Altirra 4.20 released

[+MrFish]

I know I've probably heard this explained before; but there doesn't seem to be any information in Altirra's help contents, and my searches through the forums are coming up dry.

 

What is the Browser (B:) device?

 

[phaeron]

1 hour ago, MrFish said:

I know I've probably heard this explained before; but there doesn't seem to be any information in Altirra's help contents, and my searches through the forums are coming up dry.

 

What is the Browser (B:) device?

 

There's a description in the Add Devices window:

 

 

Literally, you do something like OPEN #1,8,0,"B":PRINT #1;"http://atariage.com/" and it launches the system web browser to that URL.

 

[Tim Stone]

50 minutes ago, phaeron said:

There's a description in the Add Devices window:

 

 

Literally, you do something like OPEN #1,8,0,"B":PRINT #1;"http://atariage.com/" and it launches the system web browser to that URL.

 

Well, if you are going to do that, you could do F: like FTP or even better some cloud based connection routines. Automatically pull down something on your Atari 8-bit machine.

[phaeron]

1 minute ago, Tim Stone said:

Well, if you are going to do that, you could do F: like FTP or even better some cloud based connection routines. Automatically pull down something on your Atari 8-bit machine.

This only supports a specific use of going to a website to view additional info or report high scores, not for other types of communication. I added it to match a similar feature in another emulator, think it was the Android port of Atari800. Altirra also places several restrictions on it -- user confirmation required, HTTP or HTTPS only, and a cooldown if used too much.

 

(As a side note, FTP is dying off, now that web browsers have dropped support for it, on top of all the issues it already had.)

 

[+MrFish]

2 hours ago, phaeron said:

There's a description in the Add Devices window:

Yeah, I completely missed that. Probably because the (B:) device is at the bottom of the list, and the description is kinda short and appears in the upper left.

 

2 hours ago, phaeron said:

Literally, you do something like OPEN #1,8,0,"B":PRINT #1;"http://atariage.com/" and it launches the system web browser to that URL.

I remember hearing that before, now. I'm pretty sure I tried it when it was first added to Altirra. It doesn't seem to be working for me, at the moment. Maybe something to do with my system's config.

 

I was hoping it was a device that could read data from a page request, though. Guess I need a FujiNet.

[Note: I know someone created an external app and custom device for Altirra to emulate a FujiNet; but I think he only got up to an early stage with a version that will work on Windows 7 systems.]

 

[Tim Stone]

1 hour ago, phaeron said:

This only supports a specific use of going to a website to view additional info or report high scores, not for other types of communication. I added it to match a similar feature in another emulator, think it was the Android port of Atari800. Altirra also places several restrictions on it -- user confirmation required, HTTP or HTTPS only, and a cooldown if used too much.

 

(As a side note, FTP is dying off, now that web browsers have dropped support for it, on top of all the issues it already had.)

 

Yeah, I am sure FTP is dying off by now.  It's almost 2025 and we have the cloud if we need to send files today or email.

 

Let's flip the question another way.  What is one feature you would love to add eventually that takes advantage of today's technology to your emulator?

 

How could you take this emulator and improve on it with today's technology? Fusing what we had back then, with what we have today.  Yes, they are two different worlds, understood, but still, what would you improve on or what feature would you like to add?

[Tim Stone]

This is just spitballing here off the top of my head, so I haven't thought about this too deep....

 

What I think would be cool has nothing to really do with the emulator in a way, but take A.I. and have it study some of the Atari 8-bit games and recreate modern 4K graphics and upgrade the emulated games from the 1980's for today's standards of graphics and sounds.

 

An A.I. upgrade so to speak.  With all the bells and whistles of today's tech, but without coding this stuff for yourself.  Have A.I. learn the game and build a new version for today.  They can still be 2-D, but just higher color palette and more detailed graphics than back then at higher resolutions, while the gameplay stays the same.

 

This would bring these hidden gems that nobody knows how to gain access unless you were around back then and play them today for most people to play.

 

 

[phaeron]

2 hours ago, MrFish said:

Yeah, I completely missed that. Probably because the (B:) device is at the bottom of the list, and the description is kinda short and appears in the upper left.

 

I remember hearing that before, now. I'm pretty sure I tried it when it was first added to Altirra. It doesn't seem to be working for me, at the moment. Maybe something to do with my system's config.

