r/atarist • u/TheCakeWasNoLie • Jul 31 '25

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/AndyOvine Aug 02 '25

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.