Albert Posted November 1, 2003 Share Posted November 1, 2003 A new Atari 7800 emulator titled EMU7800 is now under development by Atari enthusiast Mike Murphy. This work-in-progress requires Microsoft's .NET framework and presently doesn't run 7800 games although most 2600 games play with sound. Most notable in this release is that Andrew Towers' TIA HW Notes paper was used to emulate HMOVEs more closely, allowing infamous Cosmic Ark stars to appear without special hacks. You can download EMU7800 here. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gregory DG Posted November 1, 2003 Share Posted November 1, 2003 Cool! Hopefully he'll keep working on it even after he graduates! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thund3r Posted November 1, 2003 Share Posted November 1, 2003 wahoo a new 7800 emu, bout flaming time too! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mimurphy Posted November 10, 2003 Share Posted November 10, 2003 I would be interested in receiving feedback on the operation of the emulator in its current state. It hasn't been widely tested, so I'm curious. I'll be posting a small bugfix release mid-November to fixup a couple small issues, most notably with the open file dialog hanging in some circumstances. Mike Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Spirantho Posted November 10, 2003 Share Posted November 10, 2003 I don`t mean this as a flame, but... why on earth are you using .NET stuff? That's the least portable and most proprietary travesty I've ever heard of! You don`t need to take it to the extreme I do (I write things using SDL usually so it runs on *anything* including Amigas!) but there must be better ways than writing in a proprietary language (C#) on a totally closed system like that. And no, I`m not a Linux-loving Windows hating megageek, I just like not to be limited to Windows... after all, the more I get tied to Windows, the harder is to get away from the horrid system. Serious question, though - why C# and not nice, portable C++? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Classic Pac Posted November 10, 2003 Share Posted November 10, 2003 Call me one of those people who can't run MESS for some reason But I like to openly thank you for trying to create a 7800 emulator all I can hope is that you fix the bugs. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DanBoris Posted November 10, 2003 Share Posted November 10, 2003 I don`t mean this as a flame, but... why on earth are you using .NET stuff? That's the least portable and most proprietary travesty I've ever heard of! From the EMU7800 Readme file: "You are probably asking, "Why would you want to implement an emulator in .NET for?" This was an academic graduate capstone project, at UW Tacoma, where I needed to find a project that had lots of technical risk. Emulator writing is fun too, so that was a helpful bonus. Before I started this project, I had no experience in .NET or Win32 programming, no real object-oriented programming experience, or emulator writing for that matter. So, there was plenty of risk indeed." I personally was happy to see an emulator done in C# on the .NET framework. Being an emu author my self this was actually an area that I was just starting to take a look at. Besides there are already portable 2600 and 7800 emulators out there, and since EMU7800 is open source any improvements made to it, can be used to improve the other emulators. Dan Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Spirantho Posted November 10, 2003 Share Posted November 10, 2003 Fair enough. Good answer. If you're writing it for yourself doesn`t matter what you're writing it in... could be in Intercal for all it matters. I`d have looked at the readme had I downloaded it but I didn`t because the emulators wouldn`t work on that machine. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mimurphy Posted November 13, 2003 Share Posted November 13, 2003 Actually, I was looking for feedback on how the emulator worked for people... rather than a commentary on the technology choice Ironically, I consider myself quite the "Linux-loving Windows hating megageek." But, I really prefer the programming paradigm of using these managed code environments (.NET/Java) for doing object oriented stuff, and using something more like C for the performance critical stuff... in the interest of productivitity, performance, and portability. I'm basically ignorant of C++, but my impression has been that there has been varying degrees of portability amongst C++ compilers over the years. For example, Visual C++ should be considered a different language, really, than GNU C++. This may have changed in recent years, I dunno. Also, I always thought the C-backward compatibility-ness of C++ was a bit tacky. So if you are really serious about compiled-language performance and portability, I think C is a better choice. And if you are really serious about doing OO, and doing all the type-safe good-to-do sorts of things, these managed code environments are the way to go. While .NET is only available on Windows (basically) now, there is a project called Mono that is attempting to bring .NET to non-Windows platforms. I kind of like programming to a standard that, perhaps someday, will take care of the portability burden for me. I like Java too, but I'm afraid that Sun has abandoned client-side applicability of its system for the obvious commercial difficulty of competing in the client-side software business. As a result, they over-promote the idea that all applications should be server-based. And, they hatch horrid things like EJB. For Micro$oft to abandon DCOM (or COM, or whatever they call their distributed object system) represents a HUGE idealogical shift. For them to give up on a system that has tremendous lock-in potential is pretty serious. Further, I have a plain 1.7GHZ Celeron P4 system. Not very high-end; I think the CPU costs something like $50 these days. It's not a "real" P4, I guess, because the CPU doesn't have much on-chip cache. But think about this, 1.7 GHZ!! Gigahertz!! Because my system is "cache crippled", I am more likely to see performance problems from accessing large data structures and poor access patterns than from less-than-most-efficient code. So looking to the near future, there will be