Altirra 4.10 released

[Mclaneinc]

Ah, you are running it through a frontend via command lines..

 

ignore the /basic line, that's for internal basic only, just use a /cart:basiccartname

 

Easy way, just copy a basic cart into the main altirra dir so it's always pathed..

 

It's the same way as it's doing it via the Altirra interface.

 

Here's a sample command line

 

E:\Atari>altirra /hardware:800 /kernel:osb /cart:revb.rom /cartmapper 1 /disk floyd.atr

 

I simplified the rom and disk names..

 

The cartmapper switch isn't 100% needed, if you had a .car version of a basic rom you would not need to use that, if you take that out then you will get a prompt to ask what cart mapper it is, telling it ahead stops that. A car file has the needed info in it's header so negates that line..

 

Hopefully this gets you running..

 

It's been many years since I last played around with the command line part of Altirra

Edited January 24, 2023 by Mclaneinc

[LessNick]

15 hours ago, Mclaneinc said:

E:\Atari>altirra /hardware:800 /kernel:osb /cart:revb.rom /cartmapper 1 /disk floyd.atr

Thank you! everything work is fine. But had to specify the full path to the BASIC cartridge dump:

 

/cart:"e:\Emu\Atari\Altirra\roms\Atari Basic rev B.rom"

 

[Mclaneinc]

That's why I said it's easier to just put the basic cart in the same directory as Altirra, save's all that pathing..

 

Glad it's all going now..

 

Paul..

[LessNick]

Hmm, ... I ran into an interesting problem here. The game consists of three discs and each disc has 2 sides A and B.

If you install all 3 disks at the same time, that is, six files,

 

 

and then try to turn the disk over, then for some reason it is not the first A/B floppy disk that changes, but the first and last in the list.

 

The logic of the “Rotate Up / Down” actions is a little unclear.

In this case, it turns out that you can actually connect only one floppy disk, with two sides, and only turn them over.

 

Dear @phaeron, it may be logical to slightly expand the /disk argument, specifying in which of the drives I want to place the floppy image and specify which side it is,

for example /d1_side_a and /d1_side_b, /d2_side_a /d2_side_b etc.

 

Now, if you just list several /disk arguments, they are connected in order and there is no way to specify which drive to use.

 

 

 

 

[VinsCool]

Hi there, I just wanted to say I really, really like the improvements with the Debugger/Disassembly/Sources Listing windows, this is just so much more fun to use and play around with the functionalities while I'm also working on my own little dumb programming projects  

I've come to really enjoy combining it with the Cheater features to actually "patch" my code on the fly to test some specific setups  

I'm always having a great time using the Altirra Emulator! haha!

[phaeron]

14 hours ago, LessNick said:

The logic of the “Rotate Up / Down” actions is a little unclear.

In this case, it turns out that you can actually connect only one floppy disk, with two sides, and only turn them over.

The rotate up/down commands don't have anything to do with sides or any labels on the disks. They simply rotate around the disk images between all of the disk drives in one direction or another. It's a way to make it easier to swap around disks on one drive by stashing disks in other drive slots, nothing more.

 

14 hours ago, LessNick said:

Dear @phaeron, it may be logical to slightly expand the /disk argument, specifying in which of the drives I want to place the floppy image and specify which side it is,

for example /d1_side_a and /d1_side_b, /d2_side_a /d2_side_b etc.

 

Now, if you just list several /disk arguments, they are connected in order and there is no way to specify which drive to use.

Sorry, but this is more than I want to try to support in the disk subsystem. It's not common to be swapping disks on multiple drives in an Atari system and trying to make the emulator handle all the different variants of this would be complicated.

[LessNick]

2 hours ago, phaeron said:

Sorry, but this is more than I want to try to support in the disk subsystem.

Well there is no way. It was worth try to asking anyway

 

Another question, is it possible to add another argument that would enable/disable vbxe-board, like for example as /[no]covox ?

[Mclaneinc]

A way around that would be to make a profile with it enabled and then load that profile via the command line.

[LessNick]

5 hours ago, Mclaneinc said:

A way around that would be to make a profile with it enabled and then load that profile via the command line.

Unfortunately, the idea with the profile does not suit me.

In the near future I will show a small project, why I needed all these troubles with command line arguments.

 

[_The Doctor__]

Flip/Rotate.

