3 ms·
The irony of course is that the keyboard is perhaps the worst thing about the Atari ST and much of the charm in these old systems is the crisp real-time respons
by buescher 3y ago
The irony of course is that the keyboard is perhaps the worst thing about the Atari ST and much of the charm in these old systems is the crisp real-time response of their simple hardware and software - which you won't get in a software emulator.
- TacticalCoder 3y agoThe boot time of the Pi is an issue: it definitely doesn't have the same "feel" as just powering the machine on and having stuff happen instantly. But besides that emulation is quite good nowadays and it mostly feels like the real thing. I've got a vintage arcade cab and if I play an original PCB or that same game, emulated from a Pi (with a Pi2JAMMA adapter), it's pretty much the same thing. Heck, for some games you can't even tell if you're running of the real PCB or playing an emulator. But you're right in that I don't like the slow boot time when I turn the thing on with the Pi connected: it's way nicer to just turn the machine on and have he the game start near instantly (quite a feat btw for games mostly running on slow Z80 CPUs and the like).
- Frenchgeek 3y agoUse some of the PiFox codebase to translate a simple ST emulator on bare metal? Most of the boot time is the OS after all...
- toast0 3y ago> it's way nicer to just turn the machine on and have he the game start near instantly (quite a feat btw for games mostly running on slow Z80 CPUs and the like). Depends on the game. Some start pretty fast, but others do a lot of loading (hard drive or optical based games often load the whole thing into ram on boot), which isn't unreasonable given the typical use case is start in the morning and leave on all day and leaving on 24/7 wasn't uncommon either. And a little bit of delay isn't even noticable if the CRT needs to warm up anyway. If you have a slow booting game and you can savestate after boot, emulation might be much faster startup than real.
- TacticalCoder 3y ago> emulation might be much faster startup than real Ah could be: I only have "simple" PCBs, not laserdisc ones or anything fancy like that (and, yup, the old CRT needs to warm up, typically the sound is coming out before any picture!)
- toast0 3y agoLaserdisc games usually run the disc in realtime, but (much newer) systems running from cd-rom or dvd often pull in the whole shebang. Things like the ps2-like hardware for DDR, and the dreamcast like (naomi) hardware would tend to pull everything into ram, rather than at runtime.
- j45 3y agoHibernate is good.
- muth02446 3y agoThis makes me wonder, why can't a stripped down linux kernel boot in < 1s?
- noodlesUK 3y agoUnfortunately, the pre-boot environment on a modern PC takes longer than most of these old machines take to boot. No amount of stripping down the kernel will save you from a 2-5s POST.
- icedchai 3y agoI remember those mushy keyboards! One of my college friends was an ST fan. Her dad had at least 4 STs: 520, 1040, a couple of Megas. I was an Amiga guy myself. I don't really like seeing retro hardware "modded" like this, unless the original machine was totally non functional, but to each their own.
- j45 3y agoSorry, is the ST emulator slower than the raw power of the ST CPU?
- buescher 3y agoSpeed isn't the issue, it's latency. Some people don't mind latency. Some people will know just how to fix latency problems with software emulators, their host platforms, and modern hardware and controllers. I'm not in either category.