Altirra 4.20 released

[w1k]

CAS files works good, 9000 baud speed

 

 

[LessNick]

1 hour ago, w1k said:

CAS files works good, 9000 baud speed

Is it possible to attach here a file from the video?

[scotty]

13 hours ago, phaeron said:

https://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-4.30-test15.zip
https://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-4.30-test15-src.7z

• Added sound samples for 1025 and 1029 printers.
• Printer graphics window sends focus back to display on Esc and supports touch scrolling.
• Added Remove and Settings to device tree context menu.
• Added Turbo D turbo tape mode support.
• Debugger: .diskdumpsec command now takes -I to display INTERNAL characters.
• Fixed a crash when removing devices when an accelerated CIO operation is in progress.

1025 and 1029 now make some representative sounds, particularly the 1029, thanks to rather clean audio from the atarionline.pl video. 1025 has line feed sound, but not 1029 as I couldn't get a clean enough sample yet. The pin sound is still a bit quiet, but that might have to wait for the audio pipeline to be reconfigured, as all sound sample playback is currently behind the second high-pass filter.

 

Turbo D support is currently untested, I verified that the PORTA bit is responding, but don't have a loader to test it.

 

Hi Avery.  Ape 32-in-1 is broke with this release.  Worked fine on test14.  Menu shows up, but not recognizing any key presses.

 

[w1k]

7 hours ago, LessNick said:

Is it possible to attach here a file from the video?

here

capek-v3.cas

[LessNick]

10 hours ago, w1k said:

here

capek-v3.cas 20.46 kB · 4 downloads

Hmm?…

 

[w1k]

1 hour ago, LessNick said:

Hmm?…

 

you mean loader?

 

turbo-dnm-dmos.zip

[LessNick]

5 hours ago, w1k said:

 

turbo-dnm-dmos.zip 2.99 kB · 2 downloads

Yes, this is exactly the version I used.

Booting from device N, if I understand correctly.

Cassette player started, but the CAS file itself has no sounds and visual stripes.

 

[w1k]

13 minutes ago, LessNick said:

Yes, this is exactly the version I used.

Booting from device N, if I understand correctly.

Cassette player started, but the CAS file itself has no sounds and visual stripes.

 

try this settings

[LessNick]

Just now, w1k said:

try this settings
 

Oh, how complicated it all is. This is not a standard tape recorder port.

Thanks I'll know.

[Bennet]

On 6/13/2024 at 12:58 PM, shanti77 said:

It's not like this all the time, but when slowdowns occur, even a restart doesn't help. Atari800 running at the same time works smoothly with other applications.
Previously, when I worked on Windows 10 + Geforce 1050, there were no such problems.

Did you ever figure this out? There was an issue on AMD systems that would cause stuttering in some cases. My system also had it and it was really annoying, but a BIOS update fixed it:

Intermittent System Stutter Experienced with fTPM Enabled on Windows® 10 and 11 (amd.com)

[scotty]

On 7/3/2024 at 4:24 PM, scotty said:

Hi Avery.  Ape 32-in-1 is broke with this release.  Worked fine on test14.  Menu shows up, but not recognizing any key presses.

 

Disregard.  Rebooted and it was fine.  Mods please remove post.

 

[+yetanothertroll]

12 hours ago, scotty said:

Disregard.  Rebooted and it was fine.  Mods please remove post.

 

Altirra does appear to stress Windows in new and exciting ways. I only seem to get BSODs when Altirra's running, often with kernel error codes I've never seen before in 30 years of scratching my head at NT BSODs, and if Altirra's running on a UHD screen, the Windows shell seems to up and quit more often, sometimes taking Altirra down with it, sometimes not. Save those diskette images early, save often!

[+Larry]

I need help with printing to a Windows printer (WiFi connected using Win11).  I presume this is possible.  I've looked up other printing threads, but nothing quite seems to fit.  I'm using 4.30, test 15.  And I have added the high level printer like this 

 

Computer > Printer > Printer Output (is grayed out) > File Writer -- (path) test.txt  (I presume no rom is needed for the high level device?)

 

At this point, I'm just trying to print out a hard copy of a Basic listing.  When I try LIST "P:", Altirra Basic 1.58 pauses like the data is being sent somewhere, but the printer output window remains blank.  The test.txt files stays empty, also.

 

I must be missing some steps -- HELP, please!

 

Edit: Found it.  Problem solved.

