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Altirra 3.20 released


phaeron

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@phaeron Brilliant - don't worry, you've answered what I was looking for with the aliased commands. I didn't realise it was as simple as that.

 

Debugger commands are equally welcome, I wouldn't want the UI overflowing with niche commands that everyone and their dog has asked for. I can use what you've supplied though even without the command.

 

I was just looking for a binary dump of the data, not data statements. Essentially there is a game which I want to rip a screen from and use as placeholder graphics in my own game.

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Maybe it's a quirk on my Windows 10 system, but with 3.90-test2, opening any Configure Emulation page with drop-down selectors spins the CPU for several seconds before it completes, the more drop-downs, the longer the delay (Computer > Memory for instance is quite noticeable).  Perfview suggests it's in a function calling a series of CreateWindowW and SendMessage commands, (user32!DialogBoxIndirectParamW -> Altirra64!? -> user32!CreateDialogIndirectParamW -> Altirra64!? -> …).  I can send the trace if it's interesting.

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Not 100% sure what you mean, the second I enter Configure System Altirra halts any emulation until you leave the configure window..

 

Not seeing any holdups or odd behaviour but I'm on Win 7 x64...Windows 10 only effect?

Edited by Mclaneinc
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http://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-3.90-test3.zip

http://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-3.90-test3-src.zip

 

There was a bug in the dark mode code that caused list views to render all white when dark mode was disabled -- should be fixed now. (The reason for this is that to implement dark mode on Win32, you have to override system colors on individual controls.) But otherwise, the controls are actually there including their items, so if you're really good, you can click where things are supposed to be. How well do you know the emulator? ?

 

8 hours ago, Atari_Ace said:

Maybe it's a quirk on my Windows 10 system, but with 3.90-test2, opening any Configure Emulation page with drop-down selectors spins the CPU for several seconds before it completes, the more drop-downs, the longer the delay (Computer > Memory for instance is quite noticeable).  Perfview suggests it's in a function calling a series of CreateWindowW and SendMessage commands, (user32!DialogBoxIndirectParamW -> Altirra64!? -> user32!CreateDialogIndirectParamW -> Altirra64!? -> …).  I can send the trace if it's interesting.

CreateWindow/SendMessage() within DialogBoxIndirectParam() is expected, that's just the dialog code instantiating the controls. For a few versions now Altirra has been doing this manually instead of letting the dialog manager do it, as it's necessary to actually make dialogs both resizable and per-monitor DPI adaptive.

 

I'm running Windows 10 1803 and haven't seen it take anywhere near that long, so yeah, something seems amiss here. The Firmware pane does spend a bit of time reading the firmware list, but the Memory pane doesn't. I did find an issue with the OS combo boxes doing dumb things with repeatedly resizing the list box while being populated, which I added a workaround for in -test3, but that was only around ~50ms on my system. If you're still seeing these long delays on the newest build, then I'd be interested in a trace. Never used PerfView, but if its traces are compatible with Windows Performance Analyzer then I can work with that. PM's fine if you want to do that.

 

Also, here are the private PDB symbols for 3.90-test3 as well, for symbol lookup:

http://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-3.90-test3-symbols.7z

 

I don't usually post these as they're big and very few people need them, but I have PDB symbols archived for all builds including test builds.

 

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5 hours ago, phaeron said:

CreateWindow/SendMessage() within DialogBoxIndirectParam() is expected, that's just the dialog code instantiating the controls. For a few versions now Altirra has been doing this manually instead of letting the dialog manager do it, as it's necessary to actually make dialogs both resizable and per-monitor DPI adaptive.

 

I'm running Windows 10 1803 and haven't seen it take anywhere near that long, so yeah, something seems amiss here. The Firmware pane does spend a bit of time reading the firmware list, but the Memory pane doesn't. I did find an issue with the OS combo boxes doing dumb things with repeatedly resizing the list box while being populated, which I added a workaround for in -test3, but that was only around ~50ms on my system. If you're still seeing these long delays on the newest build, then I'd be interested in a trace. Never used PerfView, but if its traces are compatible with Windows Performance Analyzer then I can work with that. PM's fine if you want to do that.

I should have debugged a bit more before I mentioned the issue, once I started looking into it further it became obvious it was a more general Windows kernel bug that for some reason was much more evident in Altirra than anywhere else.  Other applications had perceptible (but sub-second) delays in bringing up new windows (e.g. Notepad++ search UI was a little sluggish starting up), but Altirra was just glacial in comparison.  I have a trace, but the issue cleared up after a reboot, so I suspect something is leaking graphics elements and calculating what is visible (based on the function names) was exponentially slower than usual as a result.

