Version 0.60
project initiator and main developer of Hatari: Thomas Huth <thothy@users.sourceforge.net>
manual by Matthias Arndt <marndt@asmsoftware.de>
Hatari on the WWW: http://hatari.sourceforge.net/
Hatari is an Atari ST emulator for Linux, FreeBSD, BeOS and other Systems which are supported by the SDL library. See Appendix B for details on emulation in general. The Atari ST was a 16/32 bit computer system which was first released by Atari in 1985. Using the Motorola 68000 CPU, it was quite a popular computer having quite a lot of CPU power at that time.
Hatari started as an adaption of the free WinSTon source code to Linux (WinSTon is a ST emulator for Windows). But since WinSTon's CPU core was written in i86 assembler, it was not possible to use it for Hatari as Hatari is intended to be platform independent. So the CPU core of UAE was used for Hatari instead, because this CPU core has been written in portable C and also has some nice features like 68040 and FPU support.
At the time of this writing there is neither a complete MMU emulation nor support for STE specific features.
Hatari currently has the following system requirements:
First, you need the SDL library, you can get it at: http://www.libsdl.org/. Most distributions already ship a suitable version. Make sure to install the appropriate header files as well often called "libsdl-dev" or the like.
Second, you need the zLib compression library. You can get it from http://www.gzip.org/zlib/ but the version shipped with your distribution will be sufficient in most cases. Make sure to have the header files for it installed as well.
Of course, you need the GNU C compiler and (GNU) Make, too!
Change to the hatari/ directory and adapt the configuration file Makefile.cnf to suite your system. Alternatively, you can use the supplied configure script to auto-detect all parameters (type " ./configure --help" to see the options of the script). Don't forget to use some good CFLAGS for the compiler optimizations, e.g. run configure in the following way:
CFLAGS="-O3 -fomit-frame-pointer" ./configure
Then compile Hatari by typing make. If all works fine, you'll get the executable hatari in the src/ subdirectory.
Then you'll have to copy a TOS ROM to the data directory (the data directory is specified in the configuration file Makefile.cnf) and rename it to tos.img, or use the --tos command line option to tell Hatari where to find a TOS ROM. Hatari needs a TOS ROM image because this contains the operating system of the emulated Atari. Sorry, it is not possible to ship an image with the Hatari package since these images are still copyrighted. But you can easily create an image with a real ST and one of those various ROM-image programs for the ST. Or search the internet, but don't ask the Hatari team where to find one.
Another solution is EmuTOS, which is an open-source TOS clone. You can find EmuTOS at: http://emutos.sourceforge.net/. It's not the best solution for playing games or running other old software due to compatibility issues, but it's free and officially compatible with Hatari!
If you do not specify a TOS image on the commandline nor can Hatari find a suitable TOS image in the default dir, you'll get the chance to select a TOS image file from the GUI.
Type make install as root to do a systemwide installation. In this case it is recommended to set the DATADIR variable in Makefile.cnf to a proper value. /usr/local/share/hatari is a good value in that case.
The Hatari executable should now be in your PATH and accessible from anywhere.
When you finally have got a TOS image, try starting Hatari with the option --help to find out more about its command line parameters.
Now type hatari to run the emulator for the first time. If all goes well, you should now be presented with a window showing you the familiar little green desktop of the Atari ST. Press F12 to turn on the GUI to configure Hatari to suit your needs, press F11 to toggle windowed and fullscreen mode.
Hatari ofcourse understands several command line options.
Type hatari --help to list them all.
