Welcome to this short tour of Rainbow, an Atari 400/800/800XL emulator for the Apple Mac. If you haven't already then try out the demo version!
With suitable Atari ROMs on your Mac, you can launch Rainbow and be presented with the familiar Memo Pad screen of the 400/800 computers.
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Not the most exciting screenshot of all time! But having got this far, you can relive many of your favourite 8 bit moments on your Mac. And what better game to start with than Star Raiders?
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Great to play that one again! As you can see the graphics emulation of Rainbow is faithful to the original 8 bit hardware which includes Player Missile Graphics with full collision detection, Fine Scrolling, Display List Interrupts, all graphics modes and colours.
But aside from games, you can perform all the usual disk operations using, for example, Atari DOS 2.5.
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Low level SIO emulation means that all disk operations are possible using Rainbow's two virtual disk drives. Each drive can handle single and enhanced density images.
Disk management is greatly simplified by two extra facilities in Rainbow. The IMPORT function will intelligently paste external files from your Mac hard drive into a DOS disk image. The directory and VTOC (volume table of contents) are updated and the file can be accessed using normal disk operations. This works for both single and enhanced disk images.
The EXPORT function does the opposite; any DOS file can be saved onto your Mac hard disk. So using IMPORT and EXPORT, you can bypass the slow DOS copy operations and disk housekeeping becomes much less of a chore!
Those with DCM images can use Disk Communicator 3 (or DISCOMM3) under Rainbow emulation to unpack the file. Simply import the DCM file into a formatted DOS blank image and let DISCOMM3 do its magic to leave you a bootable disk image. Simple!
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Many of you may want to program using Rainbow. Atari Basic works great, Turbo Basic runs fine under 800XL emulation and OSS Super Cartridges such as MAC/65 and ACTION! work okay as well. Here's MAC/65's DDT debugger in use.
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For word processing, AtariWriter performs very well on Rainbow. Who needs Word 6, eh?
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For artists, here's Designer's Pencil in action.
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The shareware version of Rainbow also comes with TinyTerm software to transfer your 8 bit disks quickly and reliably over to your Mac. You can copy a whole disk over in about 3 to 5 minutes depending on the density. You will need an Atari 850 Interface Module and a simple homemade cable. Full instructions are provided.
But back to games! Let's kick off with Moon Patrol.
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Here's a nice screenshot of Jumpman, a very good platform game.
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Under 800XL emulation you can play many XL-only games like Gauntlet.
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Here's a game of M.U.L.E. in progress.
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Maybe a little harmless karate?
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Ouch! Perhaps not. Let's try Spelunker instead.
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Well, it was easy until that ghost appeared. Howsabout Boulderdash?
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Something with a little more speed like Pole Position...
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And finally, Zaxxon.
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Well, that's enough screenshots. I hope you've enjoyed this little tour and if you did, try out the demo of Rainbow. You can find it at the web site
http://www.aston.ac.uk/~lamcw/emulators.html
or by FTP at
ftp.amug.org in info-mac/app or /rec
and mirror sites. The demo includes full details on how to register for the full shareware version.
