Atari ST Emulator for Pocket PC Released

[Janak Parekh]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.pocketinfinity.com/' target='_blank'>http://www.pocketinfinity.com/</a><br /><br /></div>CastCE is finally out. It apparently supports playing a wide variety of games at 100% speed. Looks very cool.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/MarbleMadness.gif" />

[garrans]

Excellent, but where do you find a place to purchase a legal copy of the Operating System (TOS ?) and the games ?

Or does anybody have a link to someone who'd "know".

[sponge]

I'd say forget it. The system has been long since abandoned, and the only way is on eBay, etc.

[Ken Mattern]

I remember this game from the original arcade. I've been running the iobox version for quite some time and it is excellent. THE iobox version looks much better than the screen shot shown above in this thread. The sound is awesome.

For more info go to:

http://www.pocketpccity.com/software/pocketpc/Marble-Madness-TM-2002-4-9-ce-pocketpc.html

[Ivan]

I remember this game from the original arcade. I've been running the iobox version for quite some time and it is excellent. THE iobox version looks much better than the screen shot shown above in this thread. The sound is awesome.



Yes, it was quite good, although it looked and sounded alot better on my Amiga 500 8)

[having unleashed the wrath of former ST users, I now tiptoe to a corner and wait for the flames] :D

[Tim Jump]

I remember this game from the original arcade. I've been running the iobox version for quite some time and it is excellent. THE iobox version looks much better than the screen shot shown above in this thread. The sound is awesome.

Yeah, but you've got to remember something - this particular screenshot is of a game written probably 10-15 years ago for a system just as old if not older. And, of course, there are MANY other games you can play on the emulator if this doesn't strike your fancy.

I can't wait to get home and try it out - I was a HUGE Atari enthusiast for a very long time. Funny enough, never did get an ST until about five years ago. It was a great little machine that in my opinion never did get the respect it deserved.

Tim

[vincentsiaw]

man, were really getting the word 'backward compatible' the real meaning ....

[heyday]

Anyone loaded it on their Dell Axim yet? Which version did you download?

heyday

[Timothy Rapson]

The Palm uses a processor that is virtually identical to the old MAST guys (Mac, Amiga, ST) and it takes the PPC hardware to finaly port the old stuff? I suppose so much of the real power in the ST and Amiga was in the support chips, that the bare Motorola 68000 could not run these old programs on my CLie. Too bad though.

Now, what was nice on my old ST. Spiritware's Bible Concordance (Bible search, still better than anything available on PDA or desktop today.) Michtron had cool games, TimeBandit was the premier title, PageStream and Calamus brought scalable fonts to the Atari desktop before Adobe and TrueType did it on the Windows side.

What a strange and wonderful thing it would be if all that could come to the PPC.

[Janak Parekh]

Yeah, but you've got to remember something - this particular screenshot is of a game written probably 10-15 years ago for a system just as old if not older.
Hmm, maybe I'm getting too old. I thought more people than just myself would recognize the classic - Marble Madness. ;)

--janak

[paulv]

It's certainly running fine on my Jornada 565 (Using 1.02 TOS). I look forward eagerly to the Amiga emulator so I can retire my poor old A1000.

The next big trick would be a midi cable and drivers for pocket PC's so that you can use some of the midi software from the Atari ST or Amiga that ran well without being huge.

[heyday]

So here is a dumb question....

Where the heck can I get ROMS.... I've done searches and can't find jack..

Am I looking for Atari ST roms or do other roms work with this? Is the Atari ST the same thing as Jaguar?

Sorry for the lame questions..

heyday

[paulv]

I found a ROM image at ***URL Removed***

I downloaded the US 1.02 TOS (having read about it working on other sites). 2.x crashed my PPC

***Edited by Moderator 1/21/03 23:57 est. for content.

[Janak Parekh]

Guys, avoid discussing ROM locations here. Unfortunately, it's illegal to trade them. :(

--janak

[jizmo]

I remember this game from the original arcade. I've been running the iobox version for quite some time and it is excellent. THE iobox version looks much better than the screen shot shown above in this thread. The sound is awesome.

Quite irrelevant.

I absolutely hated the Iobox version, after installing it placed itself on the start menu without asking (which, in my books is unforgettable sin) and after uninstalling the demo, I got a error message saying it can't find program 'marble madness' every time I turned my PPC on.

The emulator is just fabulous, I just love it.

/jizmo

[Kati Compton]

Hmm, maybe I'm getting too old. I thought more people than just myself would recognize the classic - Marble Madness. ;)


I did too. But I'm a year older than you, so that doesn't disprove your statement.

[Tim Jump]

Yeah, but you've got to remember something - this particular screenshot is of a game written probably 10-15 years ago for a system just as old if not older.
Hmm, maybe I'm getting too old. I thought more people than just myself would recognize the classic - Marble Madness. ;)

Heh...I definitely recognized the game. If you could distill the amount of frustration it caused me in the arcades...uh, it'd be a lot.

