![]() #ATARI ST MAC EMULATOR WINDOWS#Windows now accomplish a great many of the keyboard commands, such as combat, spell-casting, and earning levels…In the ST version, you simply click on the Guild’s doors with the mouse, and a pull-down menu at the top of the screen displays your choices.”įigure 4.3: One of the best original CRPGs of its day, SSI’s Phantasie delivered a massive world to explore and plenty of challenges for your party of six adventurers. In an April 1987 review of Phantasie in Dragon #120, Hartley and Patrick Lesser wrote the ST port “incorporates far more sophisticated graphics and sound, and has almost become a new game because of the ST’s environment. The ST port that arrived a year later was considerably sharper and more colorful, and supported the ST’s mouse-based GUI. Phantasie first came out for several 8-bit systems in 1985. And when you arrived back at a town, you chose how many shares of experience points you’d earned to allot to each character, another innovative difference from other CRPGs. The game even saved the state of a dungeon after you left it, which was unusual. That meant you didn’t need a pen and graph paper to map it by hand. The “fog of war” was cleared as you explored and then stayed persistent. One of Phantasie’s best features was it mapped itself. Watching enemies get destroyed one by one was quite satisfying. You queued up your commands and executed them all at once, and then the combat system played out that turn of the battle so you could see what happened before you made your next set of moves. In combat, the game showed detailed drawings of each player and monster. The land spanned wilderness, mountainous regions, and of course, dungeons, populated with all kinds of treasure and 80 different monster types. The towns in the game let you form parties, save games, buy and sell equipment, and store your money in a bank. The game featured a passive skill system Wood said was derived from RuneQuest and D&D. You had to find the Nine Rings and use them to destroy the Dark Lord Nikademus and his Black Knights. In Phantasie, you started the game on the medieval isle of Gelnor with a party of six adventurers, selected from a whopping 15 races and six character classes. I still love hearing the theme song with its trills in the melody. Programmer Winston Douglas Wood developed the game on an Apple II SSI then ported it to a number of other platforms, including as a graphically enhanced and more colorful version for the ST. ![]() Phantasie ended up being the first of three installments. It set the tone both for what we should expect from both SSI and 16-bit platforms going forward. The first SSI game we’ll discuss for the ST was one of its best CRPGs. But arguably more effective were its attempts at simulating Dungeons & Dragons-like role-playing games. SSI made its name on bringing classic tabletop wargaming to the computer screen. ![]() #ATARI ST MAC EMULATOR FREE#Here’s a free book excerpt I hope you enjoy it. One year in the making, Faster Than Light: The Atari ST and the 16-Bit Revolution is now shipping on Amazon. STs even booted extremely quickly, thanks to their containing the entire operating system and GUI on fast ROM chips, rather than having to be loaded off of a disk. Like no other computer before or since, it came with built-in MIDI ports that made it a snap for the machine to talk to synthesizers, samplers, and drum machines, and the ST’s GUI made it easy to work with printed musical notation. ![]() #ATARI ST MAC EMULATOR SOFTWARE#To this day, I regularly review digital audio workstation software for our sister site in addition to running ExtremeTech, and I can credit my love of music recording to my original Atari 520ST system. My new book, Faster Than Light: The Atari ST and the 16-Bit Revolution, traces the history, the highs, and the lows of this fantastic personal computer, from the very first 520ST to the stellar, rare Falcon 030 model that arrived in 1992. But a special place in my heart is reserved for the 1985 16-bit model, the one that delivered both sophisticated gaming and kicked off my lifelong affinity for recording music. My favorite computer of all time remains the Atari 800, which debuted in 1979. ![]()
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