WinSTon logo

Screenshots

(C)opyright 1998
Paul Bates
e-mail

WinSTon is
Freeware

[an error occurred while processing this directive] visitors


16th August 1998

Note: This web site is retained for nostalgic reasons only. As you can see, it's about 7 years old now! The BBS doesn't work, the links are probably fudged, but this is what it all looked like back in the midst of the ST emulation revolution. — Richard Davey, 2005

WinSTon is an Atari ST emulator for Windows 95, 98 and NT. So, what has been happening since the last release? Well, my normal 9-5 job required me to work VERY long hours to meet various deadlines which left me very little time for working on WinSTon. But now IT'S BACK!

New in v0.1 Release 2

A lot of NT machines don't support 320x200 resolutions, WinSTon now scales up to 640x400 (or 480) automatically. The screen corruption that was happening on certain graphics cards under NT is now resolved. The Windows mouse pointer sticking when running in full-screen has been fixed. When running at Max Speed double-clicks now work. Hard Drive saving has been enabled.

Also with regards to blank disk images: "I've taken a quick look at the floppy disc read/writing. I can't say for sure yet, I need to look into it some more but it seems that Pacifist/Makedisk don't set up the boot-sectors with all the information WinSTon needs to read the disc. A guy put a message on the BBS saying he could not read a blank formatted disc. I tried it and no you couldn't! But, here's the strange thing, neither could my ST! I had to set some bytes in the boot sector for my ST to read it - then WinSTon read it fine... I've added a little bodge into this version so if it cannot find the correct information it assumes it instead. Doesn't help games discs, but others will be better."

"This may sound all a bit mad, but I've emulated the floppy disc drive at a lower point that Pacifist - I've learnt from all my game conversions - the more you change the less likely it is to work 100% correctly. So it's actually emulating it correct! Phew! Once I'm sure what is at fault here I can easily work around it."

"Oh, Speedball II works now, as does NewZealand Story!"

New in v0.1

First off, I re-wrote the 68000 emulation code as I was not happy with the speed or number of bugs. Also for those of you who ran the previous version of WinSTon you'll know that it had a lot of problems with the keyboard/Joystick. With the help of new documentation and my trusty ST, keyboard emulation is more reliable. FDC access has also been added, as a lot of games were found to hang when accessing the floppy drive. Also, to be more 'Windows friendly', DirectX support is now available to run full screen for all versions of Windows with it installed.

Major changes since last release:

» All new emulation code. More accurate than previous versions.
» Re-written IKBD/ACIA emulation code.
» Simple Floppy Disc Controller(FDC) emulation.
» Support for '.MSA' file format.
» DirectX support for full screen
» Full screen in all resolutions on all versions of Windows.
» Sound compatible with all Windows sound cards.
» 'Favourites' disc listing feature.
» Double-click a game to run it!

The long and short of it is - lots of games now work! Titles like Oids, Dungeon Master, Speedball, Anarchy, Gods, Lotus 2, Armour Geddon, Lemmings, The Bards Tale and many more! (sounds like a CD commercial, I know). WinSTon shouldn't be your first choice for demos or GEM work, but if you fancy a quick treck around a dungeon or a fast-blast on Robotz, this is the one for you. No messy DOS configuration, it'll use your Windows installed Joystick, video and sound card configurations and best of all - it's only a 140k download.

Here you can see WinSTons Favourites list in action. Just click the heart, choose a game and away you go. Notice we are playing Oids - currently unsupported by most ST emulators.