willymanilly

I doubt it's the emulator. Sounds like the compiled code is hitting one of the 6502 JAM instructions which effectively kills the cpu from fetching new instructions. http://forum.6502.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=1409&view=previous The only way to restore the cpu to a valid state once it's jammed on real hardware is sending a reset signal to the cpu. The error message you are seeing is alerting you to the fact the cpu has attempted to execute one of the JAM instructions and is now in an unresponsive state. VICE actually has test programs to ensure once a JAM instruction is executed the cpu indeed remains frozen. These test programs show that jam instructions can be compiled with no issues. https://sourceforge.net/p/vice-emu/code/HEAD/tree/testprogs/CPU/cpujam/

I finally checked out Warp drive so I understand what you mean now.

Cool, thanks for the suggestion. For now I'm simply using Stella as a benchmark until I get my hands on a real Atari 2600. I don't intend on emulating Stella at all, but considering it is probably the most accurate Atari 2600 emulator available, I inadvertently will be emulating it. Most of my development to date has been from referring to technical documents and schematics. I actually started the Atari 2600 emulation way back in 2014 but only really giving it some well deserved attention now. The closest thing to the Phosphor emulation in my emulator is the "blending" option which combines the current frame with the previous. It's not on by default so some games flicker, which if I recall correctly from my childhood, happens on real hardware. I'll definitely check out WARPDRIVE! Edit: Looks like I need to implement FA cartridge support and detection code for Warpdrive before it will work. From reading the mappers document it doesn't look that complicated so I will do that now (implemented now)

Thanks DirtyHairy, That's good to know. Definitely sounds like Stella has DPC+ fast fetch on by default.

Thanks everyone for all the suiggestions so far for programs to test against. I've been able to improve my Atari 2600 TIA emulation substantially. I don't currently have real hardware to benchmark against so I've been using Stella as a reference for now. I'm confident Stella probably has the most accurate TIA emulation available but I always prefer to test on real hardware when I can for all of my emulators so I'd be very grateful if someone can test a few programs on real hardware and post the results here. I only have a couple of requests for now. 1. Position variations of the test program located here by pushing joystick fire button to move the player horizontally. Stellar 6.0 first shows three triangles in row 5 at 9 shifts right Z64K first shows three triangles in row 5 at 14 shifts right 2. Does the slideshow located here display correctly on real hardware? Z64K it does, Stella 6.0 it doesn't. Thanks in advance.

Thanks heaps! That's an awesome list and will keep me busy for awhile. I need to crash out now for work tomorrow but I just had time to check mega bitmap demo. What an impressive program for the Atari 2600! It actually displays a lot more accurate in an older version of Z64K so a recent update I did obviously killed it. (** Fixed 3 June ** ) I haven't made Z64K open source yet but happy to share parts of my code with other developers. My main focus has been on the C128 emulation of Z64K so the Atari 2600 emulation has been very neglected. I plan on focusing on the Atari 2600 for the next few weeks and all the links everyone has provided will be very valuable.

Thanks for the suggestions so far. I tested Dungeon 2 and Haunted house and they both seem to work perfectly. I had to add 8K superchip detection to the emulator for the startup values program to work properly. The values I see are what I expect with my current implementation. It will be a very handy program for future testing so thanks.

Hi all, I've been recently working on updating the Atari 2600 emulation of Z64K and I'm now looking for a comprehensive test suite of programs to test all aspects of the emulation, especially the TIA. Any suggestions on games that are good test cases would be welcome as well. note: Z64K checking of cartridge type is still a WIP so some non-standard cartridges types won't be detected properly. Ideally it would be nice to have a cartridge format similar to what VICE uses for the c64 but that can be another topic. To date I've been using the following programs for testing beyond the officially documented TIA behaviour. Tricks and demos from minidig. Rsync Test by Omegamatrix Hmove Tes by Bradford W.Mott Extra Terrestrials (to test RSYNC) Bang demo and Cosmic ark (to test star field) Thanks in advance for any help in updating the above list.