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Altirra 3.20 released


phaeron

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On 5/9/2020 at 10:02 AM, Jacques said:

@phaeron

But Jakub and Olivier palettes are somehow incorporated in Altirra as built-in palettes, could the same be done with Rocky's palette (rocky_real_atari2.act, that is seen as best PAL palette so far? It would be really great :)

rocky_real_atari2.act 768 B · 8 downloads

This should be a reasonable match:

rocky.atcolors

 

It's not a perfect match as there are unexplained variations in luma across the hues that don't match with a YUV/YIQ generation algorithm, but it's a decent fit.

 

To use it, open the Adjust Colors dialog and use the Load... option in the menu. Bit of a warning, this will also overwrite your NTSC settings, so if you have changed those and want to keep them you'll have to save them out and then merge them manually in a text editor. I may change this to only load/save the current color profile instead of both NTSC and PAL together.

 

On 5/15/2020 at 1:22 AM, TheRaven81 said:

Would it be possible to add an option for un-mounting/un-loading any disk or cart images/roms that have been loaded in when a cold reset(Shift+F5) is done? Or at least unmount them upon quitting the emulator? I say an option because there may be people that do not want this. But I use the emulator simply for testing things. So when I do a full cold reset or quit, I'd prefer the emulator pretty much have a clean slate afterwards. It has me confused sometimes if I test an ATR of something, quit, and say don't come back to it for a week, and see something unexpected load when I open the emulator again(mainly b/c i can't recall what I was doing in it a week before).

It's a little tricky since the emulator often triggers a cold reset to ensure newly mounted media works, but I'll add it to the list for 4.0.

 

As some have noted, you can use profiles to swap media, though there's still no feature currently to auto-unmount the media as requested. However, you can also set the temp profile flag, which will prevent changes from being saved back to the profile. This is an option in the profiles menu and it can also be set on start with /tempprofile on the command line.

 

On 5/15/2020 at 6:05 AM, evilmoo said:

Any idea how much work it would be to get this to work in Altirra?  I know the CRT 6545 chip would not be trivial to code, but it would be really need to see some of the old vaporware in action:

 

http://www.atarimuseum.com/computers/8BITS/XL/xlperipherals/1090/80 column board/index.htm

The 6545/6845 is not that hard to emulate, it's mostly just horizontal / vertical / memory counters, and the hardware around it is often only practically usable with a small set of parameters if not only one set of parameters. I'll look into it.

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2 hours ago, phaeron said:

This should be a reasonable match:

rocky.atcolors 1.41 kB · 2 downloads

 

It's not a perfect match as there are unexplained variations in luma across the hues that don't match with a YUV/YIQ generation algorithm, but it's a decent fit.

 

To use it, open the Adjust Colors dialog and use the Load... option in the menu. Bit of a warning, this will also overwrite your NTSC settings, so if you have changed those and want to keep them you'll have to save them out and then merge them manually in a text editor. I may change this to only load/save the current color profile instead of both NTSC and PAL together.

 

Thank you for taking care, there's only one problem: I use Altirra 3.20 on Windows 10 and after entering Adjust Colors, there's no Load option in the menu ?

There's only View and Options, none of them contains Load. Plus there's Export button near "Resulting palette" and that's it.

Edited by Jacques
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16 hours ago, Jacques said:

 

Thank you for taking care, there's only one problem: I use Altirra 3.20 on Windows 10 and after entering Adjust Colors, there's no Load option in the menu ?

There's only View and Options, none of them contains Load. Plus there's Export button near "Resulting palette" and that's it.

In that case, you can either use a test release that does support that feature, or you can manually inspect the file in a text editor and set the values in Adjust Colors. Otherwise, I'm not sure what you were expecting as I can't retroactively change the build you are using.

 

6 hours ago, gambler172 said:

Would it be possible to add the CHALKBOARD in the control section?

What? Chalkboard?

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1 hour ago, phaeron said:

In that case, you can either use a test release that does support that feature, or you can manually inspect the file in a text editor and set the values in Adjust Colors. Otherwise, I'm not sure what you were expecting as I can't retroactively change the build you are using.

