While the first and second Dune games were released on the Atari ST’s 16-bit rival, the Commodore Amiga, in 1992 and 1993 respectively, neither the first Dune adventure game nor its strategy game sequel, Dune II, made it onto the Atari ST, perhaps arriving a little too late in the day to be commercially viable releases for that machine.
However, there has previously been an unofficial fan port of Dune II that could run on Atari’s TOS operating system, but it required an Atari machine with a Motorola 68030 processor to run, as opposed to the basic Atari STFM and Atari STE’s less powerful Motorola 68000 processor, meaning it could only run on an accelerated Atari ST, or on its successor machines, the Atari TT and the Atari Falcon. However, seeing the TOS fan port of Dune II inspired the homebrew coder Neil Rackett to create a Dune II fan port that could, indeed, run on an unaccelerated Atari ST, and now, Rackett has made his version of the Atari ST port of Dune II available to the public, as a free download via GitHub.
The Atari ST fan port of Dune II is based on the open-source OpenDUNE recreation of the game.
Dune II and its predecessor are so fondly remembered that music from the games was included in last year’s new Dune: Awakening game, as we reported at the time.
