Altirra 2.60 released

[Mclaneinc]

Lol, the last poster and the last poster from the list don't match

 

I wonder why

 

Thanks Avery, the fastest fixer in the West.

 

Just a question, with many collectors they have their digital stuff in zips (not all), how difficult would it be to scan inside a zip and if its a multi disk program , automatically mount disks A, B, C or 1, 2 ,3 etc if they were correctly named.

 

I'm not asking for it, just wondering how hard it would be to integrate, obviously there are some programs that work only on a single drive.

 

Again, not asking for it because its a 'lazy' request but keen to know if technically its easily do-able or not.

Edited May 2, 2015 by Mclaneinc

[Irgendwer]

I haven't worried about this because the function keys were only on the 1200XL and were seldom used.

 

At least here in Germany the addition of these keys to the XL was a very common upgrade, as it allows also easier access to the international charset and not only better cursor control and a nice speed up during lengthy Basic-program initialization phases - while allowing switching the screen DMA off.

 

A fix/compatible setting to Atari800 (F1-F4 is assigned to the cursor keys and leave the SSO keys on real F-keys untouched) would be very welcome, as I also already had the problem above...

[Joe Stella]

I like this emulator a lot, ty!

[fujidude]

Just a question, with many collectors they have their digital stuff in zips (not all), how difficult would it be to scan inside a zip and if its a multi disk program , automatically mount disks A, B, C or 1, 2 ,3 etc if they were correctly named.

 

I'm not asking for it, just wondering how hard it would be to integrate, obviously there are some programs that work only on a single drive.

 

Again, not asking for it because its a 'lazy' request but keen to know if technically its easily do-able or not.

 

Actually, there is an advantage besides the convenience factor: .zip files save storage space too. Great idea. Would be really nice to see, but as usual, more than happy with what there is already!

[Joe Stella]

If I understand the last few threads right, you're asking for .zip support? That works for me in this version. Maybe I'm not reading well tonight, so forgive me if I misunderstood.

[morelenmir]

Yeah, there were a few hacks of the XF551. I had three: a stock model, one with Bob Puff's 3.5" mod (not the dual drive mod Mat*Rat reviewed in your link) and one that held my hard drive. Since the XF's mechanical guts were just standard PC fare, I took the drive mechanism out and used its power supply to feed a SCSI drive connected to my Black Box by a ribbon cable out the back. Eventually I just connected the 3.5 mechanism direct to the Floppy Board and took the box off the SIO chain.

 

By the time the XF came out, the PC and Mac had set the standards for hardware, and it was not only cheaper for Atari to use the same mechs as the "big boys" but smarter. It was so much easier to repair an XF than a 1050 since you could just chuck the mech for a new one if the heads got damaged or the motor stopped spinning. Unfortunately, Atari not only tried to save money on the hardware end but on the firmware end, which is why we ended up with the FUBAR code that ran the thing and I'm sure makes it a pain to emulate properly.

That is an excellent idea for the hard-drive Pab! I always really fancied the one they reviewed in Page 6 back in 1986 - I think it was a Supra with a whopping 20MB capacity. If I remember rightly the thing sold for £700!!! Now that would be a nice addition to Altrirra - a virtual Supra alongside the various SIDE/MyIDE/so on simulations.

[Mclaneinc]

If I understand the last few threads right, you're asking for .zip support? That works for me in this version. Maybe I'm not reading well tonight, so forgive me if I misunderstood.

 

Hi Joe, not seen you post before so welcome..

 

Yeah zip support is in Altirra and has been for a good while now, what was being talked about was that say you had an adventure that was on 3 disks and they contained the text Side A, Side B or Side C (alternatively 1, 2 or 3 would work too), if they were all inside the same zip could Altirra be made to mount them on D1, D2 and D3 for you just by checking the zip contents first.

 

As I said in my post, the idea of mine was just to ask how much of a hassle it would be for Avery to write as opposed to a request for the feature simply because its a really lazy feature, I know we like the emulator to do so much for us but even mounting the disks too

 

What next, play the game for us

 

Obviously if Avery thought it was easy then all good and well if he ever decided to add it but I'm happy to use the disk swapper window.