 

It did draw my attention to one tiny inconsistency though.  System>"Configure System..." opens a dialog entitled "Configure Emulation"  Similarly behaving menu items ("Disk Explorer...", "Adjust Colors...") launch windows with the same title as the item.

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4 hours ago, pseudografx said:

It seems that my updated icon still hasn't found its way into the binary. ?

 

I am still keeping my fingers crossed for an Explorer icon which shows protected disk images (ATX, PRO) as a red-colored floppy symbol.

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On 6/25/2019 at 7:55 PM, phaeron said:

http://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-3.90-test3.zip

http://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-3.90-test3-src.zip

 

There was a bug in the dark mode code that caused list views to render all white when dark mode was disabled -- should be fixed now. (The reason for this is that to implement dark mode on Win32, you have to override system colors on individual controls.) But otherwise, the controls are actually there including their items, so if you're really good, you can click where things are supposed to be. How well do you know the emulator? ?

 

CreateWindow/SendMessage() within DialogBoxIndirectParam() is expected, that's just the dialog code instantiating the controls. For a few versions now Altirra has been doing this manually instead of letting the dialog manager do it, as it's necessary to actually make dialogs both resizable and per-monitor DPI adaptive.

 

I'm running Windows 10 1803 and haven't seen it take anywhere near that long, so yeah, something seems amiss here. The Firmware pane does spend a bit of time reading the firmware list, but the Memory pane doesn't. I did find an issue with the OS combo boxes doing dumb things with repeatedly resizing the list box while being populated, which I added a workaround for in -test3, but that was only around ~50ms on my system. If you're still seeing these long delays on the newest build, then I'd be interested in a trace. Never used PerfView, but if its traces are compatible with Windows Performance Analyzer then I can work with that. PM's fine if you want to do that.

 

Also, here are the private PDB symbols for 3.90-test3 as well, for symbol lookup:

http://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-3.90-test3-symbols.7z

 

I don't usually post these as they're big and very few people need them, but I have PDB symbols archived for all builds including test builds.

 

This fixed the issue prevented me from see items in cartridge mapper. I did not know that these items were present but I simply not able to see items! I was able to start any cartridges without any issues! Thank you so much!

 

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On 6/26/2019 at 12:55 AM, phaeron said:

But otherwise, the controls are actually there including their items, so if you're really good, you can click where things are supposed to be. How well do you know the emulator? ?

 

 

Its almost part of my family! ;)

 

(Must admit I didn't try blind clicking) :)

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1 hour ago, Atari Nut said:

I like the new display options.  Is there an option for round corner?

The vertical and horizontal distortion controls will give you an older CRT barrel effect. Increase or decrease the sliders to match your preferences.  

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4 hours ago, Atari Nut said:

I like the new display options.  Is there an option for round corner?

As DocV said, there's fish eye effect which is superb for us CRT freaks but no rounded corners..

 

Wish there was a bit of anti aliasing for the edges when rounding the screen, the Atari side looks great but when you see a white of bright colour bordered window you get jaggies on the edges..

 

Totally trivial wish tho...

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On 6/26/2019 at 1:55 AM, phaeron said:

http://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-3.90-test3.zip

http://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-3.90-test3-src.zip

 

There was a bug in the dark mode code that caused list views to render all white when dark mode was disabled -- should be fixed now. (The reason for this is that to implement dark mode on Win32, you have to override system colors on individual controls.) But otherwise, the controls are actually there including their items, so if you're really good, you can click where things are supposed to be. How well do you know the emulator? ?

 

I'm using dark mode (thanks again!) in 3.90 test 3. It has a small issue when loading source files: empty lines show up as white lines and lines with labels show up as white with light grey text.

 

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Thanks Avery! Finally dark mode... find most software esp coding less hard on dark modes... I always thought it’s a geek mode (my terminal in Win10 is set to black and green text color ;)) esp when Apple announced it for iOS. But my Adobe guys at Office have that for ages... and in the night I always need to reduce laptop backlight to minimum.

 

btw as you are coder of VirtualDub... how can I record in 60 fps for youtube? Is that depending on my Win10? Or Altirra? Same with those weird aspect issues when uploading to YouTube.

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On 6/24/2019 at 2:44 AM, phaeron said:

Also, deprecation notice: 3.20 will be the last major version of the emulator to support Windows XP/Vista. The plan is to release the next version as 4.00 with Windows 7 as the minimum OS. 3.90-test1 still currently builds with XP targeting but I will be changing over to the newer non-XP toolchain in the future.

 

I'm just curious, why will you be dropping support for XP/Vista? Obviously they're old and maybe causing problems to support based on API differences; is that it, or any other reasons?