One gotcha is that URLs are case sensitive. Altirra will not attempt to fix an uppercase URL to lowercase and will reject a link starting with HTTP: instead of http:, for instance.

 

2 hours ago, MrFish said:

I was hoping it was a device that could read data from a page request, though. Guess I need a FujiNet.

[Note: I know someone created an external app and custom device for Altirra to emulate a FujiNet; but I think he only got up to an early stage with a version that will work on Windows 7 systems.]

You're correct that you can't use the browser device for this. You can use a modem to connect to HTTP, but not HTTPS -- it is a raw TCP/IP connection, so it will not handle SSL.

 

In general, the facilities in Altirra are mainly oriented toward devices you would find on the original Atari; the modem allows TCP/IP because it uses TCP/IP as a proxy for a landline and a modem on the other side, which are increasingly hard to find these days. I typically shy away from implementing devices that don't actually exist unless they have some sort of targeted quality of life or utility use, like a debugging device, or file/network adapters to simulate generic input/outputs over ports.

 

FujiNet is a real device, of course, but it's also a wee bit complex to emulate, because it does a ton of things. But I have thought about the possibility of emulating its network device, at least.

 

2 hours ago, Tim Stone said:

Let's flip the question another way.  What is one feature you would love to add eventually that takes advantage of today's technology to your emulator?

 

How could you take this emulator and improve on it with today's technology? Fusing what we had back then, with what we have today.  Yes, they are two different worlds, understood, but still, what would you improve on or what feature would you like to add?

What do you think the emulator is? It's not written in yesterday's technology.

 

There are still some elements of the original experience that are not represented well yet. A relatively simple one is paddles. Part of it is that rotary controllers aren't really a thing on PCs -- outside of some really overpriced audio controls and novelty gadgets -- and emulating it through a keyboard, mouse, or gamepad just doesn't feel the same as a real rotary controller. But even more than that, modern controllers don't have the noise of the original paddles, and don't recreate the experience of trying to play Kaboom! with a set of paddles that has some slightly dirty pots.

 

Improving display and sound fidelity are always on the list, but the problem is that they require a lot of research into how the original hardware worked and how to emulate it. That takes a lot of effort when it involves analyzing analog circuits and recreating effects with digital filters. The revised pyramid bloom is an example, as it's a bit better than the previous algorithm at simulating a bright display.

 

1 hour ago, Tim Stone said:

This is just spitballing here off the top of my head, so I haven't thought about this too deep....

 

What I think would be cool has nothing to really do with the emulator in a way, but take A.I. and have it study some of the Atari 8-bit games and recreate modern 4K graphics and upgrade the emulated games from the 1980's for today's standards of graphics and sounds.

 

An A.I. upgrade so to speak.  With all the bells and whistles of today's tech, but without coding this stuff for yourself.  Have A.I. learn the game and build a new version for today.  They can still be 2-D, but just higher color palette and more detailed graphics than back then at higher resolutions, while the gameplay stays the same.

I tend to stick to things that I can do well and are compelling, and AI enhancement of games is neither, for a couple of reasons.

 

One, it's all too easy to get something that is just a novelty. A 3D extruded version or AI enhanced version of River Raid might be interesting... for about five minutes. Not worth it considering the work and complexity involved, especially if it has to be done separately for each game, and if it ends up bloating the program with a bunch of never used features.

 

Two, it's not really grounded in the original Atari hardware. The point of Altirra is to emulate the hardware running the game, not the game directly. There is some room for 2D image enhancement algorithms, but that only goes so far on a platform that has such low resolution and color depth to begin with -- there's only so far that a display can be extrapolated to 4K pixels when it's coming from a game that only has 8K bytes. Most things in Altirra are oriented toward emulating the original experience or improving some experiences that aren't always interesting, like speeding up tape loads. Extrapolating a game's display to something new doesn't fall into that, it's making things up. There is usefulness for that, but not in Altirra.

 

[+MrFish]

33 minutes ago, phaeron said:

One gotcha is that URLs are case sensitive. Altirra will not attempt to fix an uppercase URL to lowercase and will reject a link starting with HTTP: instead of http:, for instance.

That was the problem. It's working now.

