Posted Sun Nov 8, 2015 14:00
Hi folks,
a new release of Atari++, the portable atari emulator for Linux and
windows has been released here in the download section - as usual,
you find there the Linux sources and a compiled version for 32-bit
Windows.
Release 1.80 is a new major release of the Atari emulator, not only fixing a
series of nasty bugs, but also including new features and major
improvements. The major improvement is the inclusion of a Basic interpreter,
named Basic++, which improves on Atari Basic in many ways.
- Atari++ has now a built-in Basic interpreter, namely Basic++. It is a mildly extended Atari Basic dialect, which is quite a bit faster, plus one additional command, "DIR". See the Basic++ distribution for additional modifications.
- The Basic settings have been improved, the preferences allow now up to three Basic images to be defined, typically corresponding to revisions A,B and C of the language.
- The CPU emulation fixed the cycle count for some rarely used instructions.
- Added a profiler to the monitor. PROF.S starts the profiler. PROF.L lists the profile counts collected so far, PROF.C lists the cumulative cycle counts of subroutines.
- Tape emulation has been largely extended and simplified. Entering a non- existing tape will now create an error immediately. The tape emulation also allows now WAV files, i.e. digitized real tapes, and will decode them on demand. Output to .WAV files (audio-encoding) is now also possible. This integrates the wav2cas and cas2wav programs of the same author into the emulator.
- SIO sound emulation has been extended. The SIO sound now also emulates the tape sound on input, and improves on the authenticity of the disk drive sound.
- The X11 front end improves the handling of mouse clicks. Mouse clicks that do not go into the window but into an overlapping window are now ignored.
- Audio outut can now be recorded into a SAP Record-Type R file for playback.
- Disk drive emulation has been largely improved. Several drive types are now emulated, including their serial transfer characteristics, such as disk drive speed. Note that the original 1050 drive emulation no longer takes disks that are double density or have more sectors than those of the original disk formats. To play such extended disks, select one of the more advanced drive types.
- SIO emulation has been reworked to some degree to allow the extended drive types, control the serial speed and allow for proper tape emulation.
- Binary disk images now also create a valid disk structure containing the load file as AUTORUN.SYS so it can be loaded from DOS, too.
- The math pack patch has been revised and its precision has been inproved by changing the rounding policy slighty. The floating point to ASCII conversion now also follows the convention of the original math pack.
- Detection of .BAS (Basic) files as disk images is now handled more carefully, and the emulator will no longer confuse some xfd disk images with basic files.
- The built-in monitor supports now symbolic labels. Such label information can be read from a CA65 debug file output, i.e. use --dbgfile on the ca65 command line. The debug file is then read with the new ENVI.S command of the monitor.
- The math pack in the built-in Os ROM had a bug in the BCD to ASCII conversion which could not print signed zeros and some denormalized numbers correctly. This got fixed.
- The math pack could not handle signed zeros in the BCD to integer conversion, fixed.
- The BCD to integer conversion was pretty slow. The new release replaces the algorithm completely, making it a lot faster.