 

It doesn't matter to me personally, as I'm using Windows 7 on all machines I own, but I'm just curious to hear the logical reasons for moving on in this case.

 

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54 minutes ago, Heaven/TQA said:

btw as you are coder of VirtualDub... how can I record in 60 fps for youtube? Is that depending on my Win10? Or Altirra? Same with those weird aspect issues when uploading to YouTube.

This is a YouTube question, so I'm afraid I don't have experience with it. The only condition that I know of for sure is that empty frames must be recorded as full frames as YouTube's AVI importer does not handle empty frame timing properly. I have heard rumors that for 60p you need to upload a video at 720p or higher resolution. Not sure about aspect ratio detection rules. It's possible that YouTube may be wanting a standard frame size like 640x480 or 720x480.

25 minutes ago, MrFish said:

I'm just curious, why will you be dropping support for XP/Vista? Obviously they're old and maybe causing problems to support based on API differences; is at it, or any other reasons?

 

It doesn't matter to me personally, as I'm using Windows 7 on all machines I own, but I'm just curious to hear the logical reasons for moving on in this case.

Differences between XP and Vista/7:

  • Targeting XP requires a special mode of the Visual C++ compiler called XP Targeting. This mode uses an old version of the Windows SDK which is missing a bunch of fixes and also a bunch of declarations for newer Windows 8/10 features, which then requires workarounds in the Altirra codebase. Visual Studio 2019 is the end of the line for XP Targeting, the toolchain can't be upgraded to 16.x without dropping it.
  • No profiler works on XP anymore, and the only debugger that does is WinDbg.
  • XP is missing: condition variables, slim reader/writer locks, Windows Imaging Component (WIC), Direct2D, DirectWrite, Direct3D 10/11, DWM, DXGI, common controls 6.1, WASAPI, IFileDialog. All of the cases where Altirra currently supports these techs requires dual code paths, and in some cases, replacing all normal declarations with side-by-side structures or dynamically linked calls.
  • XP has bugs and issues that Vista+ doesn't and require extra testing: Rich Edit control is older, ancient inherited kernel bug from Windows 2000 causing D3D9 vertex buffer locks to occasionally be invalid on device loss, can't overlap a Direct3D window with any other window without massive performance loss.

The situation is somewhat better for Vista, but its market share is even lower, and unlike the one sad XP machine I have, I don't have any running Vista, so I'm more than content to tie its fate to XP.

 

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51 minutes ago, phaeron said:

Differences between XP and Vista/7:

  • Targeting XP requires a special mode of the Visual C++ compiler called XP Targeting. This mode uses an old version of the Windows SDK which is missing a bunch of fixes and also a bunch of declarations for newer Windows 8/10 features, which then requires workarounds in the Altirra codebase. Visual Studio 2019 is the end of the line for XP Targeting, the toolchain can't be upgraded to 16.x without dropping it.
  • No profiler works on XP anymore, and the only debugger that does is WinDbg.
  • XP is missing: condition variables, slim reader/writer locks, Windows Imaging Component (WIC), Direct2D, DirectWrite, Direct3D 10/11, DWM, DXGI, common controls 6.1, WASAPI, IFileDialog. All of the cases where Altirra currently supports these techs requires dual code paths, and in some cases, replacing all normal declarations with side-by-side structures or dynamically linked calls.
  • XP has bugs and issues that Vista+ doesn't and require extra testing: Rich Edit control is older, ancient inherited kernel bug from Windows 2000 causing D3D9 vertex buffer locks to occasionally be invalid on device loss, can't overlap a Direct3D window with any other window without massive performance loss.

The situation is somewhat better for Vista, but its market share is even lower, and unlike the one sad XP machine I have, I don't have any running Vista, so I'm more than content to tie its fate to XP.

 

Sounds like a mess. Anyone using XP still has a fine emulator in v3.20.

 

I'm starting to wonder now -- since MS is going to drop support for Win 7 next year -- how long it will take till it becomes too much of a pain to support as well...

 

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This is great news!  Too bad my MacBook Pro is off getting its explodey battery replaced! (I run Win10 in fusion to run Altirra..)

 

There was a time when I would contemplate how many levels of emulation I could get. (Windows computer emulating Atari ST emulating Apple Mac, etc.)

 

never really tried it much, but it is an interesting thought exercise. 

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12 hours ago, Geister said:

Linux version coming soon?  Like many users, when Windows 7 is no longer supported, I'm done with Windows.  I'm not going to ever move to Windows Spyware edition!  Does Altirra run on Wine? 

Yes, it runs on Wine. Have it running here on Mac OS X using winebottler.

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