The command line options in detail are as follows (in brackets the long version):
| Option | Purpose |
| -h (--help) | prints command line options and terminates |
| -v (--version) | prints version information and terminates |
| -m (--mono) | starts the emulated Atari ST in monochrome resolution |
| -f (--fullscreen) | tries to use a fullscreen mode |
| --window | forces Hatari to use a windowed mode |
| -j (--joystick) | activates joystick emulation via cursor keys |
| --nosound | disables sound (makes emulation faster) |
| --frameskip | drops every second frame (accelerates emulation) |
| -D (--debug) | activates the simple builtin debugger |
| --slowfdc | slows down FDC emulation (needed to make some games and demos work) |
| -d <dir> (--harddrive <dir>) | emulates <dir> as a hard disk |
| --hdimage <imagefile> | emulate hard disk with an image file |
| --cartridge <imagefile> |
sets imagefile as the cartridge
on the ROM port This currently does not work together with GEMDOS harddisc emulation! |
| --tos <imagefile> | specify TOS ROM image to use |
| --memsize x | set amount of emulated RAM x=0 for 512K, x=1,x=2 or x=4 for 1,2 or 4 MB |
| --cpulevel x | specify CPU (680x0) to use (TOS 2.06 only!!) |
| --compatible | use a more compatible but slower 68000 CPU mode |
| --blitter | enable blitter emulation |
| --vdi | use extended VDI resolution |
| --printer | enable experimental printer support |
| --midi <filename> | enable experimental MIDI output to the mentioned file |
| --rs232 <filename> | enable experimental RS232 communication via the mentioned file |
| -c <filename> (--configfile) | Use the mentioned file as configuration file instead of ~/.hatari.cfg |
Once you've started Hatari succesfully, you can use the emulator as an allmost complete Atari ST computer system.
Press F12 to enter the GUI. Navigate it with the mouse. The GUI is rather self explanatory.
Click to go back to the emulated ST. All checked options will be applied.
Check the option if you want the emulated ST to perform a soft reset. This should be equal to pressing the reset button on your ST.
Click to terminate Hatari and return to the host OS.
Click to abandon any changes made.
Check the CPU type to use here, enable prefetch mode and if the Blitter should be active.
For best Atari ST compatibility choose plain 68000 here.
The Timer-D patch changes the Timer-D initialization from TOS. TOS uses Timer-D as a baudrate generator for RS232. The TOS default slows the emulation down so the patch gives you a faster emulation.
You can disable the Timer-D patch if games or demos require the original TOS setting.
NOTE: These parameters are very sensitive to the emulated ST and it is strongly recommended to reset the emulated ST after changing these options.
Use the upper dialog to choose which floppy disks should be emulated in the disk drives.
You can use most standard Atari ST disk image files. See the chapter "Floppy disk images" for details.
Click on the button next to the A: and B: option to go to the fileselector. You may select and browse zipped disk images as well.
Click on to eject a disk image from the emulated drive. The emulated ST will act as if had no floppy disk in its drive.
You can specify a default directory where Hatari will start to browse the filesystem.
Check the "Auto insert B" option if you want Hatari to be smart and insert the second disk of a two disk game automatically. This option will insert the second disk in drive B and some games may not be able to find the disks there. In that rare case you will need to insert the second disk manually when prompted.
NOTE: This option does not always work properly.
If you need to create a new blank disk image, click on . Parameters for the new image can be set in the following dialog. Click on create to create the image or on to get back to the disk dialog.
After clicking , a fileselector appears. You can browse the filesystem now. Select the target directory, click beside File: and type in a name for the new disk image. The name should terminate with .st or .msa.
Hatari can currently create plain .ST and .MSA disk images exclusively.
Use the lower dialog to change the harddisk settings.
You can select a harddrive image for harddrive emulation via image file here or you may select a directory of your local filesystem to be emulated as the ST's harddrive.
Check "Boot from HD" if you want Hatari to execute the AUTO folder on the harddrive. This option is checked by default if you specify a harddrive image or a directory via the command line.
You can select the amount of RAM for the emulated ST here. Only amounts that were valid on a real unmodified STFM can be selected.
Note: This option is critical and you are strongly advised to reset the emulated ST when changing this option.
Here you will find the options to save memory snapshots as well.
Click on to save a memory snapshot to file. You can select a new filename here.
Click on to restore a memory snapshot from a file. Use the fileselector to select the snapshot to be restored.
NOTE: Memory snapshots are not interchangeable between different versions of Hatari. E.q. if you compile a newer Hatari, you cannot load your old memory snapshots back.
Here you can select the TOS image to use. Click on to select it via the fileselector.
You can also select an optional cartridge image to use. Click on to select one via the fileselector. Keep in mind that any custom cartridge image will not work together with GEMDOS harddisc emulation or the VDI extended resolution emulation since some additional driver code will be used in the cartridge memory space for these emulations.Note: These options are critical and you are strongly advised to reset the emulated ST when changing one of these option.
Here you can select which joystick you want to emulate via the cursor keys.
