mega STE tells me this photo was taken was after October 1993. The pocket watch belonged to my Grandfather who passed in October 1993 and my Dad gave me that stopwatch shortly afterwards. I still have it.

Above the monitor is my flip calendar, which likely has the wrong date since I never remember to flip it. I actually still have that calendar as well and it also has the wrong date now.

To the right of the computer is a bit of a mess. There is a floppy holder, but I cannot make out the floppies that are in it. I had most stuff on the hard drive, so didn’t directly need floppies except for installation, backups and some games.

On the shelf below the desk are some books. I can easily make out a Calculus book and as I recall the book on the far left might be for databases.

It certainly would have been cool to have some more detailed pictures of this setup. I spent a lot of time sitting there and it warranted more photos, but unlike today, people didn’t take pictures of every little thing. After all, it was expensive to buy and develop film!

It’s easy to forget how few things were actually photographed in those days. Today you can take a picture of anything easily and cheaply. Back in the 80s, you needed to grab your camera, already have film, take a photo without even knowing how it might really look, take it somewhere to pay to get it developed once the roll of film was full, then go back to pay and pick up the pictures. It was quite a process! Casually snapping photos was really not a thing, especially not of most mundane things.

And for completeness, here is a picture of my current Mega STE config:

With this newly found old photo, I now have photos of the three main Atari computers I used back in the old days!

The only other Atari I used was an Atari 400, but that was never set up at a desk. It was just connected to the TV and mostly used as a game console. I haven’t yet come across a photo of this.

As you might guess, most of my retro computers are Atari-related. I’ll try to list them in the order I acquired them. Let’s dive in!

Atari 800XL

I was given this system by my Dad. It’s not the same 800XL that we had when I was a kid, but it serves the same purpose. This one is actually a later model that has Atari BASIC rev. C. This computer rekindled my love for retro computing and started me on the path that eventually led to the creation of Goto 10.

I’m very fond of my time with our 800XL from about 1985 to 1988. I used to it learn how to program, using BASIC and Pascal, wrote many papers on it in high school and played many great games.

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The first thing to notice if you’ve never…

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Cartridges have the advantage of being super-easy to use, essentially turning the computer into a console for game cartridges. But cartridges could also be used for programming languages and productivity software.

Because the cartridge contained the software on ROM, it could be used with computers that didn’t have much RAM or by people that didn’t yet own any peripherals, such as a tape drive or disk drive.

Out of all the computers that used cartridges, the Atari 8-bit computers probably had the most cartridges available for it. My Atari 8-bit cartridge collection keeps growing these past few years and a recent bundle purchase has added even more!

Let’s look at some of the new carts I’ve acquired, with a little commentary thrown in for good measure.

I now have a fairly large number of duplicate carts, which are now listed for sale on the Goto 10 store ($5 each), if you’re interested in filling out your collection.

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It is obviously not in the best of shape and didn’t even co…

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Compute! published many books for the Atari 8-bit computers and I’ve written about their first two already:

The other Compute! book I own is Compute!’s First Book of Atari Graphics. I don’t have Compute!’s Third Book of Atari, the Second Book of Atari Graphics or Compute!’s Atari Collection Volume 1.

But for this article, let’s dig into Mapping the Atari.

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Pay special attention to the pricing. Although the prices of these computers all look reasonable through today’s eyes, when you factor in inflation, they were all incredibly expensive, much more so than most com…

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Read on to learn how this program caused some controversy in the Atari computer world and to watch a video of it in action.

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Some computers had a command-line, such as those that used CP/M or DOS. Others would use BASIC as the interface, such as the Commodore 64 or Apple II. Wi…

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The paddle controls were a somewhat interesting controller. The style first became popular with Pong and the original Atari VCS included joystick and paddle controllers.

You spin these dials to move something on the screen, the “paddle” in the case of Pong. The controllers were not free-spinning; they would stop when they reached their max left and right positions.

Atari did make free-spinning paddles for the Indy 500 game. I think that might be the only game that use them.

Unfortunately, the paddle controllers were not always reliable. The small potentiometer that they used would wear out quickly resulting in “jitters” that would cause the item on the screen that was being controlled to jump around on the screen slightly.

One particular oddity is that two paddle controllers connected to a single control port on the 2600. That meant you could have up to four players for some games!

Now, on to the games.

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I don’t usually write about such recent topics1, but 25 years is a long time and Mac OS X was a Big Deal. It was a big deal to me personally because I got my first Mac in 2001 shortly after the release of Mac OS X. It also was an even bigger deal for…

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• True BASIC

• Fast BASIC

• DBASIC

• REAL BASIC

• GFA BASIC

But I’ve never written about the official Atari ST BASIC. This is the BASIC that came on the ST Language Disk with the computer, at least in the US.

MousePad Fun

Are you looking for some fun retro gear to adorn your workspace? Then check out the Goto 10 store, which has some cool Atari-themed merch. The GEM desktop mouse pad has been the most popular so far. These will bring joy to your life and help support Goto 10!

Visit the Store

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The Odyssey 2 was Introduced in 1978, just about a year after the Atari…

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Goto 10 Store

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Also about this time, the Mega ST was available and it had the Blitter chip that helped speed up graphics operations, which helped give them improved performance over a standard ST that otherwise had the same 8Mhz 68000 CPU.

Although GEM was nice and easy to use, no one would call it speedy. Since it was quickly ported to the ST in late 1984 and early 1985, there was not a lot of time for optimizations. And because it is embedded in ROM as part of TOS, updating it is not trivial. By this point there had been only a single update after the 1.0 ROMs became standard in late 1985: TOS 1.02, which was the version that shipped with the Mega ST and eventually made it into the other ST computers. This version was mostly bug fixes with few performance improvements.

My 1040STfm that I got in January 1989 had TOS 1.02.

However, developers figured out that they could optimize things themselves and soon software accelerators started appearing to help speed up GEM. The first of these was Turbo ST.

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Zoom meetings are held twice a month and I attended a recent…

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