250 replies to this topic

[phaeron]

Version 1.9 of my Atari 8-bit computer emulator is now out:

http://virtualdub.org/altirra.html

1.9 final supercedes all 1.9-test releases; it is the same as 1.9 test-40 except for the final version bump. The change list is too long to list here, but the changes include: many serial port / modem emulation fixes, many new debugger features including conditional breakpoints and trace expressions, improved PAL color emulation and high artifacting support, new cartridge mapping modes, PCLink support for SDX host filesystem mapping, and emulation accuracy fixes to CPU/ANTIC/GTIA. The full change list is on the website.

At the above link, you can also find version 0.9 of the Acid800 test suite, which includes new tests for ANTIC DMA behavior and VSCROL+DLI timing. No emulators pass yet.

Finally, a big "Thank You!" to everyone who provided feedback, bug reports, or simply just tried the emulator -- you've helped immensely.

[Mclaneinc]

Cheers Phaeron,

Top notch as usual...

Stop messing about and get those two test fails sorted tho

[Fres]

Outstanding!

[Keatah]

Slick!

[atx4us]

 phaeron, on Sun May 15, 2011 4:19 PM, said:

Version 1.9 of my Atari 8-bit computer emulator is now out:

http://virtualdub.org/altirra.html

1.9 final supercedes all 1.9-test releases; it is the same as 1.9 test-40 except for the final version bump. The change list is too long to list here, but the changes include: many serial port / modem emulation fixes, many new debugger features including conditional breakpoints and trace expressions, improved PAL color emulation and high artifacting support, new cartridge mapping modes, PCLink support for SDX host filesystem mapping, and emulation accuracy fixes to CPU/ANTIC/GTIA. The full change list is on the website.

At the above link, you can also find version 0.9 of the Acid800 test suite, which includes new tests for ANTIC DMA behavior and VSCROL+DLI timing. No emulators pass yet.

Finally, a big "Thank You!" to everyone who provided feedback, bug reports, or simply just tried the emulator -- you've helped immensely.

I was wondering how high you'll go on the test svn's (#40) before the 1.9 final release.  Congratulations! and Thank You!

Hayden

PS.  By any chance that paths (subdirectories) support for the H: drive is in the making?

[flashjazzcat]

Yikes... what the hell suddenly happened to Shift+Ctrl+Up/Down Arrow?

Edited by flashjazzcat, Tue May 17, 2011 2:43 PM.

[flashjazzcat]

OK - as far as I can tell:

Shift+Ctrl+up/down arrow produces: shift+up/down arrow
Shift+up/down arrow produces: shift+ctrl+up/down arrow
up/down arrow produces: ctrl+up/down arrow
ctrl+up/down arrow produces: up/down arrow

My fingers are now in knots. Can this stuff please be made configurable somehow? I realize I'm probably the only person for whom this is causing issues, and I'm sorry I didn't flag it up earlier...

Atari800WinPlus:

Shift+Ctrl+up/down arrow produces: shift+ctrl+up/down arrow
Shift+up/down arrow produces: shift+up/down arrow
Ctrl+up/down arrow produces: ctrl+up/down arrow
Up/down arrow produces: math symbols, or ctrl+up/down arrow, depending on configuration

Same goes for left/right arrow, although of course without Shift+Ctrl combinations.

Of course, the PC also has - / = on different keys. With the exception of the user-selectable cursor function (i.e. deciding whether the arrow keys work with or without ctrl), these two keys - sensibly, I think - work in exactly the same way as up/down arrow (since on the Atari, they are on the same keys). The situation does not apply to the + and * keys on the PC.

Edited by flashjazzcat, Wed May 18, 2011 4:03 AM.

[rost]

I realy like altirra, thank you very much.
Especially the paste-function. It's so useful: I'm surfing in the www - find some interessting code - copy and paste to altirra - and run it. Realy fantastic!
I think the disk-explorer is very useful too, but i would like to have it as the 4th button in the file/disk drive menu. So you can browse your files and can check every image you want to mount.

Edited by rost, Wed May 18, 2011 7:01 AM.

[phaeron]

Quote

PS. By any chance that paths (subdirectories) support for the H: drive is in the making?

Not yet, although I have ideas. I already implemented this for PCLink, but the H: device is missing more than just that (it doesn't support any MyDOS XIOs, for instance).

Quote

Yikes... what the hell suddenly happened to Shift+Ctrl+Up/Down Arrow?

It's actually been this way for a while. I've just added a configuration option in 2.00-test1.

