Rob now looks at a new ST emulator. It's a wonderous moment as those things are rarer than working Sega Saturn emulators! Go on then me old son. Read on....

Name: WinSTon 0.2
Written by: Paul Bates
Required: Pentium (I think), Windows 95 or higher, DirectX 5 or higher
Recommended: P200, 32MB RAM, Windows 95, DirectX 6

For a very long time now, if you wanted to play ST games on your PC, PacifiST was the only option. A fiddly user interface and random crashes along with the fact that it hasn't been updated for years meant that although it was the best, it could have been so much bettter.

Enter a new contender to the ring WinSTon by Paul Bates. This emulator is very strange as it is actually easy to get up and running. Double click on the icon and point it to a valid ST TOS (Its OS) ROM image. That's it, GEM appears very shortly after in a nice sized window and off you go!

During emulation there are just two keys to control the emulator, F11 and F12. These control switching from windowed to fullscreen and pausing the emulator (and giving you your PC pointer back!). pressing shift and these allow you to change disk images of which WinSTon accepts both .ST and .MSA format images. In this version though you can actually write to the disks meaning that you can now save your games. Or write a new classic in STOS (a good Basic for the ST) or SEUCK (the classic Sensible Software's Shoot Em Up Construction Kit!). PC directories could also be mounted as ST hard drives meaning that productivity could be feasable.

Screen updates are incredibly fast and smooth, well on a par with PacifiST. Of course, the system requirements for this emulator are probably higher but I could achieve an excellent speed on the MAX setting on my P200MMX so it looks good for lower spec processors to play classics like Speedball 1+11 without trying to get an Amiga emulator up to speed. More screen effects appear to be supported than PacifiST like full vertical overscan and colour splits. Joystick support is also much less flaky than PacifiST with an excellent feature of the second fire button on your stick being mapped to the Atari 'SPACE' key. This is brilliant as whenever a game needed a second fire button, the ST (and most other computers of the time) would use SPACE for it. Thoughtful.

Compatability now. Well, even though this is only version 0.2, the compatability with a real ST is pretty good. I reckon about a 75-80% success rate on games that I tried. Sadly, although YM sound is emulated fine, sampled sound isn't yet implemented. Then again though, it did sound pretty bad in PacifiST though. WinSTon's homepage claims that the legendary OIDS works but my version didn't. Some games refused to work and others crashed after a while but this will come with more development. The last update to this was January this year so lets hope they persevere.

Overall this is an excellent ST emulator. The simple design with plenty of out-of-the-way-of-novices options was a pleasant surprise in an emulator and the compatability for such a new emulator, was very good. I found it very hard to crash the emulator (unlike most others!) and had a whale of a time using it.

8/10 My advice is to get this and PacifiST, some games only work on one or the other. But this emulator is good!