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Altirra 3.90 released


phaeron

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If a disk is formatted in a mixed mode with most tracks being SD and some ED, Altirra's standard disk emulation returns all sectors as good ones. A real disk drive cannot read any ED track when it has recognized the disk as SD.

WIth full disk emulation everything works as expected.

 

Due to this behaviour Samurai's Game works only with full disk emulation.

Samurai's Game (1992)(Krysal)(PL).atx

Perhaps this can be changed easily.

 

I also have some long standing feature request:

It would be nice if protected disk images (ATX, PRO) would have a different-colored icon in Windows Explorer to make them easier distinguishable.
I always registered it myself, but since Windows 10 it becomes more and more a pain in the butt to do this. Meanwhile one needs a separate "hack tool" to accomplish this task.
Here is a ready-to-use icon I recolored based on the original black Altirra icon: Altirra64-28_500red.ico

 

 

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As particular Altirra is aimed to be a developer tool, I'd really aprreciate to have the following available.

Particular POKEY needs the missing software, so visualizations of the resulting waveforms would be a real helper in sound development. 

My request would be :

 

For now, Altirra shows a 4 channel indicator of the sound. 

It is possible to cancel single voices, and record the audio directly. 

 

As POKEY is working directly like a "modulation producer", it would be helpful  to have a visualization of resulting tones. 

 

For the User , it might be the cheapest ways to tell the visualization to join channels for one indicator line. 

If this is too complex to run in Altirra, it might be very helpful to have the possibility of writing up to 4 streams of joined channels. So it might be possible to just put them into a visualization tool. 

It's recommended to show how POKEY mixe the waves and why things sound how they sound. 

 

Particular this tune has a lot "channel wave mixing" going on. But what you see there, is just the mix of everything, of in Altirra, just the square waves. 

 

 

 

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1 hour ago, emkay said:

As particular Altirra is aimed to be a developer tool, I'd really aprreciate to have the following available.

Particular POKEY needs the missing software, so visualizations of the resulting waveforms would be a real helper in sound development. 

My request would be :

 

For now, Altirra shows a 4 channel indicator of the sound. 

It is possible to cancel single voices, and record the audio directly. 

 

As POKEY is working directly like a "modulation producer", it would be helpful  to have a visualization of resulting tones. 

 

For the User , it might be the cheapest ways to tell the visualization to join channels for one indicator line. 

If this is too complex to run in Altirra, it might be very helpful to have the possibility of writing up to 4 streams of joined channels. So it might be possible to just put them into a visualization tool. 

It's recommended to show how POKEY mixe the waves and why things sound how they sound. 

 

Particular this tune has a lot "channel wave mixing" going on. But what you see there, is just the mix of everything, of in Altirra, just the square waves. 

There's an issue with doing this, which is that POKEY's outputs don't linearly mix, and thus the emulator doesn't normally generate the individual channels as you see when muting the others.

 

When recording the output with 1 channel enabled vs. 4 channels enabled, you are getting f(v1) and f(v1+v2+v3+v4) recorded, where f() is a non-linear function that produces the well-known saturation effects at higher volumes. This means two things:

  1. The outputs don't linearly add -- f(v1)+f(v2)+f(v3)+f(v4) != f(v1+v2+v3+v4). This means that when looking at the output of one channel you may see things that don't actually occur as much on the mixed output, or other way around.
  2. More importantly, the individual outputs aren't actually even generated in the emulation. Altirra's POKEY emulator never actually generates f(v1), it incrementally generates the sum v1+v2+v3+v4 as each channel changes and then computes the f(...) over it. The individual f(v1), f(v2), etc. aren't actually generated.

The audio monitor does show the individual channel outputs, but that's because it renders the volume levels directly. It's relatively easy to dump these same signals to a multi-channel audio file, but this won't show the saturation or exponential decay effects that the output does.

 

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1 hour ago, bf2k+ said:

I just tried Altirra v4.00 test 34 on my BBS machine which is a Windows XP 32 bit machine.

 

When I run Altirra.exe, it reports that it is not a Win32 application.

Yeah it's a pain, even a Microsoft Surface Pro can't run 4.00 since it's 32 bit. Good thing most other stuff does run including mads etc. You'll just have to pick another emu.

