Altirra 3.90 released

[Jetboot Jack]

Thanks for the suggestions phaeron - I will try the various options to see what happens!

 

sTeVE

[Atari Nut]

On 6/20/2020 at 3:26 AM, tjcbs said:

BTW, thanks a ton for helping me to get my personal "crt" pixel shader working in Altirra. 

 

It might not be to anyone's taste but mine, but I've been having a blast.

How are you getting that round corner effect?

[Mclaneinc]

Under View, Adjust Screen Effects...First two options..If you don't have that menu then update asap.....

[+DrVenkman]

So the Additions.ATR included with the latest Altirra includes Altirra BASIC 1.57 as a .COM file which can be loaded from DOS. Aside from editing it with a hex editor, is there an easy way to get a 8192 byte .BIN file I can write to an EPROM or load into an Ultimate 1MB BASIC slot? I checked the Virtualdub site that Avery maintains but don't see it there either. 

[Keatah]

Built into the emulator. From the dropdown menus - Tools> Export ROM Set...

[+DrVenkman]

19 minutes ago, Keatah said:

Built into the emulator. From the dropdown menus - Tools> Export ROM Set...

Thanks! Quite a few changes to both the Altirra OS ROM and Altirra BASIC over the versions saved to my Ultimate 1MB firmware.

[Jetboot Jack]

20 hours ago, phaeron said:

Can't tell either way as I don't have the latest fast build installed, but Insider builds can occasionally be broken. There was a spat of builds that caused all major web browsers to render off-center, and then there was the series of builds that broke all D3D9 windowed mode applications (which they then shipped anyway despite the bug reports, and no I'm not bitter).

 

I have some changes to add more logging, especially in the graphics system, but it's not ready yet. One thing you can do is try the various display API modes, GDI, D3D9, and D3D11. They're either accessible in Options > Display or you can force it on startup with /gdi, /d3d9, and /d3d11. And yes, /opengl and /ddraw still being in the command line help is a bug.

So that's solved it - if I select Open GL or DX11 it works perfectly - thanks for the help...

 

However if I have DX9 checked alone or combined with any other options - my system soft locks every time with 60HZ or NTSC video settings!

 

        sTeVE

[ldelsarte]

I'm very intrigued by a series of posts I had completed missed on IRATA.Online 

It mentions the existence of Atari 822, 825, 1025, 1027, etc printer emulation, being developed or already completed.

If I get it right, it produces PDF documents. That's not a TTF font for your computer for you to use in Word. That's something that generates PDF documents that "look like" they are scans of pages produced on "real" Atari printers.

I wonder if this is a functionality that could be added to a future Altirra version? Nice!

[Atari Nut]

23 hours ago, Mclaneinc said:

Under View, Adjust Screen Effects...First two options..If you don't have that menu then update asap.....

Those are for Horizontal and Vertical distortion, not Round Corner.

[Mclaneinc]

5 minutes ago, Atari Nut said:

Those are for Horizontal and Vertical distortion, not Round Corner.

Must be part of his pixel shader then...Oops...Sorry about that

[Atari Nut]

No problem, thanks.  I think he must be using a shader also.  I don't think Altirra has that effect.

[Mclaneinc]

It doesn't, I had read your post as the rounding effect and missed the word corners, got to be the shader doing it..

[Krakerman]

On 6/26/2020 at 6:25 PM, phaeron said:

Afraid not, for pragmatic reasons: I'm neither set up nor have the time to create ports to different platforms, nor am I willing to compromise on the experience on Windows to support other platforms. I do try to occasionally check problems reported when running Altirra under Wine, but sometimes there are implementation bugs on the Wine side that cause problems, like their DXGI implementation returning inconsistent monitor LUIDs. But otherwise, I try to avoid promising what I can't reasonably deliver on.

