alpental

I have seen pirates come when nobody had any crystite, and they left empty handed, so that is possible. I can't remember if there were unproductive crystite plots, or if there were no crystite plots at all on the board.

My guess is that you are in tiled mode, and the cursor is not on any of the three VMs when you choose the menu, so it does not know which VM you want to work with. You have to go into full screen mode, or have the cursor on a specific VM when you choose that menu item using keystrokes, or it can't know which of the three you intend to mount a disk in.

Again, please see the README. It sounds like you have closed every VM, so you need to start a new one using the File/New VM/Atari 800 (or whichever type of machine you want to emulate), or File/New Session before you try and load a disk image.

Some people have been confused about how to launch an individual image file like an ATR/XEX etc. in XFormer 10. There are 2 ways: 1. Drag the image file onto the icon on your desktop. It does not yet work to drag it onto an already running window of XFormer10. 2. If XFormer10 is already running, put a virtual disk into the virtual disk drive by choosing the menu option "Disk/Cartridge"/"D1:"/"D1:" and then choose the image file. Cold Start using the menu VM/ColdStart (or just press CTRL-F10). See the XFormer10_README.rtf file for more information.

To answer some other questions: we do support drag an drop of a single file, and the File/Open Folder command adds new machines to the existing tiles. If you want to start fresh with new tiles, you'll want to play with the File/New Session and File/NewVM options to create tiles one by one, and use the Disk/Cartridge menu to mount the software. You can also Delete them one by one, even in tiled mode. For instance, hover over a tile and then "Alt-F, D" will make that tile go away. If your mouse scrolls the tiles too slowly: there is a "Mouse wheel sensitivity" menu option. There are a lot of other things you can do that aren't in the video, make sure to read the readme (Help/Online Documentation), it's pretty short. There's lots more you can do if you play with the menus that I should document, like the File options I talk about in the first paragraph.

Thanks again, everybody for the feedback. I'll try and answer a few more of the questions. I do realize that we still fail half the ACID tests, I've worked with that closely. However, in the interest of shipping, I've focused on the issues that actual programs need to run. I know of hardly any program that won't run because of the remaining failing ACID tests, and I've tested over 7,500 programs! We are about 99.5% compatible with programs designed for a standard 800/XL or XE. The ACID test was never meant to indicate that an emulator would not sucessfully run programs correctly, it is a fabulous and indispensible benchmark to test cycle accuracy of very specific hardware features and anomalies. Which reminds me, I want to give a quick shout out to Avery and Altirra. The documentation provided to help other Atari enthusiasts was very helpful to me, both in making this emulator better and in my own understanding and enjoyment of Atari hardware. That 0.5% of programs that we don't run (and programs that use custom configured machines)? I would bet that Altirra would. So what are XFormer's advantages? Our faster emulation, tiled interface and the fact that you don't have to select the kind of Atari system manually ("it just works") are the biggest. We hope to add something to this community by providing some new, fun features, and we hope that XFormer will be a great choice for some people's emulation needs. For instance, our emulation core is significantly faster than any other emulator. From my experiments, I think we're the only emulator that could make a tiled mode and be fast enough to support a full screen of tiles playing in real time. As you can see in our demo video, our emulator uses about 0.05% of the CPU per machine, and we have almost 200 tiles running visible on the screen in real time. And a small confession - we have not yet implemented Direct Draw support, so that's using GDI. When we get around to that, I expect we'll be able to make an even more ridiculous demo with 400 visible tiles. :-)

It's great to hear people are interested in trying it out. It does support AtariMax cartridges, and NTSC artifacting, and PAL and NTSC tiles can be mixed (all at 60Hz until you go full screen, then a PAL program will start rendering at 50Hz), and because of popular demand, we just uploaded a new version that should work on Windows 7! There is a readme with instructions and an address to send bug reports to, we'd love to hear from everybody.

Today, http://www.emulators.com is releasing version 10 of PC XFormer, the ATARI 8 bit emulator. It is completely rewritten and modernized for an amazing new way to experience 8 bit software. Use touch screen to browse thousands of thumbnails of your Atari disk and cartridge images, all fully playable (even inside the thumbnail) and running simultaneously in real time. And all of them automatically booting into the proper type of Atari machine necessary with no manual setup. Watch the second video on the home page for a complete demonstration of more of our revolutionary features. And, it's free! Enjoy! Danny Miller Darek Mihocka

My friends and I finally fulfilled a life long (well, two year) dream tonight, by breaking 600,000 in Atari 800 M.U.L.E., something we have long theorized was possible. To get such a score, we definitely had to trade in month 12, but we were curious what kind of a score was obtainable if you don't restrict any rules of play. We played a 4 player human game, using the beginner characters. Next, we will try and break 600,000 using the humanoid expert characters, and also play without trading in month 12 to fit in with the rules of the forum. We are very curious if anybody else can figure out how to get scores that high. It is only possible if you have 4 human players, and trade in month 12, but we have further refined our strategy by playing many games over the past 24 months to see how much we could maximize our score. Our 12 month scores were: 1 - 9444 2 - 13,089 3 - 21,522 4 - 43,832 5 - 53,119 6 - 62,812 7 - 98,447 8 - 134,464 9 - 154,361 10 - 191,513 11 - 230,396 12 - 600,527 Our month 11 score was 230,396, meaning that when we play without trading in month 12 we still expect to beat 250,000. We would like to invite others to play with trading in month 12 allowed and hear your results! - Danny

Your report on the Commodore and IBM versions is interesting. Every single version of this game appears to have so many differences! It goes to show you really can't compare scores across platforms.

We definitely did everything, including the 12th month trading, specifically to get as high a score as possible. I think it does involve a fair amount of skill and is worth its own category of high score. I have never seen another score even close to 200,000 so we theorized how high it could go, and calculated it might be possible to get close to 600,000 in theory, if pirates stay away and the value of crystite happens to be high. This game represents years of learning the details of how the price of goods is set and how to maximize production. Month 12's crystite store buying price was only $96, and pirates came once, so luckier players could still beat our score. To show how important the 12th month of trading was, here is our colony score at various points during the game: Summary #6: 72,101 Summary #7: 95,374 Summary #8: 119,010 Summary #9: 154,952 Summar #10: 181,840 Summary #11: 185,013 Summary #12: 522,840 (A huge jump!) As this is on an original Atari 800, there was no cheating or code alterations, or save/restore happening to inflate the score. We just played a 4 human player tournament game. I'd be happy to disclose the strategy that got us this score at some point, but first it would be fun to see what other people get when they allow 12th month trading! - Danny

So sorry for the long delay in answering. Three of us played on an actual Atari 800 (no emulation) with four human controlled characters, sharing 4 joysticks, playing cooperatively. Danny (me), Jill and Chris. We did (obviously) trade in the twelfth month to get such a high a score for goods and total score (522,840). The game was played before I learned of this forum and the rule of no trading in month 12, but I thought it would still be of interest. Although it is certainly unfair to compare scores with and without such trading, we sometimes still find it fun to see how high a score we can get when trading is allowed. As a testament to how timeless and great a game M.U.L.E. is, my girlfriend Jill is a more modern gamer who only found out about it from me last year, and it quickly became her favourite game of all time and we spent many months playing almost every night.` - Danny

Tonight's high score, 4 player tournament game, all flappers (beginner character) 522,840 colony score!