WinSTon and The Little Green Desktop

Cast your mind back to the 80s when the ST and Amiga were the
kings of the home computing scene. Do you remember some of the
great games you played then? Ex-ST owners can relive those times
with an emulator such as WinSTon v0.2r2 which is one of the most
easy to use ST emulators I have seen. It runs under Windows 95, 98
and NT and installation is unbelievably speedy.

The only other thing you'll need is an Atari ST TOS image. Any
version will do but the authors suggest v1.0 which can be
downloaded from the same site as WinSTon, The Little Green Desktop
(LGD). The first time you run WinSTon it prompts you to browse for
a TOS image and once you've done that, up pops the familiar
'little green desktop' of the ST. Two function keys are used, F12
toggles between Windows and ST mouse mode and F11 flips between
Window and full screen mode, which (like full sound) requires
DirectX. A virtual hard disk will also be set up where you choose,
and a disk image directory.

When you want to load a game, you simply use the mouse to go to
one of the floppy drive icons along the menu bar to load a floppy
image into one of the drives. Many of the games have been hacked
and packed by familiar names such as the Medway Boys and
Automation. A little flashing button indicates when a program is
loading or unpacking, and everything I tried worked very smoothly
and quite quickly. I did find my mouse was sometimes a bit erratic
afterwards but even that wasn't a problem.  I downloaded a few
images from The Net. One of the first games I bought on the ST was
Little Computer People and it was great to see that again. You can
search the LGD site for all your old favourites - what about
Dungeon Master and ... yes ... Chaos Strikes Back! Sleeping Gods
Lie was another old favourite of mine and that was there too. The
site has over 2100 games for download and also has a lot of
utilities. Well worth a visit!

The Little Green Desktop is at http://www.lgd.fatal-design.com and
the WinSTon homepage is at http://winston.atari.org
                                                    Sue
                              - o -