Quote

I think the disk-explorer is very useful too, but i would like to have it as the 4th button in the file/disk drive menu. So you can browse your files and can check every image you want to mount.

Yeah, I wanted to have the explorer be able to work directly on the mounted images too, but I didn't get around in 1.9 to migrating the disk drive code onto the new disk image code. Right now you don't want to use the disk explorer to edit a disk image that's mounted, because the disk drive emulator won't pick up the changes. I originally started this to work toward disk image based H: emulation, but I wandered off course a bit.

Quote

Stop messing about and get those two test fails sorted tho

Only one failure left with 2.00-test1.

[ACML]

It just keeps getting better.  I have completely moved to Altirra from Atari800Win Plus, but there are a couple of Atari800Win Plus features Altirra should implement.  Can you add paddle control via the mouse like Atari800Win?  Also, joystick emulation using the mouse.  I have some Legacy Engineering USB CX-40's, but not everyone does.  Also, maybe the capability already exists, but how do I copy Atari BASIC listings and outputs to Windows Notepad or Word?  I'm mostly running the Atari 1200XL Rev 11 OS which Altirra can run as "other" which you can't do on other emulators.  Great emulator!  Well done!

[Kr0tki]

 ACML, on Fri May 20, 2011 11:55 AM, said:

I'm mostly running the Atari 1200XL Rev 11 OS which Altirra can run as "other" which you can't do on other emulators.

You can use a 1200XL OS with any emulator. On Atari800[Win] set it as an XL/XE ROM, and then disable the SIO/H: patches.

[JCat]

Definitely the top emulator for A8. Two features I'd love to see would be multiple save states and incremental machine speed settings with sound. There's many ancient games that would benefit with a boost in speed - especially 'basic' ones. Warp speed is great but way beyond what I'm referring to. Thanks for your work and dedication on this!

[Kylev]

phaeron,

I wanted to add my congratulations on developing this excellent emulator. I came on board at version 1.6 (I think) and this project has done nothing but get better and better. I am especially impressed with this newer release. I can now run my favorite game (Alternate Reality - The City) in full screen mode with no perceptible slow down. This was not the case when I first starting using Altirra. This may have been the case with some of the earlier releases, but I have just now noticed.

Great work. I look forward to seeing how much better this program can become.

Russ

[phaeron]

Quote

Can you add paddle control via the mouse like Atari800Win?

You can already do this -- there is already a preset for binding the mouse to paddle A in port 1, and if you need something custom like Atari800WinPlus's mouse-to-two-paddles setup, you can set it up in Input > Input Maps. It ends up looking something like this:

Paddle A (port 1)
  Axis 1 -> Mouse Move Horiz
  Button 1 -> Mouse LMB
Paddle B (port 1)
  Axis 1 -> Mouse Move Vert
  Button 1 -> Mouse RMB

It's a bit complicated to set up input maps, but you can look at some of the presets to see how they work. The one for the Xbox 360 controller is the most complicated: it has four different modes (joy 1, joy 1, paddle A absolute, paddle A relative), and it also fits auto-fire and start/select/option/turbo buttons on the controller as well.

Quote

Also, joystick emulation using the mouse.

This I'm not sure about. You can sort of do it by binding Mouse Left/Right/Up/Down to the joystick directions, but that only pushes the joystick as long as the mouse is moving in that direction, which may not be what you're looking for. If you're looking for a setup where moving the mouse to specific zones on screen causes various joystick directions, I don't think the existing binding modes will let you do that.

Quote

You can use a 1200XL OS with any emulator. On Atari800[Win] set it as an XL/XE ROM, and then disable the SIO/H: patches.

Is this because of ROM patching? I know Atari800Win had some problems with that and non-standard OS ROMs, but I thought it'd been solved in Atari800. I escaped that problem by accident by using address hooking, which has the downside of not working with ROM copied into RAM.

Quote

Two features I'd love to see would be multiple save states and incremental machine speed settings with sound.

On the save states -- the reason I haven't done more is that I don't want to commit to a save state format right now and there are some known issues with the current save state support (non-saved state and a total lack of versioning or validation). The reason is that save states have to save the entire core emulation state, and some parts of it are tricky to save and restore. Sometimes it changes pretty radically when I emulate new behavior; I just had to rip up a good part of ANTIC to emulate virtual DMA. I'm aware that better save state support is desired, though.

Speed changing is something I'll probably get to soon; the core supports it, but I don't have a control exposed, and I need to put in some additional logic to prevent sound latency from rising with speed-up.

[rdea6]

I just loaded Altirra 20.beta 1 to adjust some Partitions with the SDX-MyIDE.SYS, and got a screen like this after running FDISK by Flashjazzcat.





