I have quite a large collection of software for my Ataris, ranging from old games that sit on a shelf gathering dust, to utilities that I use every week. Ironically, the programs that I use most are the freeware or shareware utilities rather than the expensive commercial equivalents, so in this section I would like to describe the software I use most, and why.

Because most of this software is freeware or shareware, I also hope to add links to sources of these programs on the net, to make it easy for you to locate them, should you wish to. Games or demos, used to be available at the Imperial College mirror of the UMICH Atari archives - as are large MiNT and Falcon sections. Unfortunately this mirror can sometimes be very out of date, compared with the UMICH archives themselves.

It seems sensible to start with the program I use to actually write these pages - Everest. Everest is a text editor, nothing more, and nothing less - except shortcuts.

Shortcuts, abbreviations, kurzels - whatever you call them, they make life much easier for me to write these pages. Essentially they are exactly what they say - shortcuts. For example, when writing the code for this page, I simply typed "htm" and hit [ESC]. The result was a series of lines of code - the same lines I always use - for beginning and ending a web page. The cursor was even positioned between the "TITLE" elements, ready for me to enter a title for the page. Similarly, a pair of "CENTER" elements are as simple as typing "ce" [ESC], with the cursor placed in the middle. Even something as complex as the complete "mailto:" line of my address is only an "xa" away.

In addition, Everest is very easy to launch and use. I can simply drag a file onto the Everest icon, or onto an already open Everest window. It also supports long filenames, and multiple selections from a suitable fileselector.

There's no point having a screenshot of Everest, since it is just a text editor, at the end of the day. Instead, I have included a copy of my shortcuts file. If you already have Everest, copy this as EVEREST.KRZ into the same directory as the program (or merge it into your existing file), and edit it to suit yourself. Believe me, with help like this, web pages become (almost) easy.

Everest is shareware, supported in the U.K. by Joe Connor.

Freedom is probably my favourite program at the moment, since it epitomises all the best features of a modern GEM interface. Not only does it look good - with its 3D appearance and user defined colour scheme, but it also supports non-modal dialogues, long filenames, drag'n'drop and the GEM clipboard. What may be surprising to you, however, is that Freedom is "just" a fileselector.

Essentially it is the best fileselector I have used on any system - be it Mac, PC or even Unix based. It has been programmed to be 8 times re-entrant - so up to 8 fileselectors can be opened at once. To acheive this it is non-modal, and takes the form of a GEM window which can be moved, resized and iconified. It has more features than most desktops, allowing you to copy and move items, launch applications, view files, rename items, create and delete them, search for items and much more besides.

It also keeps a record of the last 100 files accessed, and allows you to colour code and assign icons to different filetypes. It makes navigating round the folder hierarchy extremely easy, and supports user defined paths and filemasks to aid this. It even supports Unix style wildcards, as well as an autolocator, so finding an elusive file is as easy as it is ever likely to get.

Once I get back to the Falcon, I'll get a decent screenshot of Freedom - the ST screen wouldn't really do it justice. It's shareware, supported in the U.K. by Joe Connor

O.k. So you've probably noticed all this talk of long filenames. If you've ever owned an Atari, or used one extensively, you may be thinking "what long filenames?" This is because the TOS system, as used on Atari's, was largely hashed together from other sources. The result was that the standard TOS filesystem has the same 8.3 format (8 character filename and 3 character extension) of an old DOS system. MiNT is a replacement TOS kernel, and used to stand for "MiNT is Not TOS". What it offers is a multitasking core for your Atari - based heavily upon BSD Unix. It also allows you to use loadable device drivers and filesystems - and it is with the latter that you can get long, case sensitive filenames on your Atari.

MiNT was in fact licensed by Atari themselves for their "official" multitasking system - "MultiTOS". This incorporates a new version of the AES (another part of the Atari operating system), which allows you to multitask GEM applications. This is not possible with MiNT alone, although you can run one GEM program and several TOS (text based) programs. As a result of this licensing, MiNT currently stands for "Mint is Now TOS".

MiNT gives you a Unix-like system, and can even run X (a graphical front end for Unix boxes), however if you just want to multitask GEM applications, or aren't worried about the Unix side of things, you'd be better off with MagiC, a faster commercial system. There is also a version available for the Mac (MagiCMac) which will allow you to run GEM programs on a Macintosh.

MiNT is also available for the Mac, but without a Mac version of the AES. This restricts you to running TOS programs under MacMiNT.

MiNT itself is freeware. You are allowed to look at and hack about with the code, and it is currently "maintained" by a group of enthusiasts on the net. Between them they argue about various modifications to the code, then release the updated code to the public. These newer versions are generally faster and/or more stable than the older ones, and have sections of code that are required for some newer applications to run. Consequently, even if you bought MultiTOS, you should replace the version of MiNT you have with the latest one.

MiNT is available from the Atari archive at Umich by clicking here for the binary. For the source, click here.

Note that these links are probably quite out of date now, but should still work for a pretty stable version of MiNT. If you want to be more cutting edge, however, you could try this Belgian FTP site. In the directory atari/mint/kernel/freemint-1.15-beta3.0/ you will find a raft of files for different processors, all containing the latest MiNT beta - which now supports VFAT (Win 95/98) partitions. Note that I haven't tried this out yet, but I'll report back here when I do.

To go with MiNT, minixFS is the loadable filesystem that actually gives you long filenames. The names are case sensitive, and depending on how things are set up, you can get up to 124 (I think) character filenames. It makes life so much nicer, especially under MultiTOS with a nice fileselector and some other applications that support long names. Also available from the Atari archive by clicking here for a binary. For the source, click here.

It's taken a while (even the Amiga beat us to it!), but the Atari platform now has a web browser. Ok, if you wish to be pedantic, it's had Lynx (a text only browser) for some time - though this needs MiNT and MiNT-net (funnily enough, a network extension for MiNT). All of these are available from the UMICH MiNT archive.

In fact, if you've got a 4 meg (or more) mono equipped Atari, with MiNT and MiNT-net, you could have been running the X windowing system with Chimera, a graphical browser, for some time now. An "easy" to set up distribution from the Toronto Atari Federation is available from a number of sources, including quite a few PD suppliers.

CAB, however, is a fully GEM'd web browser, using a network socket program called STiK, and a file to tie the two together. This is a truly multinational affair, with each of the three parts being written in different countries! It is, however supported as one package in the UK, by Joe Connor (for older versions). It has recently turned commercial (just CAB, not STiK) and is available from System Solutions.

The browser isn't Netscape, but it is more than capable, and is a very good start. I use it offline to check these pages for obvious errors before I post them. There are also quite a wide range of other programs that will run with STiK, including FTP, News and email clients amongst others.

For the real masochists, there is a file to tie CAB into MiNT-net, which at least allows you to do everything with only one set of configuration software and files. It's available at UMICH (use the link above), and is called "cab-for-mintnet" or something similar.

Recently I have been making more and more use of Esscode - a uuencoder/decoder for GEM. Previously I used a CLI version (though Esscode can apparently also be run as a CLI), but have recently been having to use uuencoding more and more often. Esscode is a nicely GEM'd application, and runs flawlessly under MultiTOS. It also handles mime, ship and btoa encoding, though I haven't had cause to check these out yet. It's supported in the UK, and is available from Denesh (Danny) Bhabuta.