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Altirra 3.90 released


phaeron

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And it was almost not going to happen, Avery initially made it as a project for himself, sort of a proof of concept. I was shown it by another user all those years ago and while it was just the beginnings of Altirra it just looked like it was going to be good. I'd been a beta guy for Atari800win and at that point Win was way more advanced but people started to write to Avery asking him to improve it and that he did, thankfully. Now its the most advanced of the Atari emulators out there which is brilliant work as the other emulators are all very good indeed. 

 

I favour real hardware to play on but Altirra just gives me the chance to play with hardware I never had, to play stuff as a US machine (I'm PAL) and to see the US games as they were meant to be seen. I can also play with add on's I never had. I can safely say that if my hardware ever dies completely I'd be so happy knowing Altirra will give me my hit of gaming goodness still.

 

And considering Avery is a busy guy its amazing he has time to work on it...

 

Add to it that Avery also converts some 2600 games (just for fun) to the computer its almost like he lives and breathes Atari.

 

 

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59 minutes ago, Mclaneinc said:

And it was almost not going to happen, Avery initially made it as a project for himself, sort of a proof of concept. I was shown it by another user all those years ago and while it was just the beginnings of Altirra it just looked like it was going to be good. I'd been a beta guy for Atari800win and at that point Win was way more advanced but people started to write to Avery asking him to improve it and that he did, thankfully. Now its the most advanced of the Atari emulators out there which is brilliant work as the other emulators are all very good indeed. 

 

I favour real hardware to play on but Altirra just gives me the chance to play with hardware I never had, to play stuff as a US machine (I'm PAL) and to see the US games as they were meant to be seen. I can also play with add on's I never had. I can safely say that if my hardware ever dies completely I'd be so happy knowing Altirra will give me my hit of gaming goodness still.

 

And considering Avery is a busy guy its amazing he has time to work on it...

 

Add to it that Avery also converts some 2600 games (just for fun) to the computer its almost like he lives and breathes Atari.

 

 

See for me. I grew up in Canada NTSC but spent a few years in Malta PAL. And have specific favorites on this platform in NTSC and in PAL, after that got into other pal and ntsc things and do not like how most PAL software behaves on my NTSC hardware so having Altirra has been a god send!

 

Still like the real hardware as well but ever so thankful for altirra

 

 

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4 hours ago, oo7 said:

Oh wow not only does it make itself portable it also cleans out the registry when you turn this option on!!

 

You can also control it on a per-invocation basis with command line options:

 

  /tempprofile
              Enable temporary profile mode (do not save settings)

  /portablealt:<file>
              Temporarily enable portable mode with alternate INI file
  /portabletemp
              Run with in-memory temp registry; do not load or save
              settings

 

I use /tempprofile to establish wildly different profiles for my front end work at run time, without affecting the install I already have, and sometimes /portablealt so I can share a set of weird settings between common programs. /portabletemp gives you the "touch nothing" option, where it doesn't load, doesn't save, so everything you do in terms of settings is definitely temporary.

 

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4 hours ago, ascrnet said:

Hi all,

 

Try to set up a sdrive, apart from adding the disk what else do you do ?

sdrive.png.2bb50da33ae77fd00db0118c2061b6b2.png

 

I did not understand how to make it work ?

 

Regards

Check the description in the Add Devices dialog -- the SDrive emulation only covers the small portion of functionality around raw SD card access. You can't run the parts that require mounting disks or browsing the filesystem.

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10 hours ago, phaeron said:

Check the description in the Add Devices dialog -- the SDrive emulation only covers the small portion of functionality around raw SD card access. You can't run the parts that require mounting disks or browsing the filesystem.

thank you very much for your answer, I thought that all the functionality was already complete.?

 

Regards

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Is there a way to have save state file names automatically use the same file name as the loaded game?

 

If this functionality doesn't exist, it would be a convenient option, because it would remove the need to type the game name when saving.

 

It could also have a setting like "Use default save folder" with a path set, so if a keyboard key is set to create a save state file, it could save the file to the default save folder without a dialog box - you wouldn't need to exit full screen. The same could apply to loading "Use default save folder" and load the file name that corresponds to the file name of the ROM you're currently running.

 

I know quick save/load is an option but I have sometimes had crashes when loading a quick save.

 

I only ask for this functionality to be added because I have used it in other emulators and it makes it way easier to quickly save/load.

 

Cheers.
 

