This site is a member of WebRing.
To browse visit Here.

The Atari++ Home Page

About the Atari++ Emulator

The Atari++ Emulator is a Unix based emulator of the Atari eight bit computers, namely the Atari 400 and 800, the Atari 400XL, 800XL and 130XE, and the Atari 5200 game console. The emulator is auto-configurable and will compile on a variety of systems (Linux, Solaris, Irix). Its emulation features are stunning:

Cycle precise emulation; this includes correct emulation of horizontal kernels and programs that modify chip registers within a horizontal line. In a less technical language, software making use of advanced displaying techniques will be emulated correctly.
Emulation of an advanced 1050 disk drive including single, double and enhanced density. The emulator not only understands .atr and .xfd files, but comes with a mini-boot loader that allows you to boot from binary load files (.exe and .com).
Supports .gz compressed images, and .DCM disk images. No additional tools required to load these disks.
Precise emulation of ANTIC and GTIA graphics, including undocumented scrolling features, undocumented GTIA player/missile priorities and collision detection, and some other less known GTIA features. Color artifacting is also available.
Precise emulaton of POKEY sound, including "Software Speech", high-pass filters and POKEY hardware timer interrupts. An emulation of the console speaker is also included.
Precise emulation of the POKEY SIO (serial transfer) protocol, including the Atari "sound effects" on disk loading and some lesser known influences of serial transfer on the sound subsystem.
Pokey stereo hack ("Gumby") included in the emulation.
Emulates graphics output either thru X11, or the SDL library, including a screen snapshot feature, saving images as PGM, BMP or PNG.
Sound output is either emulated by the Open Sound System (OSS), the ALSA system, the SDL library, or by recording the sound samples into a WAV file in CD quality.
Cylce-precise 6502 emulation, including "extra-instructions" that are not documented in the 6502-manual, and also including all known hardware-bugs of the 6502.
Cylce-precise emulation of Pokey timer and interrupts.
Printer emulation thru standard LPR printer user interface.
Flicker-Fixer option for games that toggle palettes fast for more colors.
Emulation of color artifacts due to PAL color subsampling
Optional de-blocking filter for magnified output
Built-in Os emulation
Joystick, paddle and lightpen emulation by keyboard or mouse, or by standard analogue PC joysticks. A special home-made interface allows the connection of Atari digital joysticks by an additional joystick driver. Hence, you'll be able to play all your old games even with your digital joysticks.
Includes emulation of the Pokey POT reading mechanism.
Saves and loads machine states to save games in the middle of the game play, and allows to resume from that point later on.
Includes emulation of a variety of cartridge types, including 5200 games cartridges and Oss supercarts.
Effective emulation of 800XL/XE and cartridge bank-switching mechanisms.
Emulation of the Atari 850 Interface box by the serial port of the host computer, including a full 850 driver "in ROM".
Interfaces to "Hias'" AtariSIO driver, allowing you to connect real Atari hardware to the PC.
Includes a Dos 2.xx compatible interface to the filing system of the emulator.
Easy to use graphical user front-end for simple setup and configuration, includes saving and loading of (human-readable) configuration files. The user front-end also allows to setup details like the player/missile collision setup to build "game-trainers" on demand.
Includes a built-in monitor allowing experts to debug Atari software easily.
And the best: It is free.

Downloading the Emulator Sources

Stable Release 1.60

This is the stable release that has been tested for a longer period and should work fine on most platforms. You can download the sources directly here: atari++_1.60.tgz

CVS Snapshot 1.60

The latest CVS snapshot is here: atari++_1.60.tgz

This release contains all the latest features, though it is also less tested. Bug reports are welcome.

atari++ 1.60 for win32

The latest built (binary) of atari++ for the win32 platform: atari++_win_1.60.zip
This is a stable release, based on the 1.58 snapshot above. Includes the SDL library. No ROM Images required.

Reporting Bugs

Please help me to improve atari++ further and report bugs to thor at math dot tu-berlin dot de.
(Please replace words in email address by the obvious letters, I get too much spam anyhow...)

To help me reproduce bugs, please always report with full version number and architecture (e.g., "release 1.58 for Linux") and
include your configuration file (.atari++.conf). If the bug appears for a specific program, include an image of the program
if possible, and provide a memory/state snapshot for "crash" situations. These snapshots can be generated in the "Full Menu"
reachable by the F1 function key. Go there to the "Preferences" topic, and select Save State.

Online Manual

An online version of the atari++ manual in html has been made available for your convenience. It is also included in the distribution: man/manual/atari++.html

ROM Sources

Atari++ 1.30 and up contain a built-in ROM emulation that tries to mimic the AtariXL operating system closely. Since the emulator sources contain this ROM only in the form of a hex dump, you might want to look into its sources:

Please download it here: os++.tar.gz

To compile and assemble the Os sources, you need a C compiler, the GNU make utility, the fileutils and the ca65 assembler.

Compiling the Emulator

Since I do not distribute binaries, either due to the size or due to the variety of different system setups I do not all want to support, you need to compile the emulator yourself. This sounds harder than it is; here is a step-by-step HOWTO:

Unpack the archive with

```
tar -xzf atari++.tgz 
```

Let the emulator figure out the configuration of your system. For that, change to the directory where the archive was unpacked into, and enter

```
./configure
```

Build the emulator by

```
make
```

This builds a file named "atari++" which is the emulator executable. In case you should find any problem building the emulator, let me know.

Prequisites for compiling the emulator

A well-installed system should be able to build the emulator from scratch without requiring any additional installations. However, in case of doubt, you might want to check for the following packages:

The X11 development files should be available. Most noticably, the X header files in /usr/include/X11 must be available for any graphics output.
Optionally, the Oss development files must be available in sys/soundcard.h. Even without them the emulator will work, but Oss sound output will not work.
Optionally, the SDL development files must be available in /usr/include/SDL. The emulator will work without the SDL headers, but you won't be able to use the SDL graphics output and the SDL sound output without them.
Optionally, either the curses or the ncurses development files in /usr/include/curses.h or /usr/include/ncurses.h must be available. The emulator will work without them, but the built-in monitor will have a less user-friendly front-end without curses development files.

If the mentioned system headers are not at the precise positions mentioned above, the configuration file might still be able to figure their location out. If this does not work, run the configuration script like this:

./configure --includedir=<your_include_directory>

Optionally, you may also select a different compiler for building the emulator. For that, specify the C compiler with the CC=compiler and the C++ compiler with CXX=compiler flag. Note that you need to specify both. For example, to configure the emulator for the intel icc compiler, run the configuration script as follows:

./configure CC=icc CXX=icc

Then build the emulator with "make" as above.

Obtaining more information

The distribution of atari++ contains a manual you can browse with

man ./atari++.man