Altirra 2.60 released

[phaeron]

I pleading old age, what do i do with the colour map, I'm thinking that unless my colour choices within altirra are right then looking at these on the colour map not have an effect or is it simply to give a visual aid as to how each system looks so you can tweak it to match?

 

It's for either reference/adjustment, due to two factors:

• People care a lot about their Atari colors.
• No two Atari systems have the same colors.

As an example, here's a pic of the program running on an NTSC 130XE and output through a Commodore 1702 monitor. The pic's been taken with a cell phone camera, though, so take the colors with a grain of salt.

 

 

Options that come after (below) "Gamma correction" does not apply.

as if I did not change these settings, I see no difference.

 

The blue/green adjustments don't do anything. I forgot to take them out from an experiment to try to reproduce some weirdnesses I was seeing on the 1702 which I suspected were related to its color decoding (it appears to use a direct RGB decoder). The artifacting phase control only works in the artifacting modes and the saturation/brightness controls only work with NTSC standard mode (not NTSC high).

 

Slightly related, wish the artifacting settings were saved separately for PAL and NTSC...

 

If I swap to NTSC I have to manually adjust the Artifacting to NTSC high (how I like it) from PAL High, then when I swap back to pal it remains set on NTSC high.

 

Not an issue, just it would have been nice for Altirra to remember the setting for both formats individually..

 

I've thought about this, but there is one cross-mode that's useful: PAL artifacting mode, which averages chroma. It's not really a physically realistic to mix this with NTSC, but people sometimes have used it in emulation. Haven't thought about whether it's OK to prohibit this and require use of PAL-60 mode instead, which is a recent addition.

 

And why do you avoid the Turbo freezer question Avery

 

Well, it's not like I'll never do it, but it's not useful to say that I might do it at some undetermined point in the future, either. I've learned the hard way that people can get mad when their pet features don't land in the timeframe they expected....

 

Here's NTSC and PAL with text labels at the top.

 

I'd never noticed, but rows F and 1 in PAL video are identical, whereas there are subtle differences on NTSC. I'd never noticed this, most likely because I'd never seen a chart where they were lined up next to each other (Phaeron's doubled-up on row 1 at the bottom, which most charts don't do).

 

Color 15 is paired with a duplicate of color 1 to make it easier to adjust NTSC -- IIRC the SALT cartridge does this as well. In most cases the "right" adjustment for NTSC is to either make those two colors the same or smoothly transition to complete the hue circle. However, some Ataris have drifted or adjusted so that color 15 is actually a bit off from that, going slightly past color 1.

 

PAL is different as in that case GTIA actually hardwires color 1 and 15 to be the same, regardless of the color adjustment setting.

 

The help file doesn't cover the adjustment procedure yet, but the way it's done: for the emulator, adjust hue start until color 1 matches, and then for either the emulator or physical hardware, adjust hue range or the color pot until the rest of the colors match. Ideally once color 15 matches on the second step, the rest of the colors and the artifacting colors will fall into place. If you're trying to match the emulator against real hardware, this will also depend on your displays and YMMV.

 

The artifacting section shows how the artifacting on the luma signal mixes with the chroma signal. The top line has the classic pure artifacting colors -- typically green/magenta or blue/cyan -- while the ones below are mixed with regular colors as a vector sum. This effect is actually used in some games. Interestingly I get straight purple/green bars out of Atari800's NTSC filter, which was pretty surprising giving that the filter is generally well behaved.

 

[Mclaneinc]

@Avery re Freezer..You know me better than that, I never demand a thing I was just interested about it and I had not noticed you had already answered about it which I apologise for. As said, not mad, just interested

[+MrFish]

Here are the corresponding ACT palettes that go with the images I posted:

 

Atari 128 Colors - ACT (NTSC, PAL).zip

 

[phaeron]

Update:

http://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-2.70-test30.zip

http://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-2.70-test30-src.zip

 

Removes the non-functional green/blue parameters in the colors dialog and adds support for emulating the floating bus condition on the second I/O memory bus on the Atari 800. This is necessary to run the original version of WarGames on 800 hardware due to a rather nasty hardware check. Thanks to Farb for the test case. Emulating this is rather expensive, so it is opt-in via System > Memory Config > Floating I/O Bus. This also makes PEEK(49152) read the correct values in BASIC.

