                                                               February 1999

    Hi,

this is the Atari 800XL/130XE emulator for Atari Falcon/TT or any other Atari
close that has got 256 colour graphics mode and CPU >= 68030. The source
code used to build this emulator is at version 0.9.9a today.

Atari800 was written by David Firth originally. Falcon port was done by me.
Empty Head (= Karel Rous) and Gerhard Janka helped a lot with his 65C02
emulation written in pure MC68030 assembler. Douglas Little's assembler
routines for VIDEL were used for achieving maximal possible speed and
compatibility.

ATARI800.TTP      - atari800 (full C source, GNU C -m68020-40 -O2)
ATARIASM.TTP      - atari800 (CPU in assembler (faster but buggy), sound)

Keyboard emulation works well:

F1 = configuration menu
F2 = OPTION key of Atari 800XL
F3 = SELECT key
F4 = START key
F5 = PowerON RESET (warm start)
Shift + F5 = PowerOFF RESET (cold start)
F7 = BREAK key
F8 = Invoke Monitor
F9 = Exit Emulator
F10= Save emulated screen snapshot
Help = Help key

Joystick emulation works fine. Both joysticks can be used at the same time.

Some special command line parameters were introduced in this Falcon port:

-interlace <number>    the <number> is a number of skipped Falcon screens.
                       Normally the Falcon screen is updated every time
                       when it's build, i.e. <number> is 0 by default. Higher
                       <number> should cause faster emulation (because of less
                       time spent by updating slow Falcon screen).

-joyswap               this causes the numeric keypad emulates joystick
                       in port 2

-videl                 on Falcon use direct VIDEL programing (allows you
                       to switch res on-the-fly and achieve special 336x240
                       resolution on VGA)

-delta                 should speed up screen output by double buffering and
                       comparing and displaying just differences between
                       current and previous screen.

-double                double the screen size on NOVA cards


News of version 0.8.6:
======================
At the bottom of screen you can see several little white squares. How many
squares you see, that many times is the emulator slower than original Atari800.
Is the emulator too slow on your machine? Hopefully there's a new project developed
by Draco - the name EmuXL says it all! New Atari 800XL emulator written in hand
optimized assembly language for the highest speed. Watch my WWW page (URL below),
new versions of EmuXL as well as Atari800 ports will be there.

News of version 0.8.9:
======================
Large parts of emulator were completely rewritten. Now the emulator is much
more accurate, much more compatible and also faster than the previous
versions. This is also the first Atari800 emulator for Falcon with real DMA
sound.

This version also doesn't touch VIDEL registers if the desired resolution
(256 colors, 240 lines and 320, 352 or 384 columns - see -resolution
switch) is already active. This might allow you to run the emulator on RGB
monitor or TV, if you manage to set the resolution first (probably
overscanned 384x240 is the best option).

News of version 0.9.6:
======================
Not very sure what's inside this version - NOVA graphics cards on Atari
are supported definitely. I was working on TT030 support but I don't know
if it's finished in this version or not. I am still working on it so
in 0.9.7 you hopefully get a version that will work on much more machines.

News of version 0.9.7:
======================
I decided to use operating system clean programming and so I use Setscreen for
changing video resolution and vscolor (VDI) for setting colour palette. Pity is
the TOS/GEM does not work as documented, so don't expect proper colour palette
in emulator when you start it from non-256 colour mode.

News of version 0.9.8:
======================
The code for changing video resolution has to be removed. The VDI is not
initialised so I couldn't set the right colors. Now you have to switch
to 8-bit color depth before running the emulator. On Falcon030 you can
use -videl option to switch the resolution by direct VIDEL programming.

News of version 0.9.9a:
======================
The -double switch was fixed and works OK.
The -delta switch added. This speeds up the emulator very much (depends
on how much is the generated picture changed between single screens).
Sound support is compiled in the ATARIASM.GTP binary (it was not compiled
in before so that's why you couldn't hear anything).

For more informations please read the files CHANGES, BUGS and TODO as well as all
other text files in the DOC folder.

Enjoy,

Petr

e-mail    pstehlik@zln.cz
WWW       http://joy.atari.org/