[Mclaneinc]

That is an excellent idea for the hard-drive Pab! I always really fancied the one they reviewed in Page 6 back in 1986 - I think it was a Supra with a whopping 20MB capacity. If I remember rightly the thing sold for £700!!! Now that would be a nice addition to Altrirra - a virtual Supra alongside the various SIDE/MyIDE/so on simulations.

 

Just a bit of trivia, an old friend and work colleague who was the first person in the UK taken to court for piracy (on the Atari 8bit, so its topical) purchased one of the first SCSI HD's for his Amiga, the cost was unbelievable and the storage was tiny but this bloke just had to have it, the courier brought it to what was then his computer shop and Kev opened the box like it was Xmas. He pulled out this drive and marvelled at it and then like a butter fingered child dropped it, the noise as it hit the stone floor was one where you KNOW its broken just like when my daughter dropped her iPad mini.

 

The drive was indeed dead as a Norwegian Blue parrot, not sleeping, dead...

 

Something like £800 quid killed in an instant...

 

A drive with 50X the storage is a mere 20 - 30 quid now..If that...

Edited May 3, 2015 by Mclaneinc

[morelenmir]

 

Just a bit of trivia, an old friend and work colleague who was the first person in the UK taken to court for piracy (on the Atari 8bit, so its topical) purchased one of the first SCSI HD's for his Amiga, the cost was unbelievable and the storage was tiny but this bloke just had to have it, the courier brought it to what was then his computer shop and Kev opened the box like it was Xmas. He pulled out this drive and marvelled at it and then like a butter fingered child dropped it, the noise as it hit the stone floor was one where you KNOW its broken just like when my daughter dropped her iPad mini.

 

The drive was indeed dead as a Norwegian Blue parrot, not sleeping, dead...

 

Something like £800 quid killed in an instant...

 

A drive with 50X the storage is a mere 20 - 30 quid now..If that...

I have been playing with setting up a fairly authentic DOS 6.22 system over the last week. Getting the thing networked has been frustrating to say the least, but amazingly satisfying when it finally sees the Win2K3 share and can access files directly rather than have me running around with single floppies! However, It struck me that even my oldest motherboard/processor combination has something like 10x the physical RAM as that Supra had in magnetic storage... It really makes you think. Sometimes I wonder what I would have thought back when I was playing 'Wizard's Crown' the first time and then through some kind of time displacement suddenly see myself twenty-five years on plugging away at 'Dark Souls'... I genuinely do not think I would have believed it.

 

Yet Altirra allows us to do exactly that, but backwards. Thanks to Avery we can have a pretty much photo-realistic 'Crysis 2' running on the desktop while simultaneously in another window Bounty Bob is struggling not to vanish down a line-art slide... Its a brave new world we live in. I don't think we realize it half the time.

[flashjazzcat]

Was any multi-disk title ever released that would even make use of more than two physical drives? I was about to suggest a "play the game for me" feature as well.

[Mclaneinc]

There are some titles whose names just fail to come to me that DID use multiple drives, not a vast amount but they are out there (another reason I wasn't making it a feature request, not enough to justify it and lazy as I said).

 

I joked with Avery a very long time ago about an AI play if for you system and I seem to remember him saying very jokingly that he had been thinking of working on AI (and from what I remember it wasn't Atari related from memory)

 

I could be wrong as it was a LOOOOOOOOOOOONNG time ago

[ricortes]

I have been playing with setting up a fairly authentic DOS 6.22 system over the last week. Getting the thing networked has been frustrating to say the least, but amazingly satisfying when it finally sees the Win2K3 share and can access files directly rather than have me running around with single floppies! However, It struck me that even my oldest motherboard/processor combination has something like 10x the physical RAM as that Supra had in magnetic storage... It really makes you think. Sometimes I wonder what I would have thought back when I was playing 'Wizard's Crown' the first time and then through some kind of time displacement suddenly see myself twenty-five years on plugging away at 'Dark Souls'... I genuinely do not think I would have believed it.

 

Yet Altirra allows us to do exactly that, but backwards. Thanks to Avery we can have a pretty much photo-realistic 'Crysis 2' running on the desktop while simultaneously in another window Bounty Bob is struggling not to vanish down a line-art slide... Its a brave new world we live in. I don't think we realize it half the time.

