Issue 25: Nov 2002
Features
- | Foreword
- | Pocket an Atari!
- | Collecting Atari Games
- | Tip of the day
- | Unfinished Business
- | I had a dream: The Grid Sequencer!
- | Atari in the USA: Mr Atari's IDE
- | Atari 7800: The system that could (but didn't)
- | Tablet PCs in Today's World
- | Atari Goes Metal
Reviews
- | Unreal Tournament 2003
- | V-Rally 3
- | Do you have 19 inches of rack mounted Atari?
- | Multi Worms
- | Pixel Power
News
| Pocket an Atari! Welcome to another article in my emulation series. If you have been following my previous articles then you will know that I have been longing for a portable Atari 8-bit for years. I'm not just talking about playing games on a mobile phone, I'm talking about full emulation, and full emulation means that you can use any software you wish. I have been looking at the Pocket PC range for a while now, unsure of what they could do. I read many articles and came to the conclusion that the early models were too slow to do anything other than to read basic e-mails and use other office-based software. However, the latest range of PDAs (Personal Digital Assistant) got me quite excited, they boast powerful processors, well, when I say powerful they are at the stage the desktop PC was some three years ago. They have full colour screens and stereo sound. The problem... Price. Too pricey! I was lucky enough to come accross a web site that sells only PDA hardware and specializes in refurbished PDAs. I'd had my eye on a Compaq iPaq for quite a while and managed to save over £200 on the high street price. When my parcel arrived I had a good look at my purchase because there can be minor blemishes or damage to refurbished goods. Damned if I could find any problem, mine looked as if all they had done was slit open the CD software and put it back in the box. Nice! Unfortunately I could not put an emulator on it just yet, I first had to go through the pantomime of Microsoft registration for my PDA to work properly, this involves being connected to the internet and can take some time if you have not done it before, I hadn't, I don't use Windows XP yet so was unsure of what to do. Luckily the instructions are pretty good when you get to the appropriate web page and you just let your PDA talk to the web for a bit. With my iPaq registered and ready to go I was ready to install an emulator. There is to my knowledge only one Atari 8-bit emulator for Pocket PC, it is called Pocket Atari. I have been following the progress of the author for a while and the software has come on in leaps and bounds. The main code is still "Atari800", the freeware emulation code, but it has been packaged for Pocket PC. This means it should run most of the stuff Atari800Win PLus does as it is based on the same code. In theory, that is. There is no installation wizard for the software, you have to copy the files over manually, the best thing to do is to create a folder on the iPaq in "My Documents" called Atari and put the files in there. There is mention of downloading an updated file for the System folder on the iPaq but I found that as I had installed the latest firmware update from Compaq there was no need. Set-up of Pocket Atari is via a text file called "atari800.cfg", this points the emulator to the files it needs to run and includes several options to configure the emulator so it runs how you want every time you start it. With the ROMs in place and a virtual disk of DOS 2.5 in the folder I double-clicked the program icon and it sprung to life, I was greeted by the following image. The lower part of the screen is taken up by a proper Atari keyboard, the little disk icon opens the configuration menu, from here you can load virtual Atari disks, cartridges and hard disks. There are options for fast disk access and an R-Time ROM patch. You can turn BASIC on or off at the menu, select from all the Atari 8-bit models from a 48 KB Atari 800 running OS A to a fully blown 320 KB super system for RAM disks and page flipping. Menu selection is mainly from the keypad on the iPaq, utilizing all the buttons on the device. The four-way arrow button doubles as a joystick as well as making selection very easy and quite slick. I tried the self-test to see what the sound was like, it sounded just like a real Atari. For better clarity I turned on the linear filtering, I am not sure of exactly what this does but text looks great with it switched on (Looks like anti-aliased re-sampling to "stretch" the Atari screen to fit the iPaq's native resolution without the irregular blockiness due to the resolution mis-match - Ed). I needed to point the software to where the DOS 2.5 virtual disk was, from the menu I selected the disk menu and it was a simple task of going through directories to get what I wanted, if you are used to a Windows environment then it will look a little different to what you are used to but the process is the same. I did a cold start from the menu and the Atari re-started into DOS 2.5. The little curved arrow at the bottom of the keyboard rotates the whole screen 90º, then flips it 180º finally bringing it back again, cool! With the screen rotated, the keyboard can be hidden by touching the small cross with the stylus, another touch in this corner of the screen brings it back again. Pocket Atari behaves just like a real Atari, but its portability really makes it useful on a PDA device. Software for the iPaq can be quite expensive if you pay for full ranges of software, shareware is available but still costs £10 - 20. There is a whole load of Atari software available for download in the public domain. Plus I have shown in previous articles how easy it is to transfer software that you own to an emulator. I regularly use Atari Writer Plus and Home Filing Manager on my iPaq. The software is very small compared to Pocket PC stuff, more reliable and works just as well. The old Atari software has really come of age when you can use it anywhere. It is a simple task to save text in ASCII to a folder on the PDA. In fact you can print from the software using its built-in driver. With my iPaq connected to my network I can swap files with the emulated Atari from anywhere, from my own hard drive to an FTP server on the internet. I took my iPaq to a local club where other radio hams and I meet on a regular basis. I was using Atari Writer at the time, one guy wanted to know what I was using, he could not believe what I told him, or how easy it was to use. I let others play for a while, it caused quite a stir. I play around with electronic music a bit and wanted to try Chaos Music Composer out to really push the emulator, it ran just fine. I now have a proper old synth sequencer comparable to the one I paid £50 for. I really enjoy using Pocket Atari, in fact I use it every day. It was a simple task to make an icon for the main menu and I can access it like any other application. I did find that the emulation is not that linear, for example, mega demos really make a big performance hit because generally Pocket PCs don't have a proper floating point process. This was fixed with a little over-clocking. I found some software on the internet to push my iPaq up from 206 MHz to 236 MHz. Problem sorted! I can now run emulation at full speed, full frames with very little hit on performance, great. Of course the other reason to buy the iPaq was because not only is it a gadget, but it is both silver and nice and shiny. Very cool! Running an Atari on it makes it just perfect. m.preston@myatari.co.uk
Useful links
Atari 800 emulator on iPaq (Linux) http://jirkasuv.duch.cz/iPAQ/atari/ Atari 8-bit world http://atari800.sourceforge.net Pocket Atari http://pocketatari.retrogames.com The Atari 800 emulator for the Mac http://www.serve.com/derekl/atari/atari_emu.html
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