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WHAT IS IT?
Pocket Atari is the official Windows CE port of the open source Atari 800 emulator. It emulates the 8-bit series of computers made by Atari in the 1980s. This includes computers such as the Atari 400, 800, 800XL, 65XE, 130XE and several others. Being in development for many years, the emulator core delivers, undoubtedly, the best emulation experience of the Atari 8-bit machines.
The Windows CE port enables users of handheld devices to enjoy their favorite games and apps in their Pocket PCs and Smartphones. The WinCE port was originally done by Vasyl Tsvirkunov. Kostas Nakos joined the development team from version 2.0.0 onwards and is responsible for the WinCE port. This is the web page to check out for the latest stable binaries and development builds.
SUPPORTED DEVICES
The WinCE port supports both Smartphones and Pocket PC devices using a single binary. It is built targetting the 2002 version of the OS. This means that it will probably run OK on devices using a newer version of the OS, as there seems to be backward compatibility. It has been tested WinCE 2002, 2003 and WM5 devices and it ran just fine. It would be nice to contact me if you get it to run on different devices.
What you really need is a WinCE device featuring an ARM processor. This is not a severely limiting requirement, as all modern devices designed for Windows CE 2002 and later are ARM enabled. Aside from that, for Pocket PCs supported displays are monochrome, palleted (256 color) and high color (65536 color) with resolution greater than 240x240. For Smartphones the supported display is high color with resolutions of 176x220 and 240x320. If you'd like me to include support for different display configurations, you can use the feature request facility of the Atari 800 Source Forge page.
NEW STUFF
v2.0.3 : Added support for QVGA landscape devices and virtual keyboard popup (hold softkey B)
v2.0.2: Added support for VGA devices, backlight/display should be always on, got rid of zlibce.dll
DOWNLOADS
Get the latest stable release version from here. It is version 2.0.3 released Jul 21 2007.
Get the latest cvs build here. (CVS 2.0.2 @ 08 May 2007)
For installation and usage instructions, check out the readme file included in the archive.
Please note that previous versions required zlibce.dll to be inside the installation directory. This is not needed from now on as the zlib library has been compiled statically in the executable.
PORT SPECIFIC NOTES
The emulator core features a great wealth of emulation-related build options. Some of the more processor hungry features are turned off in the WinCE version, as the target devices usually have less capable processors. The main disabled feature is the cycle exact emulation of graphics, but you will not notice the difference in most of the software. One other thing to look out for is the high quality Pokey sound emulation option. Turning it on in slow devices can lead to device freeze, with no clean exit options and thus requiring a reboot. Other than that, you can expect a fully working emulator.
For the users trying to roll their own WinCE binary, you may (or may not) stumble on the following issue: The Microsoft WinCE development tools may complain when opening the "PocketAtari.vcp" project file. The issue is that the project file needs CR+LF instead of only LF. You can use any utility like unix2dos to circumvent it.
LINKS
The Atari800 project homepage
Vasyl Tsvirkunov's old Pocket Atari page
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