I've been jerking around with Arduino<s> for about a month now. The UNOs sell for about $5 and have 2k ram, 32k flash. They run at 16 MHz and execute an instruction per clock cycle which makes them about 40 times the processing power of an Atari. Just got a Mega in for 8 bucks that runs at the same clock speed but has 54 I/O pins, 8k RAM and 128k flash. Doing a lot of stupid stuff for my own satisfaction and getting side tracked. Mostly doing things like running a version of Eliza on a terminal. Figured I would hang it off a joystick port for laughs. I just want to verify some of my rants about multiple processor being useful if you put some thought into it.

 

Other leap that I was asleep for is just how much cell phones have changed the game in low cost/surplus electronics. I've bought four<five? another one may be on a slow boat from China> 320x240 color touch displays, all for less then ten bucks each. Put one together for my grandkids as a touch drawing pad. They seem to enjoy it and I like the Mr. Wizard status it gives me.

 

I'm starting to hit the wall. Eliza and touch screen drawing program may be as far as I go other then hooking Eliza up to an Atari. Thing is the tiny touch screen displays are so cheap and easy to use, kind of wish I was still young + enough energy to do something about it. The displays typical have ~200k of R/W RAM and are interfaced similar to an IDE drive or POKEY for that matter. Almost makes sense to use them for memory expansion even if the display is kind of pitifully small.

 

The other thing that made me wish things were different is just the price and availability of display chips. All I could think of 'Why didn't we get a console with one of these chips?' If you want to burn a few brain cells, take a look at an ILI9327 data sheet. These chips sell for a couple of bucks. I wrote the manufacturer asking if they had anything compatible with other standards like composite or VGA but they never got back to me.<sigh>

www.mcufriend.com/download/ili9327.pdf

[Irgendwer]

Was any multi-disk title ever released that would even make use of more than two physical drives?

 

I remember only a few. I could dig deeper in my collection if you like to know specific titles.

While I had two drives back then, I created my own solution for avoiding tedious diskette changes: I soldered a switch to the drive number selectors of my 1050s - switching between 1/2 and 2/1. Copied then e.g. the sides to individual diskettes and feed the drives with them. Side change was performed by just one nudge on the switch. Worked great.

Always wondered why there isn't a more comfortable solution in the emulators. But you can also ease this process with e.g. AutoIt (https://www.autoitscript.com/site/autoit/) scripts, controlling the emulators externally.

[flashjazzcat]

A simple "D1<->D2" swap in the disk drive dialogue should satisfy all but the most torpid of users then, IMO. Rather than specific titles, I was just trying to establish if the requirement is as niche as I assumed it to be. Of course Altirra also emulates real hardware (like IDE Plus and Ultimate/SIDE) solutions which put multiple disk swapping a single button push away, and the time you save in PIO transfer speeds should compensate for the time spent mounting an array of ATRs.

[morelenmir]

I think you have more than earned the 'Mr Wizard' epithet there ricortez!!! I have often wondered if it was possible to cannibalize things which in themselves are extremely high-tech, but so ubiquitous we don't look at them twice. For instance I vaguely recall there was an enthusiasm in one quarter for re-using the super-hardenned, super-fast ASIC's and processors that are attached to motorcar airbag controllers... Now that would be a really interesting project to get something working from.

 

I am glad some of you other chaps are starting to get in to looking at Altirra's floppy support! In many ways I really do find the virtual disk drives the most vital aspect of the simulation. There is so much you can do with them and so much fertile ground for Avery to look at.

Edited May 3, 2015 by morelenmir

[morelenmir]

There are some titles whose names just fail to come to me that DID use multiple drives, not a vast amount but they are out there (another reason I wasn't making it a feature request, not enough to justify it and lazy as I said).

 

I joked with Avery a very long time ago about an AI play if for you system and I seem to remember him saying very jokingly that he had been thinking of working on AI (and from what I remember it wasn't Atari related from memory)

 

I could be wrong as it was a LOOOOOOOOOOOONNG time ago

Actually 'Wizard's Crown' was somewhat like that. It didn't actually expressly insist on multiple disks but it certainly helped! It really was a fantastic game and in my opinion head and shoulders above the somewhat self-satisfied 'Ultima' titles - not that I didn't enjoy those also. I felt so... betrayed... when the sequel 'Eternal Dagger', despite what the advert in 'Page 6' promised was only released for the paltry Commodore 64!