 

Vulkan, not for now. Altirra doesn't render a lot of geometry and draw calls, so GL or GLES feature set is perfectly fine and would have larger reach. I do have some interest in trying out Vulkan and D3D12 at some point, just to try one of the newer low-CPU APIs (I've used Metal, which is bonkers). But ideally, I'd be able to slim down what I have before taking on more display APIs. Right now the D3D9 and D3D11 display paths are essentially separate. I'd like to merge them, but one thing getting in the way is that the D3D9 path still supports old graphics cards that don't have pixel shaders or only 1.x pixel shaders. I'm considering reorganizing it so that the existing D3D9 core only handles those tiers and the common core can then handle PS2.0+ D3D9 and D3D11, along with other more modern shader-based APIs. Remember that it's not the display API is not a big deal though, it's the UI that would be a huge pain in any port.

 

Can't tell either way as I don't have the latest fast build installed, but Insider builds can occasionally be broken. There was a spat of builds that caused all major web browsers to render off-center, and then there was the series of builds that broke all D3D9 windowed mode applications (which they then shipped anyway despite the bug reports, and no I'm not bitter).

 

I have some changes to add more logging, especially in the graphics system, but it's not ready yet. One thing you can do is try the various display API modes, GDI, D3D9, and D3D11. They're either accessible in Options > Display or you can force it on startup with /gdi, /d3d9, and /d3d11. And yes, /opengl and /ddraw still being in the command line help is a bug.

There is an issue I found when selecting between D3D9 and D3D11 where D3D9 seems to be better when switch to fullscreen and smooth whereas D3D11 there is a long pause. Same if you select fullscreen/borderless. I am using a nVidia 1080ti card with multiple screens but main screen I use Altirra on is a 4K OLED display.

Edited June 28, 2020 by Krakerman

[+DrVenkman]

Hmmm ... a year or two ago, I had a folder with some nice vintage-looking .cgp shaders for Altirra that I got from someone (probably @phaeron) in a prior Altirra thread. Stupidly, I saved them somewhere inside another folder that I later accidentally deleted while cleaning up random stuff. Does anyone have any good ones handy that they like and can post?

 

Thanks.

[Suppawer]

This?:

effects.rar

[phaeron]

http://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-4.00-test3.zip

http://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-4.00-test3-src.zip

 

• Improved behavior of toggling VBXE on the fly -- hardware registers are now force-pushed to prevent visual errors if the current program is not writing color registers every frame.
• Rewrote 5200 digital noise code, should fix Galaxian again. You may still see the ship veer off once before you wiggle the stick; this is unavoidable without having the input jitter constantly in all games that use analog input, like Gorf.
• Fixed indeterminate state in XEP80 outputs that sometimes caused the XEP80 driver to fail to init after a cold reset due to the input line being held low.
• Preserve relative column offset when scrolling in the new Memory window.
• Fixed a regression with the current frame indicator being inverted in the Call Stack window.
• The startup log can now capture any logging group also exposed to the debugger. In particular, /startuplog:hostdisp will now display logging related to the host display code. The HOSTDISP log group has also been upgraded with some more logging from the D3D9 driver.
• The D3D9 display code now has additional logic to quickly reject useless devices that don't have enough VRAM to even create the swap chain. Previously the display code would get stuck in a re-init loop because this failure would only happen on the first paint. For some strange reason, Wine advertises a useless D3D9 device with 1MB of VRAM if you don't have an accelerated graphics device on the Linux host.
• Added new XEP80 drivers to the Additions disk: an ultra-speed ALTXEP8U.SYS driver with symmetric 31.5KHz communications instead of the previous asymmetric 31.5 send / 15.7 receive, and two new ALTXEP8P.SYS / ALTXEPUP.SYS variants that auto-switch to 50Hz PAL on startup. The ultra-speed driver also has timing adjustments for better reliability on a variety of systems. The previous ALTXEP8F.SYS driver has been removed to reduce the number of variants (and to avoid the variants being F and U).
• Fixed a bug in keyboard handling where a key up could be missed if the Alt key was released before the other key and an input map was bound to that key. An example was pressing Alt+Left to move the cursor when the default arrow key -> joystick map was enabled; if Alt was released first, the left arrow key would get stuck down in emulation.
• Added .fpaccel command to the debugger to allow specific floating-point acceleration hooks to be selectively disabled. (This only applies when FP acceleration is globally enabled.)
• AltirraOS bumped to 3.28 with a fix for a bug in FDIV that was causing the errors in the Pi program (overrun from a temporary into the low digits of the divisor), and a bug in E: that caused some put commands with the cursor disabled to return Y=2.
• Fixed an issue with tracepoints that caused excessive debugger UI redrawing and slowdown when using tracepoints that captured return values (e.g. bt fdiv "%g / %g = %%g" fr0 fr1 -- fr0).
• Fixed a bug in the heat map tracking where memory locations were not properly marked as being read with some read-modify instructions like ADC zp,X.
• Fixed compile-time YASM check in build scripts.
• CPU history size is now easier to retune in the source code (it is still a compile-time option).

