Aeons ago, well, in the mid 90s, I programmed the then latest version of a swearing accessory for the Atari ST(E)\/TT\/Falcon called “The Automated Final Grandson of Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged”.<\/p>\n
Wowbagger:<\/strong> A fictitious character from Douglas Adams’ “Life, the Universe and Everything” who, after an incident with a liquid lunch and a piece of elastic band became immortal. Having quickly discovered immortality also has its downside, he decided to insult every being in the universe, in alphabetical order. In the throes of nostalgia, I fired up an Atari ST emulator, configured it, and decided to upgrade that swearing accessory with the current building blocks used on wowbagger.com<\/a>. It was practice I needed for when I’d get around to doing the 42nd Anniversary Edition of ST NEWS<\/strong><\/a>,<\/p>\n There were a bunch of things I needed to do:<\/p>\n This ‘Zombie’ version has one major improvement:\u00a0 it can make a lot<\/em> more insults.\u00a0 There’s also a disadvantage,\u00a0 however:\u00a0 It grew in size by about 180 Kb, so it’s probably of limited use on original hardware with only 1 Mb of RAM. But it is like it is. If you happen to have original Atari hardware, or an emulator, you can download it here<\/a>!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Aeons ago, well, in the mid 90s, I programmed the then latest version of a swearing accessory for the Atari ST(E)\/TT\/Falcon called “The Automated Final Grandson of Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged”. Wowbagger: A fictitious character from Douglas Adams’ “Life, the … Continue reading
\nAccessory:<\/strong> A program on an Atari computer, that loads upon booting and then remains in memory. In the case of my particular accessory, it remains invisible until a user-configurable number of minutes have passed, after which it will pop up and insult the user (in English or Dutch, depending on the language setting).
\nAtari:<\/strong> In the context of this article, one of a range of computers popular in the late 80s and early 90s. They were 16-bit computers running an operating system called TOS (The Operating System), not 8-bit (like the Atari XL), nor the old classic Atari VCS game consoles.<\/p>\n\n