 

But... You know where playing with AI gets you...

[fujidude]

A drive with 50X the storage is a mere 20 - 30 quid now..If that...

 

Just to clarify for those of us not in your part of the world, "quid" is slang for pound, kind of like here in the U.S. "buck" is slang for dollar?

[flashjazzcat]

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=quid

[phaeron]

While I had two drives back then, I created my own solution for avoiding tedious diskette changes: I soldered a switch to the drive number selectors of my 1050s - switching between 1/2 and 2/1. Copied then e.g. the sides to individual diskettes and feed the drives with them. Side change was performed by just one nudge on the switch. Worked great.

Always wondered why there isn't a more comfortable solution in the emulators. But you can also ease this process with e.g. AutoIt (https://www.autoitscript.com/site/autoit/) scripts, controlling the emulators externally.

 

There are a couple of facilities in recent versions of Altirra, both of which take advantage of multiple drives:

• The drive dialog allows swapping disks between drives. Click the triangle and select Swap with Another Drive, then click the swap indicator on another drive entry.
• File > Attach Disk > Rotate Up/Down will cycle disks through all mounted drives. A popup tells you what got re-mounted to D1: so it's easy to tell if you're on the right spot. Like all menu options, this can be bound to a keyboard shortcut in Tools > Keyboard Shortcuts.

Unlike swapping manually, these work with unsaved virtual disks (VirtRW mode or blue background).

 

[fujidude]

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=quid

 

It may surprise you, but I do actually know about and how to use Google. I wanted to hear what you had to say on it. Thanks anyway.

[Kyle22]

Is there any way in Altirra to use the CF drive from an Incognito as R/W? I don't have my 800 set up right now, but would like to download some things onto its CF drive. I have a USB CF adapter in my laptop.

 

Thanks.

[Mclaneinc]

Avery, what about the notion of auto mounting based upon the file name, ie a zip containing all the disks for a game and Altirra looking at the name and seeing where Disk 1 or Side 2 etc is and mounting in numerical or alphabetical order..

 

Just asking about how much work it would be?

 

Too much for the payback?

 

Remember I'm not asking as a request, just the feasibility of it as its a lazy / novelty feature.

[morelenmir]

I think it would be useful to absolutely lay out in stone how the simulation handles certain physical actions you would perform with a physical drive. For instance, when using the '1050' profile, in order to get at the other half of of the sectors on a double-sided virtual diskette there should be a 'flip' menu command. In turn if you 'insert' the same image in to the simulation when it is using the 'XF551' profile then that is not necessary and the menu command could be greyed out.

 

This keys in to something Avery mentioned the other day and something I have thought about myself for a while. Firstly the dialog box to create a new floppy image needs to be a little more detailed. Currently there is a drop-down listbox which offers a few common variations of disk geometry, but in order to produce a custom-size image for instance to support the even higher density formats offered by SpartaDOS you have to specify the total count of sectors without any guidance on compliance to standards. While this does work - so long as you know the values ahead of time - it is a little... 'woolly'... What the dialog should offer is radio-groups for density - as it currently partially does - and then a specific radio-group for 1 or 2 sides which couples to a drop-down list box which contains a menu of sector-counts per side and another of tracks-per-sector compliant to the specifications for the various sizes of floppy disks. Either that or the drop-down listbox of 'pre-made' image types needs to be made canonical with all the compliant variations - it is a finite number and would not be too hard to fill in. Finally the finished image should itself be checked when first 'inserted' in to the drive simulation to see if its geometry is supported by the current drive profile - which Phaeron has himself suggested. Obviously I use terms like 'should' and 'will' above, but these are not to be taken as demands - just the specifications for how I think the suggested system might work better.

 

These are areas which would, I think benefit from a little more attention than they have currently enjoyed.

[fujidude]

I think it would be useful to absolutely lay out in stone how the simulation handles certain physical actions you would perform with a physical drive. For instance, when using the '1050' profile, in order to get at the other half of of the sectors on a double-sided virtual diskette there should be a 'flip' menu command. In turn if you 'insert' the same image in to the simulation when it is using the 'XF551' profile then that is not necessary and the menu command could be greyed out.