 

What? Chalkboard?

from Chalkboard Inc

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So here's a screenshot of the currently non-responsive Altirra. The printer window was not open. As I recall, I had tried to select the disk drives menu, and that initial drop-down menu was still displayed against the black background. I then brought something to fore and now Altirra no longer draws its window. I'm leaving it alone for now, in case there is anything you want me to try in regards to diagnosing it. The window generally will not show, but if I close something else, sometimes it will appear, like it does here. Process is using a few cpu cycle, ~5% currently.

non-resp.jpg

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1 hour ago, Alfred said:

So here's a screenshot of the currently non-responsive Altirra. The printer window was not open. As I recall, I had tried to select the disk drives menu, and that initial drop-down menu was still displayed against the black background. I then brought something to fore and now Altirra no longer draws its window. I'm leaving it alone for now, in case there is anything you want me to try in regards to diagnosing it. The window generally will not show, but if I close something else, sometimes it will appear, like it does here. Process is using a few cpu cycle, ~5% currently.

 

Task Manager > Details > Create dump file, then find the Altirra64.DMP file that Task Manager gives you the path to and compress it. It'll be a pretty big file, so 7z or rar it if possible and then PM me a link to a place where I can get it, like Google Drive, Firefox Send, or another file sharing site.

 

Full disclosure, this dump file contains everything in the process memory and can include personal information such as your user account name. If you are able and choose to send it, I'll be deleting the file after using it to diagnose the problem.

 

Edit: You can kill the process after the .dmp file is created.

Edited by phaeron
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7 hours ago, gambler172 said:

from Chalkboard Inc

 

When requesting items that the author does not know about its more helpful to provide a link to the thing so the author has less leg work to look at it. :)

 

Here's some carts provides by Fuls, but if its the programming set he wants then its out on disk.  Sadly from reading some posts it seemed like it was out there on disk but from further hunting its clear the disk is MIA

 

https://atariage.com/forums/topic/39867-were-the-chalkboard-games-really-released/?do=findComment&comment=2584709

 

From looking at the carts it seems its a plug in device, and the carts are only 400 / 800 apparently..

 

Here's the device..

 

https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/power-pad-leos-lectric-paintbrush-1891379824

Edited by Mclaneinc
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11 hours ago, phaeron said:

In that case, you can either use a test release that does support that feature, or you can manually inspect the file in a text editor and set the values in Adjust Colors. Otherwise, I'm not sure what you were expecting as I can't retroactively change the build you are using.

 

I simply had no clue that load option you mentioned can be missing from the last stable version (3.20). Now with your advice, I replaced it with 3.90 test-release and could load the colors-file you provided.

And I have to say it emulates Rocky2-pallete very well, so it's great to have proper colors in PAL-emulated Atari, which was missing ingredient for me.

Thanks!

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Just one thing, as I'm happy with Rocky's palette incorporation, other people may like to incorporate other palettes. 

Would there be a chance for built-in or external .act->.atcolors converter, or is such automation impossible? 

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I just want to say thank you for keeping the Atari emulation scene alive! ?

 

The CRT filters in Altirra are almost too real, as I got a pang of nostalgia I haven't felt in decades. ?

 

I have a possibly weird question:

 

Has anyone made a utility to convert Atari800winplus .a8s save states to Altrirra .altstates? I have some old states I'd love to bring into this new 64-bit era...

Edited by eobet
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That would be nice but I bet its a bit of work....I know roughly how save states work but I don't know if there's a set way of doing it ie the way it store the registers etc first, last ?

 

But there some damn clever people on here :)

 

But yeah, if having the real thing is not possible for any reason then Altirra just ticks all the boxes to match a "back then" feeling...

 

I'm still expecting Avery to write AI to play the games for you though :)  (This is an old joke, don't expect any AI for playing games :)   )

 

Edited by Mclaneinc
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On 5/20/2020 at 11:02 AM, Jacques said:

Just one thing, as I'm happy with Rocky's palette incorporation, other people may like to incorporate other palettes. 

Would there be a chance for built-in or external .act->.atcolors converter, or is such automation impossible? 

