Altirra 4.00 released

[_The Doctor__]

hmm things change...

but at least folks using an older version can get information and answers to them in the old thread. This becomes even more so a good thing as OS versions go away like XP, Vista, 7, 8.0, 8.1, and now 10... you will have to use the older versions to keep your retro emu boxes happy.

Edited April 15, 2023 by _The Doctor__

[351cougar]

the forum will still exist, its not getting deleted. Just was wondering as these seemed to be 4.10 and 4.20 beta issues in a 4.0 thread. OP can run it anyway they want , though, obviously. 

[Keatah]

Far be it from me to endorse not using older PC hardware or retro emu boxes, but there is likely a practical limit on how old emulator hardware should be. Anyhow. I still use Altirra 3.91 on a dot-com era PC. If I have issues with the old version I'll compare it against the latest test version, and then ask in the forum.

 

Practicality, reliability, integrity, versatility, uptime, bugs, incomplete features, and more, all come into play sooner or later. Best defense against old hardware and old versions of emus is migration. Migration is king. Operating systems are going to continue to come and go. Hardware will have its prime time moments and then sunset. Developer tools are going to leave older os'es behind. And old PCs will simply fade from the forefront.

 

With retrogaming/emulation having been around since the mid-1990's, going on 30 years now, migration and virtualization are essential tools in one's emulator box.

 

 

[Tempest]

Anyone have trouble with Altirra running under Wine?  It seems to run but I'm getting a black screen when I try and run a 5200 game, the splash screen never shows up.  The setup says all my roms are good.

[phaeron]

10 minutes ago, Tempest said:

Anyone have trouble with Altirra running under Wine?  It seems to run but I'm getting a black screen when I try and run a 5200 game, the splash screen never shows up.  The setup says all my roms are good.

Wine has a broken 10level9 implementation where if your graphics card doesn't support full shader model 4.0, it will break the display. Worse, Wine also lies to the program and pretends that it's working, so Altirra can't fall back to Direct3D 9. To fix this you need to explicitly disable Direct3D 11 in Options.

 

[Tempest]

5 minutes ago, phaeron said:

Wine has a broken 10level9 implementation where if your graphics card doesn't support full shader model 4.0, it will break the display. Worse, Wine also lies to the program and pretends that it's working, so Altirra can't fall back to Direct3D 9. To fix this you need to explicitly disable Direct3D 11 in Options.

 

I tried that, it's still not working.  I'm using a Radeon 7770 under Manjaro using Gnome if that helps any.

[phaeron]

7 hours ago, Tempest said:

I tried that, it's still not working.  I'm using a Radeon 7770 under Manjaro using Gnome if that helps any.

You can try changing the filtering mode to Bilinear or even unchecking Direct3D 9 as well to force-disable hardware acceleration. Not sure if that doesn't work.

 

[Tempest]

8 hours ago, phaeron said:

You can try changing the filtering mode to Bilinear or even unchecking Direct3D 9 as well to force-disable hardware acceleration. Not sure if that doesn't work.

 

I got it working, I think it had something to do with the streamlined vs authentic display settings.

 

BTW how do you take a screenshot?  I don't seen anything in the help about it.

[mirao]

5 hours ago, Tempest said:

I got it working, I think it had something to do with the streamlined vs authentic display settings.

 

BTW how do you take a screenshot?  I don't seen anything in the help about it.

View => Save Frame

May I ask how did you get the graphics working? I have similar issue on Ubuntu 23.04. I must disable the "Direct3D 9" setting (which means fallback to GDI) otherwise I get a gray screen only.

[Tempest]

2 minutes ago, mirao said:

View => Save Frame

May I ask how did you get the graphics working? I have similar issue on Ubuntu 23.04. I must disable the "Direct3D 9" setting (which means fallback to GDI) otherwise I get a gray screen only.

Is there a hot key for that?

 

I ended up resetting all the settings and when the wizard came up I selected the Streamlined settings instead of the Authentic ones.

[flashjazzcat]

ALT+F10.

[Tempest]

3 minutes ago, flashjazzcat said:

ALT+F10.

Ah ok.  Where does it put the screenshots? 

[flashjazzcat]

5 minutes ago, Tempest said:

Ah ok.  Where does it put the screenshots? 

Wherever you tell it to (it brings up a file selector).

[Tempest]

Hmm... ALT F10 is just maximizing the window for me.

[flashjazzcat]

The shortcut will be next to 'Save frame...' in the 'View' menu. Note you can customise shortcuts to your heart's content.

 

Ah: you're under WINE, I see.

 

Edited July 11, 2023 by flashjazzcat

[Tempest]

9 minutes ago, flashjazzcat said:

The shortcut will be next to 'Save frame...' in the 'View' menu. Note you can customise shortcuts to your heart's content.

 

Ah: you're under WINE, I see.

 

Ah ok that was the issue.  I just changed it to F10 (I dont use the debugger anyway) so it works now.

 

What's the difference between the screenshot and the true aspect ratio screenshot?  Are the screenshots not normally at the correct ratio?

[Ray Gillman]

Are there any atari 8-bit emulations that can run on android systems?

[+Stephen]

5 minutes ago, Ray Gillman said:

Are there any atari 8-bit emulations that can run on android systems?

There is - search for "Colleen Android".