 

 

 

[www.atarimania.com]

This is a weird one... I may just have stupidly untriggered something by accident but I can't get the first port to respond anymore. I normally use the arrow keys but none of the other options function either. The second port works just fine. Does it have to do with the mappings?

 

Used an old version of the emulator when this happened the other day but just downloaded the new release and I get the same result.

 

Thanks!

[www.atarimania.com]

I feel like an idiot... Disregard what I wrote above, the problem was a joystick dongle that I forgot to remove!

Edited July 7 by www.atarimania.com

[+DjayBee]

52 minutes ago, www.atarimania.com said:

I feel like an idiot... Disregard what I wrote above, the problem was a joystick dongle that I forgot to remove!

LOL, been there already several times. Last time after trying the German Filemanager+ - which I guess was it for you as well.

[www.atarimania.com]

16 minutes ago, DjayBee said:

LOL, been there already several times. Last time after trying the German Filemanager+ - which I guess was it for you as well.

Bingo 

[+yetanothertroll]

On 7/6/2024 at 6:44 AM, Larry said:

[...]

 

At this point, I'm just trying to print out a hard copy of a Basic listing.  When I try LIST "P:", Altirra Basic 1.58 pauses like the data is being sent somewhere, but the printer output window remains blank.  The test.txt files stays empty, also.

 

I must be missing some steps -- HELP, please!

 

Edit: Found it.  Problem solved.

 

How did you solve it? Have you tried the new graphics printing emulations?

[+Larry]

All I've done thus far is to print out a couple of Basic listing's.  Nothing fancy, yet.  After I set up the Altirra printer under devices, I LOADed the Basic programs, then did a LIST "P:".  After a few seconds, a text file will appear on your desktop called TEST.  Click on it, and then open it with Notepad (or other text software).  Bingo!  If for some reason your file path is different, then the file will end up at that path description.  Then it's a matter of printing from Notepad.

 

[phaeron]

https://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-4.30-test16.zip
https://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-4.30-test16-src.7z

• 32-in-1 fixed to properly check Select button and to work with the Esc use-current menu option.
• Block broken drag-and-drop from Explorer 7z/rar archives.
• SIO/CIO acceleration is now better at checking the Break key.
• Rewrote enhanced CIO text mode support.

The issue with drag-and-drop from 7z/rar archives in Explorer is an annoying one: the new Windows File Explorer archive support seems to be broken and doesn't support any proper data types in its drag-and-drop data object other than a shell ID list, which is useless to get the actual data. There was a bug in Altirra where it wasn't checking the data formats early enough, so it looked like you could drag from such archives, but it would fail at the last minute without warning. It now shows a blocked cursor to indicate that the drop can't be accepted. There doesn't seem to be any usable way to get data out other than to tell it to copy to a temporary file, which is annoying. This doesn't affect .zip archives, which do support stream interfaces.

 

Enhanced CIO text mode has been rewritten:

It is now a regular screen editor instead of a line-oriented terminal and has a specified fixed size, so it works more like the regular Display Handler. There are a number of other improvements:

• Control characters and custom fonts are supported. Any non-recognized characters that don't map to the normal font are rescaled.
• Font size now autoscales since the terminal size is explicit.
• Logical lines and tab stops are now supported.
• RMARGN is set >39 so the wider screen can be recognized.
• Added automatic pass-through when a custom display list or screen mode other than GR.0 is activated.
• Input is now taken through the regular emulation keyboard path instead of bypassing it, and regular caps lock behavior applies.
• Cursor control via CRSINH and CHACT bit 1 is now supported.
• The S: device is now also handled.

On 7/3/2024 at 1:46 AM, w1k said:

i upload here some loaders and WAV files for testing.. i was not lucky to load any file.. 😕

http://turiecfoto.sk/td.zip

You may need to change the turbo decoding mode to Slope + HPF for these tapes, which appear to have been generated from TURGEN in sine wave mode. These are hard for Altirra to decode since its default filter is more oriented toward turbo tapes that have been distorted by playing through an audio tape deck.

 

On 7/3/2024 at 1:24 PM, scotty said:

Hi Avery.  Ape 32-in-1 is broke with this release.  Worked fine on test14.  Menu shows up, but not recognizing any key presses.

I couldn't reproduce this issue, but did find and fix a couple of other ones. The Select button is now sensed properly so the menu won't appear every time now, but it can be a bit difficult to get to as you need Select pressed when doing a reset -- so Alt+F1 hold may be necessary sometimes.

