Latest versions of ST Emulators?

[+Larry]

I no longer have ST hardware, but thought I'd try to set up an ST emulator on my PC.  It looks like Gemulator 9 (~2008 or so) was the latest version.  Anything better?  Somewhere around my garage I should still have the "Rainbow" roms and Gemulator board, although I think it requires an ISA slot. (?) 

 

Any general suggestions to help get me going?

 

Thanks,

Larry

[bfollowell]

I'm not sure what the latest version of Gemul8r is, but 8 and 16-bit emulators have improved far beyond anything that Emulators, Inc. ever put out. There are numerous emulators available, all of which are better than the old Gemul8r and do not require the use of physical ROMs or any hardware. I've used various ones over the years, but right now, the best, in my humble opinion, would  have to be Hatari. You can check it out here:

 

https://hatari.tuxfamily.org/

 

Steem and SainT are two others, and both were much better than Gemul8r at their last iteration. I have no idea if they're still being updated or not as I haven't used anything other than Hatari since discovering it several years ago.

 

Edited September 26, 2020 by bfollowell

[ataricrypt]

I second that. Hatari all the way for me.

[ParanoidLittleMan]

Gemulator is not full Atari ST emulator, and it is indicated by it's name. It was very fast because emulated GEM calls (functions) in first place. HW emulation is only partial. I used it a lot back in time, but when new generation appeared it had no more chance. And another correction: it must not use original ROM chips, or EPROMs - later versions work with image files.

 

My vote is Steem, and prefer original Steem, what is not updated for many years. Still, 99% of old Atari SW works well with. There is Steem SSD - what is as I know still developed by Don Megacool, and that's based on original Steem sources. Matter of taste and experience who prefers which.

 

Hatari is still developed from time to time, and is designed from start as multiplatform, open source. And because that GUI is not so good as by Steem in settings, even in visual look. And there are some strange ideas of it's authors in some points (GEMDOS hard disk emulation works in some cases with code what fails on real Atari or with real hard disk emulation in Hatari - just one example). Surely better in some areas - sound, more HW emulated. Worse is in speed, not easy to use state save (what is btw. called improperly - not only memory state, complete machine state is it).

 

Saint is outdated pretty much, and clearly knows much less than 2 today favorites.

[TGB1718]

2 hours ago, ParanoidLittleMan said:

My vote is Steem,

Agreed, download here https://sourceforge.net/projects/steemsse/

 

Still being supported, the build I currently use was released March 2020

 

The only thing I can't make it do is copy/paste to/from the screen like you can do in Altirra for the 8 bit (unless someone knows a way to do it)

Other than that it's excellent.

[mdivancic]

I would suggest you try them both as they are free. I prefer Hatari’s interface over Steem, but as others have said your mileage may vary...

[jblenkle]

I've always liked SainT, but I also use Hatari and Steem (in order of preference).

[darwinmac]

While I prefer Hatari myself, as a Windows user, I would say Steem SSE has a Windows-like interface unlike Hatari. 
 

However, I want to correct one thing. Hatari is in very active development. They do only create one official new version every 12-14 months. There are also sorts of changes made in the interim. 
 

You can find nightly binaries for Windows and macOS. I assume Linux users are assumed to know how to compile the development version themselves. Since there are no Windows developers on the Hatari team, the Windows interface is very bare bones. 
 

Bob C

[MrMaddog]

On 9/26/2020 at 8:50 AM, Larry said:

I no longer have ST hardware, but thought I'd try to set up an ST emulator on my PC.  It looks like Gemulator 9 (~2008 or so) was the latest version.  Anything better?  Somewhere around my garage I should still have the "Rainbow" roms and Gemulator board, although I think it requires an ISA slot. (?) 

 

Just curious, how well did Gemulator ran on a 486 or Pentium?  I've always wanted to get one but by the time I got a PC which came with Windows 98, there were other ST emulators that were better for games (PacifiST) or faster for GEM applications (TOS2Win).

 

Right now Hatari is the best because it's the most accurate emulator and can now emulator TT & Falcon computers.  I personally prefer Steem SSE because it runs like the NTSC STe I had back in the day.

 

[bfollowell]

It ran alright. I even had one of the early versions that came with the ISA ROM card that used actual Atari ROMs, rather than TOS images.

 

The problem was that it was a GEM emulator first, and an ST emulator a distant second. It had just OK compatibility at best. It definitely wouldn't run a lot of demos and things like that. There were quite a few games that wouldn't work, especially with the earlier versions. Most GEM based stuff ran really well though.

 

[ParanoidLittleMan]

Gemulator was enough fast with those early Pentium/K6 machines. Can not say for 486 - I never had it (with good reason - crap motherboards overall in East Eu market).

The reason is that Gemulator, as it name suggests emulates GEM, TOS functions, and HW only in smaller part. Surely, CPU must be emulated too.

When SW performs some Trap function call - like VDI, AES call (Trap #2) it is executed with 80386 code and not with much slower 68000 CPU emulation. And no need to emulate HW in details.

 

Well, when Hatari is mentioned as most accurate, funny thing is that mentioned TT and Falcon emulation is not so much accurate. Not even Mega STE emulation. 

There is gemulator-like emulation in both: Hatari and Steem - so called GEMDOS hard disk emulation. It accessing some DIR on host as Atari partition (logical drive). Without some limits of TOS, and much faster than real hard disk emulation.  Well - on Steem is much faster, on Hatari rather little. And there are some strange things - working with slash too, while TOS needs backslash - like:  \FOLD\FILE  With Hatari /FOLD/FILE is good too. And that's just bad sometimes (see thread in programming section).

[TGB1718]

14 hours ago, MrMaddog said:

Right now Hatari is the best because it's the most accurate emulator and can now emulator TT & Falcon computers.  I personally prefer Steem SSE because it runs like the NTSC STe I had back in the day.

