atari800 — Atari 800

For Atari, there are three different emulators on the Murmulator: Atari 2600, Atari 800 And Atari Lynx.

The first one is limited to running only ROM files for the Atari 2600 console, the last one is a very simple handheld, which is not very common in the former Soviet Union, so we will focus on the middle one, which theoretically emulates the Atari 400, 800, 1200XL, 600XL, 800XL, 65XE, 130XE, 800XE, XE Game System and 5200 SuperSystem.

The implementation for Murmulator is based on the emulator https://github.com/atari800/atari800 – which is easily assembled under Linux. That is, the main problem is the limited resources of the small RP2040. Of course, it took some tinkering, but we managed to cram in everything we needed, at least for the original computer variants with 48 KB of memory. The additional 16 KB are included only if PSRAM is installed on the Murmulator, because otherwise everything would not fit.

The emulator theoretically supports many different types of Atari:

But more than half of them have never even been tested on the Murmulator due to a banal lack of understanding of how they differ internally (except for the amount of memory), how this should manifest itself, and what behavior corresponds to the original, and what is a bug.

The first thing that started up easily and simply was the Atari MEMO PAD:

After a bit of fiddling, I launched the included BASIC:

More to come… support for launching game files:

Naturally, there is still a way to launch ROM cartridges (image files)

Sound turned out to be a separate quest, which is extremely complex in Atari, with specific chips and a complex channel mix, but we managed to push it to basic functionality.

The emulator supports a pair of Dendy-8 or Wii joysticks, keyboard, VGA output from PAL and NTSC emulations (different number of lines) of the original device. If desired, it can be improved for a long time, adding disk drive emulation, tape input and other peripherals, but the existing result is already acceptable, and the best is the enemy of the good.

Atari is a separate world, almost as big as Apple, but even more separate )) And, thanks to the experience of porting atari800 to Murmulator, I got to know it a little more deeply.

Releases here: https://github.com/DnCraptor/atari800/releases

Murmulator himself: https://murmulator.ru/types

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