 

What's odd is that I'm not sure how the 32-in-1 reliably senses the Select button, since GTIA may be pulling down the line on power-up -- in my tests it typically starts up from cold with CONSOL=$07. For now I've just bypassed GTIA's output when checking the Select button.

 

On 7/5/2024 at 8:14 AM, yetanothertroll said:

Altirra does appear to stress Windows in new and exciting ways. I only seem to get BSODs when Altirra's running, often with kernel error codes I've never seen before in 30 years of scratching my head at NT BSODs, and if Altirra's running on a UHD screen, the Windows shell seems to up and quit more often, sometimes taking Altirra down with it, sometimes not. Save those diskette images early, save often!

This is likely a graphics driver issue, especially if the driver name reported in the BSOD is the kernel mode graphics driver. The Intel graphics driver in particular has had a couple of nasty graphics bugs that I've had to work around, such as crashing on half-precision interpolants and ignoring certain kinds of constant buffer updates.

 

[dmsc]

Hi!

3 hours ago, phaeron said:

Enhanced CIO text mode has been rewritten:

It is now a regular screen editor instead of a line-oriented terminal and has a specified fixed size, so it works more like the regular Display Handler. There are a number of other improvements:

• Control characters and custom fonts are supported. Any non-recognized characters that don't map to the normal font are rescaled.
• Font size now autoscales since the terminal size is explicit.
• Logical lines and tab stops are now supported.
• RMARGN is set >39 so the wider screen can be recognized.
• Added automatic pass-through when a custom display list or screen mode other than GR.0 is activated.
• Input is now taken through the regular emulation keyboard path instead of bypassing it, and regular caps lock behavior applies.
• Cursor control via CRSINH and CHACT bit 1 is now supported.
• The S: device is now also handled.

Thank you, had to test this with the FastBasic editor:

 

It basically just works. The only minor incompatibility (shared with most other 80 column drivers) is that the FastBasic editor modifies OLDCHR to write to the last column: it writes characters until COLCRS == RMARGN, then writes the last character to OLDCHR and moves the cursor, in the original E: handler this writes OLDCHR to the old cursor position.

 

Have Fun!

 

[drac030]

6 hours ago, dmsc said:

the FastBasic editor modifies OLDCHR to write to the last column

Does this trick also work on XEP or VBXE E: drivers? The latter does not use the ANTIC internal codes for sure (no reason to do so), XEP probably neither. And OLDCHR, IIRC, is hardware dependent, i.e. it will contain the ANTIC code on ANTIC E:, and ASCII or nothing anywhere else.

[scotty]

19 hours ago, phaeron said:

I couldn't reproduce this issue, but did find and fix a couple of other ones. The Select button is now sensed properly so the menu won't appear every time now, but it can be a bit difficult to get to as you need Select pressed when doing a reset -- so Alt+F1 hold may be necessary sometimes.

 

What's odd is that I'm not sure how the 32-in-1 reliably senses the Select button, since GTIA may be pulling down the line on power-up -- in my tests it typically starts up from cold with CONSOL=$07. For now I've just bypassed GTIA's output when checking the Select button.

 

If you hold down the F3 key (select) and press either the F5 (reset key) or Shift-F5 it brings up the menu.   Not a problem.  Thanks for the fix.   If you hold shift and do a System>Cold Reset or System>Warm Reset it does not work.  I have used the F5 key for years, so not a big deal.  

 

[scotty]

Avery, Is it possible to add a feature to save device firmware settings, so that if you install Altirra on another computer or re-install on a crashed hard drive it would be a lot easier than going through and installing them by hand?   I know there is the scan feature, but there are some stuff it does not detect.

 

[dmsc]

Hi!

9 hours ago, drac030 said:

Does this trick also work on XEP or VBXE E: drivers? The latter does not use the ANTIC internal codes for sure (no reason to do so), XEP probably neither. And OLDCHR, IIRC, is hardware dependent, i.e. it will contain the ANTIC code on ANTIC E:, and ASCII or nothing anywhere else.

Yes, on the VBXE it puts the wrong character, but still it shows "some symbol" to indicate the line continuation, so it is mostly ok:

 

 

(screenshot is by flashjazzcat of and old version, but it still looks mostly the same)

 

I suspect that under XEP it is the same as current Altirra, the rightmost column stays empty.

 

Have Fun!