[mirao]

On 12/29/2022 at 5:19 PM, mirao said:

Recently I upgraded Ubuntu 22.04 => 22.10 and since then Altirra stopped showing display output with Direct3D 9 (Tools => Options => Display => Direct3D 9).
Maybe related to new Wine 7.0 (previously there was Wine 6.0 in Ubuntu 22.04 and Direct3D 9 worked fine).

It seems to be an issue with a distribution's Wine only.
When I build Wine from sources (tested with 6.23, 7.22, 8.20), Direct3D 9 a 11 work in Altirra (tested by change of filtering mode).

It looks like the Wine version distributed since Ubuntu 22.10 (22.10, 23.04, 23.10) doesn't have built right stuff to be working with my HW correctly (CPU Ryzen 4700U, GPU AMD Radeon RX Vega 7).

I enabled Direct3D 9 because animation with Direct3D 11 is noticeably slower than with Diect3D 9 or with GDI.

[+skr]

On 7/11/2023 at 8:01 PM, flashjazzcat said:

Ah: you're under WINE, I see.

 

Me too. On Mac OS. So Screenshot is SHIFT+CMD+3 (or 4, depends on what I want). 🙃

[phaeron]

6 hours ago, mirao said:

It seems to be an issue with a distribution's Wine only.
When I build Wine from sources (tested with 6.23, 7.22, 8.20), Direct3D 9 a 11 work in Altirra (tested by change of filtering mode).

It looks like the Wine version distributed since Ubuntu 22.10 (22.10, 23.04, 23.10) doesn't have built right stuff to be working with my HW correctly (CPU Ryzen 4700U, GPU AMD Radeon RX Vega 7).

I enabled Direct3D 9 because animation with Direct3D 11 is noticeably slower than with Diect3D 9 or with GDI.

You can enable the HOSTDISP logging channel to find out what graphics API and mode Altirra is running in (/startuplog:hostdisp on the command line). The Vega not running well in Direct3D 11 is a red flag -- that GPU should support the full D3D11 feature set easily. Performance issues typically mean that the graphics API is dropping to software rendering through llvmpipe, which Altirra can't detect. Searching around, there are some messages that indicate that whether Wine is configured to use DXVK and whether Vulkan is available may be factors.

[mirao]

11 hours ago, phaeron said:

You can enable the HOSTDISP logging channel to find out what graphics API and mode Altirra is running in (/startuplog:hostdisp on the command line). The Vega not running well in Direct3D 11 is a red flag -- that GPU should support the full D3D11 feature set easily. Performance issues typically mean that the graphics API is dropping to software rendering through llvmpipe, which Altirra can't detect. Searching around, there are some messages that indicate that whether Wine is configured to use DXVK and whether Vulkan is available may be factors.

If you can look at the log ....

This is a log from a distribution's Wine, Direct3D 11: https://gist.github.com/mirao/5ed6224a2668a2cb8fc758d181a4e1ce , where I'm getting gray screen only.
And this is a log from a custom (my own built) Wine, Direct3D 11: https://gist.github.com/mirao/e1cc0f98a8fc09069dba1b46a87f958d , where a display output is correct (but worse performance than with Direct3D 9).

 

Thanks.

 

[mirao]

On 11/17/2023 at 2:12 PM, mirao said:

It seems to be an issue with a distribution's Wine only.
When I build Wine from sources (tested with 6.23, 7.22, 8.20), Direct3D 9 a 11 work in Altirra (tested by change of filtering mode).

An easier way than building from a source exists: using a binary from WineHQ repository: https://wiki.winehq.org/Ubuntu. Then Direct3D 9/11 works too.
So I would prefer to use this repository and not rely on internal Ubuntu repo.

On 11/17/2023 at 2:12 PM, mirao said:

It looks like the Wine version distributed since Ubuntu 22.10 (22.10, 23.04, 23.10) doesn't have built right stuff to be working with my HW correctly (CPU Ryzen 4700U, GPU AMD Radeon RX Vega 7).

I enabled Direct3D 9 because animation with Direct3D 11 is noticeably slower than with Diect3D 9 or with GDI.

Some more "performance" testing in Altirra:

• CPU Ryzen 4700U, GPU AMD Radeon RX Vega 7 - animation with Direct3D 11 is slower than with Direct3D 9
• CPU Ryzen 5800H, GPU AMD Radeon RX Vega 8 - animation with Direct3D 11 is the same as with Direct3D 9

As for various filter settings when using Direct3D 9 or 11, if I set "Filter mode => Point", image seems to be sharpest (it can be checked e.g. on GR.0 font), the same way as when I disable Direct3D completely.
If I use other filter modes + various value of "Filter sharpness", screen is still a bit blurred (less or more) when comparing with "Filter mode => Point".

[scotty]

So my Windows drive crapped out.   I have Altirra on a seperate drive.   When I reinstalled Winblows, and loaded Altirra in, it is like a fresh install.   Where does Altirra store the settings for bios names and stuff that I earlier set up, so I do not have to go back and do each one by hand?  I have a backup image of my C drive, so if it is in there, that is not a problem.   

 

I am not looking for the Bios files, as I have them in a subdirectory in my Altirra directory.  Just looking for the file or files that Altirra saves when you have all your BIOS files setup and you save them.

 

[+gnusto]

Altirra values in a default configuration are saved in the registry under Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\virtualdub.org\Altirra. Specifically you probably want "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\virtualdub.org\Altirra\Saved filespecs" for the locations of your BIOS files.

 

But honestly, I would just run the wizard again. There aren't a huge number of things to configure and Altirra scans for the BIOS files automatically given a hint of a directory.