Atari ST Color only software running in Monochrome
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- Опубликовано: 8 фев 2025
- Need is the mother of invention....the Omnires software creator wanted to run color only software on his monochrome monitor. He made it happen.
Viewer of the channel Pierre found this old software and sent my way. I imaged the floppy disk and had it uploaded to Atarimania here: www.atarimania...
I was only able to get it to work in TOS 1.0
#retrogaming
#atari
#atarist
#ultima
#dungeonmaster
Very interesting, thanks for sharing 👍 IDK that any program could display color only games in mono Hi-Res! No exactly "are you telling me for 40 years …" moment 😉 for me, since I had 1040STfm/SM124 and TV was good enough for games, but still it's cool to know.
I used a program called Sebra to run monochrome only programs on my color monitor. It was mostly for PD games from Germany and GDOS based apps where I need to have the screen to have the exact ratio for printouts. (Medium rez programs stretch their graphics vertically)
But I was so happy to be able to use a VGA display for the ST's high rez mode. :)
The ST High Res mode really was beautiful for it's time.
I recall that software too! Used it myself back in the day, I am not 100% sure which monochrome only software I was running in it, but I feel like it was the software PC-Ditto and trying to get a VGA game running. I recall it worked at less than a snails pace, but back then I was so blown away it worked I didn't care (never used it for anything serious though).
There were several different color emulators back in the time. I used them but can't remember the names in my 1.06 Atari STe. Of course only OS friendly software runs. Don't expect anything like Turrican 2 or Wrath of the Demon to run.
I also remember some software that allowed doing the opposite: running mono software in color mode either by halving the vertical resolution or doing some kind of interlacing (worked only on STe's). Finally I also tried once a software that did overscan in mono mode and increased resolution.
So, there is a lot to explore in this field 😉
Handy for those who bought vga adaptors. I ended up buying a ubswitch, fortunately my monitor displays all three st modes. The next problem though, modern joysticks/wireless controllers etc, there are some options, you might be interested in covering that area? From memory many games required swapping the mouse over, not ideal 😕
Glad I read the fine print - only runs in TOS 1.0. For those of us with later versions - is there a floppy image of TOS 1.0 that could be installed, just before this program, to enable running it.
I've tried running with booted versions (as opposed to in ROM) of TOS 1.0 and wasn't able to get it running.
Interesting.. now I'm curious what Sundog would look like..
Sundog booted up and ran fine...that one was an easy one to set up.
@powerofvintage9442 very nice!
Ha, I could tell by the music on Ultima IV that it was way slow. But why was it blue?
My other question is... is it actually 'upscaling' it to 640x400? That would explain the slow down, for sure.
It isn't blue, that's just the color of the Atari Mono display...it's a "grey". They way I read the manual description, it isn't upscaling but greyscaling, or converting the color to greyscale counterparts.
There are options with the software to just convert specific bitplanes into black and white. It runs much faster that way, but looks terrible for games.
Pretty cool, but I have a feeling that Goldrunner is not going to work well with this adapter ;-)
Definitely not super high performance.