                     The Steem Engine
 
               By Anthony and Russell Hayward

http://www.pyridine.co.uk/steem/  steem@pyridine.co.uk

Thank you for downloading the STE Emulating Engine, which from now on I will call Steem to save my precious typing fingers. Our aim is to make Steem the most accurate and easy to use emulator possible.

Steem is freeware, you don't have to pay anything or do anything to entitle you to use the program. However if you like it, or if you don't, you can e-mail us your thoughts: steem@pyridine.co.uk

This file is currently what passes for help, hopefully when I get some time I'll be able to make up some lovely compiled help file with beautiful backgrounds and glorious graphics, but for now you'll have to make do with this thing that could have been written in DOS's edit.

We've tried to make Steem as straightforward as possible, so I will not go into great detail about anything. :-)

What's It For?
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An ST Emulator attempts to recreate the Atari ST computer in software on a PC. This means you can play your favourite ST games and even run applications without needing an ST, in fact it is often more pleasant using an emulator (none of those horrible mouse ports to fight with!). With Steem running you will have a window on your desktop which works just like an ST display.

Starting and Stopping
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The main window contains the ST display and a toolbar. Click on the green play button to start emulation. Immediately your mouse cursor will disappear, so you can control the ST cursor. To get your PC mouse back again press the Pause/Break key. Emulation will still continue while your mouse is running free, you can click anywhere on the ST display or press Pause/Break again to regain control of the ST mouse. To stop emulation either click the run button again or press Shift + Pause/Break. The button to the right of play resets the ST, if anyone can come up with a better standard 16-colour, 16x16 icon then please send it to us!

If you are used to the original Win32 ST Emulator, WinSTon, you might want to use F12 to release the mouse - see below to find out how.

Full-Screen
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The full-screen mode is a bit tucked away on Steem. To go full-screen you must click on the maximise box of the Steem Engine window. When in full-screen mode the Pause/Break key stops emulation, you can't release the mouse. To go back to windowed mode, click on the far right button on the Steem toolbar. You need DirectX installed on your computer for full-screen to be possible.

Load/Save Memory Snapshot
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The camera button on the Steem toolbar brings up a menu from which you can load and save snapshots. Save snapshot will save out the current state of the ST to a file. This can be useful for games without save facilities. When you load a snapshot it will change your TOS version, monitor type, memory size and the current disks in the drives. Snapshots are a bit experimental, so there are no guarantees they will work properly, although to our great surprise they have rarely failed in our tests.

Fast Forward
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Lots of ST games have tedious animated intro sequences which can last for minutes or even days. Press and hold the red fast-forward button and Steem will go full-steam ahead to get through it as soon as possible.

Configuration
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The buttons on the right side of the window are for configuring the emulator.

The Disk Manager
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On the far right is the disk manager. Clicking on the button will make it appear, clicking again will make it disappear. This window controls all the disks on the ST, the 2 boxes up the top hold the disks currently in the drives. The large box down the bottom shows all the .ST disks in the current directory. The disk manager is like a little explorer window, you can go into a folder by double clicking on it or selecting it and pressing return. All disk images, links to disk images and zip files containing disk images in a directory are shown. Disk images are floppy disks turned into files, this is how most games are accessed on ST emulators. To put a disk in a drive, drag it to the box to the right of the big drive icon. To remove it from the drive just drag it back out to the directory view. If you right click in the directory view a menu will pop up allowing you to create a new standard size disk image, a custom size disk image or folder.

The other important button on the disk manager is the Hard Drives button which brings up the hard disk manager when you click on it. You can have up to 10 virtual hard drives, to set one up select the folder on your PC and then select the letter that you want it to be on the ST. Hard drives aren't as reliable as disk images, most things will work but not everything. If a program isn't working properly copy it to a disk image (using the ST desktop) to see if that helps.

The disk manager allows you to select a home folder. This is where all your disks or links to disks should be stored. You can go to your home folder at any time by clicking the third button from the left in the disk manager window. If it is greyed out you are already in your home folder. The button to the right of the home folder button sets the current folder as your home folder. The next button brings up a list with a few useful options:

o Check Inside All Zips - When checked this makes Steem checks all compressed ZIP files in a directory to see if they contain a disk image before displaying them. If you have a lot of ZIP files (or shortcuts to ZIP files) in one directory this option being checked can cause it to be slow to display.

o Hide Broken Shortcuts - This option hides shortcuts which point to a file which doesn't exist. If you show these shortcuts then you can right click on them and select Fix Shortcut to allow Windows to search for the target file. You may want to check this if you have many broken shortcuts that are going to stay broken to speed up displaying of their folders.

o Open Current Folder in Explorer - Opens the folder the disk manager is looking at in Windows Explorer.

o Folders in Explorer - When checked causes the folder view to appear when you open a folder in Explorer.

o Import WinSTon Favourites - Clicking on this option brings up a dialog box that allows you to create shortcuts from WinSTon's favourites system. First select the folder containing WinSTon which has the favourites you want to import. Now select a folder to import the favourites to. The option Only Downloaded Disks when checked causes Steem to only create shortcuts to disks that already exist, when unchecked Steem could end up creating thousands of broken Shortcuts which will become unbroken if you download their target disk from WinSTon. The last option tells Steem what to do if the shortcut already exists at the required location, if you set this to skip then it would be quite quick to import the favourites again if you download a new disk through WinSTon you want to use in Steem (thus avoiding creating loads of broken shortcuts).

