Altirra 2.80 released

[a8isa1]

QMEG 4.04 + Rambo XL works with the ATR8000 emulation. Just as clumsily as in real life. The ATR8000 doesn't like the default ultraspeed setting or QMEG's driver doesn't like the ATR8000 by default.

 

Have to pop into QMEG's monitor. Set all relevant drive numbers to NORMAL. Do the shortcut Cold boot which is TAB then ESC.

 

I didn't have many copy protected disks back in 1983. I'm sure some wouldn't work on the ATR8000 but I thought some did. Not having any success with the recent ATX files.

 

Formatting a simulated 8" disk seems a lot slower than my 1.2MB HD drives. (I don't own any 8" drives). Formatting 5.25" disks seems a little slower. Is formatting speed a function of the drive mechs?

 

Phaeron thanks for this in emulation.

 

-SteveS

 

[EDIT]

 

Please disregard the comment about ATX files. I negected to disable BASIC. In my defense the step is a little different in emulation and easily forgotten.

Edited March 10, 2017 by a8isa1

[Triads]

Phaeron, the emulated drive sounds are on and I cant turn em off, drive sounds unchecked/checked doesn't change it...

Checked with A8isa1 and confirmed the same issue..

 

thanks

[phaeron]

If you are using Warp mode say to speed up a long intro and for some reason a program crashes then warp mode stay enabled until you press F1 again, noticed it on the last beta but may have been earlier, does this on both 64 and 32.

 

Yeah, this is a bug I need to fix. The warp key needs to be force-released when the display loses focus for any reason.

 

 

No "firmwaredetect.cpp" update...?

 

It'll be there eventually....

 

Formatting a simulated 8" disk seems a lot slower than my 1.2MB HD drives. (I don't own any 8" drives). Formatting 5.25" disks seems a little slower. Is formatting speed a function of the drive mechs?

 

Two differences. First, 8" spins at 360 RPM instead of 300 RPM, so rotational delays are actually lower -- that's how the firmware detects an 8" drive. However, when it does so, it also assumes 77 tracks minimum instead of 40 by default, though that can be changed.

 

Looking at the FDC command output, it looks like the additional delay for 8" is at the beginning of the Write Track command, which probably means that the drive is blowing a rev between the end of the seek and the start of the track format (Write Track always goes from index to index). For 5.25", it might be a difference in seek or head settle wait timing. This especially gets weird because some models of the FDC change these timings depending on whether they're being clocked at 1MHz or 2MHz. The mechanism shouldn't matter for seek times though because the seek timing is controlled solely by the FDC and the firmware, unlike rotational timing which depends on motor speed.

 

If you're willing, a good reference I could use is either an audio recording or a video with sound of the ATR8000 formatting a disk, where I can hear the head step. That's pretty easy for me to compare against the emulator to see where it's missing or has too many revs during the process.

 

Phaeron, the emulated drive sounds are on and I cant turn em off, drive sounds unchecked/checked doesn't change it...

Checked with A8isa1 and confirmed the same issue..

 

I can't reproduce this. You don't mean the beep-beep-beep sound, do you? That's from POKEY and can't be turned off, whereas the drive sound option toggles the rotational and seek sounds. Any particular drive configuration needed to replicate?

 

[Madi]

Phaeron, the emulated drive sounds are on and I cant turn em off, drive sounds unchecked/checked doesn't change it...

Checked with A8isa1 and confirmed the same issue..

 

thanks

Same here. The drive spinning sound continues until drive stops. Actually, noisy.

 

Madi

[Mclaneinc]

Same here, turning off the drive sounds only stops the sound of the head being stepped and not the drive spin sound, as for the drive spin sound going on until the drive stops, that's perfectly normal.

 

The SIO noise is there and sounds as good as it always has.... ...Nothing to do with the issue..

 

Slightly related, I don't have my real 1050 hooked up to compare but is it me or does the step noise for the real drives sound too loud in comparison to the all over noise?