plenty of CPU power available to plow through all the managed-code stuff without penalty. Admittedly, I was doubtful in the beginning that a managed-code system could run an emulator. But, I found the biggest bottleneck was pushing updates to the display. Games that didn't have complex display updates, I could get to run full-throttle at almost 200 FPS. One aspect of this project was to see how well .NET could perform, and it did exceed my expectations. Anyway, I think I've blabbered on long enough. Believe it or not, I am not really a Micro$oft lover. I still am amazed they were able to sell that entire line of crappy Windows 9x systems, and I never liked Visual Basic or Visual C++ and the associated COM-based programming models. I'm also amazed that they seem to have gotten it right with .NET, and am afraid they'll find some way to screw it up. Also, it wasn't my intent here to encourage an advocacy flamewar. I simply wanted to explain my rational, which ultimately rests upon personall preferences and value judgements regarding the practice of programming. Mike Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Spirantho Posted November 13, 2003 Share Posted November 13, 2003 Oh, that's not a flamewar. Believe me that wasn`t even a light roasting compared to some of the flamewars I've seen (heck, I read comp.sys.amiga.advocacy for a while. You used to need an asbestos suit in there). For what it's worth, C++ *is* standardised. In fact, ANSI C++ was standardised a few years ago, and all the compilers fell in line... except one. Guess which one? Yes, MS VC++. However, even that (the .NET version) is now in line so you don`t need to worry. If your emulator will run on a standard XP installation, though, I`ll test it out on my Opteron when I get chance... could be interesting. It would have been nice to try it on my AmigaOne too though (even though it's only running Linux until I get AmigaOS 4 .. real soon now. ) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lumpbucket Posted November 13, 2003 Share Posted November 13, 2003 This is totally off-topic, and i wholeheartedly apologise, but... Spirantho, I note that you're from Wales. Are you coming to the OS4 on Tour show in Bath? Back on topic... its nice to see a new Atari 7800 emulator, even if I can't use it (only have Amigas at home). Keep up the good work :-) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Mitch Posted November 13, 2003 Share Posted November 13, 2003 I'm kind of waiting for the 7800 support to be added. I don't really need the 2600 support. Mitch Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mimurphy Posted November 15, 2003 Share Posted November 15, 2003 Yeah, it should be able to run on XP. I don't have XP myself, but I would expect that it would include the .NET runtime. If not, its a free download. BTW, I've posted a follow-up release fixing a couple of UI bugs and cleaning up the distribution a bit. Mike Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Artlover Posted January 4, 2005 Share Posted January 4, 2005 It's a good emulator. But I curse that .cvs rom database file. It had me beating my head against the wall for a few minutes trying to figure out why it wouldn't see BeefDrop despite it being in the roms dir. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shawn Posted January 5, 2005 Share Posted January 5, 2005 Yeah, it should be able to run on XP. I don't have XP myself, but I would expect that it would include the .NET runtime. If not, its a free download. BTW, I've posted a follow-up release fixing a couple of UI bugs and cleaning up the distribution a bit. Mike It works on XP Pro Build 2600 just fine. Ironic that the windows build number is 2600 eh?? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Artlover Posted January 5, 2005 Share Posted January 5, 2005 I have an technical issue. Under Win2k, when I quit the program, the program doesn't actually quit. The windows go away, and it doesn't show on the taskbar anymore, but it's still a running process in the processes menu of task manager. You can keep running and quitting it, all the time leaving yet another instance of it in the background. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Mitch Posted January 5, 2005 Share Posted January 5, 2005 I have an technical issue. Under Win2k, when I quit the program, the program doesn't actually quit. The windows go away, and it doesn't show on the taskbar anymore, but it's still a running process in the processes menu of task manager. You can keep running and quitting it, all the time leaving yet another instance of it in the background. Are you hitting the "quit" button or just hitting the X in the upper right hand corner? If you hit quit it should exit properly. Mitch Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Artlover Posted January 5, 2005 Share Posted January 5, 2005 Are you hitting the "quit" button or just hitting the X in the upper right hand corner? If you hit quit it should exit properly. It seems that you're right. If I hit quit, it quits properly, if I hit the X it doesn't. Now to figure out why I seem to have a habit of quiting with X instead of quit. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Godzilla Posted January 14, 2005 Share Posted January 14, 2005 well i for one am just really happy to see a new 7800 emu! keep up the good work! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schmutzpuppe Posted January 16, 2005 Share Posted January 16, 2005 I have an technical issue. Under Win2k, when I quit the program, the program doesn't actually quit. The windows go away, and it doesn't show on the taskbar anymore, but it's still a running process in the processes menu of task manager. You can keep running and quitting it, all the time leaving yet another instance of it in the background. Are you hitting the "quit" button or just hitting the X in the upper right hand corner? If you hit quit it should exit properly. Mitch I fixed this bug, exe is attached. Matthias emu7800.zip Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Artlover Posted January 16, 2005 Share Posted January 16, 2005 I fixed this bug, exe is attached. Matthias Kool, it works. Thank you. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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