Joystick 1 is the normal ST joystick port and 99.9% of all ST games use this port, Joystick 0 emulates a joystick plugged into the ST mouse port allowing you to play 2 player games.
If no joystick is checked here, joystick emulation is done via a connected PC joystick.
See the chapter "Emulated Joystick" for details.
Here you control the video output of the emulated ST.
Check "Fullscreen" to run Hatari fullscreen, default is windowed.
Check "Interleaved mode" if you wish to have that old TV feeling in Hatari. Every second line will be black. This will only work in ST-MEDIUM or ST-LOW in scaled up resolutions.
Check "Frame Skip" to speed Hatari up if emulation is too slow. This will only draw every second ST frame instead of the default of drawing every ST frame. Uncheck if you have a fast PC.
Check "Use Borders" if you wish to have the borders around the ST screen.
"Force 8Bpp" will force SDL to use an 8bit video mode. You don't need this for modern video cards.
You can select which sort of monitor to use. Check "Color" for games and demos. If you check "Mono" here, Hatari will emulate the good old SM124 and will not allow you to switch to color modes from the running ST. This toggle acts like a monitor switch with a color and monochrome monitor connected.
"Zoom ST-Low res." will control if Hatari renders ST-LOW to a 320x200 or 640x400 PC display (with borders turned off) or 384x267 or 768x534. Basically select this to toggle between a small or a large window.
Extended GEM resolutions will emulate some sort of extended graphics card in the emulated ST giving you larger resolutions and a higher colordepth in GEM. Select a resolution and color depth. Check to activate. It will disable all other video options mentioned above. Uncheck to get back to a normal ST behaviour.Click to create a screenshot in .BMP format to the current working directory or click to record a sequence of single screenshots. You can opt to only record new movie frames when the screen content really changed.
Here you can select the keyboard mapping to use.
Two different mappings called "Symbolic" and "Scancode" are predefined.
You can also load a custom keymapping file here if you wish. Please note that selecting to use a custom keyboard mapping will use the "symbolic" mapping for all keys not defined by your map file. See the supplied example mapfile on how to build your own keyboard mapping.
Here you can control the sound subsystem.
Check if you want emulated sound at all. Emulation is faster if sound emulation is turned off.
3 frequencies from low to high quality are available. Experiment a little bit to find out which fits best for your setup. Medium quality will work ok in most cases.
You can select to record a piece of sound here. Check which format to use and click the button. It is a toggle button so you will need to return to the GUI to switch sound recording off again.
Check here if you want to enable experimental printer support. See the chapter "Emulated printer" for details.
As Hatari currently only supports printing to file, click on to select the file to print to. You can enter a new filename as well.
NOTE: As the printer emulation is not perfect yet, activated printer support may interfere with the emulated sound. This is due to the fact that the Atari ST uses some general I/O ports of the soundchip for the printer port. The Hatari team suggests to disable printing while using games and demos.
Check the second checkmark if you want to enable experimental RS232 support. The RS232 device is configured according to the settings of the emulated RS232 of the Atari ST. This means Hatari will automatically use baudrate and handshaking as configured for the emulated ST.
Select a suitable device file for input and output. Click on to select. A good choice is /dev/ttyS0 or /dev/ttyS1.
You can enable MIDI as well. This currently works for outputting MIDI data only. A good choice is /dev/midi00.
Click on to select a suitable MIDI device file for output.
Your sound driver must support MIDI to make this work.
NOTE: RS232 and MIDI emulation are very experimental, too. Don't enable them unless you really need them!
While the emulator is running, you can activate or toggle various features via the following keyboard shortcuts.
