Altirra 4.10 released

[scotty]

8 hours ago, phaeron said:

Can't reproduce and VirusTotal looks clean.

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/62e562299579aadab377b8ae0cafbe7e487ffeff0b7da4afaea968e554333340/detection

 

If there was a Defender issue, it's been fixed.

 

I'm not opposed to it, but I don't have any current plans. Run-ahead has pretty large implications on emulation architecture and also introduces some jank that needs to be smoothed over, like audio discontinuities.

Strange....  I redownloaded it and same thing if I click Altirra or Altirra64.    If I click the additions.atr it loads Altirra fine and boots the ATR.  I am at a total loss.   never seen it behave like that before.

[+gnusto]

14 minutes ago, scotty said:

Strange....  I redownloaded it and same thing if I click Altirra or Altirra64.    If I click the additions.atr it loads Altirra fine and boots the ATR.  I am at a total loss.   never seen it behave like that before.

This is Windows "smart" defender behavior. It's triggered because the Windows servers haven't seen enough instances of that version of Altirra being launched (yet). If you are fast on the download as they come out, this has always happened. There is no virus indicated here, it's just saying it doesn't know for sure what this is, not that it detected a virus.

 

Edit because I forgot to mention: hit "More Info" and then "Run Anyway". Avery didn't give you a virus.

[+DrVenkman]

11 hours ago, gnusto said:

Edit because I forgot to mention: hit "More Info" and then "Run Anyway". Avery didn't give you a virus

This.

 

I get the same warning every time with every new version. Avery hasn’t root-kitted my PC yet and it’s been years. I doubt he’s going to.

[kenp]

40 minutes ago, DrVenkman said:

This.

 

I get the same warning every time with every new version. Avery hasn’t root-kitted my PC yet and it’s been years. I doubt he’s going to.

Good to have seen this.  i'll be installing an Altirra one day soon, i hope.

[scotty]

On 8/30/2023 at 12:14 AM, gnusto said:

 

Edit because I forgot to mention: hit "More Info" and then "Run Anyway". Avery didn't give you a virus.

For sure....   I know Avery would never do that.  Been with Altirra for many, many years, and this was the first time it ever happened.  Thank you for the info.

 

 

Edited August 31, 2023 by scotty

[woj]

Hi Avery, are there any plans / will to have the Sophia GTIA chip emulated in Altirra? The extension is not really that relevant from the the emulation point of view, however, testing things as simple as Sophia chip detection are a bit of a pain without this support, but there is one emulation relevant feature, it supports true interlace mode for displays  It also has some quirks that got me ages to sort out, in particular, it seems the Sophia special registers cannot be read and written in one session of SPECEN flag (I mean, they can, but it messes up the internal configuration). 

 

Or is there somewhere, but I missed it...?

[+DjayBee]

7 minutes ago, woj said:

it seems the Sophia special registers cannot be read and written in one session of SPECEN flag (I mean, they can, but it messes up the internal configuration).

To me this sounds like a question for @Simius

[woj]

Just now, DjayBee said:

To me this sounds like a question

It's not a question, it's a fact of life that would have to be considered should the chip be ever emulated. An undocumented feature if you will.

[Mclaneinc]

No issues with Altirra in the last two updates, Windows Defender has not kicked in once, like Wrathchild, on Win10 Home..

 

Never used read ahead on Denise or other emulators, but it's sounds like a nice feature. If Avery adds it in the distant future then great, if not then there's probably good reason why not.

[Mclaneinc]

On 8/30/2023 at 5:05 PM, DrVenkman said:

This.

 

I get the same warning every time with every new version. Avery hasn’t root-kitted my PC yet and it’s been years. I doubt he’s going to.

Sounds like a challenge to me   (Obviously I jest, I'd not wish that on anyone)

[phaeron]

https://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-4.20-test24.zip
https://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-4.20-test24-src.7z

• Add full 1030 modem emulation.
• Fixed 8048 ADDC A,@Rn and JTF instructions.
• Fixed a bug with some 1030 device options being sticky, particularly the answer setting.
• Improved debugger source file resolution -- the debugger now attempts to resolve source file references against the module path and the paths of any open source windows.

Probably not surprising after I posted the dumps for the 1030 chips -- I had propped the firmware on a munged version of the XF551 emulation to confirm some things, and it wasn't too hard to get the full modem working from there. A couple of things are currently missing: analog loopback, and the relay sound. The 1030 has an audible 'twing' from a small relay when it puts the phone on-hook, which is most noticeable when pulse dialing and more characteristic than the default short thud that Altirra plays.

 

[VinsCool]

Hello, I have some bug report from the most recent version.

