The Atari ST actually covers a whole family of machines — ST, STE, Mega STE, TT and Falcon — which Recalbox emulates with the Libretro HatariB (default), Libretro Hatari and standalone Hatari emulators.
Your games go in /recalbox/share/roms/atarist, in .st, .stx, .msa, .dim, .ipf and .m3u formats, including compressed as .zip or .7z — and that goes for standalone Hatari too.
The emulated model is derived from the subfolder the game sits in. Organise your games this way and the right machine is selected automatically:
| Machine | Recognised subfolder names |
|---|---|
| ST (default) | atarist, atari-st, st |
| STE | atariste, atari-ste, ste |
| Mega STE | atarimegaste, atari-megaste, atari-mega-ste, megaste, mega-ste |
| TT | ataritt, atari-tt, tt |
| Falcon | falcon, atari-falcon |
Each machine has its own BIOS, called TOS. Recalbox looks for it in this order:
st.img, ste.img, megaste.img, tt.img or falcon.img;tos.img file in the same subfolder;/recalbox/share/bios/tos.img;You can therefore play without supplying any BIOS at all — EmuTOS is enough for many games — but an original TOS noticeably improves compatibility.
| Button | Action |
|---|---|
A |
Right click |
B |
Left click |
X |
Opens the emulator interface (disk swapping…) |
Y |
Shift key |
SELECT |
Toggles between mouse and joystick mode |
L1 |
Opens the virtual keyboard |
R1 |
Changes mouse sensitivity |
L2 |
Displays the current control mode and mouse sensitivity level |
Only the first joystick is usable for now: two-joystick games cannot yet be played by two people.
A keyboard is essential for many Atari ST games and applications; a mouse is strongly recommended.
All three emulators accept configuration overrides, with a different suffix:
.retroarch.cfg files;.hatari.cfg files.Naming follows the usual rules in both cases: <game>.<ext>.hatari.cfg for a single game, .hatari.cfg for a whole folder.
Three utilities are installed on your Recalbox, in /usr/share/hatari, and are used over SSH:
atari-hd-image.sh — creates a hard-disk image with partitioning and volume naming. Usage: bash atari-hd-image.sh;hmsa — converts floppy images between the MSA and ST formats. Usage: ./hmsa;zip2st.sh — converts the content of a .zip archive into a .st floppy image, very handy for Falcon games that are often only found as .zip. Usage: bash zip2st.sh.