Atari 800 Emulator (Linux) on a Chromebook. How to install?

[Marius]

Hi all,

 

Usually I am an Apple Mac user. But for another job I purchased a chromebook. A nice device and it has much more features than one would expect.

 

It has also a Linux environment. I would like to know: who has already successfully installed an Atari 800 emulator in this Linux environment? I am not so interested in 'Colleen' the Android Atari 800 emulator. 

 

I hope someone can give me here the complete instructions (it installs software through the terminal) and so far I was not very successful.

 

Thanks

Marius

[Peri Noid]

If you have a regular Linux installed, look at a package manager for your distro. It may simply have atari800 to be installed from it. 

[Marius]

35 minutes ago, Peri Noid said:

If you have a regular Linux installed, look at a package manager for your distro. It may simply have atari800 to be installed from it. 

The odd thing is, that it is Linux as a virtualization in Chrome OS. I tried to activate/install some kind of package manager, but somehow that failed as well.

 

 

[Panther]

Did you install another Linux instance other than ChromeOS?  If not, you'll need to do that first after enabling developer mode.

 

[+bhall408]

I'm one of the folks with Argon, and Argon supports Chromebook -- see attached picture...

 

You can install it from Google Play.

 

You can use touch (if your Chromebook is so equipped), keyboard or a USB or BT game controller.

 

We even went crazy and supported touch for the Atari 800 game Planetary Defense - you tap on the screen to fire the shots.

 

Argon is optimized for games - so if you are looking to do text games/etc this may not be what you want. But if it is to play games, well that is what we're here for!

 

[Marius]

On 9/4/2023 at 3:09 AM, Panther said:

Did you install another Linux instance other than ChromeOS?  If not, you'll need to do that first after enabling developer mode.

 

No. I am using the built in Linux feature. So I have to install it through text. Some apps (well on websites) can be installed this way. For instance: I installed the Viber chat client on my Chromebook in Linux (so it is a Linux app). I do not know how to install another version of Linux. And I was secretly hoping that it would be easy to install the Atari 800 emulator on this device. But I am afraid it is not going to happen.

[Marius]

On 9/4/2023 at 10:17 PM, bhall408 said:

I'm one of the folks with Argon, and Argon supports Chromebook -- see attached picture...

 

You can install it from Google Play.

 

You can use touch (if your Chromebook is so equipped), keyboard or a USB or BT game controller.

 

We even went crazy and supported touch for the Atari 800 game Planetary Defense - you tap on the screen to fire the shots.

 

Argon is optimized for games - so if you are looking to do text games/etc this may not be what you want. But if it is to play games, well that is what we're here for!

 

Hey Thanks, I will definitely check it out. 

It is actually not for playing games. I love to code and I would like to use the Chromebook for it. But I am afraid it is slightly too complicated what I want. 

 

[zzip]

16 hours ago, Marius said:

No. I am using the built in Linux feature. So I have to install it through text. Some apps (well on websites) can be installed this way. For instance: I installed the Viber chat client on my Chromebook in Linux (so it is a Linux app). I do not know how to install another version of Linux. And I was secretly hoping that it would be easy to install the Atari 800 emulator on this device. But I am afraid it is not going to happen.

If you have developer tools installed, it is fairly easy to build Atari800 from source 

[Marius]

On 9/7/2023 at 4:03 PM, zzip said:

If you have developer tools installed, it is fairly easy to build Atari800 from source 

Oh I am totally unknown to those procedures. I always was. I never managed to build a working executable from a source. 

[invisible kid]

Oops, nevermind, misunderstood.

Edited September 8, 2023 by invisible kid

[zzip]

On 9/8/2023 at 6:53 PM, Marius said:

Oh I am totally unknown to those procedures. I always was. I never managed to build a working executable from a source. 

For Atari800 it's pretty easy,   It can be done with just two or three commands after you download the source code

./autogen.sh  (the 5.0.0 version needs this run first, others versions don't)

./configure

sudo make install

 

That will work assuming you have all the build tools and dependencies installed.  (GCC, SDL and so forth)

you can pass parameters to configure to customize things

[Marius]

On 9/11/2023 at 4:05 PM, zzip said:

For Atari800 it's pretty easy,   It can be done with just two or three commands after you download the source code

./autogen.sh  (the 5.0.0 version needs this run first, others versions don't)

./configure

sudo make install

 

That will work assuming you have all the build tools and dependencies installed.  (GCC, SDL and so forth)

you can pass parameters to configure to customize things

Let me try that! Let's see what happens. Very interesting!

[Marius]

On 9/11/2023 at 4:05 PM, zzip said:

For Atari800 it's pretty easy,   It can be done with just two or three commands after you download the source code

./autogen.sh  (the 5.0.0 version needs this run first, others versions don't)

./configure

sudo make install

 

That will work assuming you have all the build tools and dependencies installed.  (GCC, SDL and so forth)

you can pass parameters to configure to customize things

Well it seems that nothing of what is needed is installed. It is a pity. I am not experienced enough (not at all to be honest) to get this done. It's a pity. But perhaps in the future it gets more user friendly.

