A quick trip to Atari.Anides.de

It’s CiH here, with another short(ish) article for your enjoyment.

This text is about another of those long-hidden legacy sites, that still somehow exists and can still be used today, in this case for picture enhancement enjoyment.

I’m writing about the one-stop, multi-formatting image conversion shop which is atari.anides.de. This was created by ‘Anima’, aka Percy of Light, who was also responsible for several arcade to Atari conversions. The most memorable to me personally being Galaga 88 and Cho Ren Sha, but there were several other experimental projects at varying stages. (Will the Sharp 68000 PacMania conversion ever be finished?)

Image conversion is yet another string to the multi-talented Anima. The site offers some very high quality results. It is as simple to use as dragging and dropping an image file of your choice to it. (Note to Anima, if you are thinking of making any changes, an ‘upload’ button would be useful for mobile devices.)

From a standard Truecolour image, you can specify a very wide array of Atari specific display modes. You can try anything from standard Degas ST 320 x 200 images, all the way through to TT High resolution at 1280 x 960 pixels. This takes in many of the standard Falcon 030 screen modes, including an ill-advised 640 x 240 pixels worth. At least we miss out on the nightmarish 320 x 480 VGA official Atari Truecolor mode.

There is quite a bit of flexibility with other parameters. For example, you can go for STFM 512 colours or STE 4096 colour or even Falcon VGA palettes. There are enhanced, enhanced and dithered and quantised images shown, to choose from. My point of view is that enhanced or enhanced and dithered are the best at preserving the best parts of the original true colour image.

For the purpose of looking at something a little bit different, I’ve been playing with some STE overscan modes. Yes these are here too, offering a choice of 416 x 273 pixels with sixteen colours, or the medium resolution equivalent at 832 x 273 pixels with four colours.

The major benefit to using the overscan is that the images are converted to something that displays as fullscreen on your STE. Well it does on mine.

If you choose to go down the road of overscan goodness, you can save the converted file as a .DU1 or .DU2 file. (DU1 low resolution and DU2 medium resolution.) This generates a somewhat larger file, around 113 KB.

It is at this point that you may realise that there isn’t anything that natively supports this custom image file. Fortunately, Evil of DHS has come to the rescue with some picture displaying applications that you can use with your real or emulated STE. These are the imaginatively but aptly name DU1 and DU2_VIEW.TTP programs.

If you have TOS 2.06 or thereabouts, it is as simple as dragging and dropping the image file on to the application. If you are enjoying an earlier desktop experience, then the time honoured method of running the .ttp and typing the file name in the dialog box would apply.

It is debatable how useful some of the image combinations might be. I’m showing my ignorance of the Atari TT at this point, but is there anything that can display a TT medium resolution (640 x 480) .UBI file format on native hardware? On the website, it does do quite a good job with conversion.

I’m going to let some of the images I’ve converted to do any further talking from this point. These are all photographs taken of a live original STE displaying these pictures.

Gdańsk Marina. A place I’m very familiar with. Converted from a photo of mine.

Cobra Mark 3, Elite Dangerous. This is the desktop background on my CT2 Falcon running Mint.

Outline Party, I think this was the 2005 edition. Not my photo, as I’m in it!

Anaglyph 3D fish. This converted down to STE overscan and the 3D glasses still worked!

Sillventure 2000, at the end of the pier. Some folks you will all recognise!

A Medium resolution picture to finish with. Good results, even with the reduced colours.

There is a useful link to Atari Forum at the top of the page, which links to the first disclosure and subsequent discussion. It is as long ago as 2014, that the first version of this site appeared. The discussion itself is a worthwhile and entertaining read and fills in on a lot of detail that I’ve undoubtedly missed out here.

You can link directly to the site at the following link - https://atari.anides.de/

You may also want to get hold of the DU1/2 image displayer applications. These are still available at - http://files.dhs.nu/files_gfx/duo_v2.zip

So to conclude, if you have an STE and want try something different. Throw a few converted pictures at it and step into the overscan full screen world!

CiH - For Atariscne.org - Jan 2026.