Altirra 3.90 released

[Atari_Force]

Support of creating FSK signals. Not yet?

[Mclaneinc]

Here's the two 1090 files incase people need them and thanks to Nezgar for the pointer to the 1050 H..Just the Bit3 roms to find..(Edit: Found

 and thanks to Faicu for the dumps...)

 

1090 CSet.rom 1090 OS 80.rom 1050-revH 6D9D589B.BIN

bit3-404785-char.bin bit3-404785-code.bin

Edited April 13, 2021 by Mclaneinc

[Suppawer]

Hi Paul

 

And:

"Bit 3 Full-View 80 charset" rom crc32: 738C6AC1

 

???

 

Edited April 13, 2021 by suppawer

[Faicuai]

12 minutes ago, suppawer said:

Hi Paul

 

And:

"Bit 3 Full-View 80 charset" rom crc32: 738C6AC1

 

???

 

Already tested Bit3 emulation with the above poste ROMs.

 

Those are the only rooms needed, and they are bit-for-bit genuine duplicates on my Bit3 on-board roms.

 

(I will post results here later, as I am running some timing-tests on Emulated Bit3 vs. real Bit3 on 800).

Edited April 13, 2021 by Faicuai

[Mclaneinc]

Thanks Faicuai for stepping in, must say I could not verify them but but you have as your own card versions. I tried the Bit3 emulation but I get an "unsupported video mode" message, but then again I've never used any 80 column emulation or real item before.

 

Here's 4 png's of the Bios's I've used for the files that are not auto found..

 

(any mistakes PLEASE let me know)

 

 

Edited April 13, 2021 by Mclaneinc

[Faicuai]

1 hour ago, Mclaneinc said:

I tried the Bit3 emulation but I get an "unsupported video mode" message

Yes, the first place I tried them was on my very old (and upgraded) Dell 1440z mini laptop, which I use for emulation, RespeQt, etc. It runs Windows-10 Pro x64, and got the exact same message (possibly a video-setup problem between Altirra. and OS Video facilities, in windowed-mode?).

 

Then went to the HP Z840 ws. and tried it there successfully. Also on Windows-10 Pro, but significantly different HW facilities, though.  I will need to check for additional updates on the 1440z, unless the video drivers can no longer render what Altirra is attempting.

 

When testing, DO NOT test with XL / XE loads in Altirra. Add above ROMs in Firmware Manager, and add Bit3 device in System Config.. Then, select 400/800 as main system and Atari OS/b load (or OS/N). DO NOT attempt Altirra 800 OS. Select "auto switch" on Video output options, and attach Basic ROM of your choice, and perform M=USR(54818) to direct Bit3's firmware to hook up E: vectors.

 

It should work. for the most part...

Edited April 13, 2021 by Faicuai

[Faicuai]

Very well, so here's what I've found:

 

1. Booted the 800 with Bit3 installed (and Altirra with exact same ROMS as physical Bit3) with OS/b (plain vanilla) and Atari Basic cart.

2. The test program:

 

Here are the results:

 

1. Altirra:

 

2. 800 (CTIA), OS/b and Bit3:

 

 

A few observations:

 

1. Bit'3 signal CANNOT be displayed as is in 480p standard format.
2. Bit3's output begins a few scanlines after 0 (upper and lower right/left corners of above image will show darkened gray-bezel precisely overlayed  by DVDO iScan processor to mask out no-scan / signal areas, product of aspect-ratio management and conversion). Line 24 is chewed-up for this very same reason. Cannot be displayed correctly in 240p/480p via Component inout (max. bandwidth).
3. Oddly, the timings seem just a bit off... Altirra runs a bit faster than actual HW.
4. The fonts rendering are virtually identical !!!
5. Sometimes, when scrolling or printing, Altirra's output temp. hangs, and the. continues (?) Not seen on real HW.
6. As a reference, the XEP80 runs this particular test in 8.2 sec (ultra-speed). which is about 10% slower than actual Bit3.

Well, that's for now.

 

Fedex just arrived and it is time to inspect if they brought what I think they did... 8-)

 

[Jeffrey Worley]

Bug Report:

 

Altirra 3.90 with U1MB 3.10 and Side2 with 3.10 firmware.  Altirra does not abide by the U1MB menu setting to load config.sys from disk, rather it invariably loads config.sys from the Car: device.  My real atari setup has the Config.sys setting in U1MB to D3:, from where it gets the Config.sys I store there.