 

I found some information about chromebrew (that would be those tools/dependencies or whatever it is called haha) but even that is not wanting to be installed on my Chromebook. 

 

I should dive into this, but the information on internet is so limited that I feel that this is going to be a very frustrating process. So I want to thank you for your suggestions and time. If you have a solution after you read this, please let me know... but somehow the Linux on ChromeOS seems not to be a complete Linux package. 

[invisible kid]

Too bad! I run a distro where I need to build from source and I can definitely relate about having to build dependent libraries. I'm not familiar with ChromeOS at all but it looks like it doesn't have or use a package manager like apt? If not, then I agree, it might be better to skip on ChromeOS in this instance. Maybe someone more familiar with it has a better answer.

[Marius]

43 minutes ago, invisible kid said:

Too bad! I run a distro where I need to build from source and I can definitely relate about having to build dependent libraries. I'm not familiar with ChromeOS at all but it looks like it doesn't have or use a package manager like apt? If not, then I agree, it might be better to skip on ChromeOS in this instance. Maybe someone more familiar with it has a better answer.

Of course I couldn't let it go... so I spent 1,5 hours on installing stuff. Yes I was able to install a lot using apt, but still not all. 

I found even a script that tries to install the atari800 emulator, it comes pretty far, but eventually it says that it failed to install. I will try to interpret the error log, but oddly enough it seems that the leftover error messages are about errors in the script itself.

 

I also tried to install an older version of the emulator, but also failed. I should try to install a common version of Linux first on another computer and get some experience in using Linux again (it has been a long time since I have been using it). Once I learned again some things, I might be also be able to get things done on the ChromeOS Linux thing...

[invisible kid]

Oh, awesome, that sounds good to me, you may be close. I don't directly use apt on a daily basis, but my experience shows that the debian packages are always configured correctly and play nice with other things. It does sound like a bit of work setting up an environment to build and having to install dev versions of everything. But being unfamiliar with ChromeOS my experiences may not carry over here.

Edited September 15, 2023 by invisible kid

[Jfcatari]

Here is how to install atari800 on the linux side of chromeOS

 

1. sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list
2. Add the following line to the end of the values listed:   deb https://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye contrib
   •    
3. sudo apt-get update
4. sudo apt-get install atari800

atari800 is not found in the main repos, but it is the contrib.

 

 

[Marius]

It works! Amazing! Thank you so much!

 

[Jfcatari]

Currently ChromeOS linux is using bullseye, you can update to bookworm using the following.  Bookworm includes atari800 version 5.0.0 while bullseye is using 4.1

 

https://medium.com/@ceroberoz/update-debian-bullseye-11-to-bookworm-12-in-chromeos-80509cf876d0

 

[Marius]

1 hour ago, Jfcatari said:

Currently ChromeOS linux is using bullseye, you can update to bookworm using the following.  Bookworm includes atari800 version 5.0.0 while bullseye is using 4.1

 

https://medium.com/@ceroberoz/update-debian-bullseye-11-to-bookworm-12-in-chromeos-80509cf876d0

 

You are absolutely amazing! Thank you so much, again!

I have another question. It seems that in previous version of Linux for chromebook one could enable the GPU. That feature (I read the instruction) seems nobody available?

I noticed that the emulator has a lot of trouble to run on 'full speed' even the sound in the Selftest sounds buggy. 

my Chromebook is brandnew with decent specs (i3 cpu), hardware from Q4/2022. I guess I need to do something to make the emulator run better. 

Do you have any suggestions about that too?

[Jfcatari]

There is not much that I can think of to boost the performance. 

 

How much memory do you have?  I know the chromebooks are not upgradeable memory wise like the Chromeboxes are.

I have an Acer i5 8thgen chromebox with 8 GB RAM and it seems just fine for me.

 

I have been working with Linux since 1994, so tinkering with Linux under Chrome OS, is like old hat to me.

Edited September 16, 2023 by Jfcatari

[Marius]

It is an Acer Chromebook Vero Made on 18 october 2022. It has i3 CPU and 8GB mem. 

It should run fine. So I do not understand yet why even the selftest sound sounds laggy/glitchy ... I will try to find a detailed specs chart.

[Marius]

https://www.acer.com/nl-nl/chromebooks/acer_chromebook_vero_514_cbv514-1h_cbv514-1ht/pdp/NX.KAJEH.005

This is exactly the Chromebook. The website is in Dutch, but I guess the specifications are pretty international...

 

[Jfcatari]

I just looked at the specs that should be a decent machine with a 12th gen i3 and 8 GB RAM.

 

Did you check here?

 

chrome://flags/

 

Type that in the chrome address bar and search for GPU.   Make sure everything is on.

 

 

[Marius]

16 hours ago, Jfcatari said:

I just looked at the specs that should be a decent machine with a 12th gen i3 and 8 GB RAM.

 

Did you check here?

 

chrome://flags/

 

Type that in the chrome address bar and search for GPU.   Make sure everything is on.

 

 

Hi, unfortunately that did not help, but I managed to downgrade the sound settings. That seems to work better. 

 

My last issue so far is that not all they keys seem to work. I can not use the " key and another few. That is also weird... but slowly but steady the emulator starts to run stable. So that is absolutely amazing.