Joystick Configuration
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The button to the left of the disk manager configures joysticks. Steem allows you to use any Windows compatible joystick in any way you want. You will see that this window has 2 halves, the left side configures the ST joystick that would have gone in the mouse port. The right side is for the joystick that would have gone in the joystick port. Basically you must select the device you want to control the port and then go through pressing the key/button/direction you want to use. When a PC joystick is being used you can click with the left mouse button in the middle box to set the dead-zone. The last key/button/direction you select is for autofire, when this is turned on (by selecting a speed), pressing the selected key/button/direction will act as if you were pressing and releasing fire very quickly again and again. This is handy for games that won't allow you to hold down the button to fire multiple shots or the like.

Another option available is to stop a joystick working when num lock is on or scroll lock is off. This is useful if you have got one of the joysticks using the keyboard, as the selected keys won't count as key presses while they are used by an active joystick.

One odd thing we found is that, under Windows, some keyboards won't allow certain keys to be pressed together at the same time. For example left cursor key, up cursor key and space. If you find the keyboard controlled joystick unresponsive, try altering the key assignments, like making shift or control fire.

Machine Config
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The button to the left of joysticks sets up the hardware of the ST. In this simple box you can set memory size, monitor type, keyboard language and TOS version. The TOS version box finds all valid TOS images in the directory that Steem.exe is in and also in your home folder. Steem doesn't seem to work very well with TOSs 1.00, 1.06 and 1.62, try to avoid them.

Options
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The button to the left of machine config sets up a few options of the emulator.

o CPU SPEED

Here there's an option to boost the speed of the emulated ST, to improve those painfully slow games you could get for the ST. The ST's CPU ran at 8 Megahertz (8,000,000 clock cycles per second) but here you can whack it up to get things going faster. NOTE: Anything above 8,000,000 could cause ST programs to crash/not work properly.

o CHECK FOR UPDATE

This is where you can enable and disable automatic checking for a new version of Steem each time it is run. When you click configure a box will appear, at the top are some statistics for how well auto update is working. Below are a few options to make it work better, or turn it off completely. When a new version of Steem is detected a new button will appear on Steem's toolbar. When you click on it a box will appear with full details of the new version and the choice whether you want to download it now, later or not at all. Auto update will not work from behind a firewall, if you are behind one disable it and join the Steem update mailing list to keep informed: http://steemupdate.listbot.com/

o SOUND

Steem's sound chip emulation is a bit dodgy at the moment, we knocked it up in about a week. It can slow the emulation down quite a bit. Turn on "mute" if it seems to be causing problems or it sounds horrible.

o STARTUP

The next 3 options only take effect next time you start Steem. If you have DirectX errors when you boot up, or DirectX doesn't work properly, then you can tell Steem to not use it. Sound is not available if DirectSound is not used, and drawing is slower without DirectDraw.

You can also choose to start in full-screen mode.

o FILE ASSOCIATIONS

Windows loves to associate and de-associate programs with file types. The two buttons here allow you to make sure Steem starts when you double-click on a relevant file.

Display Options
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Use this box to configure what Steem looks like.

First is frame skip, this is very useful for slower processors. Next is fullscreen drawing mode. You don't need to know what the possible settings mean, but which is best will be different depending on your computer's hardware, try them all to see which is quickest. Fullscreen drawing mode also affects windowed mode when the window is set up to be 640x400, make sure you try all the modes, it can make a big speed difference.

The next option toggles the Steem on screen display on and off. The Steem OSD is there to look pretty and give information. The blue bar in the bottom-left corner indicates the current speed of the emulator compared to the refresh rate of the monitor on a real ST - if the bar is full it is drawing at the ST sync rate. The flashing yellow light in the top-right comes on when the floppy drive is accessed. There are also occasional scrolling messages which pop up to delight and inform you. 

The next few options are for the size of Steem's window. First is the option of whether Steem should resize it's window when the ST changes it's resolution. Below that are the sizes it will default to for each resolution. On some video cards making the size bigger than the real size (the first option) will slow down emulation considerably. When resizing on res change is off you may find it difficult to get the window to a precise size, making ugly lines appear, to help there are two options on the main window's system menu (accessed by clicking on Steem's icon in its title bar). Normal size will resize the window to the size you have selected for the current ST screen resolution. Restore aspect ratio will maintain the current size of the window but will alter it so that it's aspect ratio matches that of the selected size for the ST resolution.