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3 hours ago, _The Doctor__ said:

Yeah it's a pain, even a Microsoft Surface Pro can't run 4.00 since it's 32 bit. Good thing most other stuff does run including mads etc. You'll just have to pick another emu.

Uh, what? I dropped support for Windows XP for 4.00 but it still supports both 32-bit and 64-bit. The Surface Pro line started with Windows 8 64-bit, it should have no problem running either version.

 

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Video compression: H.264 + MP3

Frame rate: 50.000 (integral)

Video bitrate: 5Mbps

Audio bitrate: 192kbps

Aspect ratio mode: Full - use correct aspect ratio

Resampling mode: Sharp bilinear - sharper resampling

Frame scaling: Scale to 960x720 (4:3)

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12 hours ago, Keatah said:

Time to upgrade. Many recent releases of things no longer work on XP.

Yep...  I see that I have several options.

 

1. Upgrade the BBS machine to Windows 7 - easy and cheap.

2. Buy myself a new desktop Core i9 machine and move my current desktop into the role of BBS machine.

 

(I like option 2 better)

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Probably an issue with the ARM processor in the surface... it's been a problem before, 32 bit app works 64 bit doesn't... it's just one of those things. The Surface is going to a new home now. I tire of it's finicky nature and someone wants it so it's now theirs. No longer going to be my problem :)

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1 hour ago, _The Doctor__ said:

Probably an issue with the ARM processor in the surface... it's been a problem before, 32 bit app works 64 bit doesn't... it's just one of those things. The Surface is going to a new home now. I tire of it's finicky nature and someone wants it so it's now theirs. No longer going to be my problem :)

If you have a Surface Pro X then that is a different story. For that you will indeed not be able to run the x64 versions of programs. There is a preview version of x64 emulation support in current Windows Insider builds but it is still significantly slower than native and also gives no hardware graphics acceleration unless you have one of the few lucky devices with preview driver support.

 

Altirra does have an ARM64 version that runs full speed on Windows on ARM devices. You can find the 3.90 ARM64 build on the Altirra home page. I don't publish the ARM64 versions of test builds due to low interest, but I can make specific builds available on demand. The native ARM64 build is about three times faster than the x86 build under emulation.

 

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6 hours ago, bf2k+ said:

Yep...  I see that I have several options.

 

1. Upgrade the BBS machine to Windows 7 - easy and cheap.

2. Buy myself a new desktop Core i9 machine and move my current desktop into the role of BBS machine.

 

(I like option 2 better)

Why aren't you using an Atari for your BBS machine?

 

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21 hours ago, MrFish said:

Why aren't you using an Atari for your BBS machine?

 

Atari equipment (to me) is precious.  I don't want to burn it up on a 24/7/365 BBS.  My BBS has been running on an emulator since 1999 (8000+ days)... basically non-stop.  In the 80's it ran on real hardware.  I burned up an MIO (not hard to do with those earlier models) and 2 800XLs although one was the result of an Ingot.

 

PCs are cheap and I am not attached to them...

 

I am actually starting to sniff into the possibility of running the BBS on a Pi 3...

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12 minutes ago, bf2k+ said:

Atari equipment (to me) is precious.  I don't want to burn it up on a 24/7/365 BBS.  My BBS has been running on an emulator since 1999 (8000+ days)... basically non-stop.  In the 80's it ran on real hardware.  I burned up an MIO (not hard to do with those earlier models) and 2 800XLs although one was the result of an Ingot.

 

PCs are cheap and I am not attached to them...

 

I am actually starting to sniff into the possibility of running the BBS on a Pi 3...

Makes sense. I've logged onto your BBS a few times in the past.

 

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12 hours ago, cathrynm said:

This XEP command #198 is broken on Altirra.

XIO 20,#1,12,198,"E:"

on Altirra it fills the screen full of the 'Esc' char.  On a real XEP80 it clears the screen properly (with EOLs I presume).  At least it looks correct.

Fixed for next version, it was using $1B instead of $9B (probably from before I discovered the EOL hack in the charset).