 

Probably just me, maybe a slider for the drive noise at some far related point?

 

Edit: just cleared my settings which made no difference in the drive sounds thing, step noise is either on or off, spin sound always on..As I like the sounds and have them turned on I didn't notice but tested anyway..

Edited March 10, 2017 by Mclaneinc

[Triads]

Phaeron, I went as far back as test 10, trying with and w/o an Altirra INI and the spin motor sounds are there with Drive Sound option unchecked. I only noticed this because I tried the new ATR8000 addition. For me when using the ATR8000 the drive sound doesn't stop. Other emulated drives I've tested have spin sounds but spin down normally after a few seconds. With Drive sounds checked I get Head/track movement sounds. Sorry I didn't test this sooner, I mainly use IDE+ and generic floppy drives.

 

Edit - This is on both x86-64 versions.

Edited March 10, 2017 by Triads

[a8isa1]

 

Two differences. First, 8" spins at 360 RPM instead of 300 RPM, so rotational delays are actually lower -- that's how the firmware detects an 8" drive. However, when it does so, it also assumes 77 tracks minimum instead of 40 by default, though that can be changed.

 

 

If you're willing, a good reference I could use is either an audio recording or a video with sound of the ATR8000 formatting a disk, where I can hear the head step. That's pretty easy for me to compare against the emulator to see where it's missing or has too many revs during the process.

 

 

I can't reproduce this. You don't mean the beep-beep-beep sound, do you? That's from POKEY and can't be turned off, whereas the drive sound option toggles the rotational and seek sounds. Any particular drive configuration needed to replicate?

 

In the early AT days 1.2 MB floppy drives were dual speed 300 RPM and 360 RPM. Pretty sure mine are like that.

 

The drives have 80 tracks but they were intended to replace 8" drives IIRC. That never really happened.

 

On the ATR8000 we use the 1.2 MB drives as if they were 8" drives. 77 tracks, 26 sectors per track. They can't read 40 track disks in the Atari environment (at least I never found a means to do so).

 

I'll see what I can do about a sound samples If I remember the jumper settings the Teac FD50A's solenoids have to be heard to be believed. By contrast I can't even hear the stepper motors for the transports

 

-SteveSl

Edited March 10, 2017 by a8isa1

[a8isa1]

Sound samples of my 3 types of floppy disk drives formatting. Each recording taken with my phone 2 inches from the mech.

a8isa1_floppy_drive_sounds.zip

Edited March 11, 2017 by a8isa1

[tschak909]

In the early AT days 1.2 MB floppy drives were dual speed 300 RPM and 360 RPM. Pretty sure mine are like that.

 

The drives have 80 tracks but they were intended to replace 8" drives IIRC. That never really happened.

 

On the ATR8000 we use the 1.2 MB drives as if they were 8" drives. 77 tracks, 26 sectors per track. They can't read 40 track disks in the Atari environment (at least I never found a means to do so).

 

I'll see what I can do about a sound samples If I remember the jumper settings the Teac FD50A's solenoids have to be heard to be believed. By contrast I can't even hear the stepper motors for the transports

 

-SteveSl

 

8" drives on the ATR8000 were truly magical. You finally had enough storage to do big things...for things like word processing and database work, it was awesome. With OS/A 4.1, you could get full drive capacity, and decent sized filenames..but no subdirectories... meh, but on other systems you didn't get this either (CP/M, PET, etc... Apples didn't have much in the way of high capacity disks...and even Corvus systems just sliced up the disk into 140K chunks, but I digress...)

 

Of course, having enough space to store all your favorite games on a single disk, wasn't bad either

 

To get a 5.25 HD drive to read a DD disk, basically would require some extensive firmware changes (motor select for 300rpm and doing double-steps for tracks.)

 

Would we be discussing this in 1988 or so, there would be good cause to take the ATR8000 firmware, and drop in high speed SIO, double tracking for reading standard disks in the drive, etc.. but... times have moved on.