I've tried Hatari and while the emulation seems accurate, for the life of me I can't seem to get the screen dimensions

correct, it starts at such a ridiculously small window and try as I might, I still can't seem to get it how I want it, also

I find the mouse can stop moving before the edge of the screen and moves off the emulator back into windows, it does

this a lot and make it difficult to use.

 

Steem SSE on the other hand is easy to get the right size and works quite well, it emulates the STE (which is my main "real" ST)

and it's nice to develop things on the emulator then move to the real hardware.

[Sporny Kun]

1 hour ago, TGB1718 said:

I find the mouse can stop moving before the edge of the screen and moves off the emulator back into windows, it does

this a lot and make it difficult to use.

 

It is possible to keep the mouse in the emulator windows. If Hatari is already started, AltGr+m. To start Hatari in this mode, use the "-grab" switch (i learned this last one recently, very convenient).

[zzip]

I'm a big fan of hatari.     I used to like Steem,  the old version.   Always run into issues with the SSE versions,  so I don't use it much anymore.

 

FYI-  F12 in hatari brings up a configuration menu where you can change a lot of options.

[zzip]

7 hours ago, ParanoidLittleMan said:

Well, when Hatari is mentioned as most accurate, funny thing is that mentioned TT and Falcon emulation is not so much accurate. Not even Mega STE emulation.

Yeah, it does ST/STe fairly well.   Falcon is obviously buggy since I can only get maybe half the Falcon software I try to work without crashing.   But is there anything that emulates Falcon better yet?  

 

For TT-  hatari can emulate a 68030, running at a higher speed, and higher graphics resolutions.   What TT features is it missing?   I find that running some Gem apps that support it works great in higher resolutions and extra speed.   But I don't have that many apps that can really benefit, and I don't have a real TT to compare it to.

 

7 hours ago, ParanoidLittleMan said:

There is gemulator-like emulation in both: Hatari and Steem - so called GEMDOS hard disk emulation. It accessing some DIR on host as Atari partition (logical drive). Without some limits of TOS, and much faster than real hard disk emulation. 

Most emulators support both GEMDOS type hard disk emulation and hard disk images.    Hard disk images will give you a more accurate experience (you have to install hard disk drivers, and partition them, etc), but GEMDOS type is easier for most users to set up.

[TGB1718]

39 minutes ago, zzip said:

FYI-  F12 in hatari brings up a configuration menu where you can change a lot of options.

I have tried changing the settings here, but still fail to get any reasonable screen size/resolution, in fact

most of the time when it starts, it's a white background with yellow text, very hard to see, can anyone suggest

some Atari Video and Hatari Video settings that work, I've played for ages and not found anything that really works.

 

I'm using it as an STE emulation

[bfollowell]

33 minutes ago, TGB1718 said:

I have tried changing the settings here, but still fail to get any reasonable screen size/resolution, in fact

most of the time when it starts, it's a white background with yellow text, very hard to see, can anyone suggest

some Atari Video and Hatari Video settings that work, I've played for ages and not found anything that really works.

 

I'm using it as an STE emulation

 

That is really strange. I've never had any issues like that and I pretty much use default video settings. Maybe this weekend I'll have some time to play around and see if I can reproduce your results. Do you go in and change any settings, especially video settings, other than setting the machine, TOS, and memory of the machine you're emulating?

 

[zzip]

1 hour ago, TGB1718 said:

I have tried changing the settings here, but still fail to get any reasonable screen size/resolution, in fact

most of the time when it starts, it's a white background with yellow text, very hard to see, can anyone suggest

some Atari Video and Hatari Video settings that work, I've played for ages and not found anything that really works.

 

I'm using it as an STE emulation

Are you using it as window or full-screen?   What version of hatari?    What version of TOS? 

 

I always get white background with black text as default, not sure what would cause yellow.

[TGB1718]

@bfollowell & @zzip thanks for the replies, when I used the default settings the window was far too small, so I adjusted

the Atari Screen and Hatari screens, but just can't find any settings that are satisfactory.

 

Just found out why I get yellow/white, I had it selected to 4 colour, changing to 16 seems to sort that.

 

Using V1.9 of Hatari, TOS 2.06 (same as in my STE), I use it windowed (looks strange full screen on a 30" monitor)

 

[zzip]

24 minutes ago, TGB1718 said:

@bfollowell & @zzip thanks for the replies, when I used the default settings the window was far too small, so I adjusted

the Atari Screen and Hatari screens, but just can't find any settings that are satisfactory.

 

Just found out why I get yellow/white, I had it selected to 4 colour, changing to 16 seems to sort that.

 

Using V1.9 of Hatari, TOS 2.06 (same as in my STE), I use it windowed (looks strange full screen on a 30" monitor)

 

I always run it full screen.  A 320x200 window is just too small on a 1440p monitor, even double-sized.

 

I use SDL2 because it does a better job stretching the image to full-screen.   My biggest issue is when using scanlines (TV mode) they never got stretched right,  but the most recent version does a much better job with that.

[+Larry]

Steem question solved...

[TheNameOfTheGame]

On 10/8/2020 at 11:48 AM, zzip said:

I always run it full screen.  A 320x200 window is just too small on a 1440p monitor, even double-sized.

 

I use SDL2 because it does a better job stretching the image to full-screen.   My biggest issue is when using scanlines (TV mode) they never got stretched right,  but the most recent version does a much better job with that.

 

Yes, full screen is nice, but there is a problem with multi-monitor setups.  The mouse is captured on the monitor where Hatari is running and it doesn't release the mouse pointer when trying to move to the second monitor.  If that could be fixed, it would be ideal.