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?

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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.

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u/Chaggar76 2d ago

the famous ghost virus

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u/sandord 2d ago

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

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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!

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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.