Altirra 3.10 released

[256 colors]

 

What was so difficult to configure in Atari800WinPLus? "Awful sound"? Can you please elaborate on that too?

I just found it hard to configure never remembered my last settings and kept resetting and losing track of OS ROMS

So far as the sound often was heard weird hissing and crackling sounds with strange squeals too

None of the above had anything to do with my cpu power or sound devices because i could run a PSX2 emulator pretty much flawless

[+MrFish]

I just found it hard to configure never remembered my last settings and kept resetting and losing track of OS ROMS

So far as the sound often was heard weird hissing and crackling sounds with strange squeals too

None of the above had anything to do with my cpu power or sound devices because i could run a PSX2 emulator pretty much flawless

 

I've used it for years, and up until now, with none of the problems you describe.

 

What operating system have you been using it with?

[256 colors]

 

I've used it for years, and up until now, with none of the problems you describe.

 

What operating system have you been using it with?

64 and 32 bit versions of XP,7,8.1 and windows 10 always had the same problems

[+DrVenkman]

For what it’s worth, the Linux variant of the Atari800 emulator packaged with RetroPie does the same stupid “forget your settings” bit every time I’ve bothered to try it out. I basically just ignore it though because I use my RetroPie setup for other things most of the time, I have plenty of real Atari hardware and I have Altirra on my Winbox. I just presumed it was some kind of *nix permissions issue or an older version of the Atari800 codebase, but maybe it’s a more systemic issue? Dunno.

 

But I *much* prefer Altirra anyway, which is what this thread is about.

[+MrFish]

64 and 32 bit versions of XP,7,8.1 and windows 10 always had the same problems

 

Weird. I don't know what to tell you, other than I've used it since 2005 until today under XP 32-Bit and Win 7 64-bit on a number of different PC systems with no such problems.

Edited March 10, 2019 by MrFish

[Mclaneinc]

I don't remember any real issues with Atari800Win Plus, I was an avid user of it before Altirra and my names even in the manual because I beta tested it so much (which is the point of mentioning it). Sound certainly was not an issue other than it never got properly worked on after a while, the caretaker updaters came along and went. Never lost setting here and sound was as pretty easy.

 

Sorry to hear you did have issues...

Edited March 10, 2019 by Mclaneinc

[256 colors]

Altirra for me pretty much works straight out of the box first time with zero issues

Set it up for the machine i want use and forget about it

[Mclaneinc]

Altirra has been pretty solid, I have had odd things like settings going weird BUT I'd bet its either down to me or the like and not Altirra. The oddest thing I had was on my recent dive in (and back out) of Win 10, it was telling me the 32 in 1 OS firm I had was missing every time after I re-added it and the way File Types worked was weird for me, as in it went to the Default program settings app and not Altirra's own little screen.

 

Again, probably some aspect of Win 10 and not the emulator..

 

Probably

[flashjazzcat]

On top of cycle-exact emulation of the machine itself, Altirra emulates a quite staggering amount of hardware - frequently with a similar degree of behavioural precision to the emulated machine itself. Newly implemented features are usually fully usable on their first implementation, even on newly released test builds, and where problems do exist (bearing in mind these are test builds), they are routinely corrected in an efficient manner. The fact the 32-in-1 (a device which admittedly interests me not in the least) was apparently a little tricky to implement is not in the least bit surprising, and such teething troubles in no way characterise the project in general. I adopt test builds pretty much as soon as they are released, and despite the seemingly constantly fluctuating underpinnings of Windows OS, I experience very few difficulties. Certainly there is room in the world for more than one Atari emulator, but from a developer's perspective (at least this developer), nothing else even comes close on the Windows platform. With any project, with increased complexity comes an increasing scope for bugs, but the fact test versions of this emulator consistently exhibit the kind of stability one would expect from a release build of the average application reminds us that things are in the safest of hands. I used to manage with Atari800WinPlus too, but that was before Altirra existed or at least had reached maturity, and without Altirra I would be in a fully dejected state.

[Docwiz]

The great thing that Phaeron does is provide a compiled emulator with the source code and allows people to fix problems themselves.

 

I am happy that he is still working on the emulator because I can't code the way he can and that's okay.

Hey guys this is a FREE emulator and the source code is offered to all to change what they want to change.

That's the cool part here.

 

I am just happy to have something I can use to relive the best parts of growing up with my computer and something that hasn't been lost to time.

 

I have thought about buying the real hardware on ebay, but I would never boot it up, because I would have to put all the software on disks and find an HDMI to Atari cable and it's just not worth it when I have

an emulator on Windows I can just load up and play at any time I want and not take up any space as well.

 

If you want Phaeron to help you, you have to help him so he can replicate the issues you are having easily,

maybe a checklist should be formed so we know the OS, hardware configuration etc...

