WinSTon
An Atari ST Emulator

WinSTon running Armour-Geddon

WinSTon is an Atari ST emulator for your Windows 95/98 or Windows NT 4.0 PC.  The current revision of WinSTon is v. 0.2.  To run WinSTon you will need an Atari ST TOS image.  TOS is the ST's operating system and comes in a number of versions.  WinSTon is compatible with all major releases of TOS.

It has been my experience that WinSTon is a great emulator for games.  Titles like Oids, Dungeon Master, Speedball, Anarchy, Gods, Lotus 2, Armour Geddon, Lemmings, The Bards Tale and many more run flawlessly.  WinSTon is NOT recommended for GEM applications.  You are probably better off with PaCifiST if you need GEM compatibility.

When WinSTon is first run, if you have not installed a previous version, it will ask you to select a suitable TOS image.  Use the 'browse' button to select the image and click on OK.  The emulator will now boot to the familiar Atari ST green desktop.   (Note:  TOS images are available from many places on the Internet.)  Paul Bates, the author of WinSTon, suggests using TOS 1.00(English) for games as this seems to provide most compatibility.

The emulator uses two basic keys - F11 and F12.

• F12 toggles between Windows and ST mouse mode. While in Windows mouse mode any mouse movement moves the familiar mouse around the screen. By pressing F12 this re-directs the mouse to the emulator screen, moving the ST mouse around.

• F11 will toggle between Windows and full-screen mode. To run in full-screen mode you will need DirectX(available from Microsoft) installed on your system.  Please note that the DispDIB method of full-screen is no longer supported.  WinSTon can now select the full screen display from a number of DirectX modes available.  These are split into 16 color/Hi-color and Low/High resolution.  You will only be shown the modes which your graphics card and DirectX can support, so if your DirectX drivers are not capable of Hi-Color then only the 16 color options will be available.  The options shown in the dialog screen are in order of speed(fastest at the top). So a 16 color display will have the fastest update but no in-game color effects will be seen.  To see these colors you must select one of the Hi-Color options.

WinSTon also has support for Low & High resolution.  When in Low resolution WinSTon will pick the nearest DirectX mode to display the screen for a faster frame rate.  As some games constantly flick between resolutions during play you will notice that DirectX will keep selecting a new resolution.   This can be annoying for the user and so the High resolution option has been included.  With this option selected just one DirectX mode will be used and this gives a more solid display.

WinSTon running Anarchy

WinSTon also has an interlace feature. This has two advantages - it is faster and it also helps to remove the 'chunky' pixel look of the PC 320x200 resolution.  With the interlace option selected WinSTon will only draw to alternate lines of the screen when using a High resolution DirectX display mode.  If this display is not to your taste simply de-select the option, although you will notice a performance penalty when doing this.

Try out all the modes available to you and select the one which most suits your needs - you may notice different results on different machines as WinSTon will select the most suitable display modes it can (i.e. an overscan mode may not be available)

Major future additions

• More speed!

• Sound sample support.

• Add color rasters to 16-color full screen modes. Support 16-color display for Windows.

• Check all TOS versions(it seems some territory roms don't work correctly).

• Improve emulation, so even more software will run.

• RS-232 NULL Modem connection to allow PC to PC and PC to ST communication.

• Internet option for RS-232.

• MIDI support - If anyone knows how to write code to send/receive bytes through a MIDI port under the Windows environment, please let me know!

• Add 50Hz and 60Hz speeds

• Support Spec512 colors

• Tree structure for favorites.

• Blitter support to speed up GEM applications.

• Document of games/application which run on WinSTon.

• Version of WinSTon with full debugger.

• Extended resolutions for GEM applications, e.g. 800x600 and 1024x768

Go to the WinSTon homepage

This emulator can be downloaded directly from it's homepage.

NOTE: In order to run this emulator, you must have the emulator itself, and a copy of the ROM's from the original system.  The emulator itself is Freeware.  The ROM's are copyrighted by the programmer or the manufacturer. You are only legally entitled to use ROM files if you own the actual game, or a PCB/ROM Cartridge from the game that you are emulating.

ROM's are not available on Back In Time,
but they can be found on the Internet.