First Atari 2600 emulator?

[jhd]

What was the very first Atari 2600 emulator?

 

I'm going with Activision's Atari 2600 Action Pack, released in 1995.

 

If memory serves, there were some earlier projects underway before that, but nothing had reached the playable stage. The consensus, at the time, on whatever Usenet group discussed such things (alt.emulation?) was that PC hardware was not yet up to the task.

[+thegoldenband]

Something that's never been clear to me is whether any of the mainframe-based programs used by Atari (and Activision) developers in the 1970s and 1980s qualified as "emulators".

[Trebor]

What was the very first Atari 2600 emulator?

 

I'm going with Activision's Atari 2600 Action Pack, released in 1995.

 

If memory serves, there were some earlier projects underway before that, but nothing had reached the playable stage. The consensus, at the time, on whatever Usenet group discussed such things (alt.emulation?) was that PC hardware was not yet up to the task.

 

That would probably win if the consensus is if it just ran a few select games...In which case PCAE or Stella probably could do similar, just not publicly...

The authors of course would have to confirm.

The Action Packs emulated just a few Activision games and that was all. An all around emulator, able to emulate the majority of 2600 titles fall around this time line:

 

PCAE/Stella = 1996

z27 = 1997

 

Brings back memories of C64S (Pre-Seattle Labs), ColemDOS along with DASArcade being my first set of emulators.

[jhd]

Stella is much older than I realised.

 

I heard that the Action Packs can be made to play other games, but as it won't run on my current hardware, I have no way to verify this. (It may be limited to 4K ROMs if bank switching is not supported.)

[JL]

Stella is much older than I realised.

 

I heard that the Action Packs can be made to play other games, but as it won't run on my current hardware, I have no way to verify this. (It may be limited to 4K ROMs if bank switching is not supported.)

 

 

I think I had the Windows 3.1x version of vol 1 and 2 running in DosBox. It's been a while so I'd have to revisit it. I'd be curious to know how to make the Action Packs play games from rom dumps. I also have the Windows 95 version of vol 2 and 3

Edited October 10, 2012 by JL

[DanBoris]

Action Pack was the first that I am aware of, it was released in June of 1995. I remember back then a lot of people were skeptical at first that it even was an emulator. Next was probably x2600 which is what my Virtual VCS emulator was based on, but I have not been able to find any record of when that project was created, but it was prior to June of 1996. My Virtual VCS emulator had it's second release on 6/18/1996. I don't have any documentation of when the first release was but I think it was only a couple weeks earlier. The first playable release of Stella 7/12/1996. Best I can find PCAE came in late 1996.

[skosh]

How about VCS2600 by Thomas Djafari .? It was an early 2600 emu in assembly and could run on lower end machines of the time. Just not sure about exact dates and if it was first but know it is in the ball part.

[SeaGtGruff]

How about VCS2600 by Thomas Djafari .? It was an early 2600 emu in assembly and could run on lower end machines of the time. Just not sure about exact dates and if it was first but know it is in the ball part.

I've collected a lot of 2600 emulators. My copy of VCS2600 has a date of 10/20/1996, but that's the "r7" (release 7?) version.

 

VVCS was also released in 1996 (v0.60 was dated 07/25/1996).

 

A26 (v0.15) was also released in 1996 (12/11/1996).

 

And V2600 (v0.81) was dated 03/25/1997.

 

I don't know when the initial versions of those emulators were begun or when they were released.

[DanBoris]

I've collected a lot of 2600 emulators. My copy of VCS2600 has a date of 10/20/1996, but that's the "r7" (release 7?) version.

 

VVCS was also released in 1996 (v0.60 was dated 07/25/1996).

 

A26 (v0.15) was also released in 1996 (12/11/1996).

 

And V2600 (v0.81) was dated 03/25/1997.

 

I don't know when the initial versions of those emulators were begun or when they were released.

 

As I mentioned above the second release of VVCS was 6/18/1996, an I don't have a record of it but I am pretty sure the first release was just a couple weeks before that.

[+FujiSkunk]

This doesn't confirm what came first, but I can confirm the Activision Action Pack did in fact have an emulator and it could in fact play games other than the Activision games that came with it. At the time I had the Macintosh version. Some hacker discovered the game ROMs were stored in resource forks (remember those, Mac-heads?) and so could be easily pried out and replaced with any game ROM you wanted. Pretty much any 2K or 4K ROM would work, and a handful of larger ROMs also worked. I suspect Activision coded the emulator to whatever bank-switching scheme(s) they used, and didn't bother with any others.

Edited October 12, 2012 by FujiSkunk

[JL]

Found this, thought it might be of some interest.

 

That "first" collection of 2600 dumps existed and was traded around at least as early as 1995. I created a basic cart dumper using a the parallel port and a simple counter/latch under DOS and started dumping my collection around that time to play them in the first "Action Pack for Windows 95". I found you could make them 16k and save them over the files it was looking for.

 

Soon after that, someone sent me a zip file with all of those early dumps with that naming. I didn't know anything about bank switching at the time, so I never did extend my tools or dumper (or SRAM cart) to handle that.

 

This brings me way back to the early days of emulation. Dave Spicer and that first arcade emulators. Fun times- I even wrote a Centipede/Millipede emulator back before MAME existed.

[Keatah]

With those old emulators, looks like we'll need new emulators to run them, on win 7 or 8.

[israelg]

With those old emulators, looks like we'll need new emulators to run them, on win 7 or 8.

 

DOSBox...

[Keatah]

I use dosbox to run an old version of mame for a handful of old roms..