 

Loading config.sys from disk is important:  Here's an example of mine:

 

<snip>

 

USE BANKED

DEVICE SPARTA

DEVICE ENV

DEVICE DOSKEY

DEVICE SIO

DEVICE ATARIDOS

DEVICE D3:>DOS>RS.GR8

DEVICE COMEXE

DEVICE RAMDISK

DEVICE ULTIME

DEVICE QUICKED

SET SCRDEF=,,,0,38

SET SC=C:>DOS>SCMAIN.OVL

SET MANPATH-CAR:;C:\DOS\MAN

SET PATH=CAR:;C:\DOS

SET PROMPT=$L$P\

 

<Snip >

---------------------------------------------------------

 

Most but not all of this can be accomplished in Autoexec.bat, but it should not have to be.

 

Best,

 

Jeff

[flashjazzcat]

27 minutes ago, Jeffrey Worley said:

Altirra does not abide by the U1MB menu setting to load config.sys from disk, rather it invariably loads config.sys from the Car: device. 

SDX always attempts to read CONFIG.SYS from any SDFS boot volume before resorting to CAR:; the CONFIG.SYS setting simply alters the value of the OS DCB variable DUNIT so that said volume need not be mounted on D1:.

 

I haven't encountered a problem like this when developing the U1MB firmware on virtually every Altirra build which has been published, so I wonder if this is just an emulator setting issue. Can the emulated machine actually read D3: once you've reached the SDX command prompt (i.e. what happens when you type 'DIR')?

Edited April 14, 2021 by flashjazzcat

[Faicuai]

51 minutes ago, Jeffrey Worley said:

Bug Report:

 

Altirra 3.90 with U1MB 3.10 and Side2 with 3.10 firmware.  Altirra does not abide by the U1MB menu setting to load config.sys from disk, rather it invariably loads config.sys from the Car: device.  My real atari setup has the Config.sys setting in U1MB to D3:, from where it gets the Config.sys I store there.

 

Loading config.sys from disk is important:  Here's an example of mine:

 

<snip>

 

USE BANKED

DEVICE SPARTA

DEVICE ENV

DEVICE DOSKEY

DEVICE SIO

DEVICE ATARIDOS

DEVICE D3:>DOS>RS.GR8

DEVICE COMEXE

DEVICE RAMDISK

DEVICE ULTIME

DEVICE QUICKED

SET SCRDEF=,,,0,38

SET SC=C:>DOS>SCMAIN.OVL

SET MANPATH-CAR:;C:\DOS\MAN

SET PATH=CAR:;C:\DOS

SET PROMPT=$L$P\

 

<Snip >

---------------------------------------------------------

 

Most but not all of this can be accomplished in Autoexec.bat, but it should not have to be.

 

Best,

 

Jeff

Confirmed.

 

Just found the exact same problem, here (48 hours ago, when I started testing Bit3 emulation, but on my workstation).

 

In Altirra, SDX will not seek and show SPARTA.DOS config files, when booting from an image extracted from a CF which correctly boots on actual HW (with 3.10), fetching SPARTA.DOS content, on-boot. Instead, emulated SDX session seems to boot (only) from CAR: config.sys
 

HOWEVER, I can confirm that, if I attached a SDX .ATR image as D1: with SPARTA.DOS folder on it, and direct SDX to boot from D1: during BOOT-screen (in BIOS) by pressing "D" and then "1", Altirra DOES show list of .CFGs on D1:.

 

As for CF image, I tried every possible setting on BIOS I could think as being relevant, but it does not work. Can't read SPARTA.DOS folder.

Edited April 14, 2021 by Faicuai

[flashjazzcat]

Turn off 'Fast boot' in System->Acceleration (OS acceleration).

[Faicuai]

7 minutes ago, flashjazzcat said:

Turn off 'Fast boot' in System->Acceleration (OS acceleration).

?

 

NAILED (!!!)
 

Problem solved! I even thought my USB-3 card-reader was corrupting the captured CF images... pulling hair from where I had none left...

 

THANKS!

[+Stephen]

3 hours ago, flashjazzcat said:

Turn off 'Fast boot' in System->Acceleration (OS acceleration).

Beat me to it.  I got bit by this issue a while back.  If there's a FAQ for these things, this definitely needs to be added.

[Jeffrey Worley]

3 hours ago, Faicuai said:

Confirmed.

 

Just found the exact same problem, here (48 hours ago, when I started testing Bit3 emulation, but on my workstation).

 

In Altirra, SDX will not seek and show SPARTA.DOS config files, when booting from an image extracted from a CF which correctly boots on actual HW (with 3.10), fetching SPARTA.DOS content, on-boot. Instead, emulated SDX session seems to boot (only) from CAR: config.sys
 

HOWEVER, I can confirm that, if I attached a SDX .ATR image as D1: with SPARTA.DOS folder on it, and direct SDX to boot from D1: during BOOT-screen (in BIOS) by pressing "D" and then "1", Altirra DOES show list of .CFGs on D1:.