It's a bit of a fiddly process. A closed form solution isn't feasible with all of the different parameters, so it's an iterative algorithm that doesn't always converge to something useful. Also, there are palettes out there that make no physical sense, such as one there all of the colors are consistent with YIQ generation except that color $00 was forced to black, or NTSC/PAL palettes using the wrong algorithm from the other video standard. Some experience with the color generation algorithms is necessary to tell whether the result is valid or bogus. It might be something I can ship, it's not something I would want to encourage everyone to use. What I have now is just getting to the point where I'm comfortable using it, but making it usable for others is another matter.

 

18 hours ago, eobet said:

I have a possibly weird question:

 

Has anyone made a utility to convert Atari800winplus .a8s save states to Altrirra .altstates? I have some old states I'd love to bring into this new 64-bit era...

None that I know of, though it should be possible. The problem with save states is that they contain a lot of internals from the emulator, so even though they're theoretically based on the behavior of the same original chips, the internals are coded very differently. Using save states for storage is risky as there are many ways they can break, especially when upgrading the emulator or hitting some state that isn't saved or you didn't want to save (particularly attached disks). I don't guarantee that save states will work between different versions of Altirra, because there's too much internal state to try to keep fully backwards compatible.

 

Fortunately, A8WP is old enough that it didn't emulate that many of the undocumented behaviors, so a lot of the state it saves is just memory and hardware register values. I reversed some of it and it didn't look very obscure but I never got as far as writing a full loader. The .altstate2 format currently used by Altirra is zipped JSON + a memory blob, so it's relatively easy to write from an external program written in Python or another language. But again, I've not actually tried writing such a converter.

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38 minutes ago, tane said:

How can I after press F9, step forward only one frame every time I press the key (ex: with the arrows)? , meaning "one frame" when something changes on the screen .

No key for it, you'll need to go frame ('gf') command in the debugger.

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On 5/15/2020 at 3:41 AM, phaeron said:

This is intentional, both to prevent the emulated computer from opening huge files. This is particularly an issue with H6-H9: since the file is kept in memory to support seeking with EOL translation. You should have gotten disk full errors trying to write to the file past that point, however.

 

I could see lifting this limit for H1-H4: since in that case the data can be spooled to/from disk.

 

Any progress in fixing the 16mb limit?

 

One request, that is pestering me always, is it possible to include a tic-box in the device-list?

This to disable or enable devices.

That would awesome, when testing software on many different systems...

 

Thanks!

image.thumb.png.2dc609cecb512f8c8ac7c3eb2a1259c1.png

Edited by mr-atari
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11 hours ago, mr-atari said:

Any progress in fixing the 16mb limit?

3.90 is frozen for everything except critical fixes, this will not be addressed until 4.00.

 

11 hours ago, mr-atari said:

One request, that is pestering me always, is it possible to include a tic-box in the device-list?

This to disable or enable devices.

That would awesome, when testing software on many different systems...

There are some issues with doing this due to the way that devices are stored internally -- use profiles for this for now.

 

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On 5/14/2020 at 12:08 AM, phaeron said:

Fixed (release candidate try #3):

http://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-3.90-test34.zip

http://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-3.90-test34-src.zip

 

With all the RC/Test candidates, do we have a timeline for the "full" final 3.90? I have a project I want to get back to , but have been waiting because of all the great new features and fixes that have been going in since 3.20!

 

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3 hours ago, RobS said:

With all the RC/Test candidates, do we have a timeline for the "full" final 3.90? I have a project I want to get back to , but have been waiting because of all the great new features and fixes that have been going in since 3.20!

Likely within a week. 3.90-test34 is about ready to release, I've just been too lazy to do it. If there are any further changes they'll probably be one-liners.

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40 minutes ago, Alfred said:

A minor thing. In the debugger you show JSL for the JSL opcode, but it always shows JMP even when it's the JML opcode. Can you make it show JML ?

For opcode $5C? Sure, fixed for 4.0.

 

Edit: Hold on, the official W65C816S documentation contradicts this request. In both the opcode table and the cycle table, the only opcode canonically listed as JML is $DC, even though it's inconsistent with JSL:

 

image.png.16542de77ee053faa381f78bcb01f587.png

 

image.png.c07f07b15e8530f9e848a46262596f6f.png

Edited by phaeron
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