This has been at issue for ages,

It's clear that each drive holds a disk and each disk has 2 sides. For accuracy there should be 2 image positions for each Drive ID Slot. They should be able to be flipped as with a real drive. Primarily folks rotate the stack as a ghetto flipping mechanism, and there's a knack to doing that.

You could still rotate the entire stack of drive ID's if you wanted to keep that as well.

I see the advantages to both.

It's not an onerous thing to do compared to some of the major work that's been pulled off for the emulator to date.

 

Edited January 26, 2023 by _The Doctor__

[Mclaneinc]

To be honest, with anything that's multi drive it's normally 2 disks / 4 sides with the rare 4 - 6 disk games, but I find it so much easier to just drag and mount to the drive needed for the swap. I find the rotate side slows the process down. With the digital stuff there's no actual flipping anymore, so the drag and drop suits me.

[Mclaneinc]

1 hour ago, LessNick said:

Unfortunately, the idea with the profile does not suit me.

In the near future I will show a small project, why I needed all these troubles with command line arguments.

 

Can't say I understand, the profile idea is just another command line switch, I've numerous profiles, and it's as simple as /profile:nameofprofile. So no real difference to what you are already doing.

 

I shall be interested as to what the project is...

 

As for a /vbxe switch, I must admit I was surprised not to see one considering the other available CLI arguments, but only Avery knows if he will make one or why he didn't..

[ascrnet]

Hi @phaeron,

 

You changed something in the joystick configurations because the Joy 2B+ configuration is not working in the new version and it was working in the previous one😅

regards

 

[phaeron]

18 hours ago, LessNick said:

Well there is no way. It was worth try to asking anyway

 

Another question, is it possible to add another argument that would enable/disable vbxe-board, like for example as /[no]covox ?

I've been moving away from adding switches per device because they don't scale, especially with all the devices supported and all of the parameters that devices now have. For instance, the /covox switch doesn't expose the device parameters, it simply always creates Covox device with defaults. It's there for legacy reasons. VBXE has both memory address and core parameters to set. Plus it's not well defined what happens if you use those switches and there is already a similar device, but with different parameters.

 

What I could do is make it a bit easier to add devices from the command line, at least with defaults. But at some point, it does reach the level where it's unwieldy to specify a device tree on the command line. It's not intended to expose every parameter that could be configured out to the command line, there's just too many of them.

 

55 minutes ago, ascrnet said:

Hi @phaeron,

 

You changed something in the joystick configurations because the Joy 2B+ configuration is not working in the new version and it was working in the previous one😅

That's odd, I didn't change the input map serialization or encoding. Which version did you have before, and what was supposed to be in that input map? Joy 2B+ is not a standard input map, so it would have had to be a custom one.

 

[LessNick]

23 hours ago, Mclaneinc said:

I shall be interested as to what the project is...

very soon

 

15 hours ago, phaeron said:

VBXE has both memory address and core parameters to set. Plus it's not well defined what happens if you use those switches and there is already a similar device, but with different parameters.

Clearly understood. a bit of a pity, but... ok

[LessNick]

@phaeron I ran into an interesting problem. If you select the "ALL OS-B" profile in the emulator, then the game loads without problems.

 

If you specify altirra /kernel:os-b as an argument or even select the full profile like /profile:"ALL OS-B", the boot stumbles on the 1st sector and nothing happens further.

 

It seems that something is missing in the settings, although in theory the same profile should have included all the necessary components.

Printer's Devil (198x)(BCI Software)(US)[OS-B][k-file].atr

[www.atarimania.com]

The program runs fine, it's a non-autobooting disk requiring The Print Shop to access the files.

[Mclaneinc]

Just read Atarimania's reply and that explains it, I was at the point of disassembling the first track when I read it, I'd tried every way to boot the disk available.

 

Still trying to work out where this All OSB setting is and how the OP got the disk to boot when there's no real track code on sector one.

[_The Doctor__]

because altirra can run stand alone .xex and such, it has it's own sort of patch in load/run. In the command line maybe that doesn't always happen or might need to be ?switched? on

Edited January 28, 2023 by _The Doctor__

[ascrnet]

On 1/26/2023 at 11:36 PM, phaeron said:

That's odd, I didn't change the input map serialization or encoding. Which version did you have before, and what was supposed to be in that input map? Joy 2B+ is not a standard input map, so it would have had to be a custom one.

 

in Altirra 4.01 works without problems, but in the new version something changed. I attach a picture of the old version and working without problems. Also the quick test xex I made and a video I made some time ago of how to configure the joy 2B+.