 

7 hours ago, Krakerman said:

There is an issue I found when selecting between D3D9 and D3D11 where D3D9 seems to be better when switch to fullscreen and smooth whereas D3D11 there is a long pause. Same if you select fullscreen/borderless. I am using a nVidia 1080ti card with multiple screens but main screen I use Altirra on is a 4K OLED display.

The delay is a common characteristic of switching the display resolution, due to the time it takes both for the display driver and the monitor to respond to the mode change. Altirra defaults to exclusive full screen mode, though recent versions of Windows 10 will sometimes attempt to silently transform this to borderless windowed mode behind the application. The difference you are seeing between D3D9 and D3D11 is probably because of that.

 

Borderless windowed mode avoids the mode switch delay and generally offers a better experience, as notifications, overlays, and dialogs can draw over it. However, Altirra defaults to exclusive fullscreen because there are still sometimes problems with performance or with vsync with borderless -- one of the issues being that exclusive fullscreen is necessary to target certain refresh rates or aspect ratios. If you don't see issues with tearing or hitching when using borderless windowed mode, then you should stick with that. I may switch the default over at some point.

 

 

[Krakerman]

Thanks for the update!

 

Edited June 29, 2020 by Krakerman

[Krakerman]

Question in regards to profiles. Can profiles save the drives that are setup with attached atr images? If not could you add that option as it would allow for easy launch at startup with drives with multiple disks by just using the profile via cmdline.

 

Also is there a cli option for mounting multiple disks?

Edited June 29, 2020 by Krakerman

[Mclaneinc]

The CLI, yes, just list them after the altirra command and any switches ie /NTSC with their respective D: numbers and yes for the mounted images, when you have setup the profile edit the categories and tick mounted images and save the profile.

 

Don't forget that you can mount multiple images but unless the program supports multiple drives you may just have to swap them in and out of D1: with the disk drives box under File.

Edited June 29, 2020 by Mclaneinc

[Krakerman]

Thanks for the info will have to play around with that.

[+DrVenkman]

18 hours ago, suppawer said:

This?:

effects.rar 272.52 kB · 12 downloads

Thanks.

[Keatah]

What does one do with these filters? Which ones work? Or, rather, which files are supposed to work?

 

To put it this way, I tried getting them to work and only ended up with a shrunked down image on one, the rest give me a cryptic error message in red text at the bottom.

 

Maybe there's a tutorial on these?

[+DrVenkman]

28 minutes ago, Keatah said:

What does one do with these filters? Which ones work? Or, rather, which files are supposed to work?

 

To put it this way, I tried getting them to work and only ended up with a shrunked down image on one, the rest give me a cryptic error message in red text at the bottom.

 

Maybe there's a tutorial on these?

Not many of them are actually compatible with Altirra. To use them, make sure you're set to D3D9 (Tools -> Options -> Display -> Direct3D 9) Make sure any others are unchecked to force Altirra to use it.

 

Then under Display Effects, point Altirra at the *.cgp you want. The ones that appear to work are in the root folder of the archive shared above.

[+CharlieChaplin]

Avery, what was changed/fixed/updated in Altirra Basic 1.57 ?

 

[phaeron]

11 minutes ago, CharlieChaplin said:

Avery, what was changed/fixed/updated in Altirra Basic 1.57 ?

Compatibility fix for a program that needs DRAWTO to work after AUX1 permissions were stomped by an XIO #6,0. The changelog for Altirra BASIC is in the readme that comes with the ROM set export.