Might have to go back to version 19.  I have tried several different SDX443 roms.

[Creature XL]

I am using Altierra for debugging code. The Debugger is fantastic.
Just today it helped me find a nasty bug. Well, if I would have known about the "Verifier" I would have saved 1 or two hours of my life today.
Yes, I did write "pla tya" in my NMI

Are you still interested in new ideas/features? While debugging today, I found some very useful things you could implement. I haven't noted them but one I remember:
Mulitple "memory view" windows. Oh and what would be nice is an option to make the watch-overlay independent from Atari screen rendering. The values disapeared just in that moment I needed them because of an VBI.

However, the Debugger is fantastic as it is Thanks a lot.

[flashjazzcat]

 rdea6, on Sun May 22, 2011 7:39 AM, said:

I just loaded Altirra 20.beta 1 to adjust some Partitions with the SDX-MyIDE.SYS, and got a screen like this after running FDISK by Flashjazzcat.



bootscr.png

Might have to go back to version 19.  I have tried several different SDX443 roms.

I take it this works with 1.9, then (I've never tried the IDE driver with PCLINK, I must admit). The only rational thing that would cause this is the "MYIDE" symbol being undefined.

EDIT: Just tested it with 2.0, without PCLINK - works fine.

EDIT: Just tried the configurable arrow keys: GREAT! I haven't managed to find fault with this at all yet. Thanks for your efforts with this Phaeron - I should be able to migrate fully from A800Win now.

EDIT: Just had a look at the disk explorer for the first time... amazing!

Edited by flashjazzcat, Sun May 22, 2011 11:07 AM.

[Fox-1 / mnx]

The only time I use an emulator is while checking what's actually in an ATR.  I use the old Atari800Win Plus 4.0 for this.

With all the talks about Altirra I finally gave it a try and it's either I'm stupid or Altirra v1.9 has a bad SIO/PERCOM emulation.  Even with all the SIO patches turned off it won't work (write/format) with several DOS' versions (like most SpartaDos (disk) versions, some TurboDos, some MyDos, SuperDos, TopDos, etc.).  These are all DOS' with "warp speed" routines and work with Atari800Win Plus when disabling all all SIO-patches.

edit: The "about" tab still shows "copyright 2008-2009" :-)

Edited by Fox-1 / mnx, Sun May 22, 2011 11:14 AM.

[Mclaneinc]

Hi Fox

I ran Topdos under version 2.00 beta 2

http://www.virtualdu...-2.00-test2.zip

I set Disk drive under System to have the SIO patch off then ticked the Burst Standard, Top Dos booted at warp speed

I then created a ED disk in D2: from the New spinner.

Set the drive R/W and formatted / init disk on the D2: and wrote dos files.

After that I saved the created atr out and booted it into Altirra from fresh, it booted up perfectly and at the right speed.

Unless I'm understanding the problem wrongly?

Edited by Mclaneinc, Sun May 22, 2011 11:53 AM.

[Mclaneinc]

 Creature XL, on Sun May 22, 2011 8:27 AM, said:

Are you still interested in new ideas/features? While debugging today, I found some very useful things you could implement. I haven't noted them but one I remember:

Creature, list them away, Avery is always looking out for 'intelligent' idea's unlike the dribble I post to him mostly

Seriously, the back end is very dev orientated so I guess any debugging stuff would be more than welcome to add to his large list

[Mclaneinc]

 Kylev, on Fri May 20, 2011 8:14 PM, said:

Great work. I look forward to seeing how much better this program can become.

Kyle / Russ,

Brilliant little program isn't it...

Like many on here I have followed / added idea's and tested 99% of the Atari emulators ever released, Win Plus was my personal favourite for many moons and then one day Carmel Andrews posted a link to the initial release of Altirra, I being a nosey person had a look. At that point Altirra was little more than Avery's / Phaerons proof of concept idea, it was not initially meant to be little more than that but thankfully he got feedback and carried on.

From then on I carried on testing and adding idea's for Win Plus and then suddenly it died, at that point it was the most complete and most accurate emulator out there so I wasn't too fazed, but then Altirra started to grow and expand at a fantastic rate, Avery bolted features on in what seemed a daily basis and the proof of concept suddenly turned into a fully fledged and very powerful emulator.