Edited by Blocky
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2 hours ago, Mclaneinc said:

I like this idea, anything that makes me lazier always appeals :)

 

Seriously I hope Avery adds it...

 

It could be expanded on even more - if incremental saves were made, it would avoid risking a save file crashing when loading, you could just load the one before it. For loading it could just load the last saved file.

 

I'm not sure why I can save 20 times in a row without any problem then at some point it crashes loading it. For this reason I am naming the save state 01, 02, 03 etc.

 

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Yes, I've heard it runs very well...

 

Re Blocky and the incremental saves, as long as we don't go down the route of automated saves it all sounds good. I do not like programs that spit out automated stuff which isn't part of the program running, its annoying to find all these little files strewn throughout the directory that you can't quite remember what they were for later on.. :)

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On 3/3/2021 at 1:42 PM, Blocky said:

It could be expanded on even more - if incremental saves were made, it would avoid risking a save file crashing when loading, you could just load the one before it. For loading it could just load the last saved file.

 

I'm not sure why I can save 20 times in a row without any problem then at some point it crashes loading it. For this reason I am naming the save state 01, 02, 03 etc.

Saving state within Altirra is tricky and there are still occasional cases where it doesn't completely save state correctly, which is why I haven't worked on exposing the save state system more. At some point I want to set up a replication test where one instance of Altirra follows another through save states to detect this, but I haven't gotten around to it. In general anything involving devices is likely to fail, and saving during disk access will probably fail (4.00-test is somewhat improved here).

 

14 hours ago, Mazzspeed said:

To anyone interested, Altirra runs on the Raspberry Pi 4 (400) using Box86 and Wine. I haven't gone too deep yet in relation to testing, but it appears to run very well indeed.

If you have access to an AArch64 build of Wine, you should try running the ARM64 build of Altirra instead. It'll run faster natively than the x64 version will in emulation. On Windows 10 ARM64, the ARM64 build is 3x faster than the x86 build.

 

1 hour ago, tane said:

Why does game 'A' work with atari800 but not with Altirra?:  D8.ROM

It does, if you use the Atari XL/XE ver. 2 OS. The menu screen has a bug with placing a display list under the OS ROM and then switching the OS ROM back in with DLIs hot. This causes random DLIs to run. Neither the menu nor the game actually rely on the ver. 2 OS, but it just happens that with some ROM configurations this causes the DLI handler to constantly run over where the VBI fires. Since Popcorn relies on the stage-2 VBI to progress to its title screen and stage-2 never runs since the VBI always runs within the DLI, it gets stuck. Temporarily turning DLIs off and back on again unjams the startup code.

 

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1 hour ago, phaeron said:

If you have access to an AArch64 build of Wine, you should try running the ARM64 build of Altirra instead. It'll run faster natively than the x64 version will in emulation. On Windows 10 ARM64, the ARM64 build is 3x faster than the x86 build.

I don't know whether 32bit Raspbian is actually capable of running AArch64?

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On 3/3/2021 at 7:16 PM, Blocky said:

Is there a way to have save state file names automatically use the same file name as the loaded game?

 

If this functionality doesn't exist, it would be a convenient option, because it would remove the need to type the game name when saving.

 

It could also have a setting like "Use default save folder" with a path set, so if a keyboard key is set to create a save state file, it could save the file to the default save folder without a dialog box - you wouldn't need to exit full screen. The same could apply to loading "Use default save folder" and load the file name that corresponds to the file name of the ROM you're currently running.

 

I know quick save/load is an option but I have sometimes had crashes when loading a quick save.

 

I only ask for this functionality to be added because I have used it in other emulators and it makes it way easier to quickly save/load.

 

Cheers.
 

Getting the game name wouldn't be easy. Imagine Booting from SDX cartridge, inserting a disk and loading a game from a binary file on that disk. Altirra knows the names of the ROM image and the disk image , but has no idea of the binary load file.

 

But it would be possible to ask the user for game name only once and then remember it. Like the quicksave in Wolf3d, Doom and other PC games.

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I wrote a simple AutoIt3 script you can run that saves the game to the second, so there's no way you can possibly overwrite another saved game file and all your saves (for that gaming session) will be listed in order. At the end, when you're going to quit out of the game, you can just load the last saved game file to make sure it's not crashing the emulator, then rename that last file with the name of your game and delete all the older saves.

 

I only wrote this script because sometimes loading a saved game crashes the emulator (no idea why).

