[HN Gopher] How to emulate an Atari ST from inside
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How to emulate an Atari ST from inside
Author : rcarmo
Score : 54 points
Date : 2023-08-04 07:36 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.raspberrypi.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.raspberrypi.com)
| rbanffy wrote:
| And, with this, you can run Atari Unix (or just use the Raspberry
| Pi OS).
| rramosastudillo wrote:
| Nice!
| buescher wrote:
| The irony of course is that the keyboard is perhaps the worst
| thing about the Atari ST and much of the charm in these old
| systems is the crisp real-time response of their simple hardware
| and software - which you won't get in a software emulator.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| The boot time of the Pi is an issue: it definitely doesn't have
| the same "feel" as just powering the machine on and having
| stuff happen instantly.
|
| But besides that emulation is quite good nowadays and it mostly
| feels like the real thing.
|
| I've got a vintage arcade cab and if I play an original PCB or
| that same game, emulated from a Pi (with a Pi2JAMMA adapter),
| it's pretty much the same thing. Heck, for some games you can't
| even tell if you're running of the real PCB or playing an
| emulator.
|
| But you're right in that I don't like the slow boot time when I
| turn the thing on with the Pi connected: it's way nicer to just
| turn the machine on and have he the game start near instantly
| (quite a feat btw for games mostly running on slow Z80 CPUs and
| the like).
| Frenchgeek wrote:
| Use some of the PiFox codebase to translate a simple ST
| emulator on bare metal? Most of the boot time is the OS after
| all...
| toast0 wrote:
| > it's way nicer to just turn the machine on and have he the
| game start near instantly (quite a feat btw for games mostly
| running on slow Z80 CPUs and the like).
|
| Depends on the game. Some start pretty fast, but others do a
| lot of loading (hard drive or optical based games often load
| the whole thing into ram on boot), which isn't unreasonable
| given the typical use case is start in the morning and leave
| on all day and leaving on 24/7 wasn't uncommon either. And a
| little bit of delay isn't even noticable if the CRT needs to
| warm up anyway. If you have a slow booting game and you can
| savestate after boot, emulation might be much faster startup
| than real.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > emulation might be much faster startup than real
|
| Ah could be: I only have "simple" PCBs, not laserdisc ones
| or anything fancy like that (and, yup, the old CRT needs to
| warm up, typically the sound is coming out before any
| picture!)
| toast0 wrote:
| Laserdisc games usually run the disc in realtime, but
| (much newer) systems running from cd-rom or dvd often
| pull in the whole shebang. Things like the ps2-like
| hardware for DDR, and the dreamcast like (naomi) hardware
| would tend to pull everything into ram, rather than at
| runtime.
| muth02446 wrote:
| This makes me wonder, why can't a stripped down linux kernel
| boot in < 1s?
| noodlesUK wrote:
| Unfortunately, the pre-boot environment on a modern PC
| takes longer than most of these old machines take to boot.
| No amount of stripping down the kernel will save you from a
| 2-5s POST.
| j45 wrote:
| Hibernate is good.
| icedchai wrote:
| I remember those mushy keyboards! One of my college friends was
| an ST fan. Her dad had at least 4 STs: 520, 1040, a couple of
| Megas. I was an Amiga guy myself.
|
| I don't really like seeing retro hardware "modded" like this,
| unless the original machine was totally non functional, but to
| each their own.
| j45 wrote:
| Sorry, is the ST emulator slower than the raw power of the ST
| CPU?
| buescher wrote:
| Speed isn't the issue, it's latency. Some people don't mind
| latency. Some people will know just how to fix latency
| problems with software emulators, their host platforms, and
| modern hardware and controllers. I'm not in either category.
| j45 wrote:
| This would be a great way to run some pretty good business tools
| that existed primarily in Europe for the ST.
|
| Calamus was a great desktop publishing tool, and I'd say some of
| the animation software/tweeners have been hard to compare to
| since. They were unusually good at what they could do and create
| beginners at the same time.
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