| Shortcut | Purpose |
| ALTGR+a | record animation |
| ALTGR+g | grabs a screenshot |
| ALTGR+i | boss key: leave full screen mode and iconify window |
| ALTGR+j | activates joystick emulation via cursor keys |
| ALTGR+m | (un-)locks the mouse into the window |
| ALTGR+r | (warm) reset the ST |
| ALTGR+c | coldreset the ST (same as the original power switch) |
| ALTGR+s | enable/disable sound |
| ALTGR+q | quit the emulator |
| ALTGR+x | toggle normal/max speed |
| ALTGR+y | enable/disable sound recording |
| F11 | toggles fullscreen and windowed mode |
| F12 |
activate the GUI You may need to hold SHIFT down while in windowed mode. |
| PAUSE | will go to the debugger if it was activated at compile time |
All other keys on the keyboard act as the normal Atari ST keys so pressing SPACE on your PC will result in an emulated press of the SPACE key on the ST. The following keys have special meanings:
| Key | Meaning |
| Alt | will act as the ST's ALTERNATE key |
| left CTRL | will act as the ST's CONTROL key |
| Print Screen | will emulate the ST's HELP key |
| Scroll Lock | will emulate the ST's UNDO key |
| Page Up | will emulate the ST's ( key in the keypad |
| Page Down | will emulate the ST's ) in the keypad |
ALTGR will act as ALTERNATE as well as long as you do not press it together with a Hatari hotkey combination.
The right CTRL key is used as the fire button of the emulated joystick when you turn on joystick emulation via keyboard.
The cursor keys will act as the cursor keys on the Atari ST as long as joystick emulation via keyboard has been turned off.
For obvious reasons your PC mouse will act as the emulated Atari ST mouse. In fullscreen mode it will act as expected, directly controlling the ST mouse pointer.
However it is a little bit different in windowed mode. To make the mouse work there as expected you need to grab it first or lock it into the Hatari window. Do this by pressing the ALTGR+m hotkey combination. Press it again to go back to normal mouse behaviour which allows you to work in other X11 windows while Hatari is up and running.
The Atari ST joysticks are emulated ofcourse allowing you to play your favourite games with Hatari.
The default mode is to use a connected PC joystick. You can use any joystick that is supported by your kernel. If your joystick works with other applications, it will likely work with Hatari as well. Make sure it is calibrated and then off you go. Move the stick to point into the desired direction. Please note that Hatari will not detect analogue movement as the Atari ST only had digital joysticks. The first firebutton will act as the normal firebutton on the Atari ST while the second firebutton will emulate a keypress of the SPACE key on the ST as many ST games utilitze the SPACE bar for secondary game functions. (Xenon for example)
If you do not have a PC joystick or joypad, then you do not need to desperate. You can emulate one of the two Atari ST joysticks via the cursor keys. Just activate it in the GUI. Then the cursor keys will act as the joystick directions, the right CTRL key will act as the firebutton. You can still use the cursor keys as the ST's cursorkeys in this mode as long as you press SHIFT along with the cursorkeys.
Hatari by default only handles ST modes, ST-LOW, ST-MED and ST-HIGH.
Overscan effects and socalled "Border Removal" are possible too.
Due to the fact that these effects are achieved by using quirks and glitches in the original chips to do things beyond their specification emulation is a bit tricky for these and not all ST applications utilizing these techniques will work properly in Hatari. Especially socalled "Sync Scrolling", a special technique to emulate the low byte of the video address, currently does not work properly in Hatari.
Beside that you can setup extended VDI modes. These only work with GEM-compliant applications and they are equal to fitting a videocard into your Mega ST.
Make sure to disable extended VDI modes for playing games as 99% of all ST games will not be able to make use of higher resolutions.
Due to the fact that printer handling is very different between Unix style machines and the Atari ST, emulation of the printer is achieved by writing all printer output to a file.
The file will contain a sequence of data, the same that would appear on the data pins of the Atari ST printer port. That would include control characters and commands for graphic printing. Clicking "Print desktop" on the GEM desktop would result in a messy data dump in the printer output.
Printer emulation works best for plain text files or programs that do not format the output for a specific printer. The file contents can be used with your favourite text editor for further processing and printing to a real printer.
To get real direct printing out of Hatari on a PostScript printer,
you may set up a GDOS printer with a PostScript driver on the emulated
Atari and set your printer device file as Hatari's printer output.
NOTE: This has not been tested yet and the Hatari team cannot
guarantee that it will work.
Serial communications in Hatari is designed to directly use a serial port on your PC.
Communications parameters are set automatically upon the settings of the emulated ST. This means all you do is to set the communication parameters like baudrate from your ST communications software. Hatari will do the rest and handle the serial input and output for you.
Hatari does not use floppy disks directly but disk images due to differences between the floppy disk controllers of the ST and the PC. Three types of disk images are currently supported: The raw "ST" type, the similar "DIM" type and the compressed "MSA" (Magic-Shadow-Archiver) type.