At the very bottom is a little option to toggle those pop-up hints on and off, now you've read the readme you don't need them really.


External Devices
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This dialog configures the emulated ST's link to outside hardware. Everything is quite experimental, not thoroughly tested.

The first thing to configure is MIDI. Select the PC MIDI out device you want the ST's messages to be sent to. You can also set the volume of the output (this won't work on all devices). Below that you can set the MIDI device that will send messages to the ST. MIDI doesn't work with all ST programs that try to use it, but we are improving it slowly.

Below MIDI is the printer setting, you can tell Steem to output printer data to LPT1 (printer in port 1), LPT2 (printer in port 2) or to a file. Most modern printers don't support printing in the way the old ST used to do it, you will need an ST compatible printer for it to look right. I have no idea whether this will work on Windows NT/2000/ME!

Shortcuts
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In this dialog you can set keys, joystick buttons/axes and the middle mouse button to do various actions.

The first thing in the dialog is a large box which displays some instructions for people who haven't read the readme. Below that is the permanent shortcuts box, these are shortcuts that you can't turn off, they will be active all the time you are using Steem. In the box you should see some default shortcuts, for each one there are 3 boxes separated by +, some of these contain text which tells you what key/button/axis they are assigned to or MMB (Middle Mouse Button). To change the content of one of them simply select it by clicking (the box will go brighter) and press the key/button/axis you want, or click on it with the MMB. To clear the selection press the Pause/Break key. To the right of the key/button/axis selection boxes there is an = followed by a large box, this contains a list of many actions that pressing the selected combination of key/button/axis/MMB will cause. If you select "Press ST Key" then the box to the right of the action box will go brighter and you can click on it to select the ST key that the selected combination of keys/buttons/axes/the MMB will press. In this box F11 will count as the ( key on the ST keypad, F12 will be keypad ), Page Up is Help and Page Down is Undo. The "Del" button deletes the shortcut. Below the shortcuts are 2 buttons that allow you to create more shortcuts, "Add New" creates a blank one and "Add Copy" creates one that is the same as the shortcut above the buttons. If you create more shortcuts than can fit in the box then a scrollbar will appear allowing you to see them all, you are limited to 30 shortcuts maximum.

Below the permanent shortcuts are the temporary shortcuts. These work the same way as the permanent shortcuts except you can have an unlimited number of different sets of shortcuts. This can be useful for programs that relied heavily on having every ST key exactly where it was on the ST keyboard, you can use the shortcuts to remap the keys that are in the wrong place by using the "Press ST Key" action. Another use is for games that used a combination of joystick and keyboard control, you can remap the keys used to joystick buttons/axes and control the whole game from the joystick. Just select the shortcut set you want from the box, or add one using the button.


General Info
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The button to the left of display options tells you a few useless facts about the emulator. Click on the tabs at the top to switch between pages.


That's it! You now know everything you need to know about The Steem Engine. We hope you have fun using it.

Contact
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We are very interested in people's comments about Steem. If you have any or you have ideas for how we can improve it please e-mail us at steem@pyridine.co.uk.

Emulation Bug Reports
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If you find a bug, please check on the web site before you send it to us: 

http://www.pyridine.co.uk/steem/bugs.htm

If there is nothing there about it then send a message to:

steembugs@pyridine.co.uk

Steem Crash Reports
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If Steem crashes on you then we want to hear! It is very important to us that Steem is stable. Please send us an e-mail with as much info as you can, tell us what you were doing when it crashed, if it was a one-off or a persistent error, and anything else you think might be appropriate:

steemcrash@pyridine.co.uk

NOTE: This address is only for if Steem.exe crashes, not the ST.


Thanks for reading this file, or just scrolling to the bottom, I hope you enjoy using Steem. Remember to check http://www.pyridine.co.uk/steem/ regularly, updates are coming thick and fast! If you don't want to check too often then you can join the Steem update announcement list by e-mailing steemupdate-subscribe@listbot.com, after you have confirmed your subscription you will get an e-mail whenever a new version is available.

Readme written by Russell Hayward

Legal Stuff
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THIS PROGRAM AND DOCUMENTATION ARE PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, NOT EVEN THE IMPLIED WARRANTY OF MECHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. BY USING THE PROGRAM YOU AGREE TO BEAR ALL RISKS AND LIABILITIES ARISING FROM THE USE OF THE PROGRAM AND DOCUMENTATION AND THE INFORMATION PROVIDED BY THE PROGRAM AND THE DOCUMENTATION.