I was just trying to point out that the emulator can play a lot more than just Marble Madness. And that a program devoted to the one game is going to look a lot better than an emulator. But I'm sure you already knew that. :)

Tim

[jizmo]

Oh, and those of you who are thinking of the copyright issues, I'm sure you can purchase the actual computer for next to nothing from somewhere. I don't know any place that would actually sell the TOS-rom file.

Once you've got your hands on the computer, I suppose you are entitled to have a 'backup' version of its rom, thought I'm not sure on this one. You can use a utility on ST to to write the rom file to disk and then read it on PC (Atari's use PC-compatible 720Kb DD-disks).

Used games can also be found, but they are all copy protected so that one cannot make a disk image from them (except for those games that have some kind of protection scheme in the manual that comes with them). I suppose (I'm not 100% sure about this one either) that if you own the full version of the game, you can legimitely use the version that you might find from the net.

These things apply if you really are concerned about the copyrights. But then again, I have to agree with Sponge that most of the stuff is nowadays abandonware and cannot be found for sale anywhere. Many european university FTP servers have loads of Atari games for download.

Surprisingly high amount of demos (graphical shows) also work well with the demo and they're all free.

http://pacidemo.planet-d.net/html.html

..has many demos for the platform. Check 'Odd Stuff' by Sector 1 & Dune, for example. You might have to disable the sounds because these demos push the Atari to its absolute limits.

/jizmo

[jizmo]

I'll continue even further, since I am an old enthusiast of this platform. :wink: Some people had forgotten what decent games Atari ST had, so I'll just repost this brief list that I posted to Pocketgamer yesterday.

So, here are a few to try out on Atari:

Shoot 'em up / action:
-------------------------
Xenon II (obviously)
Turrican II
Prince of Persia
Midnight Resistance
Addams Family
D/Generation

Adventure:
-------------
Police Quest 2
Larry 3
Space Quest 3
Lure of the Temptress
Future Wars

Driving:
----------
Super Cars II
Vroom
Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge 3

and of course the game of the games: Civilization.

I don't care about the RPG titles myself, but I bet that there are loads of them also available.

/jizmo

[IanG]

I had an ST back in the day as well. Xenon 2 was great, but how could you overlook Speedball 2 from your list? Pretty much everything by the bitmap brothers was top notch.

I think there was Dungeon Master for the RPG fans.

We should even be able to play a decent game of Lemmings now as well :D

Later

Ian G

[jizmo]

I had an ST back in the day as well. Xenon 2 was great, but how could you overlook Speedball 2 from your list? Pretty much everything by the bitmap brothers was top notch.

Hehe .. I didn't ponder that long what the *ultimate* games on ST are, just thought a a few good ones of each genre to test. Speedball 2 really belongs to the list, but isn't it out on PPC anyway?

LucasArts' Monkey Island and Zak McKracken should be on the list too, but I left them out, because they are already available via ScummVM.

But I might've added two puzzle games on my list. Certainly Lemmings that you mentioned and Pushover is also a must, as it's one of the most funniest brainteasers I've ever played.

/jizmo

[AdrianP]

Quick questions for people who have installed this...

Which version should I install on an XDA?

How much memory does the emulator take up? How much memory do e.g. games take up? How much free RAM do I need to run the emulator?

Can the emulator and e.g. files all be installed onto an SD card rather than main memory? Will there be any performance hit?

These are probably pretty dumb questions, so apologies in advance.

Thanks

[Rirath]

I was (and am) a huge Atari 2600 fan, but I never even heard of the ST until recently. I'll give it a go, but I'm hoping it doesn't go with Pocket MSX as "Eeh." And no Janak, you're certainly not the only one to recognize Marble Madness. :) There's just not enough die hard gamers around here.

But I might've added two puzzle games on my list. Certainly Lemmings that you mentioned and Pushover is also a must, as it's one of the most funniest brainteasers I've ever played.

If the controlls are good, it'd be worthwhile for them two alone. Who didn't love Lemmings, and Pushover was indeed good fun.

[CharlyV]

Which version should I install on an XDA?

How much memory does the emulator take up? How much memory do e.g. games take up? How much free RAM do I need to run the emulator?

Can the emulator and e.g. files all be installed onto an SD card rather than main memory? Will there be any performance hit?


GAPI PPC2002 version

min. 8MB

Yes, you can install the emulator on the Storage Card.
For the rest read the CastCE manual.

CharlyV

[Buddha]

Absolutely a great addition! Now I can play even more old adventure games on my ipaq!

One thing though I've had with several games:

Once I've reset and started a game, when I'm asked to insert the next disk nothing happens. I load the next floppy image en click 'continue' in the emulator but nothing happens, it just keeps asking me to insert the next disk for the game in question. (I've had this with 'Lure of the temptress' and 'Fascination' aswell as 'Cruise for a corpse' )

Has anybody else had this?


UPDATE: The problem with some multiple disc games has been found and should be fixed in the next release, which I hope will be soon! :)