 

This way it makes it easier for him to debug.

 

The idea is if you want your bugs fixed and you can't compile your own fixes,

then you need to help him by trying to get down to the very basics and see if the problem still exists.

 

See! Problem solved.

 

Now let's get back to the fun stuff instead of arguing and putting people on ignore lists.

Edited March 10, 2019 by Docwiz

[Kyle22]

The great thing that Phaeron does is provide a compiled emulator with the source code and allows people to fix problems themselves.

 

I am happy that he is still working on the emulator because I can't code the way he can and that's okay.

Hey guys this is a FREE emulator and the source code is offered to all to change what they want to change.

That's the cool part here.

 

I am just happy to have something I can use to relive the best parts of growing up with my computer and something that hasn't been lost to time.

 

I have thought about buying the real hardware on ebay, but I would never boot it up, because I would have to put all the software on disks and find an HDMI to Atari cable and it's just not worth it when I have

an emulator on Windows I can just load up and play at any time I want and not take up any space as well.

 

If you want Phaeron to help you, you have to help him so he can replicate the issues you are having easily,

maybe a checklist should be formed so we know the OS, hardware configuration etc...

 

This way it makes it easier for him to debug.

 

The idea is if you want your bugs fixed and you can't compile your own fixes,

then you need to help him by trying to get down to the very basics and see if the problem still exists.

 

See! Problem solved.

 

Now let's get back to the fun stuff instead of arguing and putting people on ignore lists.

All that you said is great, but I beg to differ on one point.

 

Real Hardware is the greatest. My BBS runs on a real Atari 800 Incognito. That Mitsumi keyboard is a joy to type on vs, this hp probook laptop. This laptop is flat, has little square keys with very little travel.

 

I do use Altirra at work. I wrote a simple BASIC program to calculate our split percentage of our eBay sales. Also another one to figure out the shipping costs (uses copy/paste text from ebay into a text file on an ATR).

 

I love Altirra, it is by far the best emulator I have used, please don't get me wrong. I LOVE ALTIRRA, but nothing is the same as the look and feel of real hardware.

 

There is room for both. Use Altirra as a developer's tool. When you have real hardware you can run RespeQt on your Windows box. You can use an Ultimate Cart... The list goes on.

 

[_The Doctor__]

Avery

is there documentation on how the CIO interception works perhaps a short explanation how you intercept the Pokey SIO signals et al, I was kind of glazing over searching for it and must have missed it.

 

Doc to Doc... our bugs? I don't want to own any bugs, certainly don't want to create or incubate any... you want your bugs fixed? what?

certainly we didn't write the emu so I don't think the users own the bugs. Though a user certainly could configure something incorrectly. Some folks don't even know where the bugs live, they just know something isn't quite working or isn't correct. I'm all for locating and eradicating the bug menace and arachnid forces. Let's do our part and squash the bugs. I just don't wan to come face to face with some kinda smart bug. The mobile infantry has made me the man I am...... come on troopers! do you want to live forever!

 

I think he does a heck of a job running things down. We don't own the bugs, we just find them. I remember when we got a thank you for doing so.

Edited March 11, 2019 by _The Doctor__

[TheNameOfTheGame]

Yeah, so? We spoke our minds as well. My expressing my opinion doesn't prevent anyone else from expressing theirs. Alfred already expressed his and now claims to have gathered up his toys and left because of the response it provoked. I don't understand why the obnoxious and cranky must be excused.

 

Yeah, it just seemed several users piled on so quick...group responses can suppress the individual quickly (echo chambers and such).

 

Eh, cranky and obnoxious for us old-timers (we're all getting there) isn't so much a sin oy vey lol. Maybe there is some history here I'm not aware of...anyway it won't tarnish my opinion of yourself or phaeron..you are class acts.

 

Maybe he should have provided more detailed info...I'm guilty of that also in some of my help requests or bug reports..my brain is slowly turning to mush being over 50 haha.

Edited March 11, 2019 by TheNameOfTheGame

[flashjazzcat]

I have no direct personal issue with Alfred or with his projects. This was a tit for tat exchange from my point of view since I was somewhat inflamed by the dismissal of our favourite emulator. If I contributed to thread pollution or hurt feelings, I apologise to all concerned.

 

As a developer of Atari software, I am familiar with the frustration that can be caused by imprecise or misleading 'It's not working' bug reports, and that is not to throw shade on those who are not technically minded or masters of expression. End users sometimes require a bit of coaxing when it comes to the provision of detail, and even a comprehensive bug report from someone in the know may lead to further questioning. But developers probably expect others who exhibit all the characteristics of a 'developer' not to be a 'user' when it comes to providing feedback or troubleshooting issues.