 

33 minutes ago, phaeron said:

You're correct that you can't use the browser device for this. You can use a modem to connect to HTTP, but not HTTPS -- it is a raw TCP/IP connection, so it will not handle SSL.

Yeah, I need HTTPS.

 

33 minutes ago, phaeron said:

FujiNet is a real device, of course, but it's also a wee bit complex to emulate, because it does a ton of things. But I have thought about the possibility of emulating its network device, at least.

I'd be happy with the network device portion. I want to write a program that will pull constantly-updated information from a website. I just don't own a FujiNet, yet. Plus, it's much quicker and convenient to develop using Altirra than real hardware.

 

[+DjayBee]

4 minutes ago, MrFish said:

I'd be happy with the network device portion. I want to write a program that will pull constantly-updated information from a website. I just don't own a FujiNet, yet. Plus, it's much quicker and simpler to develop using Altirra than real hardware.

Go with FujiNet PC then.

The FujiNet part is running natively on your PC and you add a device to Altirra which connects the two.

 

The used repository is currently a bit confusing because it became part of FujiNet's main tree but the build did not yet. Thus I do not know where to fetch the latest version.

This link is from my understanding an old version but it works nonetheless (unless you need one of the features added to FujiNet since the beginning of the year): https://github.com/a8jan/fujinet-pc-launcher/releases

[Tim Stone]

1 hour ago, phaeron said:

What do you think the emulator is? It's not written in yesterday's technology.

 

There are still some elements of the original experience that are not represented well yet. A relatively simple one is paddles. Part of it is that rotary controllers aren't really a thing on PCs -- outside of some really overpriced audio controls and novelty gadgets -- and emulating it through a keyboard, mouse, or gamepad just doesn't feel the same as a real rotary controller. But even more than that, modern controllers don't have the noise of the original paddles, and don't recreate the experience of trying to play Kaboom! with a set of paddles that has some slightly dirty pots.

 

Improving display and sound fidelity are always on the list, but the problem is that they require a lot of research into how the original hardware worked and how to emulate it. That takes a lot of effort when it involves analyzing analog circuits and recreating effects with digital filters. The revised pyramid bloom is an example, as it's a bit better than the previous algorithm at simulating a bright display.

 

Yes of course. I never did try Stelladapter - The real Atari original Joystick and paddle USB Interface from this forum.  I remember trying it on Atari800Windows, but not on Altirra, does this work?

 

I have a couple of Atari Joysticks and Paddles here and I use Stelladapter to run them on USB, but I have never tried them on Altirra. hmmmmm..

 

So, when do you feel that this emulator is finished?  When you make those huge changes.  The sound itself is just like I remember to be honest.  And I know you have the shader that makes your monitor into a TV, which is cool. Although it only works with DX 9 and not Direct3D 11/12.

 

 

1 hour ago, phaeron said:

I tend to stick to things that I can do well and are compelling, and AI enhancement of games is neither, for a couple of reasons.

 

One, it's all too easy to get something that is just a novelty. A 3D extruded version or AI enhanced version of River Raid might be interesting... for about five minutes. Not worth it considering the work and complexity involved, especially if it has to be done separately for each game, and if it ends up bloating the program with a bunch of never used features.

 

Two, it's not really grounded in the original Atari hardware. The point of Altirra is to emulate the hardware running the game, not the game directly. There is some room for 2D image enhancement algorithms, but that only goes so far on a platform that has such low resolution and color depth to begin with -- there's only so far that a display can be extrapolated to 4K pixels when it's coming from a game that only has 8K bytes. Most things in Altirra are oriented toward emulating the original experience or improving some experiences that aren't always interesting, like speeding up tape loads. Extrapolating a game's display to something new doesn't fall into that, it's making things up. There is usefulness for that, but not in Altirra.

 

 

Yeah, this isn't something that Altirra needs to do anyway. I was thinking of a way to do this using art generation of A.I. art to regenerate assists based on actual Atari 8-bit games themselves to bring that part up to the next level.  Improvise. 

[+MrFish]

6 hours ago, MrFish said:

I was hoping it was a device that could read data from a page request, though. Guess I need a FujiNet.

[Note: I know someone created an external app and custom device for Altirra to emulate a FujiNet; but I think he only got up to an early stage with a version that will work on Windows 7 systems.]

2 hours ago, DjayBee said:

Go with FujiNet PC then.

