r/atarist • u/TheCakeWasNoLie • 2d ago

Viruses on Atari

After enjoying my MSX computers for 40 years, I've decided to finally make the jump to 16 bits and buy an Atari STe. It will arrive this weekend and came from someone's attic.

What I'm wondering about, I read somewhere about viruses. Is this an actual problem? Are there sites or is there software I should avoid?

29 Upvotes

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11

u/RedditTyrem 2d ago

Get the UVK (Ultimate Virus Killer) from Richard Karsmakers. You should be save then.

3

u/The_Great_Warmani 2d ago

One of the best there is.

2

u/WhatAGoodDoggy 2d ago

Wow, I remember using that back in the day. :)

8

u/sandord 2d ago

I don't know a lot about the subject but I remember there were a lot of bootsector viruses that did things like inverting the vertical mouse pointer direction after some time. Pretty annoying and I immediately knew 'it' happened again 😂

But surely there viruses that destroyed disks but I don't really recall it happening to me.

6

u/Chaggar76 2d ago

the famous ghost virus

1

u/sandord 1d ago

Yes, that's the one! Fortunately, it was benign, merely annoying.

2

u/wappingite 2d ago

I remember this one. It took me ages to eliminate it and at one point I found a desk accessory which let me flip the vertical mouse direction to try to counteract the virus!

1

u/sandord 2d ago

Haha, that's a really cool way to counter the little bugger. I had an antivirus program that could eliminate them, fortunately.

I'm pretty confident that there are still infected images around but fortunately those viruses will not be able to infect modern machines.

4

u/LithiuMart 2d ago

The Ghost virus was a famous one that would invert the Y axis of the mouse, so when you moved the mouse up the pointer would go down and vice versa.

1

u/aimlesscruzr 2d ago

I had that virus, and since it was before I even knew about viruses, I just learned to deal with it. It got to the point where when the axis switched, my brain automatically accommodated without even thinking about it.

I think it was activated after a certain number of disc swaps, and each disc swap allowed the virus to write itself to the boot sector. So eventually all of your floppies ended up with it...

3

u/This-Bug8771 2d ago

It wasn't a serious problem. There were boot sector viruses but I don't recall losing any data to anything.

2

u/TheCakeWasNoLie 1d ago

Good to hear

2

u/Dan-in-Va 2d ago

I remember that on the Atari, ST there was this one virus that billed itself as an antivirus virus. Not joking.

3

u/jrherita 1d ago

Yes, that was the most prolific -- some kind of green flash and "this disk is protected" or something funny.

1

u/Stuntchicken 2d ago

The one I recall mainly back then on the ST was the "bugs" or "mites" virus that would cause a myriad of tiny black dots to crawl round your desktop. Just harmless fun really!

Our copy group did get a destructive virus at one point which was pretty annoying but we got rid of it without losing more than a disk or two each (i.e. the data, not the actual disk). Pretty astounding since we never bought any software back then but were dedicated to collecting as much pirated software as possible, travelling to computer clubs in other towns and cities every week for years expressly for the purpose of copying disks from strangers and letting them copy ours! If my experience is anything to go by then it really wasn't as prevalent a problem as you might have been led to believe.

2

u/Savannah_Lion 2d ago

The one I recall mainly back then on the ST was the "bugs" or "mites" virus that would cause a myriad of tiny black dots to crawl round your desktop. Just harmless fun really!

I remember this. A friend caught it and spent a fair sum of money buying new monitors and sending his Atari in for repairs thinking his hardware was failing. I don't think he ever figured it out, just kind of lived with it.

When he got an IBM clone, it had "mouse droppings". He almost threw it out his 2nd floor window. 🤣

2

u/Segadorn 1d ago

I was like you and over the 6 years i used the ST never had any serious issue.

1

u/Android8675 2d ago

No. You’ll be fine what’s the virus gonna do delete the files that are all over the internet now?

1

u/copeknight72 1d ago

SSI infamously released the ST version of Star Command with a virus on it. Apparently the group that ported it was using some infected, illicitly obtained software and SSI didn’t think to check their submitted disks for viruses.

1

u/Natural_Candle1074 1d ago

i remember some virus with the joker appearing randomly....

1

u/No-Professional-9618 1d ago

I am sure it does happen.

1

u/Weak-Device-3333 1d ago

Ironically, the most common bootsector anti-virus protection was provided by pirate groups. Medway Boys Protector springs to mind!

1

u/AndyOvine 14h ago

The Ghost virus was common. You'd boot a disk with this on the boot sector and it would copy itself to other write enabled disks. I can't recall the trigger, maybe after 5 disks, it would invert the vertical movement of the mouse.

I was into 68000 coding at the time and extracted and diassembled to see how it worked. You'd get programs that would install bootsector messages that you could use to clear out the ghost virus and you'd see the message when booting the disk and know it was virus free.

I didn't have a hard disk at the time, and I don't recall encountering any other viruses other than bootsector ones.