 

-Thom

[Kyle22]

. . .and even Corvus systems just sliced up the disk into 140K chunks, but I digress...). . .

 

 

Not any more. We have the Corvus APT SDX driver. Now we just need some Atari interfaces and some Corvuses (Corvi?)

 

[tschak909]

see..that is truly...bizarre... awesome..but bizarre

 

-Thom

[phaeron]

Minor update:

http://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-2.90-test28.zip

http://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-2.90-test28-src.zip

 

Fixes drive rotation sounds not being toggleable and also getting left stuck on in some cases.

 

Thanks for the drive sound recording, that'll be helpful.

 

Looked a bit more into CP/M and found that the ATR8000 apparently uses a weird track 0 configuration of a single 128 byte boot sector followed by 512 byte data sectors, which Altirra currently doesn't support. The emulator currently manages disk images by virtual sector, which doesn't map well when the full drive emulators do track reformats at the physical disk level.

[k1w1]

Ok, I think I have all of the current device ROMS for Altirra. I have also included 2 snapshots that show which roms attach to which device. The roms that have a "+" symbol in front of them are the ones that Altirra auto discovers. The others need to be attached manually.

 

I was a little unsure of the 1050 Turbo I & II rom sets ("turbo 1050-34" & "turbo 1050-35"). is that the correct association?

 

Please let me know if you see any errors or anything missing.

 

k1w1

 

PS. I just noticed that the "LDW 2000.rom" has the same checksum as the "Indus GT 1.2.rom". Further investigation revealed that the LDW 2000 disk drive was a clone of the Indus drive. I have now deleted the LDW 2000.rom from this set.

altirra bios.zip

Edited March 12, 2017 by k1w1

[toddtmw]

Ok, I think I have all of the current device ROMS for Altirra. I have also included 2 snapshots that show which roms attach to which device. The roms that have a "+" symbol in front of them are the ones that Altirra auto discovers. The others need to be attached manually.

 

I was a little unsure of the 1050 Turbo I & II rom sets ("turbo 1050-34" & "turbo 105-35"). is that the correct association?

 

Please let me know if you see any errors or anything missing.

 

k1w1

 

This is awesome! Thank you so much for posting this.

[DjayBee]

Hi phaeron,

I have a two small feature requests:

 

Currently Altirra does not allow to create an ATR from a PRO or ATX with error or phantom sectors.

Would it be possibile to have the user select to write it anyway - keeping sector contents of bad-state sectors and an arbitrary phantom instance?

Sometimes it is useful to just have all data from a disk to work on; like for dump comparison or as a starting point of cracking.

 

Can you add a red floppy icon for file associations of protected images in Explorer?

[Mclaneinc]

Is it that you just want it red as there's already an association for PRO files..

[DjayBee]

Is it that you just want it red as there's already an association for PRO files..

 

Yep, I stole this idea from ProSystem which marks protected images in red. Up to now I manually fed REG-files into RegEdit to accomplish it.

It helps a lot when you have ATX and ATR with the same name in a directory.

 

Find attached a modified ICO which I extracted from Altirra, painted it red in Gimp and exported it as ICO again. I hope it does not only look valid but is useable as well.

Altirra64-290-28_500.ico

[toddtmw]

I sent you a PM on this, but I think it would be helpful to add an "Are you sure" dialog for anything that would cause the emulated Atari to reset to make sure people don't lose anything they are working on.

[fujidude]

I sent you a PM on this, but I think it would be helpful to add an "Are you sure" dialog for anything that would cause the emulated Atari to reset to make sure people don't lose anything they are working on.

 

On the Atari, cases where you want or need to press reset usually don't present a way to save work anyway I thought. I guess it might be good as a check against accidental pressing of F5, but it should probably be an optional setting if it is there at all. I know I would get real sick of needing to confirm every reset real fast.