The FujiNet part is running natively on your PC and you add a device to Altirra which connects the two.

 

The used repository is currently a bit confusing because it became part of FujiNet's main tree but the build did not yet. Thus I do not know where to fetch the latest version.

This link is from my understanding an old version but it works nonetheless (unless you need one of the features added to FujiNet since the beginning of the year): https://github.com/a8jan/fujinet-pc-launcher/releases

Thanks DjayBee. Yes, I'm aware of FujiNet-PC; but I think you missed my previous comment about needing to run it on Windows 7. He did start working on a version for legacy systems (XP - Win7), but it's only experimental, and has issues, as you can read about in the text below. He hasn't worked on the experimental version since it was first released back in July 2023; and I'm not sure if the project has been abandoned or not, since he hasn't worked on the main version since August of 2023 either.

 

FujiNet-PC 2306.1 Windows XP build Pre-release
@a8jan a8jan released this Jun 25, 2023
· 1663 commits to fujinet-pc since this release · release-2306.1-winxp · e870d65

 

Experimental build for legacy Windows systems

- Made with old build environment, use of old libraries
        - implicates bugs, impacts security, affects crypto, ...
- Runs on Windows XP and Windows 7

 

AtariAge: FujiNet-PC (thread)

 

[+MrFish]

6 hours ago, MrFish said:

Guess I need a FujiNet.

2 hours ago, DjayBee said:

Go with FujiNet PC then.

Actually, I just realized, I can have my program work with local file versions -- of the data I'll be grabbing from the net -- until I get a FujiNet or some way to emulate it. I can write all the parsing logic and the rest of the program, and then just switch it over to pulling the data from the net instead of files later. The main coding will be done; switching over the data source should be a relatively trivial exercise.

 

[+DjayBee]

30 minutes ago, MrFish said:

I think you missed my previous comment about needing to run it on Windows 7

I did not miss it but understood it in the wrong direction that it would run only on Win 7 and before.

[+MrFish]

2 minutes ago, DjayBee said:

I did not miss it but understood it in the wrong direction that it would run only on Win 7 and before.

Ah, ok. No problem.

 

[phaeron]

18 hours ago, Tim Stone said:

So, when do you feel that this emulator is finished?  When you make those huge changes.  The sound itself is just like I remember to be honest.  And I know you have the shader that makes your monitor into a TV, which is cool. Although it only works with DX 9 and not Direct3D 11/12.

Hopefully, not as long as I'm still interested in working on it. When a project is "finished", it starts to die. The trick is to ensure that the project doesn't get bogged down too much in maintenance work. That's where dealing with a 40 year old computer design helps, it's not going anywhere.

 

We're still finding out things that could be improved, such as some specifics of PAL displays, and digging up "new old" stuff like never previously seen 810 firmware revisions. Enthusiasm will taper off, and progress will slow down... which you can kind of already see, given that this forum is only one of a few hotspots on the web for Atari 8-bit. But ten years ago you probably could have also found someone saying that everything's been done and emulated on the 8-bit, and clearly they were at least ten years off. It was pretty surprising, for instance, how little information there actually was out there about Happy disk drives despite how notorious they were.

 

[spicyjack]

13 hours ago, phaeron said:

It was pretty surprising, for instance, how little information there actually was out there about Happy disk drives despite how notorious they were.

The Happy info you have documented in the Altirra Hardware Reference Manual, is that all reverse engineered info, or are there sources of documentation for the internals of the Happy Enhancement?

 

I'm guessing reverse engineering, since you don't have a lot of references to other sources in those sections of the manual (810 Happy and 1050 Happy).

[phaeron]

9 hours ago, spicyjack said:

The Happy info you have documented in the Altirra Hardware Reference Manual, is that all reverse engineered info, or are there sources of documentation for the internals of the Happy Enhancement?

 

I'm guessing reverse engineering, since you don't have a lot of references to other sources in those sections of the manual (810 Happy and 1050 Happy).

Reverse engineered. For the Happy 1050 combination of disassembling the firmware, running the firmware under emulation, and testing on an actual Happy 1050 (genuine, even has the goofy warranty tape). For the Happy 810, first two only since I don't have a physical device.

[_The Doctor__]

Gopher holes are back lol maybe ftp will make a comeback, but you can fujinet that now correct?