                     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 maximize 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 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 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 never 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 small 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 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.

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 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.

o KEYBOARD

Here you can tweak the way Steem uses the keyboard. On the ST, the Capslock and Control keys were the other way up than they are on PC keyboards, which can make some games hard to control. Select Swap CapsLock and Control to make the control key act as ST capslock and vice-versa.

The second option lets you access two keys that were on the ST keyboard but aren't on the PC's, namely keypad brackets. With this option turned on, F11 is ( and F12 is ). With it turned off, F11 switches full-screen/windowed and F12 releases the mouse, like in WinSTon (another Win32 ST emulator).


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.

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 buttons 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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We do want to hear about bugs, but there are so many! :-) 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 that looks like it then send us a message at:

steembugs@pyridine.co.uk

I can't tell you whether we will be able to respond very quickly, it depends how many we get.

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.