 

10 hours ago, Caterpiggle said:

I did downloaded the latest version of this emulator and I still have big trouble how to play Atari paddles via my 2600-adapter II device. I did clicked all the possible input features. Still refused to work with my paddles. But joysticks works fine, that's strange ....

There is no defined mapping for paddles in DirectInput/XInput so you will have to check how the 2600-adapter II presents the paddles and customize the input map to match. Input Setup will show you what the emulator is receiving.

 

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Hello Phaeron,

 

Myself, why you removed the old features under DirectInput/XInput and move to Input Setup ? I did tried to follow your way, Input Setup. It does not make sense when I full turn 360 degree in my paddle. What I seen the arrow turn only right side area from top to down, that's it. Never show 360 degree, nothing. Buttons does not response at all. Yes, it is hook up my 2600-Adapter II device.

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9 hours ago, Caterpiggle said:

Hello Phaeron,

 

Myself, why you removed the old features under DirectInput/XInput and move to Input Setup ? I did tried to follow your way, Input Setup. It does not make sense when I full turn 360 degree in my paddle. What I seen the arrow turn only right side area from top to down, that's it. Never show 360 degree, nothing. Buttons does not response at all. Yes, it is hook up my 2600-Adapter II device.

Is this the "tennis" controller or the "driving" controller?  The tennis controllers use a potentiometer and will not do a full revolution, while the driving controller will spin forever in either direction.

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14 hours ago, Caterpiggle said:

Myself, why you removed the old features under DirectInput/XInput and move to Input Setup ? I did tried to follow your way, Input Setup. It does not make sense when I full turn 360 degree in my paddle. What I seen the arrow turn only right side area from top to down, that's it. Never show 360 degree, nothing. Buttons does not response at all. Yes, it is hook up my 2600-Adapter II device.

I didn't remove anything. It's been this way for a long time.

 

Paddles aren't a thing in PC controllers, the Windows API understands sticks, buttons, rudders, and D-pads. What you've got is an adapter that converts an Atari controller into a PC controller, so the emulator has no idea that you're actually using a pair of paddles. You need to use Input Setup to see what it's doing on the PC controller side, and then set up mappings in Input Map to map that onto the emulated paddle. It sounds like the adapter is driving the right analog stick, which definitely doesn't match any of the preset paddle maps -- you'll have to create a custom one.

 

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57 minutes ago, phaeron said:

I didn't remove anything. It's been this way for a long time.

 

Paddles aren't a thing in PC controllers, the Windows API understands sticks, buttons, rudders, and D-pads. What you've got is an adapter that converts an Atari controller into a PC controller, so the emulator has no idea that you're actually using a pair of paddles. You need to use Input Setup to see what it's doing on the PC controller side, and then set up mappings in Input Map to map that onto the emulated paddle. It sounds like the adapter is driving the right analog stick, which definitely doesn't match any of the preset paddle maps -- you'll have to create a custom one.

 

I was curious about the Atari VCS classic stick and supporting it's paddle.  Any plans to support it?  (Someone may have asked already).  I can test.  May consider sending you my extra if need be.  Would be pretty cool to use on 8bit games (though for joysticks I still prefer my 500xj)

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30 minutes ago, leech said:

I was curious about the Atari VCS classic stick and supporting it's paddle.  Any plans to support it?  (Someone may have asked already).  I can test.  May consider sending you my extra if need be.  Would be pretty cool to use on 8bit games (though for joysticks I still prefer my 500xj)

I use the VCS Classic Stick, which I connect to my Mac via Blutetooth with Atari800MacX, and the stick works great. But as phaeron said, Paddle is another story. I can read the controller as stick OR as paddle, still have to figure out the details. Evans&Sutherland´s "Digistar 6" recognizes the paddle function, but crashes. When I´m in Salt Lake next time, I´ll talk with the creator of the Joystick.dll about it. Would be to cool to control my digital planetarium with an Atari stick. :)

 

Fun Fact: I can connect the Stick to my Atari 800XL with USB Cartridge (still available from ABBUC, technical Details: https://atariwiki.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=MicroUSB ) and it sees stick and paddle changes. :) Let´s see, what we can do with that. :)

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