Well. Here it is. What started out as a few scribbled notes turned into three YouTube videos showing both old, and new features of the next release of Atarixlbox... Whenever that may be... I kinda threw them together quickly (didn't want to waste too much time that could be used goofing off, uh err I mean programming). So no complaints about the poor sound/video editing.

Check 'em out!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iR_MA_9t5Ns
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMM__ur7nZo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSYYu4G4oPQ

Disclaimer: Be prepared to waste 28 minutes of your life.

No ETA at all on release. Just something I felt like doing.

Sweet job! You really found a way to bring the colors out in the games they looked so sharp and crisp too. Very impressive! Good work. This was one of the most nonuser friendly emulators xport had. It looks like you cleaned it up real nice. I appreciate the time and effort you spent on this. It is sweet I cant wait to get a copy when it is released. Thanks

Best atari 5200 emu ever!
Crazy job you did with this one bro!This emu smell the BIG atari fan!
It gives me the envy to try some atari 5200 gems (karateka with the black albator look a funny good piece of crap
I didn't knew this centipede tv spot (shame on me): just fantastic!

Yeah big thanks to Giles9999 for providing the multiple skins for each system on my request. Atarixlbox covers a wide variety systems that meant something different to people depending on which one they owned and I wanted to convey that.

Most people are only exposed to the 5200 titles. Which, although they comprise a good portion of the best, there are still many great titles outside of the 5200 to be discovered. I think it is pretty close to the anniversary of my 1st release of Atarixlbox. Hard to believe. It started off as a simple bug tweak (snapshot fix, sound fix, activating artifacting, cleaned up 5200 controls). But ended up becoming an effort to make the machine more accessible to people who may have trouble understanding it.

I'm hoping to do the same for AdamX, Z26, and BlissX. I really need to get going on those at some point.

Special thanks to Atarimac for figuring out (mostly) the VAPI file format. That is what mostly motivated me to pick it up again. Plus I needed to get around to adding "Palette loading" and the "Palette controls" which caused me to stumble on to the NTSC filter.

Thanks to Kr0tki for making the NTSC filter. The only downside to it is that it is a bit of a performance killer. So I had to come up with a "Rewind frameskip" option to get around that. The video does not really mention the "Rewind frameskip" because at the time I was not sure how much it was really needed. But it looks like for some games it needs to be bumped up to 1 or 2 in order for rewind to be able to be activated while the NTSC filter is on. I think it is worth it, though. It really does give a nice look to the games.

Truly impressive. Can't wait to try it.

I'm surprised that the 'ol noggin had not kicked in and people started realizing and asking questions about something potential yet.

My only question is when can I get a copy of your dat files for games that run on this emulator. You have the most clean and organized set. I have had more problems with getting the right images than anything else. The games for this system are available in so many different forms. You by far spend more time with this emulator than any of the rest you tinker with. You are the grand master when it comes to the 5200.

damn, man! thi shit is clean! i cant wait till you release it. this is going o put the fun back in those old atari games!


that colorization is the bomb! you really know your way around these proggies, man. good lookin out! great work!

I'm beginning to think I broke this up into too many parts. The first two have about double the views of the third one. Although a good amount were a result of me working on the annotations.



That's a good point.. I never thought of that. Although my collection is not nearly as organized as it looks. The whole idea behind it though is I'm under the assumption most people either get the goodset, the no-intro set, or the Tosec sets. Which mostly consist of cartridges.

Most of the other stuff can be retrieved from atarimania.

Yeah I meant to mention it in the annotations but forgot. The Atari was really the only machine to use "artifacting" to get color in higher resolutions. It has something to do with the way TV's interpret data. So emulators typically display these games in "black and white". The apple did something similar to "artifacting" but it works slightly different.

The cool part is that old tv look (like the shimmering when cycling thru colors), scanlines, etc.

Nice work man. I really like how you show the color difference in the 3rd video.

I got some pretty sweet datfiles myself for this. I don't know how new the ones on my thread are, but I'm sure I've even got stuff to update on what's already there.

Last I checked but it has been awhile only manuals were available on the 5200 Xtra-packs.

Yeah the whole idea started with the color differences idea I jotted some notes on. Next thing I know I end up with 3 videos. Probably coulda trimmed down on the number of color/bw examples, or at least cut the time in half. But the software I was using didn't like what I was doing and would refuse to playback anything after the first play or after I changed anything.

Real pain in the neck. Then it wouldn't let me render the thing to an uploadable file so I had to capture it off of my computers TV out card. And I didn't really wanna waste toooo much time on the silly thing.

Got the idea for the first song (part 1) from the name of the test text file RessX sent me when we were having problems with the txt file viewer. You (RessX) should also recognize the last song (part 3).

Hey Run,

Yeah... my bad if they're not there yet. That may have been one of the ones I had held off on since there was still so much to do left. I'll see what I can do about getting what I've got up there. It would probably just be one file for now that would throw all the roms in the same folder, but they should all work fine since I've tested them (you might have to set up controls for some of the 800 games). They'll all be within the XBox name limit and they won't have things like (U) or (J) or (Alt) or none of that crap.






Madmab,

Yeah, that color thing was cool. For a long time I just had games like that in black and white and more blocky until you told me which games to change and they look so much better. That was probably like 10 months ago by now. Wow... we've all been working together on this for a long time now.



My brother would say it was because you aren't doing it on a Mac....

And if you were doing it on a Mac, he'd say it was because you weren't doing it on a powerful enough Mac.

Might be a bit of truth to that, since I'm not impressed with how I'm able to work with videos on my end... although I don't have a kick ass PC either.