But Avery didn't stop there, yet more wonderful feed back from here gave him extra idea's along with his own ones and with his happiness to work along with people the emulator is now a remarkable piece of kit. For me its amazingly accurate in the core of how it works as a standard Atari model (its also bloody accurate at bolted on upgrades etc), some will say like Avery himself that its still got issues that need working out, but as it stands the software runs without flaws such a huge percentage of real games that it's verging on perfect (colour and sound are tough issues to be 100% precise on)

And then for the dev freaks / geeks / top people, the emulator offers them emulation of new hardware, drive types, DOS types and now outside link ability, the debugging side is wonderful (I'd love a good manual for it tho) and the package as a whole simply does what it should and a million percent more...

I know I sound like some reclusive fan, someone like Kathy Bates character in Misery but its just that thanks (?) to illness I have a lot of time on my hands and emulation is a wonderful relaxant / hobby for me so I have time to look at it more than most.

Must go now, I've 3 other emulator writers chained in my cellar that need hobbling...It keeps their interest up

Edited by Mclaneinc, Sun May 22, 2011 12:24 PM.

[rdea6]

My problem with Altirra and Fdisk was corrected by setting the SYSTEM >Disk Drive to accurate sector timing.

I recently set my C drive to BOOT and with real hardware this is very efficient.

[flashjazzcat]

 rdea6, on Sun May 22, 2011 12:35 PM, said:

My problem with Altirra and Fdisk was corrected by setting the SYSTEM >Disk Drive to accurate sector timing.

I recently set my C drive to BOOT and with real hardware this is very efficient.

Glad you got it sorted. I like:

A: - SIO2SD
B: - SIO2PC (mirrored folder)
C: - Boot
D:-O: - more partitions!

Have you tried MOUNT yet? We really need to give that app a good thrashing to iron out any bugs.

Edited by flashjazzcat, Sun May 22, 2011 12:40 PM.

[phaeron]

@rdea6:
I haven't been able to reproduce this myself, and it's odd that accurate disk timing would make a difference. I only have version 1.0rc of the MyIDE driver, though.

@CreatureXL:
I'm still improving the debugger, so yes, I do take suggestions. Adding a real watch window has been on my TODO list, but I think I can add the multiple Memory panes pretty easily.

The verifier is something I've been slowly growing over time. I'd like to add more to it, but a lot of the things I'd like to add are tricky on an 8-bit Atari. For instance, I wanted to add uninitialized memory access traps, but tricks like LSR zp to clear a flag byte and bogus hits from false reads in the CPU core make that difficult.

@Fox-1:
You shouldn't have a problem writing to disks as long as they're marked read-write; a common mistake people make with Altirra is leaving disks mounted as read only, since that's the default. (When I was an Amiga user, I was one of those paranoid people that kept all of his disks write protected except when necessary.) However, the issue with formatting is that Altirra doesn't implement all of the extended disk commands, particularly Write PERCOM Block. I had forgotten about this because I usually either use DOS 2.0S, which uses only a standard format, or SpartaDOS X, which lets you write a directory without a format. I need to go and add the missing commands.

Damn it, missed the about box. I bumped the version/dates on everything except that. It's always something.

[Fox-1 / mnx]

 phaeron, on Sun May 22, 2011 3:18 PM, said:

a common mistake people make with Altirra is leaving disks mounted as read only,

I'm very sure these are not write protected.

----------------------------------------------
Example 1

-Boot MyDos 4.53/4
-Created new 1440 sector ATR within Altirra (D2:) and write to disk (360KB ATR image).
-MyDos config to High Capacity disk, 1440 sectors
-Format D2:
-MyDos hangs and ATR shrinks to 91KB.
-Soft RESET, write DOS files to new ATR, dir shows 1338 free sectors.

Yes, it DID format and wrote to the new ATR but required a RESET and the ATR is wrecked.

----------------------------------------------
Example 2

-Boot Top-Dos 1.20
-1440 sect. ATR as D2:
-Set status D2: to D2Q (drive 2, Quad density).
-Returns error 130, wrecked 91KB ATR, about same story as with MyDos.

----------------------------------------------
Example 3

-Boot Turbo-Dos XE 2.1HS
-Create new 720 sect. DD ATR, 180KB (D2:)
-Format D2: as Double Density.
-DOS hangs, requires a RESET, ATR shrinks to 91KB, wrecked.

----------------------------------------------
Example 4

-Boot Sparta-Dos 3.2g
-Create new 720 sect. DD ATR, 180KB (D2:)
-XINIT, 40 trks SS, Double Density
-Error #8B - Format Aborted
-ATR still 180KB but just can't be formatted.

----------------------------------------------

All above done with disabled SIO patch and all above works with Atari 800Win.  Did I overlook an Altirra setting?