8 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 23.3 ms ] thread
Hatari has existed as an emulator for like a decade....

I get this may be transpiled to the web, but...

More people have been flocking to "retro computing" for a while now.

My hunch is that it's partially driven by mourning over increasing loss of deterministic "von Neumann computing"; so not pure nostalgia.

It doesn't matter the platform or if "only" in software / web or whatever it's just a great hobby to dabble with in general, especially when kids are getting into it.

The ZX Spectrum Next, Commodore 64 Ultimate and the likes, same as their OG versions are still great "bicycles for the mind" and a great intro to microcontrollers etc.

I'd personally be ready for an FPGA based "Mega Atari 800" or some such!

Having used it a few months back, it certainly feels like it was made decades ago. UX is horrid all around.
As I understand it, Hatari is mainly aimed at running classic ST games. I think its emulation core was the basis of the Amiga PiStorm and similar projects.

There's another all-software ST emulator out there called Aranym:

https://aranym.github.io/

It has its own all-FOSS ST-compatible OS distro, AFROS:

https://aranym.github.io/afros.html

Aranym is aimed at running ST GEM as well as possible on modern machines, for productivity apps and so on -- so it sacrifices absolute hardware compatibility in favour of performance and features like high screen resolutions.

I would love to see a bare-metal Raspberry Pi version of Aranym, to turn a spare Pi into the fastest maxed-out Atari TT030 ever. :-)

Still using my real Atari for MIDI sequencing. It is one of the tightest and jitter free setups you can get even today. As far as I know the midi ports are directly bound to the CIA which itself is directly connected to the CPU. If you compare this to MIDI over USB, then there are worlds between it. This also also one of the limitation of the Hatari emulator. You cannot use it for midi stuff as you do not get the advantages.
Kind of unusable on my HDPI monitor, get a tiny rectangle on the page, and the mouse locations don't map correctly.

Still kind of cool I guess.

H Atari isn’t an online emulator, this is just an online build of it.