[Trebor]

R.Cade, on Sun Apr 25, 2010 4:59 PM, said:...This brings me way back to the early days of emulation. Dave Spicer and that first arcade emulators. Fun times- I even wrote a Centipede/Millipede emulator back before MAME existed.

 

Very cool times indeed. There were a slew of stand alone arcade emulators. Rygar, Gauntlet, Ghosts'n Goblins, Bombjack, Asteroids, Mr. Do! Series, Pac-Man, Lady Bug, and a bunch of others that all had at least one stand alone emulator, sometimes several. Later on, we saw things like Callus and JAS, System 16 and a few others that focused on a particular set of games or hardware type(s).

[DanBoris]

Very cool times indeed. There were a slew of stand alone arcade emulators. Rygar, Gauntlet, Ghosts'n Goblins, Bombjack, Asteroids, Mr. Do! Series, Pac-Man, Lady Bug, and a bunch of others that all had at least one stand alone emulator, sometimes several. Later on, we saw things like Callus and JAS, System 16 and a few others that focused on a particular set of games or hardware type(s).

 

I remember those days. I also remember there were people who got very upset when MAME added support for games that where in these standalone emulators. They were sort of accusing MAME of putting these single game emulators "out of business" as it were.

[israelg]

I remember those days. I also remember there were people who got very upset when MAME added support for games that where in these standalone emulators. They were sort of accusing MAME of putting these single game emulators "out of business" as it were.

 

'putting these single game emulators "out of business"...'

 

nice..

[thomasd3]

I wrote VCS2600 back in '96. Similarly, I had the action pack and this was pretty much it. I wrote it in ASM and released it but collisions were not working properly in the first version. Then I fixed most of it, but there were a few bugs remaining.

After that Dan came up with A26 which I think was better. I don't think I ever fixed the remaining bugs.

 

Dan and I took very different approaches where he'd emulate the CPU and TIA in lockstep while I emulated the CPU until the collision registers were read or the next hblank was hit; then I'd catch up the TIA; while this created very efficient loops, it also created architectural problems that were hard to fix.

 

Later on, we worked on a commercial project to remake a hardware 2600; I've thought about open-sourcing the VHDL code but never got around it. It has all the bankswitch types and supports everthing but Pitfall 2 (however supercharger games, things like burger king, etc are totally supported). We ran a real 2600 with a logic analyzer and compared the bus with the VHDL output and everything is 100% but we could never figure out one bug in Joust due to the input: on startup our HW implementation starts the game instantly, as if you pressed game reset; we chalked it up as something in the startup state being different, but we never found out.

 

The menu system was using the 2600's hardware where an extra set of registers would appear to control memory banking (to access the game directory) and the video was replaced by a simple 40x24 text mode with rom character set; I remember that the CPU would conflict with the video system that was grabbing whatever was on the bus for the display, so the cpu had to sleep during the display area otherwise 'snow' would appear on screen. Fun memories!

[Arenafoot]

 

I think I had the Windows 3.1x version of vol 1 and 2 running in DosBox. It's been a while so I'd have to revisit it. I'd be curious to know how to make the Action Packs play games from rom dumps. I also have the Windows 95 version of vol 2 and 3

I want to say that my "Activision Action Pack for Windows" (IBM 3.5" HD disks) was purchased in 1994 (? or very early 1995?) - before Windows 95 came out. I remember buying it from K-mart and I didn't even own a PC! I just knew I had to have it for when I would get my first PC!

[Keatah]

I remember those days. I also remember there were people who got very upset when MAME added support for games that where in these standalone emulators. They were sort of accusing MAME of putting these single game emulators "out of business" as it were.

 

I never knew that part. But I was ohh so green then too. I do remember Mike Cuddy's Gyruss sound emulator. In fact I ran it the other day in dosbox!

[Nukey Shay]

we could never figure out one bug in Joust due to the input: on startup our HW implementation starts the game instantly, as if you pressed game reset; we chalked it up as something in the startup state being different, but we never found out.

 

Joust does count on carry status being set or clear following LSR SWCHB to handle game reset (it does this twice). So it may have been confusing to the new hardware when DDR has not been changed from read-only? Game Select is handled common enough...LDA SWCHB followed by 2xLSR.

Edited February 28, 2014 by Nukey Shay

[Keatah]

When looking back 20 years ago at the first emulators -- I never thought of them as fun. Novelties, curiosities, that sort of thing. I already knew a lot of the 8-bit machines were either classic or destined to become classic. I knew of thousands upon thousands of arcade games. And millions of games for disk, tape, and cartridge systems.

 

What I didn't consciously foresee was that all of it would be emulated. I was seeing bits and pieces of experiments here and there. I thought huge communities writing stuff in the future (homebrews) would be nice, I always believed it to be impossible because none of it would be marketable and no one could possibly be interested crap 8-bit systems.

 

IIRC my first emulator had something to do with running Amiga and Apple II software on the PC. It was something I picked up at a computer fair or show. I didn't know what to do with it, or how to get it working, so I just tossed it aside. It was on 5.25 floppies and I still have it I believe. I just thought the damned thing was a scam or joke. Maybe sometime I will re-visit it.

Edited February 28, 2014 by Keatah

[thomasd3]

 

Joust does count on carry status being set or clear following LSR SWCHB to handle game reset (it does this twice). So it may have been confusing to the new hardware when DDR has not been changed from read-only? Game Select is handled common enough...LDA SWCHB followed by 2xLSR.

Could be right; I don't have anything setup anymore, so unfortunately I can't validate.