 

As for CF image, I tried every possible setting on BIOS I could think as being relevant, but it does not work. Can't read SPARTA.DOS folder.

That is the exact configuration I'm using.  I took a DD image of my real atari's sd card, used qemu-image to convert it to an .VHD image and mounted it under Altirra.  Works a treat.  I'll try the fix above when I get back to the office tomorrow morning.

 

Best,

 

Jeff

[Jeffrey Worley]

14 hours ago, Stephen said:

Beat me to it.  I got bit by this issue a while back.  If there's a FAQ for these things, this definitely needs to be added.

Turned off fastboot and the problem is solved.  Thanks!

I'm running Altirra in Wine on Kubuntu 20.04.  Works  a treat though I wish it worked in the background.  Seems that it only computes when in the foreground and the window is active.

Edited April 15, 2021 by Jeffrey Worley

[+Stephen]

24 minutes ago, Jeffrey Worley said:

Turned off fastboot and the problem is solved.  Thanks!

I'm running Altirra in Wine on Kubuntu 20.04.  Works  a treat though I wish it worked in the background.  Seems that it only computes when in the foreground and the window is active.

I don't know if this is a Wine issue or not, but there is an option in Altirra (under system) called "Pause when inactive".  Make sure that is unchecked.

[Jeffrey Worley]

13 minutes ago, Stephen said:

I don't know if this is a Wine issue or not, but there is an option in Altirra (under system) called "Pause when inactive".  Make sure that is unchecked.

Duh.  I'm a bid dummy.  Pause when inactive.  Right there on the dropdown.  Thanks!

 

Jeff

 

[eobet]

@phaeron When I tried Altirra, I was able to get a very lovely curvature to the screeen and some coloring artifacts I fondly remember. However, I don't think I managed to get a CRT effect on top of that.

 

Is that because I simply didn't find the feature, or that you're opposed to it, or you haven't had time to make one? (If it's the latter, this one is pretty convincing...)

[phaeron]

http://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-4.00-test34.zip

http://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-4.00-test34-src.zip

• Implements Bit 3 transparent access timing and a fix for the VBLANK timing issue which caused periodic pauses.

 

On 4/16/2021 at 6:40 AM, eobet said:

@phaeron When I tried Altirra, I was able to get a very lovely curvature to the screeen and some coloring artifacts I fondly remember. However, I don't think I managed to get a CRT effect on top of that.

 

Is that because I simply didn't find the feature, or that you're opposed to it, or you haven't had time to make one? (If it's the latter, this one is pretty convincing...)

Altirra doesn't have a CRT effect feature. It can be implemented via the custom effect system, but such an effect isn't included and it only currently works with Direct3D 9 mode.

 

I haven't prioritized this both due to time and also because I don't find most CRT effect shaders to be compelling. Most of the effects I've seen that attempt to emulate CRT phosphors end up either way overdoing it or reducing contrast too much, the latter of which is already a problem when trying to maintain reasonable color accuracy. I keep an old Commodore 1702 monitor for comparison purposes and the fact is that a reasonably adjusted CRT monitor of the era doesn't show that much curving of the image or color convergence artifacts. That makes it a lot more likely that different people want different things out of a CRT effect, and exposing settings is additional complexity on top of the work to implement that effect (which is typically already complex enough as a multipass effect).

 

[+MrFish]

On 4/17/2021 at 6:31 PM, phaeron said:

Most of the effects I've seen that attempt to emulate CRT phosphors end up ... way overdoing it...

This

 

[Yautja]

Hello,

 

What is the best configuration to record video in the emulator?

 

Thanks in advance for your recommendations.

 

- Y -

[Yautja]

BTW, this is my current configuration. The results is a poor quality recording.

 

 

[+MrFish]

4 minutes ago, Yautja said:

BTW, this is my current configuration. The results is a poor quality recording.

 

 

Personally, for compression, I use "Run-Length Encoding (AVI)"; it's lossless, which ensures you're getting clean video; and it still produces reasonably small files.

 

[phaeron]

34 minutes ago, Yautja said:

BTW, this is my current configuration. The results is a poor quality recording.

 

 

You have the recorder set to use low video bitrate, 1Mbps. Raise that for better quality. Hardware video encoders aren't as good as software encoders, especially if you have an older card, so you will need more bitrate than you may be used to for a regular non-realtime encode. The only catch is that this will make the output file bigger, so check it to make sure you don't end up with a file too big to upload.

 

[Keatah]

When emulators first got CRT & NTSC effects I sucked it all up and tended to go full throttle. Who can blame me? It was a novelty. Today I use them gently and sparingly, like fine spices. Effects & filters add ambiance and flavor. Some I don't use at all, like geometrical distortions. A perfectly proportioned image is something I wanted since B/W TVs were a thing.