 

Also, if you are still experiencing stuck keys on the keyboard, please follow the diagnostic steps outlined for the test28 build: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/236488-altirra-260-released/?p=3331925. I need this output to determine exactly what's going on since I can't reproduce it myself.

 

@Avery re Freezer..You know me better than that, I never demand a thing I was just interested about it and I had not noticed you had already answered about it which I apologise for. As said, not mad, just interested

 

Sorry, didn't mean to imply that you'd done this. I've just had too many people ask "will you ever do X" without realizing how non-useful the answer is.

 

[voy]

Pardon my ignorance (if any) but is there possiblity to add dumping of POKEY registers every frame just like in this thread:

 

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/242349-sap-type-r-recording-turbo-basic-tunes-to-sap/ ?

 

There are many BASIC and other exotic language programs with music.

 

(Yeah I think about ASMA new entries!)

 

So?

 

That's right, there are many games or demos where extraction of the music is very difficult or (almost) impossible in another way. The ASMA Team is very interested in such functionality of Altirra.

[phaeron]

http://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-2.70-test31.zip

http://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-2.70-test31-src.zip

 

Fixes a couple of crash bugs in the floating I/O bus feature, adds SAP type R recording support, and SAP type B/C/R playback. Too lazy to do type D at the moment as it requires turning off the OS ROM. This also prevents some type B/C files from loading when they try loading on top of where the player or OS lies, but many work.

[Mclaneinc]

Thank you for the drag n drop SAP player built in....Love it...Its one of the things I asked about a while back but you said you were not too keen on it but as usual with you Avery, there's always a nice surprise that comes out of another topic. I've hit a few of the sids you refer to but at least you error trapped them rather than Altirra just 'falling over'.

 

Again, appreciated...

Edited October 5, 2015 by Mclaneinc

[serj]

wow.
it is fantastic, there is no limit to perfection!

how many years I have been waiting for this in emulator.

the first emulator that supports "* .sap" files.

 

many thanks !

 

small wish:
Please indicate on the screen, keys for sap player.

I spent a lot of time searching for the key that toggles music.

who do not know - it is the key "\".

I check melodies from the archives asma.

asma 3.8 ---> Games

airball.sap - silent
Archon.sap - error
Arex.sap - crash emulator.
Battle_Eagle.sap - error
Callisto.sap - error
Dark_Chambers.sap - error
Deathland.sap - error
Deflektor.sap - error
Desert_Falcon.sap - error
Diamonds.sap - hang
Digi_Duck.sap - error

Donkey_Kong_Junior.sap - crash emulator.

Exoter.sap - error
F_R_E_E.sap - hang
Final_Legacy.sap - ???

Edited October 5, 2015 by serj

[Mclaneinc]

You can use the arrow keys as well..

 

Crashes are expected considering what Avery said re unsupported modes and locations causing overwrite..

[serj]

Avery, please, you can also add a little option in emulator ?

very necessary adjustment "main emulator window on top of all windows".

Edited October 5, 2015 by serj

[voy]

Thank you, Phaeron, for your work!

[fujidude]

Thanks phaeron. Keep the good stuff coming.

[Keatah]

The extraordinary value and versatility of software emulation is once again demonstrated.

