Mac Emulator For Atari St

TOXICO'S HOME PAGE-ATARI ST EMULATION Emulating Atari ST on a Macintosh In September '97 I finally replaced my Atari STFM with an (the so-called 'Multimedia Performa'). Over the years the Performa was upgraded with: Sonnet G3/400 CPU, to 136 MB RAM, 13 GB HD, Voodoo3 2000 Video card, Yamaha 400t CD-R, and (finally) a 24x CD-ROM.

Xformer 2000 is the Atari 8-bit emulator for Windows 2000 and XP, made by the same people that brought you the ST Xformer Atari 8-bit emulator for GEM, and the PC Xformer Atari 8-bit emulator for MS-DOS.

Towards the end running Mac OS 9.2.2. I got a good run with it until the seven year old 6360 started giving problems at the end of 2004.

Then I got an, updated with OSX Leopard. (Nice, but no Classic environment.) In retrospect, I should've stuck with the original OSX Tiger on that machine. Since April 2010 I have a, running OSX Snow Leopard. (Some older PPC based software is broken, but most still runs in Rosetta.) I couldn't see any good reason to upgrade to OSX to Lion or Mountain Lion on this now-old machine. But then, in late 2013 OSX Mavericks came on the scene as a free upgrade. Rosetta isn't supported so I lost the use all my PPC software. Apart from that, the newest OSX Sierra has been sweet since I upgraded to 8GB RAM!

I've enjoyed trying some of the Mac-based Atari ST emulators. You could ask why I bother?

Office 365 for mac and windows. One reason for using these is to salvage some old files from Atari and move them into a Macintosh environment. Another reason is that some specialized music software written for old synthesizers never made it to newer computing platforms.

For instance, what modern software can edit patches on a 1980's Casio CZ-1 synthesizer? Emulators for Macintosh I know about are: • • • • Downloads can be found at NoSTalgia The freeware ST emulator is a complete emulation, but doesn't access the Mac hardware (e.g. Floppy drive - if you have one) so well. The older Version 0.65 worked best for me on Mac OS 9.x. It was good to communicate using OMS over MIDI with my old Casio CZ-1. (The newer Version 1.42 works with Quicktime Music Instruments, but OMS is greyed out.) Another cool thing to do is use Atari-based music patch software to edit the sounds of some synthesizers via MIDI.

CZ Rider and CZ Android worked well with my old Casio CZ-1 and Mac OS 9.x/OMS on my old Performa 6360. On OSX, Version 1.42 'sort-of' works. My main problem is MIDI is only output to Quicktime Instruments. I need to spend more time with it. I'm liking using monochrome settings for 'serious' applications. The new Version 1.52 for Mac OSX was released recently, with improvements. My only wish is for 'real' MIDI in/out via OSX Core Audio.

This emulator is my favorite for music applications and some games. Unfortunately, the Mac's joysticks don't work with it, so you're stuck using the keypad for games. A big plus is NoSTalgia can take screenshots.

NoSTalgia can access the Mac MIDI port using Quicktime, (or via OMS on OS 9.x), which is way-cool if you've got a heap of old sequencer files to work with. I was pleased the public release of Passport's Master Tracks Pro 3.6 works well.

(On OSX the MIDI in/out seems broken.) The DuST program for Macintosh is useful to convert ST floppies into disk images before loading. This is a very slow way to move files between the ST and Mac. An easier way is to drag the HDD-C icon in the NoSTalgia Folder onto Mac OS 9's Disk Copy program. The File Exchange Extension must be enabled for this trick to work. To make things easier, I keep an alias for Disk Copy in the Mac's NoSTalgia folder.