 

As long as you save often enough, it won't lose much gameplay if your latest save file crashes when loading, you can just fall back on the save file before it.

 

This will run if you have AutoIt3 installed, or it can be compiled and run without needing AutoIt3... enjoy :P 

 

 

Spoiler

WinWait ("Altirra")
WinActivate ("Altirra")
Send ("!")
Send ("f")
Send ("s")
Send ("{ENTER}")
;;
WinWait ("Save save state")
WinActivate ("Save save state")
Send (@YEAR)
Send ("-")
Send (@MON)
Send ("-")
Send (@MDAY)
Send ("{SPACE}")
Send ("at")
Send ("{SPACE}")
Send (@HOUR)
Send ("h")
Send ("{SPACE}")
Send (@MIN)
Send ("m")
Send ("{SPACE}")
Send (@SEC)
Send ("s")
Send ("{ENTER}")


 

 

Edited by Blocky
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I've been playing with an XEP80 I got from Best.  This looks to me like a difference between Altirra's xep80 emulation and the real thing.  Both cases, I'm running the altxep8u.sys driver from the additions.atr disk.  That the real XEP80 inserts a line break only when drawing into the far right column on the last line of a logical line block.

 

 

10 POKE 82,0:POKE 83,79
20 PRINT CHR$(125);
30 FOR N=1 TO 8
40 PRINT "NOGAPSBETWEENLINESONREALXEP80";
50 NEXT N
60 FOR N=0 TO 5
70 POKE 85,79
75 POKE 84,N
80 PRINT "U";
90 NEXT N

IMG_0596.JPG

IMG_0594.JPG

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2 hours ago, cathrynm said:

I've been playing with an XEP80 I got from Best.  This looks to me like a difference between Altirra's xep80 emulation and the real thing.  Both cases, I'm running the altxep8u.sys driver from the additions.atr disk.  That the real XEP80 inserts a line break only when drawing into the far right column on the last line of a logical line block.

 

Ah, you're right, I'll fix that. To be precise, it only inserts a line when the character overwritten at the right margin is EOL.

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Thanks, this isn't specific to altirra or the emulator, but the altxep8u.sys version I have doesn't seem to be obeying the poke 766,1 flag on either.  When I do a listing in basic with an up arrow character in a string, it does this.  I thought I got the most recent version of this, but posting these file lengths I'm using to check.

poke766.PNG

altxever.PNG

altxver.PNG

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Yes, I'd seen you on Lemon64 and obviously here. Happy tinkering and stay safe.

 

Paul..

 

PS Regular paid employment, sounds good to me...

 

Edit: And thank you for making hours of my playing so much fun with Shamus but Shamus II, grrr  :)

 

Always nice to see one of our programming legends on here

Edited by Mclaneinc
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14 hours ago, cathrynm said:

Thanks, this isn't specific to altirra or the emulator, but the altxep8u.sys version I have doesn't seem to be obeying the poke 766,1 flag on either.  When I do a listing in basic with an up arrow character in a string, it does this.  I thought I got the most recent version of this, but posting these file lengths I'm using to check.

Ah, thanks, another good catch. You've got the latest version, but there was a bug in that DSPFLG (766) wasn't getting reflected to the XEP80 properly. I also noticed and fixed another bug with the international character set not being reflected properly either, due to a CHBASE vs. CHBAS mixup (grumble). v0.8 is attached with the fixes.

 

Additions.atr

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13 hours ago, phaeron said:

Ah, thanks, another good catch. You've got the latest version, but there was a bug in that DSPFLG (766) wasn't getting reflected to the XEP80 properly. I also noticed and fixed another bug with the international character set not being reflected properly either, due to a CHBASE vs. CHBAS mixup (grumble). v0.8 is attached with the fixes.

 

Additions.atr 90.02 kB · 17 downloads

 

FYI, these new drivers are not working on latest FAST BASIC v4.5 built-in E: editor (which works with any arbitrary # of columns up to 80).

 

Just loading any existing text-file or starting from a blank one, will generate down-pointing arrow chars (above any line being edited with, say, Backspace) or when typing a series of lines, and then attempting line-insertions (with Carriage-Return above those lines) will not scroll them downward. Instead, they will be obliterated.

 

V07 worked well (don't know if by chance or not, but it is what it is). All this on SDX environment, with no real or special drivers loaded.

Edited by Faicuai
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