JokkeH

Hi phaeron! I see you have built a fantastic emulator, and I am glad it can be run using WINE on Linux. I did not realize that the UI code is such a big part of the your project although I did read some of your sources. It took me a while to figure out what the "vd" directories were for - so it is for "VirtualDub". You have reused your video program code there. Anyway, many thanks for the Altirra emulator and info. The atari++ author Thomas Richter helped me with his emulator. He says: with copy protected games like this it is important to use a very conservative setup. With the default setup, it will indeed not play correctly. Hence, to ensure that the game works, please: - select the "Os B Rom", and provide atari++ with the original ROM image - select "Atari 800" as machine type - disable all Os patches, i.e. no "H: device", no "SIO patch", Then boot from the first disk. This should keep the game happy. It is in particular important to disable the SIO patch. Based on that piece of advice, I got Conan working with: atari++ -machine 800 -osbpath /usr/local/atari800/sysroms/ATARIOSB.ROM -siopatch false -InstallHDevice false -FrontEnd SDL -ANTICVideoMode NTSC -GTIAVideoMode NTSC -VideoMode NTSC -acceptlicence true -joystick.0.port AnalogJoystick.0 -image.1

Hello! I use Fedora Linux. I always thought that atari++ and atari800 emulators were good enough until I tried running Conan. Using atari800, all I get is screen corruption everytime I start the game, and have switched from floppy A side to B side. Using atari++ 1.81, Conan works perhaps 1 time out of 10 and I have no clue why this is so. I am suspecting it could be some kind of a weird, timing-related issue, but have no expertise to analyse this any further. And even when Conan happens to work with atari++, I suppose the game will require further floppy operations. The erratic and seemingly non-deterministic behaviour of atari++ is not really convincing: What if you advance in the Conan game, and atari++ causes screen corruption again later? It would be very annoying. Frustrated, I started searching for alternative emulators. I came across Altirra, but it is for Windows. No problem, I tried running it under WINE and using the authentic emulation mode, Altirra ran Conan flawlessly, time after time. This emulator feels great. I also ran Avery Lee's Acid800 tests. Both atari++ and atari800 on Fedora Linux failed many, many tests while Altirra failed only one. It seems to me that Altirra is clearly the best Atari 800/800XL emulator out there. I am happy that it works under WINE, so I can use it on Fedora Linux. However, it would be super fantastic if there were a native Linux/*BSD port of Altirra. Luckily Altirra is GNU GPL licensed, so the source code is available for modification and those with enough skill could possibly port it, perhaps using SDL for graphics and sound. My question is: How huge would that porting effort be? I suppose Altirra uses Windows native GUI libraries, but the core functionality is OS independent. For one simple thing, on Linux, I am used to having traditional Makefiles. Altirra is compiled using Microsoft Visual C++ compiler and all those project and resources files seem pretty mysterious to me.