Ah-Ha!

Lots of great 80's tunes... SOOOOO many bad ones. You got a pretty good selection going there.

LOL.... never seen that Centipede commercial before. That is the best commercial ever made.

Nice work on this. Might I suggest (when your rig allows it) shaving the watch time down to the time of one Music Video or two.. Most people only have a few minutes worth of attention span. *raises hand*

I'd love to see if you could condense and edit the work in those 3 videos down to one video that's got what you feel are the best videos in there. It would be cool to add other things like commercials between stuff too. Maybe a little sound editing and different songs (I noticed a few songs that seemed to relate to the subject matter that should be considered in a shortened video).

Maybe somebody who is skilled in serious video editing could tackle this. I'm just a dabbler in stuff and assume you are too. Maybe there's somebody here that is as good with video and has the rig to make sure this looks like a professional video.


Later,
~Rx

Well I think RAM is the big issue but the program does not do a good job of telling you when it is short. It just tends to either crash or act up.

Yep, can't have a little 80's without the cheese to go with it. I probably woulda trimmed em down more, but like I said the editor I was using didn't like what I was doing and was slowing things down to a crawl and I just wanted to get them over with.

Plus once after adding annotations I'm reluctant to redo them. Adding the annotations alone takes a bit of time due to it's limitations.

Well back to metroid prime.....

Just wanted to bump this thread because this emulator is going to be the biggest hit since sliced bread to the older crew of xbox1 fans. This had to be the most incomplete in the xport set of emulators by far. I knew it would be bad ass since it seems to be madmab's favorite out of the bunch and would receive the most needed care. I just hope it has a good way of auto detecting the files so it knows what configurations to use. The old models are such a pain to sort threw for the correct system setup. It also had bad controller mapping that had no set button config and you would have to make changes because of the keypad to because of the keyboard number set on the controllers if I am remembering correctly. I remember the 7800 was screwy like that too before madmab started playing with it. I will assume this one gets atleast those types of corrections as the 7800 system did.

I also wanted to say I will be able to help out coding a little bit on the xport systems soon. I want to do some work for us a new linux disrto with the 2.6 kernel with support for the 32k and 64k cluster sizes. I also want to make some changes to the xbmc xbox side of things like network support for the emulators which run on cut files on xbmc. And try to find a way to get xbmc and the linux drivers to be able to use the 128k cluster sizes that we can produce but the xbox will not read. If just this can be worked out we will have the ability to run 4tb hdd in the xbox when they hit the market. Right now we are stuck at 2tb as a cap. I have ccompleted this mod already and it runs at 100% These xboxes make increadable media servers for your home system and half the power consumsion of a nas or pc to run your files. Which can be burned or streamed easy from within xbmc. Which are fully accessible with xp with a couple 3rd party programs or within the factory media system on vista or windows7.I have the right tools already but lack the ability. I am currently back in school with all IT classes. coding, networking, and operating system classes right now. I don't want to branch off of the directions your taking but help you with your work if it is cool with you madmab on the xport side. It will be a little time down the road before I am competent or ready but wanted to give you a heads up and see if you were cool with the idea. It is crazy being back in school after 15 years or so. Not to mention it seems way easier.

Well the last Atarixlbox already had the most changes... Auto-config, proper mapping of the 5200 controllers (including analog), plus fixes to some of the main issues the older versions had. The only real new things in the latest one is I cleaned up the overlay/keyboard so they don't mess up the edges of the screen, added VAPI/PRO support (although PRO seems to be broken), the NTSC filter (which is really nice), plus a rewind frameskipper to make up for the speed loss.

The rewind frameskipper also happens to help out a little with the memory issues causing the skin to act a little weird on the ingame menu. This is mostly due to different Atari games having different sized savestate "footprints". But it is also an issue with several other emulators as well. I really need to find another definable constraint that I can put in there to make it more flexible.

There is a new autoconfig system that does not rely on all those files like I had in the last one, but I still need to build up the database.

Anyways in regards to dealing with x-port's code. Well, although I do have some programming background, none of it was with C or any variations. So this is really all a learning process for me and I'll be the first to admit that even I still don't know what I'm doing. But I can say (from my perspective) that taking this on was/is a big task and in some ways bigger than I originally invisioned it would be.

Because there are so many x-port emu's I did alot of things that I had to backtrack and redo because I found out later that one emu may do things differently than another did. Or that one emu is structured just slightly different from another to not work in the way I anticipated. So it really does take a long time to sift thru all the code and understand what is really going on in the big picture.

It can be difficult distinguishing between what may be older unneeded code, and newer better code.

Anyways I meant to tell you that while messing with some Wii emulators that use samba that I read that some "older" versions of unix samba servers did not support something and would not work. I remember you saying something about having problems in that area. I wish I kept the link cause I kinda forgot where I read it. It was probably in the support forums for those particular emualtors.

Glad you got the low volume fixed with the stereo/mono switch.
I'll be waiting for it.
Been using the xbox1 for only xbmc for months now.

Mike

Was this ever released?
I'm waiting still for the volume fix.


Mike

Yeah you can find it in the download section over at ww.emuxtras.net

Version 8 or ( 7.8beta in program) still needs work. I can't get the joystick controls to work at all. Try remapping the controllers, but it don't work right.
Back to version 7 I guess.

Try changing the "Preset controller config" to match the system to which the game you are playing is for.

For example if you are playing a 5200 game, go into the "in game" menu or the "game configuration screen" and set the "Preset controller" type to "5200 joystick".