No more WinUAE betas?
 

Are you taking a break, Toni. I didn't participate much in the discussions, but I always enjoyed following the progress.

Give the poor man a break :)

He's probably the most proficient beta producer out there, the only emulator author I know who's near is Phaeron aka Avery Lee, maker of the Atari 8 bit emulator Altirra and the world renowned Video software Virtualdub, Avery is on his 50th beta in the current cycle of the 2.00 series..

Toni is also a busy guy beyond Winuae....

In all honesty I'm hoping he's having a vacation and enjoying the hell out of it with any family he has.

Hey, wow, thanks for directing us to that new Atari emulator, Mclane.

It actually plays Orc Attack perfectly! First Atari 800 emulator to do so. At least by my testing anyway.

My pleasure mate, been beta testing it for years now, bar far the most accurate emulator out there, here's the link to the latest beta.

http://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-2.00-test50.zip

For the most accurate emulation make sure you set it to use the various system roms out there in the prefs. The in built HLE and LLE kernals are not as close as the emulator with the original OS roms.

Plays every thing I've thrown at it and trust me, that's thousand upon thousands of disks and files.

Thanks for the link to the latest beta, Mclane.

I'm very impressed with Altirra. It's knocked Atari800Win PLus off its top spot for me now.

As said, a pleasure, if you want to keep up to date with it then use the blog here..

http://virtualdub.org/blog/pivot/ent...weblog#message

Its long since passed Winplus which I also officially beta tested (I even get a mention in the helpfile :) )

Sad I know :)

Have fun....

Back on topic, look like the boss is having a well earned break...

So far only simple bug fixes added. Nothing to test yet..

One possible "real" feature is A2024 monitor emulation (and possibly it also allows emulation of display hardware that plugs in video port) but current display emulation/buffer support can't handle display that has different size than native chipset display. I am still trying to find solution that isn't too messy..

...

I don't care about Ataris but I have been following Altirra development and it feels familiar, attempting to find out how the hardware actually works and emulate it instead of emulating how it is supposed to work (or "documented" to work) and/or adding game specific hacks until it works, also games that don't work on real hardware must not work on emulation. Must not assume anything :)

Avery has the same zest as yourself, very keen on accuracy without hacks as you say.

I've said it many times that you and him are indeed very similar, however I'm unsure if he owns a crystal ball....

I personally can't think of anything to add to WinUAE at the moment. Is pretty perfect for me. I'll have a think...

hmmm - guess total cycle-exact, but probably wouldn't be noticed.

That's a trend I've noticed amongst a dedicated subset of emulator authors - C64, A8, Amiga, NES, SNES, Game Boy, Genesis/MD, Master System - all of those devices have highly accurate emulators that strive to accurately reproduce hardware behavior as much as is possible. It's also a very nice trend for homebrew coders - early "NES" homebrew isn't really NES software as it doesn't run on a real NES. It's nice to be able to code something and have some confidence that it will run similarly (if not identically) on actual hardware. Even still, at this point, it's piss-easy to write certain code that will fail on emulators (like, on the MD, all one needs to do is change the backdrop color mid-scanline, as no emulator supports this currently). The ease of writing such code is decreasing, however, thanks to the efforts of dedicated coders like Toni.

Hell, some systems even work to emulate imperfect video output, especially on systems like the NES where the image is directly generated as composite video. I love those type of video filters, and I normally despise video filters. This is definitely "easier" to do for systems that output direct RGB and then encode a composite signal from that.

I'm stunned Fusion does not handle that mid line change, Steve Snake the author apart from being a dev in real life was a megadrive dev with games like NBA Jam being his coding, when it came to Kega / Fusion he was ultra keen on accuracy.

Nice guy too, made some furniture for him, showed me his megadrive dev kit etc.

But to return it more on topic, I'm ok on filters that mimic how the machine looked in the wild, so things like scanlines, composite filters are real nice but these filters that actually alter the look of things beyond how it really looks just don't do a thing for me. Cleaning up the jaggies is one thing that I'll admit I 'cheat' on but that's as far as I cheat.

I want to see my Amiga how it looked, not as a cartoon look...

Good thing we have the choice :)

I COMPLETELY agree! :agree
Respect! :bowdown

The main feature I'd really like to see in WinUAE is VSync (including the new low latency and with RTG) fully compatible with fastest possible CPU + JIT.
It would be the ultimate classic Amiga compatible.

(...That and perhaps one day an ARM port with JIT... ahhh I can dream :D)