 

I get the impression that you are not taking multiple controls at the same time. 😅

 

The Joy 2B+ on pins 5 and 9 needs the values of 1 or 224. where 224 is button pressed. i think we talked about this a long time ago and it became active since Altirra version 3.20.😉

[phaeron]

https://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-4.20-test1.zip
https://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-4.20-test1-src.7z

• Save state rework:
  • Added Covox, R-Time 8, U1MB, VBXE, and XEP80 save state support.
  • Added partial SIDE 1/2, SIDE 3, MyIDE, and BlackBox save state support. Save states will not work if saved during a disk transfer; there is now a warning if a save state is attempted during one.
  • Axlon and 65C816 high (linear) memory are now saved.
  • Fixed a bug with SKSTAT not being saved properly, which caused stuck keys.
  • Fixed some extended memory not saving properly in 128K and 320K modes.
  • Fixed DP register not being saved in 65C816 mode.
  • Added thumbnails to save state files. They are not used in the emulator yet, however.
• Updated file association registration:
  • The placeholder app registration created by Explorer is removed on registration to get rid of the duplicate app entry.
  • Fixed an issue where the Windows shell might not be updated immediately after changing file type registrations.
  • There are now command-line switches to have the emulator register or unregister file types in silent mode.
  • Added a dialog explaining how to navigate the brain-dead Windows 10/11 Default Apps settings UI.
• Debugger: It is now possible to escape a symbol name that starts with @, e.g. #@current.
• Debugger: VBXE blit logging/dumping now has a compact display mode, and the .vbxe_bl command can now dump a blit list at any local address.
• Debugger: Zero page addresses are now loaded from CC65 debug info.
• Cassette: Added data-as-audio playback support for raw FSK and PWM blocks in .cas files. There are some harmonics from turbo tapes when doing this due to jitter from the 10KHz resolution in raw .cas blocks which appears hard to filter out; Altirra's internal tape precision is 31KHz but a pulse adjustment pass would be needed to take advantage of that.
• Input: Fixed POT lines being grounded improperly when binding a digital (binary) input to the analog paddle knob.
• Cartridge: Fixed the Phoenix and Blizzard cartridge types to also disable the cart on CCTL reads.
• Cartridge: Added support for the Williams 16K cartridge type.

 

[LessNick]

21 hours ago, Mclaneinc said:

Still trying to work out where this All OSB setting is and how the OP got the disk to boot when there's no real track code on sector one.

ALL OS-B is a profile with all checkboxes selected

[LessNick]

23 hours ago, www.atarimania.com said:

The program runs fine, it's a non-autobooting disk requiring The Print Shop to access the files.

If I understood correctly, then the disk is not bootable and cannot be loaded in any way on a real ATARI with OS-B?

 

I would very much like to confirm or deny this version, does anyone have the opportunity to load this disk on real hardware?

[Mclaneinc]

46 minutes ago, LessNick said:

ALL OS-B is a profile with all checkboxes selected

You sort of made it sound like a built in mode, when it's a profile you created..

 

Now I understand..

 

As for if that disk is boot-able on real hardware, I'd say 99.9999999%, NO.. All disks read the first sector to show in what way they will boot, that disk has no real loading code, it's purely a data disk (with protection I presume). PS @phaeron, Williams 16K carts?

 

I have one that's 16K, a proto of Blaster, but I'm sure that worked before...It's the only 16K Williams cart I have (well that is named as one, I may have others with no naming?, care to name / point out some please?

Edited January 29, 2023 by Mclaneinc

[LessNick]

Dear @phaeron, can you please tell me how to work with Turbo 2000 files?

If I just select a wav file through the menu "File→Cassette→Load", then an attempt to load automatically begins and since this Turbo naturally does not happen. At the same time, I can stop, start recording without interruption, wind forward / backward, etc.

 

If I connect a cartridge with Turbo 2000 firmware (I tried completely different versions), then after the reset, an attempt to boot normally starts again, while the cartridge launch is completely ignored.

 

If I turn off automatic startup in the Altirra settings (uncheck the Auto-boot on startup checkbox), then the cartridge starts up normally, but the cassette control no longer works.

I can't click "Play" or otherwise start playback.

 

Am I doing something wrong or is something broken?

 

I found a youtube video of a person loading a Turbo 2000 into an Altirra, but it's a very old version and the controls were very different.