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Probably due to the combination of the okimate color thermal printer (also available for C64) and that awesome Camera grab program. Vision something. Allowed you to print t-shirts and stuff from photos. It was another 10 yrs before PC's could do it as well.

I did envy the C64 guys with their giant mounds of disks. We moved on to apple iic and I got my giant piles of floppys too.

This whole thread has me firing up the emulators again, thanks a bunch Slashdot, another weekend lost to nostalgia and The Little Green Desktop.

Since I can't e-mail you, I'll post a reply here.

I remember O.G.R.E., that was a great game. Had it for the Atari ST myself. I did a little searching after reading your post, and I've found the following links:

Commodore 64 version (is there a C64 emu for Linux?):
http://www.download-full-games.com/c64/games/ogre. html

A "lite" version of the original board game:
http://www.sjgames.com/ogre/resources/
http://www.sjgames.com/ogre/resources/ogrelite.pdf

A possible connection to the Atari ST version - this page has a list of disk images, each file appears to contain several games. I don't know what to do with this file to extract the games within, but the site mentions using the STEEM emulator, so maybe that will do it for you? Anyways, OGRE is almost halfway down the page, in file A_202:
http://steem.atari.st/automation.htm

Or direct to the file:
ftp://ftp.cs.tu-berlin.de/pub/atari/games/Automati on/A_202.ST

For possible help using the file, here's a blog entry from a few months ago - this guy has been running the game from this file under a different emu (SainT), so maybe you can pick his brain for assistance:
http://scottobear.livejournal.com/tag/atari

I'm sorry I couldn't actually find the DOS version, but I know from experience the ST version is great, and the C64 will probably be easy for you to run. Good luck!

I thought immediately about ECO, a game on my old Atari ST back in the late 80's. I think it was availible on the amiga as well:

http://www.atari.st/view.php?id=498

Last year my Yamaha DX7 music keyboard battery died. I didn't know it at the time but when the battery dies, all programmed sound patches and modes are erased, even the factory presets. No problem, I had made a backup years ago with DX Android on the Atari ST so I could just restore from those backups. I got the battery replaced but when I got the Atari ST out of the closet it would not boot. I guess I could have searched ebay for a replacement but instead I got the Atari ST emulator, STeem from http://www.atari.st/ and was able to restore the patches from the backups using it.

I have emulators for most of the computers I had previously owned. I still have the software, just would not have a way to play them anymore if it wasn't for emulators. Some of the ones I use besides the Atari ST that I had previously mentioned are:
Amiga http://www.winuae.net/
Atari 800 http://www.concentric.net/~Twist/atari800win/
DOS Games http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/
Another Atari ST Emulator http://sourceforge.net/projects/winston/

I was messing around with downloading old Atari ST games for an emulator recently, and was somewhat surprised to discover some very old first-person shooters.

Infestation, released by Psygnosis in 1990. Completely 3D, with flat-shaded polygons used for the world and for monsters. Seems bloody difficult, though - either that or the version I downloaded is broken, killing the player within a minute or so. From screenshots I've seen, it appears to go indoors as well, in full 3D again.

Castle Master, released by Domark in 1990. Again, completely 3D with flat-shaded polygons. Not really a shooter, more of a puzzle game, but still has that first-person viewpoint. Unlike, say, Doom and Wolfenstein 3D, you can look up and down...

Robocop 3, released by Ocean in 1992. Mainly driving, but I was really impressed to see a first-person shooter mission thing. Fully 3D with flat-shaded polygons (yet again), the enemies are effectively polygon billboards which, while they're very simple, look surprisingly realistic. Complete with Robocop-style green squares locking on to said enemies, and hostages you mustn't shoot. Way better than the film, although that's not difficult.

There's probably a load more games like this. A bit of an evolutionary dead-end, maybe, but id Software didn't pioneer the FPS game. They definitely popularised it, though.

I was messing around with downloading old Atari ST games for an emulator recently, and was somewhat surprised to discover some very old first-person shooters.

Infestation, released by Psygnosis in 1990. Completely 3D, with flat-shaded polygons used for the world and for monsters. Seems bloody difficult, though - either that or the version I downloaded is broken, killing the player within a minute or so. From screenshots I've seen, it appears to go indoors as well, in full 3D again.