 

I have to note my disagreement on this. I prefer the current method of dealing with "flippies." That is, each side is its own image file. After all, the flip side of a disk in a 1050 is seen by the Atari as a completely distinct disk, just as much as if it were on a different physical disk entirely. The fact that people made flippies in the physical world, is not at all relevant in the virtual world in any way that I can see, other than perhaps the information on the flipside might be related to the front side. It is easy to organize floppy image files for emulator use, so I see little advantage other than a slight convenience of initiating a "flip" action in the emulator vs. mounting a different image file. I do see a disadvantage though. If people have "double" images containing two separate "single" images, and those single images are not related... then it can get messy sharing software because something unwanted tags along with what is wanted. Also, many programs on the A8 allow one with multiple drives to load the other drive(s) with other disks for the program. This setup doesn't even require a "flip" action. Since emulators let you have all the "drives" you want, it would seem to be a convenience advantage to have each disk in its own separate image file.

 

 

This keys in to something Avery mentioned the other day and something I have thought about myself for a while. Firstly the dialog box to create a new floppy image needs to be a little more detailed. Currently there is a drop-down listbox which offers a few common variations of disk geometry, but in order to produce a custom-size image for instance to support the even higher density formats offered by SpartaDOS you have to specify the total count of sectors without any guidance on compliance to standards. While this does work - so long as you know the values ahead of time - it is a little... 'woolly'...

 

Here I totally concur! I have sometimes turned to other software to make the images, but it would be so awesome to have it all handled in Altirra. It is so close to being all it needs to be in that regard, but just not quite.

[morelenmir]

 

I have to note my disagreement on this. I prefer the current method of dealing with "flippies." That is, each side is its own image file. After all, the flip side of a disk in a 1050 is seen by the Atari as a completely distinct disk, just as much as if it were on a different physical disk entirely. The fact that people made flippies in the physical world, is not at all relevant in the virtual world in any way that I can see, other than perhaps the information on the flipside might be related to the front side. It is easy to organize floppy image files for emulator use, so I see little advantage other than a slight convenience of initiating a "flip" action in the emulator vs. mounting a different image file. I do see a disadvantage though. If people have "double" images containing two separate "single" images, and those single images are not related... then it can get messy sharing software because something unwanted tags along with what is wanted. Also, many programs on the A8 allow one with multiple drives to load the other drive(s) with other disks for the program. This setup doesn't even require a "flip" action. Since emulators let you have all the "drives" you want, it would seem to be a convenience advantage to have each disk in its own separate image file.

 

That is a fair point fujidude and well made. Honestly I had not even considered that some people didn't use flippys! All my disks were flipped and even the 'backups' that formed the vast majority of my game collection were flippies that sometimes had what were originally I suppose two SS DD diskettes put on to either side of one DS DD copy. Even this question itself would go away if Altirra checked the currently selected image was compliant to the current drive profile. Although another would also arise - say you were using a XF551 profile and through it created what amounted to a flippy image - a DS DD diskette with, say the 'Countryside' and 'Dungeon' disks of 'Wizard's Crown' (I seem to have that game on the brain currently!) on either of its two sides... Now how would you tell the XF551 to read side 2 for the 'Dungeon Disk' when it was required by the game given the XF551 has two heads and doesn't need to flip? For that matter how would you tell it to even write the two sides separately in the first place? I suppose that is not really a question facing Altirra uniquely, but something the real hardware encountered as well. Perhaps the 'flip' option would only become enabled when Altirra detected a DS DD (or DS SD for that matter!) image had been inserted but the profile in use was '1050'?

 

This is a fascinating area for me actually as it highlights the flaws in my own assumptions. The first disk drive I ever had was the 1050 and so I learned disk-drive culture through its foibels - specifically reading one side at once and flipping when necessary. Even when I got my first PC, which had both 3.5 and 5.25 drives and obviously both had two heads I mentally considered the writing process as using one conceptual side when in reality those machines were using both but hiding the process from the user... VERY interesting. The psychology of computer use fascinates me.

 

One other question that occurs to me is; does the '*.ATR' disk format even store discrete details like number of sides and density of sectors/tracks in the first place? Are these data kept in a header that Altirra could read when the image was first inserted and so do its geometry compliance check? Perhaps the default format for disk images that Altirra produces and saves should be the '*.ATX' format of 1:1 VAPI clones? That format does keep these data I believe.

Edited May 4, 2015 by morelenmir