Welcome to Atari 8-bit world

Good preview of emulators available for IBM PC is at Atari 8-bit Emulator Page.

One of them, Atari800 emulator comes with full source code in C. The code is written with portability in mind, so now there are several ports of Atari800 for PC, Amiga, Atari and other machines running Linux or similar operating system.

As there were no new versions of Atari800 since spring of 1997 several people started updating the 0.8.0 source code (Perry McFarlane, Rich Lawrence, Thomas Richter, Radek Sterba, Robert Golias and me). Soon or later we all got in touch and started working together. We also got in touch with the original Atari800 author, David Firth, who basically agreed with me maintaining the source code and putting out the DOS and Falcon ports. That's why you can find the development source code (currently at version 0.9.6) of Atari800 emulator on this page (see below).

If you have any patches or noticed any bugs, please send them to me or to our mailing list (see below). But first please read the BUGS list and do not report bugs we already know about.

• My current development source code (v0.9.8a) was updated last time on August 7, available here. You will need a ZLIB for linking this version. ZLIB is available here.

• The last code release happened on August 5, available here.

• Here's list of CHANGES since the last source code release done by David Firth.

• The MS-DOS port of Atari800 emulator version 0.9.7 (runs also under MS-Windows95 and WindowsNT) is available for download here. The interesting new feature is colour artifacting.

For a long time people thought that there was only one Atari800 emulator for Atari ST series of computer: ST Xformer. Unfortunately, ST Xformer was written for MC68000 using dirty hacks (for higher speed), so it didn't run on Atari TT030 or Falcon030. Besides, the Xformer was very incomplete (bad graphics/bad sound/missing PMG) and usable only for simple BASIC programs. Now the situation has finally changed:

Two new Atari 8-bit emulators for Atari Falcon030/TT030/Medusa/Hades:

• Atari800 v0.9.7 is my port of Atari800 emulator
  originally written by David Firth. The emulator is complete: full Antic/GTIA/Pokey emulation, 130XE memory banks, virtual disks, disk images (even megaimages), Player-Missile Graphics etc. The emulator is written in pure C, so it's slow (on my Nemesized Falcon040 it runs at about 40% of original speed). Hopefully the emulator will get optimized assembler routines to achieve higher speed.

  News in the version 0.9.7 of Atari800/Falcon:
  

  • several fixes and minor speed ups
  • VIDEL dependent routines removed
  • clean system-friendly routines for gfx added - so this version should run on any Atari computer with 256 colour graphics and CPU >= 68030

• EmuXL v0.32 is a totally new project developed by Draco. Current version is about 0.3. GR.0 and GR.8 are emulated as well as virtual drives (accessing TOS filesystem). EmuXL comes with nice GEM user interface. However the biggest advantage is the speed compared to Atari800 for Falcon. EmuXL can run at about 160% of original speed on standard Falcon040/32 MHz. Surely the emulator is far from finished: the rest of graphics modes has to be implemented which will force Draco to use 256 colors mode of Falcon. PMG and sound emulation will cause further slowdown, but since Draco writes it in hand-optimized assembler, the speed should be still better than of the Atari800/Falcon port.

Some food for your emulator

Here is a disk image with four very cool demos.

Here is a page that contains links to other pages where you can find other interesting programs for your Atari800 computer or emulator.

New mailing list for Atari800 developers

Pro ceske uzivatele tu mam minimalne dva dobre linky: RASTER a Hubert.