Based on the previous post I've made in the thread regarding assembly sources path, I'm getting very similar results, but this time it ends in a program crash.

 

As far as I could tell, it behaves the same as I previously described, which was to open the File Browser despite having the files listed already.

This time however, when I press the Cancel button from the File Browser, and try to select the same file, it would throw this error message:

 

I can dismiss it without any problem, so that's interesting.

Trying to open the file for the third time will then lead to an unavoidable program crash:

 

 

I suspect that it tried to use the NULL path directly, based on the error code itself.

I am aware that I am a WINE user here, so this is again very likely to be a quirk exclusive to it.

Attached below is the crash dump file generated for reference.

 

AltirraCrash.mdmp

 

[EDIT] Just to make it clear: If I used the File Browser as intended to open the files, it would be working perfectly fine as soon as the first file was loaded to the debugger.

I've had similar issued with other programs before, so I am not too worried about it.

Edited September 4, 2023 by VinsCool
Addendum, and I can't English today.

[VinsCool]

Update: I experienced another crash.

This time it happened immediately when I tried to open the same source file, which was previously opened in the same program instance just a moment earlier.

The only thing I did differently was to close the Debugger, before re-opening it to test some stuff in my program, and trying to load the assembly sources immediately borked the process.

 

AltirraCrash.mdmp

[mirao]

I can confirm similar issue as @VinsCool. The version 24 is buggy, the version 23 works fine.

 

Steps:

1. Run Altirra
2. Debug => Open source file
3. Open a source file (an ASM file)
4. You get an error instead of file open in a viewer:
   
5. If you close the error dialog and try to open the source file again, Altirra will crash in a few seconds
   AltirraCrash.zip

My environment is Ubuntu 23.04, Wine 8.0

My Altirra configuration:

Base system	PAL 800XL (320K)
Additional devices	Host device (H:), Printer (P:), MidiMate
OS firmware	Atari XL/XE OS ver.3 [29F133F7]
Mounted images	None

 

[wildstar87]

Is it possible to "flash" the emulated VBXE to the recently release NTSC core, or is that something that you would have to change in the emulation?

[flashjazzcat]

Change in the emulator.

[phaeron]

https://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-4.20-test25.zip
https://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-4.20-test25-src.7z

• Fixed debugger crash when opening source windows after having closed one, and tweaked the lookup algorithm.
• Fixed debugger windows that did not implement context menus properly when activated from the keyboard.
• Added context menu options to the source window to open the file in Explorer or the default editor.
• 1030 relay sound is now played instead of generic sound when going on-hook.
• 1030 full emulator now supports analog loopback.

1 hour ago, wildstar87 said:

Is it possible to "flash" the emulated VBXE to the recently release NTSC core, or is that something that you would have to change in the emulation?

No, Altirra doesn't support VBXE core flashing. FPGA cores are raw digital circuitry and also stored in a proprietary binary format, so they're not easy to interpret and would be very slow to use. To give you an idea, when AMD first introduced AMD64, they published a Simics-based emulation of the Athlon 64 so OS devs could develop on it. It ran at 4MHz equivalent, on a highly optimized, precompiled simulation generated by a commercial simulator.

 

The NTSC core isn't needed anyway as Altirra never embedded the laoo palette -- it presets palette 0 to the current palette in the emulator, so it was already effectively built in. This was partly to avoid dependencies on the laoo palette, and partly to avoid the ugly mismatch of improperly using a PAL palette in NTSC mode. This meant that programs didn't use quite the same palette as on the actual hardware even on PAL, but relying or modifying on the specific colors in palette 0 was not a great idea anyway, more so now that there are cores with the Rocky or NTSC Contemporary palette as well as the U1MB plugin.

[VinsCool]

I can confirm the crash no longer occur for me.
I get the same behaviour I had previously, which is just a single File Browser that could be dismissed, then everything will work perfectly.

[jenorton]

Hi Avery and others:

 

I just gave a very brief demo of Altirra's new accessibility feature using UI automation on a blindness-related podcast, called "Living Blindfully".

 

Since version 4.20 is still in testing phase, I didn't give a Web address yet.  I do, however, plan to post the address to the podcast once v4.20 comes out of beta.

 

If you'd like to listen to my brief demo, you can go to this address:

 

http://livingblindfully.com/246

 

Look for the segment that says, "Be my AI and more old technology that is new again [1:37:54]"

 

Sorry this was a quick-and-dirty demo.  Again, I'll mention more once the v4.20 release comes out.

 

Cheers!

[+DjayBee]

Help please regarding the "Printer Output" window.

 

I wanted it big and dragged it out of the main window.

Afterwards I wanted it to return to the main window but unfortunately docked it in the same place as the display.

