Readers Top Ten

Chris Bloy is a regular on 42BBS, he also co-moderator of the 42_TEEN_CHAT echo. Here are his ten favourite Atari utilities...

10. QWK Bakup, Simon Coward

I used this program to transfer my QWK packets from my ram disk to a floppy disk without touching a thing. Useful for ALL BBS users.

    Rating: 77%

9. Splitter, Unknown

This program splits large achived files in to sections so they can be fitted onto more than one disk. Good if you want to transfer a large program from your hard disk to another computer via floppy disk.

    Rating 77%

8. STE Screen Expander, Unknown

I love this program and i use it all the time. What it does is expands the screen by upto 50%. You have too choices - to have a scrolling screen or an interlaced one. Works in medium and high rez and is an essential utility to have if you want a shareware expander.

    Rating 78%

7. Assign, Sabi Walsky

If you have GDOS then you must have this as well. It helps you set up the assign.sys files and is very easy to use unlike some other GDOS programs. I have GDOS and use this all the time to add new fonts and save time trying to get the id number right.

    Rating 80%

6. Archive Checker, Stu Lewis

I must admit having so many archived files its hard to keep control and a log of all the files. This utility has got to be one of the best, it scans the archive for CRC error and Garbage at end of archive messages and trys to recover the data. It not always 100% successful but it can't hurt to try it once.

    Rating: 80%

5. Start-It 3.03, Christian Ernst

This is a boot manager is useful if you have a hard drive but not if your a floppy disk user. You can change you setting to suit the program your going to use. You can choose what rez to boot in and also show a picture as well. This is the ST version of Stoop for the falcon.

There are so many option here you would spend all day reviewing them.

    Rating: 80%

4. Generic STOS Fixer 1.1, Anthony Jacques

This is one of those programs that is a life saver if you want to program in STOS. There are some many versions of TOS that if you want to cater for everyone you have to write a program for all TOS levers. This is where this program is of most use, it fixes your STOS program to run on all TOS machines up to 2.06.

[Generic STOS Fixer can fix versions up to TOS 4.92 meaning that STOS programs can now work on the Falcon - Colin]

    Rating: 86%

3. Hramdisk, John Eidsvoog

There a lot's of ramdisk programs for the Atari and most of them are very good, but this has to be classed as one of the top. It's resetable and runs very well on TOS 1.02 machine but crashes on my 1.04.

I use it because I have no hard drive and comes in handy for comms and downloading files from the internet.

    Rating: 86%

2. 1st Guide, Guido Vollbeding

This is a very usefull acc/prg to display and play pictures, sound files and shows all formats of ascii files. This has got to be the second most used program for my machine.

I use it mainly for watching MPEG movie files which is very fast on my STE.

    Rating: 93%

1. Fastcopy, Martin Backschat

This is got to be the best PD copier avaliable for the atari. It's been written in 'c' and this is one of the reasons it's fast. I used the atari desktop format function for too long, but now i'll never touch it again.

It has a number of other features like scan your disks and you can even re-configure your disk to more sector with out reformating the disk.

    Rating: 97%