As I’ve been going through all this stuff, it occurred to me that people might be interested to learn about what I was doing with my Atari back in the early ’80s (and since then), and how I started using computers in the first place.A, l'/ '2/ll ' 349.00 MAC to TVconversion, the altemative for. I’ve been down an Atari rabbit hole lately, organizing and documenting my old Atari files and programs, which I originally transferred to my Mac back in the ’90s. Features.In the early ’80s, before I had a Mac, and before I was making fonts, I was an Atari home computer user. Expansion cards are rare, expensive, and sometimes have compatibility issues when made with stacked DRAMs. By default, the Atari 400 computer only has 16K of RAM very little software will work with only 16K of memory. The 48/52K RAM Card is made especially for the Atari 400 computer system.I wasn’t all that interested until I read Ted Nelson’s self-published, Whole Earth Catalog-style book Computer Lib/Dream Machines in 1980. Which refers to the Motorola 68000's 16-bit external bus and 32-bit internals.In the late ’70s, microcomputers like the Apple II and Commodore Pet were getting a lot of attention. The initial ST model, the 520ST, saw limited release in AprilJune 1985 and was widely available in July. The Atari ST is a line of home computers from Atari Corporation and the successor to the Atari 8-bit family.Redream is a cross-platform Sega Dreamcast emulator available for Windows, Mac, Linux and now Android and the Raspberry Pi 4. But when I saw an ad for the Sinclair ZX80, which sold for only $199 (plus $5 shipping), I’d found a less expensive way in.Atari 400 / 800 / XL / XE Atari ST CHIP-8 CHIP-16 Commodore 64 Commodore 65 Commodore Amiga. A basic Apple II setup cost over $2,000 (over $6,000 in 2020 dollars).I was 26 years old with a full-time job, but those machines were beyond my means. It took most of the available memory just to do that.But I’d gotten a taste of what you could do with a computer and started looking for something better.The Apple II was the most popular at the time, and the first IBM PC had just been introduced. Trying to see what I could do with it graphically, I wrote a program to display a bitmap-style lowercase “a” using graphics characters and simple PRINT statements. It only had 1K of memory (1024 bytes), plus 4K of ROM (read-only memory) that contained the operating system and BASIC language interpreter.I did some tutorials to learn the basics of BASIC and typed in some demo programs, but quickly learned how limited this little machine was. There were no moving parts, not even a power switch—just some connectors in the back to plug in the power supply, a standard cassette recorder, and a black and white TV. And it looked cheap. The case was two sheets of vacuum-formed white plastic held together with plastic rivets.
The sound and graphics were amazing for the time—better than the Apple II—and the Atari 400 was a lot cheaper, so I bought one (along with a Star Raiders cartridge). You would “hyperwarp” from sector to sector and then fly around shooting down enemy ships using a joystick. It was a first-person shooter (as they call them now) with a three-dimensional view of stars and space ships. I’d never seen anything like it. On display was an Atari 400 running a game called Star Raiders. Atari 400 Emulator Free Upgrade ToThe way color worked on the Atari was that you had a certain number of colors to work with in each graphic mode, and each of these colors could be set to any of 128 possible shades and hues. The GTIA was exciting since it added more graphic modes and up to 256 different colors.But all the existing drawing programs on the Atari used its older four-color graphic modes, including the first one I bought, Micro-Painter. I also went with the cheaper option for storage with the Atari 410 Program Recorder—which let you load and store programs and data (very slowly) on audiocassettes.Soon after I bought it, there was a free upgrade to a new graphics chip—the GTIA. As a touch typist, it wasn’t great, but it worked, and I typed in programs from computer books and magazines to learn what the machine could do. I did play a lot of games on it, but I was more interested in programming it and using its graphics capabilities for art.Like the ZX80, the Atari 400 had a membrane keyboard to keep the cost down. This let me draw 16-shade grayscale images. You could change brushes and colors as you were drawing, but there was no way to “pick up” your brush to move it to a different part of the screen, and there wasn’t any way to save or open picture