[toddtmw]

The one that got me was changing the CPU speed. I was working on a basic program. It was a little slow, I was like, I'll just bump the CPU speed up a little. And it cold reset the Atari. It makes sense that changing the CPU would require a reset but a warning would be nice.

[a8isa1]

Using ATR8000 for D2: with D1: being other results in Error 160 for access attemps to D2:.

 

This configuration I often use on real hardware. SIO2PC or SDrive would serve as my D1:

 

ATR8000 Emulation doesn't respond to Autoterm. ATR8000 should go into its monitor waiting for keystroke 'B' to boot CP/M.

 

I can't test with alternate communication program DT-80. That one requires pressing RESET on the back of the ATR8000 after DT-80 is started.

 

I also can't test with communication program built into Omniview XE OS. I think this is my own issue. I can put Omniview XE into 80 column mode but I can't figure out how to press OPTION+SELECT+START followed by RESET in Altirra.

 

Print buffer never seems to fill. It's large for a 64K ATR8000 but with no printer attached it should eventually fill.

 

I haven't gotten around to testing RS232. Is this implemented?

 

-SteveS

Edited March 12, 2017 by a8isa1

[Mclaneinc]

Hi Avery,

 

Was playing around with the Super Archiver and ran the diagnostic, I searched for threads but apart from talking about the implementation of the driver I didn't see any posts about the diagnostic fail from you but I did find one from Hias dating back to 2014 which note reason why the rom fails and offers a solution.

 

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/228814-searching-for-super-archiver-rom-dumps/?do=findComment&comment=3056497

 

I don't know if its any help or not?

Edited March 14, 2017 by Mclaneinc

[phaeron]

Update:
http://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-2.90-test29.zip
http://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-2.90-test29-src.zip

• ATR8000 now supports multiple drive select. Turns out the firmware selects and steps all four drives simultaneously on startup. This fixes running with D2: only.
• Implemented ATR8000 reset button.
• Lowered minimum baud rate for transmission from ATR8000. The reason ATRMON wasn't working was that the emulator was blocking transmission below ~16kbaud, and ATRMON uses 9600 baud.
• Updated ATBasic to 1.53 to fix an issue where a NEW didn't reset the READ/DATA pointer.
• Super Archiver now supports ROM write-through.

I also can't test with communication program built into Omniview XE OS. I think this is my own issue. I can put Omniview XE into 80 column mode but I can't figure out how to press OPTION+SELECT+START followed by RESET in Altirra.

Print buffer never seems to fill. It's large for a 64K ATR8000 but with no printer attached it should eventually fill.

I haven't gotten around to testing RS232. Is this implemented?

To do an O+S+S reset, use System > Hold Keys For Reset, press F2-F4, then do a warm reset.

 

Couldn't reproduce the print buffer issue. The emulator currently holds BUSY high, which prevents the ATR8000 from writing to the printer port. I did a test and was able to fill up the 64K printer buffer, though it took a while.

 

RS232 is not currently implemented.

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/228814-searching-for-super-archiver-rom-dumps/?do=findComment&comment=3056497

I don't know if its any help or not?

 

Thanks, that was helpful -- fix applied. Actually, I didn't know a schematic was available for the Super Archiver.

 

atbasic.bin

atbasicx.xex

[Keatah]

I sent you a PM on this, but I think it would be helpful to add an "Are you sure" dialog for anything that would cause the emulated Atari to reset to make sure people don't lose anything they are working on.

No it would not. It will become annoying real fast.

[Keatah]

On the Atari, cases where you want or need to press reset usually don't present a way to save work anyway I thought. I guess it might be good as a check against accidental pressing of F5, but it should probably be an optional setting if it is there at all. I know I would get real sick of needing to confirm every reset real fast.

Correct. Applewin Apple II emulator tried this option. People complained. They eventually put in another option to enable/disable the confirmation.

 

I prefer to not confirm resetting. And I speak with 20 years of emulator testing. A programmer or serious gamer should be saving their work periodically anyways.