Categories: Top ::

Review: Atari Gothica DVD collection
Sat, 24 Jun 2006

I stumbled across this DVD-set on ebay and being the Atari-ST-wanker than I am it was only a matter of instants before my willpower broke. I've already acquired a prodigious collection of old ST junk and built up a respectible archive of BBS-related software in my little attempt at software preservation, but its been up to the pirates of yesteryear to have kept alive some of the great software from the platform. No one, but no one would have kept their copy of Word Perfect for the ST, so in a way the pirates (yar!) from 1986 have really achieved something. But these barrel-chested fellows didn't archive the free software, artwork and audio that made up such a large part of that precious 16-bit culture -- since it was freely available and distributed by BBS, Fidonet, and user groups already. No effort was made to especially preserve it, so only the pro-tools such as Notator MIDI-notation (still used by some few) or applications that have grown even today (Calamus graphic layout suite) and games live on. Emulation can provide a platform to fire up Gauntlet and Dungeon Master.. but <SallyStruthers>won't someone please think of the culture?</SallyStruthers> Without effort, no one but I will remember the DEGAS Elite version of Elric some anonymous artist rendered...

A few various Atari ST collections can be had online, mostly disk images of the games for feeding to various emulators. Atari Gothica is a collection that (from my quickly looking through it) is not made up of that -- instead it is SIX DVD's of Atari software, music files, picture files, textfiles and other jetsam from the era. This my friends, is Atari gold! Atari nerds among you will know you can head over to a few FTP sites that existed back in the day through to now, but how long will they remain?

I do have some complaints about this collection; sure, its obviously DVDs burnt in someones basement.. fine, thats how the homebrew and retro communities survive. The disks themselves (arrived very promptly from the seller on ebay.. likely the guy who assembled them?) aren't well liked by my laptop's DVD drive, so each file will take a few minutes to copy. One of these days I'll read all the files off and burn new DVDs myself, but so far I've not had errors reading the disks.. just speed problems.

Further, the content is all in self-extracting .exe files -- and I don't know about you, but I never run .exe's from some guy on ebay. Still, feeding them into an unzip tool has worked fine, since .zip format keeps its header at the end so one can just unzip them and go, without running the .exe's themselves.

Aside from these nits are the good bits: These disks are each 4 gigabytes of late 1980's media and programs and tools for the Atari ST, TT and Falcon platforms. If you want crappy techo music made by kids using .MOD 'Tracker' programs, theres planty here. If you want thousands of images in formats like Degas, Neopaint, Deluxepaint including Amiga IFF files.. you'll be in love here. From .TOS and .TTP and .PRG files to GEM Desk Accessories its here. A sweaty heady mix of Atari nostalgia.. the crap you'd find on hundreds of old hard drives (if anyone could still use MFM hard drives!) from back in the day. I ran an ST BBS with 50 whole megabyte sof this junk, and that poor drive died.. so I'm glad through the efforts of Jason Textfiles.com we have the BBS culture preserved, and through all these whacky ST collections we can still keep a small island of 16-bit crappy applications.

One thing I found amusing -- I picked a random disk and opened up one of the zip files on it and it had a few thousand old image files. I scrounged for an application that could open them (to avoid firing up an emulator to do so) and voila -- I had a complete 320x200 low res series of snapshots that pretty much represented the artwork my brother had on the walls in his room circa 1989. I'll have to find those images again and post them to the blog .. it'll take you back. Hell, finding Atari images of Max Headroom take me back. The 'trash' media from any given era are a very good indicator of the norm of a time, and these files are no exception.

[ Category: / technology / atari ] [link] [Comments]