[Mclaneinc]

As long as Avery knows you are doing the best you can he's normally happy to 2nd guess some bits. As said, not everyone is super tech, lots of folk just want to use their old machine again and emulation can be quite daunting. Normally one of us will jump in if someone is struggling and help because we don't expect Avery to fix every little mention when we can do it and help the community.

 

In depth bug reports are another story and to be honest, if you are doing an in depth report then you really should be at the level to understand the things around it, Alfred seemed to be at that level but was elusive for unknown reasons....

 

But its also not our place to rubbish someone, say what he isn't doing, yes, but to rubbish is a bit cheap..We can do better..

 

Anyway, its done and dusted and this needs to return to a dev thread at some point /Me zips my typing hands

[Docwiz]

All that you said is great, but I beg to differ on one point.

 

Real Hardware is the greatest. My BBS runs on a real Atari 800 Incognito. That Mitsumi keyboard is a joy to type on vs, this hp probook laptop. This laptop is flat, has little square keys with very little travel.

 

I do use Altirra at work. I wrote a simple BASIC program to calculate our split percentage of our eBay sales. Also another one to figure out the shipping costs (uses copy/paste text from ebay into a text file on an ATR).

 

I love Altirra, it is by far the best emulator I have used, please don't get me wrong. I LOVE ALTIRRA, but nothing is the same as the look and feel of real hardware.

 

There is room for both. Use Altirra as a developer's tool. When you have real hardware you can run RespeQt on your Windows box. You can use an Ultimate Cart... The list goes on.

 

 

 

Yeah, I don't blame you. If you have the real hardware that is awesome, but I can't find myself using it. It would just be in the closet. I thought about buying a real system, but I have moved on mentally and so it's hard to go back.

That's why I like the emulator.

 

I gave away all my old Atari equipment back in 1993 as the PC had Zmodem and had awesome games and programs (which I can run with another emulator DOSBOX) and it's hard to go back and hookup hardware when I have it on my current PC.

 

That is why I want to do AR/Mixed Reality version of the emulator. That way I can see my old 800xl, without having to buy one and bring it out.

[phaeron]

Avery

is there documentation on how the CIO interception works perhaps a short explanation how you intercept the Pokey SIO signals et al, I was kind of glazing over searching for it and must have missed it.

 

There actually isn't much in the way of CIO interception. The majority of acceleration and HLE support either happens at the SIO level or a CIO device underneath CIO (where "CIO" and "SIO" are the corresponding OS routines for character and serial bus I/O).

 

All CPU-level hooks in Altirra work by trapping when the emulated CPU PC reaches a specific value. In particular, it doesn't modify the ROM to insert a special opcode, which avoids problems with invalidating OS checksums or failing OS checks in loaders. The downside is that ROM-copied-to-RAM deactivates the hooks. The hook can modify, redirect, or continue execution.

 

The CIOV vector at $E456, which is used for all character I/O involving IOCBs and file/device paths, is hooked for only three reasons:

• Once at boot to register devices into HATABS.
• To accelerate a PUT CHARS request to an HLE device that is already open, if the corresponding CIO acceleration option is enabled. This will only work if the HLE device is opened -- if H: is set to also register as D: and DOS overwrites that with its own D: entry, writes to D: are not intercepted.
• When the Enhanced Text (CIO intercept) video is enabled, which redirects E: to a native terminal window implementation.

All other requests fall through to the regular CIO routine. HLE devices do invoke hooks again, but this is done through a standard CIO device vector table pointing to five hook stubs, similar to the way that a PBI-based CIO device works. The hook system tries to find a free page to put this in with the priority order: $D6xx, $D7xx, $D1xx, $D5xx, and $D340-D37F. Things get really tight if you have a lot of devices but there is no emulated device that overlaps the last range. From there, CIO calls into the device vector and the hook then intercepts the low-level request from CIO. If burst I/O is enabled, the hook does the same burst trick that DOS does to handle the entire request from one PUT BYTE call. Part of the reason this is needed is that some software bypasses CIO and calls directly into CIO device vectors, particularly BASIC, so HLE devices can't depend on a CIOV hook to work -- they have to implement Open/Close/Get/Put/Special handlers like any other CIO device.

 

Thus, CIO interception will typically only kick in when an HLE device is actually accessed.

 

SIO interception works similarly in hooking SIOV instead of CIOV, but they usually don't overlap -- the cases where they support the same device, like T:, are mutually exclusive in that the CIO mode only does something when the HLE handler is enabled and the SIO mode only does something when a 6502-based handler is enabled. There is more opportunity for breakage with the SIO hooks because, unlike CIO where all devices are registered in HATABS, there is no way to know what devices a PBI or custom OS firmware might handle. The PBI hook in recent versions usually helps with this because, like the CIO device hooks, it works under SIO through the standard PBI priority chain to give PBI devices first crack at any requests. The downside is that it needs PBI support to work and causes problems when software has broken PBI support.