files.So I modified it to work in the new graphic mode 9, which allowed up to 16 shades of a single hue. It was little more than a demo that let you draw pictures using a joystick in one of the four-color graphic modes. I did this by modifying a type-in program from Compute! magazine called The Fluid Brush. Because TV screens are “landscape” orientation, I had to work sideways. I used my mode 10 paint program to do it.The image needed to be in “portrait” orientation for the magazine. The new art director at Ambassador, Barb Koster, knew I had an Atari computer, so when they did an article about Atari in 1982, they hired me to make a digital portrait of Atari’s founder, Nolan Bushnell. Next I changed it so you could move the brush around without painting.Since I was getting more serious about all this, I got an 810 floppy disk drive and an Atari 800, which had more memory (48K), a real keyboard, and better video output.Right around this time, I had left my job as assistant art director at TWA Ambassador magazine and had gone to work at Minnesota Public Radio. I made a version that worked in this mode and then added a way to save and load pictures. (Until I figured out a a way to save files, I had to take Polaroid photos of the screen, as you can see above.)Mode 10 was also interesting since it let you use up to nine arbitrary hues and shades at once. Graphic Master used the Atari’s one-color/two shade “high res” mode of 320 by 192 pixels. Things like JPEG, TIFF, and PDF were more than a decade away.I bought a few other joystick-based “paint” programs, including Graphic Master and Fun With Art. There wasn’t any way for me to get good color printouts back then, and forget about sending digital artwork to a magazine. For the “final art,” a photographer shot the image directly from my TV screen. I taped this to my 13” TV screen as a guide for drawing the portrait. Unfortunately, the Koala Pad surface was square, unlike the TV screen, so you had to adjust to the difference in aspect ratio when drawing. It had a great drawing program called Micro Illustrator. It allowed me to work at the Atari’s highest resolution, though in black and white only. Fun With Art came on a cartridge and used the same four-color mode as Micro-Painter, but used an Atari graphics trick that let it display up to 128 colors at a time, but no more than four per row.I had two different graphics tablets for the Atari, which worked more or less like a modern Wacom tablet. It didn’t support fonts the way modern computers do. I did the cover illustration using Fun With Art and headline type inside using Graphic Master, recreating our house typeface, Alternate Gothic, in bitmap form.I also made some fonts on the Atari. For the February 1984 issue, we did a feature article about home computers. I used its screen capture feature so I could bring the models into paint programs to add color and shading.Over the next two years, I did illustrations with my Atari for other magazines, including Credit Union Advantage, where I was design consultant in my spare time, two illustrations for The Farmer, a magazine that shared the same publisher as Ambassador, and a “digital driver’s license” for AAA Magazine.When I went to MPR, I became art director of Minnesota Monthly magazine. It used the same great Micro Illustrator software.I also had a program called Atari World in which you could create 3D wireframe models. Is force shutdown bad for mac pro sierraIt didn’t have color, but it had a high-res screen and was much faster, with a mouse and graphical user interface. You could do a lot more with it, like use multiple fonts in a word processor or graphics program.It felt like the future—and it was the future, as it turned out.I still did stuff with my Atari after I got my first Mac, and had them side by side on my desk. As much fun as the Atari was, the Mac was much more advanced. I did have some ideas for programs and games they could be used for, but I never got very far with it.Just as I was getting pretty good at doing graphics and programming on the Atari, the Apple Macintosh was launched in January 1984, and I had to have one. There were 128 possible characters, and you could also display any of them in reverse.The fonts I made were mostly for fun, since there wasn’t any easy way to use them normally. The screen could fit 40 characters across and 24 characters down in the normal text mode. You couldn’t use them in off-the-shelf word processors or text editors.Each character in an Atari font had to fit into an 8 by 8 pixel square. ![]()
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