[phaeron]

Update:

http://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-2.70-test32.zip

http://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-2.70-test32-src.zip

• Fix for the stuck key problem -- was due to a WM_KEYDOWN/WM_CHAR ordering problem that only showed up on some system configurations. Thanks to flashjazzcat for the in-depth testing. The raw key mode has also been changed so that only the last key registered continues the repeat instead of any key.
• SAP type D playback is now supported. Matching NTSC files to NTSC systems or PAL-to-PAL is recommended, but the player will attempt to play mismatched files at the correct rate via a DLI hack. This may or may not work depending on whether the player uses VCOUNT and the PLAYER hook.
• The SAP type R player now displays volume bars per channel.
• There is now an option on the Tools menu to convert SAP files to Atari executables. The emulator does this internally when you boot a SAP file; this just lets you get at the executable directly. Bit of a warning: the executables require a MEMLO of $0800, so you'll need to boot them from a game DOS or similarly capable loader (e.g. AtariMax cartridge). The players autodetect NTSC/PAL ANTIC.
• Added a hack to keep the emulation running while menus are displayed. We'll see how this works.

One gotcha on SAP files -- I am starting to find bugs in some of the SAP players. The Pitfall II player, for instance, reads uninitialized memory. Unfortunately, the byte it reads is SAVMSC+1, and it crashes because this byte is >= $0A when booting from the OS. This is due to the difference between the minimal Atari-like environment used by SAP players and the full environment when booting on real hardware.

 

[Mclaneinc]

Very nice update, I love the nifty utilities that do non emulation important things like this, Altirra is like the main Xmas present and the utilities / add ons are the unexpected extra present.

[serj]

all that I have given in the list above - not working.

that is corrected in such a case?

[phaeron]

all that I have given in the list above - not working.

that is corrected in such a case?

 

It isn't possible to support all SAP files this way. SAP files assume a partial computer that only plays audio, while Altirra emulates a full computer and needs a place to put the driver. The file does not specify a safe place to put the driver, so any location will conflict with some SAP file.

[Shannon]

 

wow.

it is fantastic, there is no limit to perfection!

how many years I have been waiting for this in emulator.

the first emulator that supports "* .sap" files.

 

 

Errr.. not that it is mainstream but I added SAP playback in the atarixlbox emulator for the xbox a few years ago.

 

Cool feature to see added by the way.

 

On another note..

 

Does anybody have good settings for the artifacting modes? I remember when playing Ultima IV the water being blue.. but the default setting gives me an ugly greenish color. Which I do remember having on my XEG..

 

Thanks

[Shannon]

On another side note... I was going through the maxflash images that I got from the maxflash site and flashing them to emulated carts and I could not get both the "Mysterious Adventures" or "Scott Adams Adventure" disks to load. I was able to get them to load in the modified version of Atari800 and flash the emulated carts successfully.

 

This was with Altirra 2.60.

[Mclaneinc]

Re the artifacting mode colours, same here, I messed around and tried to match the screen colours for the NTSC A.E. from the box, maybe a bit bright but its a fair match..

 

 

See what you think...

 

 

Capture.rar

[bfollett]

Re the artifacting mode colours, same here, I messed around and tried to match the screen colours for the NTSC A.E. from the box, maybe a bit bright but its a fair match..

 

 

See what you think...

 

 

You compressed a 22kb png file to a 16kb rar file. You must really be bandwidth starved! What were you using a 300 baud Atari modem?

 

Bob

Edited October 20, 2015 by bfollett

[Mclaneinc]

I forgot about posting it using the image button so tried to attach it and of course it won't take png's so I rared it..

 

DOH!!

 

Senior moment...

 

[fujidude]

I post .PNGs all the time. I attach them as files, then use the tool to place reference to it in the body of the post. The forum displays it. Looks like what you just put up is a .PNG.

Edited October 20, 2015 by fujidude

[Keatah]

I found setting the Artifacting Phase to be the key control for what you're trying to adjust. Depending what version of the game you're running, setting it to -10 or +169 worked great on my system. Try it!

 

 

And in looking at this I found that the Artifacting Saturation and Artifacting Brightness slider controls do nothing.

 

And anything to do with PAL artifacting from the Video menu, PAL Artifacting (Standard) and PAL Artifacting (High) results in a B/W picture with slight color fringing..

[phaeron]

Artifacting Saturation/Brightness only pertain to NTSC (Standard).

 

PAL artifacting modes won't work with a game that uses NTSC artifacting -- alternating pixel patterns don't match up with the PAL color subcarrier.