Castle Master, released by Domark in 1990. Again, completely 3D with flat-shaded polygons. Not really a shooter, more of a puzzle game, but still has that first-person viewpoint. Unlike, say, Doom and Wolfenstein 3D, you can look up and down...

Robocop 3, released by Ocean in 1992. Mainly driving, but I was really impressed to see a first-person shooter mission thing. Fully 3D with flat-shaded polygons (yet again), the enemies are effectively polygon billboards which, while they're very simple, look surprisingly realistic. Complete with Robocop-style green squares locking on to said enemies, and hostages you mustn't shoot. Way better than the film, although that's not difficult.

There's probably a load more games like this. A bit of an evolutionary dead-end, maybe, but id Software didn't pioneer the FPS game. They definitely popularised it, though.

I was messing around with downloading old Atari ST games for an emulator recently, and was somewhat surprised to discover some very old first-person shooters.

Infestation, released by Psygnosis in 1990. Completely 3D, with flat-shaded polygons used for the world and for monsters. Seems bloody difficult, though - either that or the version I downloaded is broken, killing the player within a minute or so. From screenshots I've seen, it appears to go indoors as well, in full 3D again.

Castle Master, released by Domark in 1990. Again, completely 3D with flat-shaded polygons. Not really a shooter, more of a puzzle game, but still has that first-person viewpoint. Unlike, say, Doom and Wolfenstein 3D, you can look up and down...

Robocop 3, released by Ocean in 1992. Mainly driving, but I was really impressed to see a first-person shooter mission thing. Fully 3D with flat-shaded polygons (yet again), the enemies are effectively polygon billboards which, while they're very simple, look surprisingly realistic. Complete with Robocop-style green squares locking on to said enemies, and hostages you mustn't shoot. Way better than the film, although that's not difficult.

There's probably a load more games like this. A bit of an evolutionary dead-end, maybe, but id Software didn't pioneer the FPS game. They definitely popularised it, though.

most of the slant seems to be definitely doomsday, environmental, and decidely anti-government..

It's portrayed as something new, as well - but I remember one of the games included with my Atari ST back in 1988 had a similar plot synopsis. Overlander was a pretty standard driving game, but the box described a post-apocalypic world where the ozone layer had been destroyed. Lone drivers in fast cars would deliver packages across ultraviolet-irradiated freeways abandoned by everyone except armed bandits, between the few remaining fortress settlements in which the rest of mankind survives.

1988, eh?

Political? Not really - it's just a standard post-apocalyptic science fiction world. The problem seems to be more people reading non-existent politics into computer games than game designers subtly filling their games with political rhetoric.

My money's on emulators like DOSBox; if the beloved Atari ST and Amiga can live on, then by gum, we're not going to lose Wing Commander, Ultima Underworld, or Starflight, either.

Isn't it only a matter of time before my PC can achieve the (arguably ridiculous, but surely wonderful) ability to emulate its 486-based ancestors at speed?

The screenshot I saw looks a bit more functional than I remember the GEM ui being, but yeah... speaking of the ST, it looks like the little green desktop has moved to http://www.atari.st/

What the hell are drawers? Are you using GEM ?

These users is the reason to why Apple has been able to survive the late 80s and early 90s when the x86 ran away from then performance wise.

It is fun to notice all these little fanatic communities for all old computers: Atari, Amiga, ABC80, Spectrum, C64...

It is nice to see that some of us aren't here just for performance and the latest games!

check out the little green desktop

And yes, my Atari ST nostalgia was revised by one of the truly great emulators around then, PacifiST. Nowadays the best emu would be Steem - try it! Little Green Desktop has applications to use ..

The original GEM was like that, 20 years ago or so! Check out the atari desktop, where you can reach the filesystem with 2 simple clicks!!!! The whole GEM runs fine in 128 KB, and it is fully graphical, allowing file drag-n-drop etc.

And the Amiga OS was like that from the beginning. Each executable was accompanied with a .info file, which was a simple text file describing the properties of the file. Another tool was responsible for opening and processing the .info files in a graphical manner, making the whole thing too easy. Check out this and various other bits for how the Amiga GUI was one of the best, enhancing productivity, unlike modern O/Ss.

I don't know about the Amiga, but it certainly killed commercial software development on the Atari ST. Something about seing your software on a warez BBS half a day after it was released tended to put developers off :)

On the other hand, it means that we still have access to most of the games that were released on the Atari.