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                    NEWS IN THE ATARI RELATED EMULATION SCENE
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There are again some quite interesting movements in the emulation scene, but not
only in  emulating  different  Atari machines  on PC, no, also  emulating  other
machines on  Atari... Here comes  a bunch of news  and snippets about the latest
developments.

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                           Atari ST emulators for PC
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After a wave of emulation projects  in the past, featuring "PaCifiST", "TOSBOX",
"Echo" or "Winston" in the  freeware and a  lot of tries in the commercial area,
today only two major projects are left... at least atm.

STEEM reached version 2.4 and turns out to be  THE emulator for games and demos,
running the most  special STE  demos and  games as  well. It supports fullscreen
modes, DMA sound and so on, and, overall, it even runs in quite reasonable speed
on older PC systems (Pentium MMX and PCI grafix card  for example). The extremly
good  compatibility and  high quality sound output, and  not to forget  the easy
control brought me to the point to check out ST stuff more on that machine since
it makes it much  easier for me to get  screenshots as well  as realtime reviews
(writing about the production in another window while it runs in its own...).
http://steem.atari.org

SAINT meanwhile  started as  demo specialised  emulation reached v1.2o but still
falls back behind STEEM, even if it is  called to be "THE" emulator for demos...
at least  this hype was  set by the  programmers, James Boulton and Leonard from
Oxygene.
Still a  big bunch of demos that  are running well on  STEEM causing problems on
SAINT... so it is  still the worse  choice for emulating an Atari on PC. As said
above, I for myself prefer STEEM...
http://saint.atari.org

Apart from those important emulations there are much more around. Interesting is
the free release of GEMULATOR 2ooo in version 8.o3 this year but I have to admit
that I didn't checked it out so far.

As it seems all other real emulations  in the freeware area are stopped, such as
TOSBOX, WinSTon/STew, Echo, FaST, TOS2WIN and not to forget PaCifiST...

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                             Jaguar Emulation for PC
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After all here it comes, the first running emulation for the Atari Jaguar. After
older projects  were skipped  or frozen (just like JAGULATOR), this one works in
the end, it's called "PROJECT TEMPEST" and on the related  homepage you can find
screenshots of games that are running on this emulation.
Atm, PT has reached already version o.15 and games  like ZOOL 2, TEMPEST 2ooo as
well as DRAGON - THE BRUCE LEE STORY are said to run on the emulation.
Unfortunately you have to pay a big price since the emulation is damn hungry for
fast and  new hardware, absolute minimum system should be a PC with at least 8oo
MHz and at least 128 MB RAM but a system with at least doubled specs should only
be able to make the games run in reasonable speed...
Anyway, I will have an eye on the movements there...

Update... vo.2o reached!

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                          Gameboy Emulation on ST/Falcon
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Apart from the things above  this should be really  interesting for Atarians. In
fact there are now two emulators for the GAMEBOY around.

The latest  thing that  popped up  is the "GNUBOY", but this crosscompiled GNU C
thing  has so many  drawbacks that I  don't see a  deeper sense behind it. It is
called to  emulate the normal  GAMEBOY as well  as the  GAMEBOY COLOR and, it is
said to need a  strong hardware. Maybe I have to mention that this port is done,
again, by DATA of TRIO, who  is responsible  for DOOM  engines  and QUAKE engine
ports to the Falcon as well.
Since  the Falcon is the  strongest thing  I own I  tried to start SUPER MARIO 2
there and what should I say, after  I loaded the ROM file the screen turns black
and stood black for a while. But  hell, after one minute or something, the title
picture is build  up on the  screen! I hear a  crusting noise that reminds me to
some DSP error and the machine locks up. End of adventure.
After seeing how long the  emulator needed to load the  ROM file and how long he
needed to build  up the intro  picture I doubt  that this emulation project will
make any sense, at least  not on o3o-Machines, maybe  at least a o4o or even o6o
processor  will be needed to run this emulation... And at this points I'm out of
order.

The second  project is the "STEMBOY" from  Bodo Wenzel, his  project reached the
version 3.3o and  should run on ST  as well, but leaving  out sound emulation at
all so far. Unfortunately I didn't got this thing to run only one time, I always
get bombs, two or three and finally my machine bombs me out and I have to reset.
This happened several times and  in different resolutions  mainly as I wanted to
load a ROM file, it doesn't matter if it was a leeched or the supplied one...

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Thats it for the moment. Atm, I have no idea how the development is going on the
C16/+4 emulation the Paranoia gang is working on and the sense is quite doubtful
in my eyes as well, but  we will  see what happens  when a first  public release
will hit the streets.

As you can see at these few snippets, there are still some  movements around and
with the  latest try  to emulate the  GAMEBOY on  the ST/Falcon  also  into that
emulation area on  our own machines  comes back some life. At next I will try to
search for the problems that  caused the bomb outs of  STEMBOY and when I get it
to run properly, I will check it out deeper for the next UCM...

_.tSCc.__________________________________________________________moondog_1o/2k2_