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Pocket an
Atari!
Welcome to another
article in my emulation series. If you
have been following my previous articles then
you will know that I have been longing for a
portable Atari 8-bit for years. I'm not
just talking about playing games on a mobile
phone, I'm talking about full emulation, and
full emulation means that you can use any software
you wish. I have been looking at
the Pocket PC range for a while now, unsure
of what they could do. I read many articles
and came to the conclusion that the early models
were too slow to do anything other than to read
basic e-mails and use other office-based software. However, the latest range of PDAs (Personal
Digital Assistant) got me quite excited, they boast powerful processors,
well, when I say powerful they are at the stage
the desktop PC was some three years ago. They
have full colour screens and stereo sound. The
problem... Price. Too pricey! I
was lucky enough to come accross a web site
that sells only PDA hardware and specializes
in refurbished PDAs. I'd had my eye on
a Compaq iPaq for quite a while and managed
to save over £200 on the high street price. When
my parcel arrived I had a good look at my purchase
because there can be minor blemishes or damage
to refurbished goods. Damned if I could
find any problem, mine looked as if all they
had done was slit open the CD software and put
it back in the box. Nice!
Unfortunately
I could not put an emulator on it just yet,
I first had to go through the pantomime of Microsoft
registration for my PDA to work properly, this
involves being connected to the internet and
can take some time if you have not done it before,
I hadn't, I don't use Windows XP yet so was
unsure of what to do. Luckily the instructions
are pretty good when you get to the appropriate
web page and you just let your PDA talk to the
web for a bit. With my iPaq registered
and ready to go I was ready to install an emulator. There is to my knowledge only one Atari
8-bit emulator for Pocket PC, it is called Pocket
Atari. I have been following the progress
of the author for a while and the software has
come on in leaps and bounds. The main code is still "Atari800", the freeware emulation
code, but it has been packaged for Pocket PC. This means it should run most of
the stuff Atari800Win PLus does as it is based
on the same code. In theory, that
is.
There is no installation
wizard for the software, you have to copy the
files over manually, the best thing to do is
to create a folder on the iPaq in "My Documents"
called Atari and put the files in there. There
is mention of downloading an updated file for
the System folder on the iPaq but I found that
as I had installed the latest firmware update
from Compaq there was no need. Set-up
of Pocket Atari is via a text file called "atari800.cfg",
this points the emulator to the files it needs
to run and includes several options to configure
the emulator so it runs how you want every
time you start it. With the ROMs in place
and a virtual disk of DOS 2.5 in the folder
I double-clicked the program icon and it sprung
to life, I was greeted by the following image.
![[Screen-shot: iPaq self-test]](images/selftest.gif)
The lower part
of the screen is taken up by a proper Atari
keyboard, the little disk icon opens the configuration
menu, from here you can load virtual Atari disks,
cartridges and hard disks. There are options
for fast disk access and an R-Time ROM patch. You can turn BASIC on or off at the menu,
select from all the Atari 8-bit models from
a 48 KB Atari 800 running OS A to a fully blown
320 KB super system for RAM disks and page flipping. Menu
selection is mainly from the keypad
on the iPaq, utilizing all the buttons on the
device. The four-way arrow button doubles
as a joystick as well as making selection very
easy and quite slick. I tried the self-test to see what
the sound was like, it sounded
just like a real Atari.
![[Screen-shot: iPaq self-test music]](images/stmusic.gif)
For better clarity
I turned on the linear filtering, I am not sure
of exactly what this does but text looks great
with it switched on (Looks like anti-aliased re-sampling to "stretch" the Atari screen to fit
the
iPaq's native resolution without the irregular blockiness due to
the resolution mis-match - Ed).
![[Screen-shot: Linear filtering]](images/filter.gif)
I needed to point
the software to where the DOS 2.5 virtual disk
was, from the menu I selected the disk menu
and it was a simple task of going through directories
to get what I wanted, if you are used to a Windows
environment then it will look a little different
to what you are used to but the process is the
same.
![[Screen-shot: iPaq disk management]](images/diskman.gif)
I did a cold
start from the menu and the Atari re-started
into DOS 2.5. The little curved arrow
at the bottom of the keyboard rotates the
whole screen 90º, then flips it 180º
finally bringing it back again, cool!
![[Screen-shot: iPaq DOS 2.5]](images/dos25.gif)
![[Screen-shot: iPaq rotate screen]](images/rotate.gif)
With the screen
rotated, the keyboard can be hidden by touching
the small cross with the stylus, another touch
in this corner of the screen brings it back
again.
Pocket Atari
behaves just like a real Atari, but its portability
really makes it useful on a PDA device. Software
for the iPaq can be quite expensive if you pay
for full ranges of software, shareware is available
but still costs £10 - 20. There is a whole load of Atari software available
for download in the public domain. Plus
I have shown in previous articles how easy it
is to transfer software that you own to an emulator. I regularly use Atari Writer Plus and
Home Filing Manager on my iPaq. The software
is very small compared to Pocket PC stuff, more
reliable and works just as well. The old
Atari software has really come of age when you
can use it anywhere. It is a simple task
to save text in ASCII to a folder on the PDA.
In fact you can print from the software using its built-in driver. With my iPaq
connected to my network I can swap files with
the emulated Atari from anywhere, from my own
hard drive to an FTP server on the internet. I took my iPaq to a local club where
other radio hams and I meet on a regular basis. I was using Atari Writer at
the time,
one guy wanted to know what I was using, he
could not believe what I told him, or how easy
it was to use. I let others play for a
while, it caused quite a stir. I play
around with electronic music a bit and wanted
to try Chaos Music Composer out to really push
the emulator, it ran just fine. I now have a proper old
synth sequencer comparable
to the one I paid £50 for.
![[Screen-shot: iPaq Chaos Music Composer]](images/chaos.gif)
I really enjoy
using Pocket Atari, in fact I use it every day. It was a simple
task to make an icon for
the main menu and I can access it like any other
application. I did find that the emulation
is not that linear, for example, mega demos
really make a big performance hit because generally
Pocket PCs don't have a proper floating point
process. This was fixed with
a little over-clocking. I found some software
on the internet to push my iPaq up from 206
MHz
to 236 MHz. Problem sorted! I can
now run emulation at full speed, full frames
with very little hit on performance, great.
Of course the
other reason to buy the iPaq was because not
only is it a gadget, but it is both silver and
nice and shiny. Very cool! Running an Atari
on it makes it just perfect.
![[Screen-shot: iPaq Atariwriter Plus]](images/awriter.gif)
![[Photo: iPaq Atari]](images/ipaq.jpg)
m.preston@myatari.co.uk
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