 

In both cases there are also safety checks involved to punt to SIOV or fixup variables in the case of weird requests, my favorite cases being one game that did a disk sector read on top of the SIO timeout flag and a cassette loader that re-read the checksum from SERIN as an incredibly ingenious and evil copy check.

 

There's not really such a thing as "POKEY SIO signal" interception because the emulator is the only thing implementing the SIO bus, so there's nothing else to intercept from. There is a little bit of a cheat in normal cases in that the SIO bus uses byte transactions instead of bits, though it's hard to find a case that isn't useless in practice. This cheat is eliminated entirely when full disk drive emulation is active as then the emulator has to sample the bit stream produced by the drive firmware the same way that POKEY does.

 

65C816 native mode throws an additional wrench into the works because the Atari OS was never designed for a 65C816 and there is no official defined interface for it for custom OSes to follow. All hooks are suspended when any of the following are true:

• Native mode is active (E=0).
• The program bank or data bank is outside of bank 0 (PBK or DBK non-zero). This is really dangerous and hard to use in emulation mode, but someone might do it.
• The direct page has been relocated (DP != 0). This is also dangerous and hard to use in emulation mode, but also supported by the CPU.

I believe KMK's 65C816 XL OS has some native mode call / extended addressing support, but the emulator doesn't try to handle it. Most SIO hooking is for acceleration purposes, so the hook falling back to the regular SIO path doesn't break anything, just doesn't accelerate the I/O.

[Keatah]

Yeah, I don't blame you. If you have the real hardware that is awesome, but I can't find myself using it. It would just be in the closet. I thought about buying a real system, but I have moved on mentally and so it's hard to go back.

That's why I like the emulator.

 

I gave away all my old Atari equipment back in 1993 as the PC had Zmodem and had awesome games and programs (which I can run with another emulator DOSBOX) and it's hard to go back and hookup hardware when I have it on my current PC.

 

That is why I want to do AR/Mixed Reality version of the emulator. That way I can see my old 800xl, without having to buy one and bring it out.

 

All true enough.

 

I recently spent a few months on cleaning and "restoring" some vintage hardware. Hopefully I won't have to do it again for another 10 or 20 years. It's all nice to look at and occasionally take out for a Sunday spin around the block. But for day-to-day use emulation is superior in just about every way. With convenience, reliability, and consistency being the top three benefits.

 

Some of the more recent emulators are good enough that you can sometimes forget you're using modern hardware, or vintage hardware connected to modern mouses, keyboards, and monitors. Not to mention superfast disk drives of boundless capacity.

 

At the very least emulation is highly complementary to original hardware. An accessory no one should be without.

Edited March 12, 2019 by Keatah

[Mclaneinc]

And that is the joy of emulation and real hardware, they both have a place in our needs.

 

Everyone is a winner...

[Docwiz]

And that is the joy of emulation and real hardware, they both have a place in our needs.

 

Everyone is a winner...

 

Right on! Well said!

Edited March 13, 2019 by Docwiz

[phaeron]

http://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-3.20-test17.zip

http://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-3.20-test17-src.zip

 

• Compiler bumped to VS2017 15.9.9.
• Fixed an issue with some sub-dialogs in the UI closing when Escape was pressed.
• Lowered the load address of the type D SAP player from $0800 to $0400 so that some digisound demos work.
• AltirraOS updated to 3.16:
  • Minor optimizations to text I/O (thanks to the crazy discussions on this in the programming manual thread!).
  • Help key and HELPFG are now implemented in the keyboard handler.
  • 816: The default emulation-mode COP instruction handler no longer crashes.

 

[Mclaneinc]

Weird, I was just playing some SAP's yesterday and getting the load address issue and hoped that it would change in the future and then this release....Nice upgrade for a possibly under used but great feature....Thank you..

[Mclaneinc]

Testing more stuff and its amazing how many low loaders there are...Such a pain to try and run them on a machine without all sorts of changes...An unforgiving task for the dev...

[Keatah]

Briefly browsed the docs and didn't find my answer.

 

Question: What is the Export button here for? It makes a small xxxxxx.pal file. But what can I do with it? Can I load this back somehow? Is this used with any specific application/utility?

 

Feature request: ability to add multiple custom palettes to the Preset box/dropdown.

Feature request: ability to import a previously exported palette.

 

[Mclaneinc]

The exported file can be used in Atari800Win Plus to give a more accurate colour range but there is no import as yet (or if)

 

You can sort of cheat an import via the registry if you save the corresponding key(s) out, its less painful than a C&P job in an ini file.

Edited March 21, 2019 by Mclaneinc