Now I cannot move it anymore because it does not have a "title bar" like the "Call Stack" in the below screenshot. I also cannot close it because the "X" is missing too.

[phaeron]

3 hours ago, DjayBee said:

Help please regarding the "Printer Output" window.

 

I wanted it big and dragged it out of the main window.

Afterwards I wanted it to return to the main window but unfortunately docked it in the same place as the display.

Now I cannot move it anymore because it does not have a "title bar" like the "Call Stack" in the below screenshot. I also cannot close it because the "X" is missing too.

Select the printer output pane and then use Window > Undock.

[phaeron]

https://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-4.20-test26.zip
https://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-4.20-test26-src.7z

• Added screen reader support for reading out foreground/background colors (Windows+F or NVDA+F).
• Added 835 modem full emulation.
• Performance Analyzer can now load monitor execution traces from Atari800WinPLus 4.0 (TRON/TROFF).

This is a bit of a grab bag, so going down the list in more detail:

 

The UIAutomation code now supports text formatting attributes, so it can report foreground/background colors. Interestingly, NVDA seems somewhat better at naming colors than Windows Narrator, as Narrator will report "teal" and "maroon" for colors that NVDA reports more accurately as "blue" and "red".

 

The 835 modem emulation is based on the 1030 emulation, with adjustments for the 835 hardware. It requires the 835 firmware as there is currently no high-level emulation; the 835 hardware and firmware are so close to the 1030 that this was a relatively quick adjustment. Unlike the 1030, the 835 has no boot support and no tone dialing support, but interestingly it does support playing phone audio, which the 1030 doesn't. So the 835 shipped with phone audio but no tone dialing, the 1030 shipped with tone dialing and autobooting but no phone audio, and then finally the XM301 had both phone audio and tone dialing but no autobooting. As far as I can tell the 835 doesn't seem to have shipped with a T: handler at all, so pretty much the only thing that officially could drive it was TeleLink II.

 

The Performance Analyzer can now import a monitor trace generated by Atari800WinPLus 4.0's TRON/TROFF commands, which is essentially a big text file with one line per instruction. This requires some hokey tricks to re-assemble the instructions back to opcodes and guessing at a bunch of missing information, but it's enough to get some usable traces. For instance, the importer reconstructs an approximation of SIO traffic based on POKEY register accesses, so here's a trace of the SuperDOS 5.1 issue in Atari800WinPLus, where SuperDOS tries to do a high-speed Status command and A8WP responds with Error instead of NAK:

The importer does have to fill in quite a bit of missing information. There is no indirect effective address (EA) information, no halted/unhalted cycle accounting, and it has to guess when interrupts occur and what type. The serial traffic timing is approximated since the trace only shows when the CPU read SERIN or wrote SEROUT, and not when the shifters actually ran. The instruction trace can also have the wrong opcodes for some undocumented instructions, since the importer actually has to run an assembler to recover the opcodes. But it actually works better than I thought it would.

 

Note that Altirra's binary trace format is more compact than this text format. The raw TRON trace above, which is just under 4 seconds, generated a 116MB raw text file. It compresses to 5.9MB with .zip and 1.1MB with .7z, but is 349K when resaved to .attrace format. Text trace with instruction logging is of course easy to implement, but it doesn't scale too well to four minute long traces.

 

As for why the importer only supports output from the older Atari800WinPLus 4.0, it's just because newer versions of Atari800 don't seem to have the monitor trace functionality compiled into the official Windows releases -- they're built with the TRACE command disabled.

 

[kenp]

I was intending to download Altirra one day, hopefully soon, but am under the impression that it does not come with the ROM images from the computers it is emulating.  Are these the ROM images that I've seen mentioned as being taken down in this new Atari take over or AtariAge?  If so are there alternate sources of these ROM images (that Atari cannot control?)

[reifsnyderb]

3 minutes ago, kenp said:

I was intending to download Altirra one day, hopefully soon, but am under the impression that it does not come with the ROM images from the computers it is emulating.  Are these the ROM images that I've seen mentioned as being taken down in this new Atari take over or AtariAge?  If so are there alternate sources of these ROM images (that Atari cannot control?)

Altirra comes with it's own compatible ROM.  If you want to download Atari ROMs, a quick google search will fine them.  Also, Atari ROM source code is on this site and I've confirmed it compiles.

[kenp]

1 hour ago, reifsnyderb said:

Altirra comes with it's own compatible ROM.  If you want to download Atari ROMs, a quick google search will fine them.  Also, Atari ROM source code is on this site and I've confirmed it compiles.

Many thanks for the reassurance. 

 

I'm old and I've seen too many Intellectual Property owners start off all nice and friendly only to turn on the community once they get what they want from it.