The raw type (file suffix should be "*.st") is simply a sector by sector image of a real floppy disk. You can easily create such an image with the dd program which should normally be pre-installed on every Unix-like system. Simply type something like dd if=/dev/fd0 of=myimage.st to create a disk image. Of course you need access to /dev/fd0, and depending on your system and the type of floppy disk you might have to use another device name here (for example I use /dev/fd0u720 for 720kB disks). However, if the disk is copy-protected or doesn't use a MSDOS compatible file system, this might fail. So be very careful if you're not sure about the disk format.
The other possibility is to image the disk on a real Atari ST. There are programs like the Magic Shadow Archiver for this task. Hatari supports this slightly compressed MSA disk images, too. Note that Hatari only supports the "old" MSA format, there are some Magic Shadow Archiver clones (like Jay-MSA) that create better compressed but Hatari-incompatible disk images. However, if you have got such a MSA disk and want to use it with Hatari, you can still run the corresponding MSA program within Hatari to extract the incompatible disk image to a normal floppy disk image.
While *.ST and *.MSA are more or less the "standard" types of Atari disk images, you might sometimes also find STT or ADF images on the internet. These currently do not work with Hatari.
Hatari can now also utilize *.DIM images just as *.ST ones without any problems. Note that DIM images are nearly the same as the raw ST images (they only have an additional 32 bytes header), so you can easily transform the DIM images into ST images by stripping the header from the files. For example try something like: dd if=input.dim of=output.st bs=32 skip=1
If you've got a disk image that has been created with the old ST emulator PaCifiST (for DOS) or with early versions of the program Makedisk, and the disk image does not work with Hatari, then the disk probably suffers from the "PaCifiST bootsector bug" (Hatari will display a warning message then). In this case, the bootsector of the disk contains some illegal data, so that the disk even does not work on a real ST any more. However, if it is a .ST and not a .MSA disk, you can easily fix it by using a hex-editor to change the byte at offset $D (13) from 0 to 1 (don't forget to backup your disk image first, since you can also easily destroy your disk image when changing a wrong byte there). If the disk contains a bootsector program, you probably have to adjust the boot sector check sum, too (it can be found at offset $1FE + $1FF).
Hatari supports disk images that are compressed with (Pk-)ZIP (file suffix must be ".zip") or GZip (file suffix must be ".st.gz" or ".msa.gz"), so you can archive your disk images into zip archives. You can also directly run the zip archives you may download from the net as long as the archive contains a disk image in .ST or .MSA format.
Note: Hatari does not save disk images back to *.ZIP files so your highscores and savegames are lost if you load the game from such a zipped disk image.
Hatari supports two ways of emulating a ST hard drive: The low-level ACSI hard disk emulation and a GEMDOS based drive emulation.
To use the ACSI hard disk emulation, you need a hard disk image file with a pre-installed HD driver in it. So either try to image your old ST hard disk or grab one from the internet. There is a HD image on the Hatari web page for download. Perhaps we'll also provide a tool for creating HD images one day.
With the GEMDOS based drive emulation, you can easily "mount" a folder from the host file system to a drive of the emulated Atari. To use the GEMDOS based drive emulation, you should use a folder on your hard disk that only contains files and folders with valid TOS filenames. That means that all files/folders should be written in capital letters and their length mustn't exceed the 8+3 file name length limit. If you don't want to rename all files to get capital letters, it is also possible to store that folder on a FAT filesystem since those filesystems are case-insensitive.
GEMDOS drive emulation is an easy way to share files between the host system and the emulated Atari, but it is known to be incomplete and a little bit unstable, especially if you use it together with the ACSI hard disk emulation. So if your programs complain that they could not find/read/write files on the GEMDOS HD drive, you should try to copy them to a floppy disk image or a real hard disk image!
Due to the way the GEMDOS drive emulation is implemented at the moment, it is not possible to use a cartridge image together with GEMDOS drive emulation.
Note that changing the HD-image or the GEMDOS HD-folder will reset the emulated Atari since it is not possible to switch the hard disk while the emulator is running.
May the fun without the price to be with you ;-) !
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA
The GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation | The GNU General Public License
Emulation via software is an art and Hatari is an example of this.
Emulation is to make a computer behave like a (probably) completely different machine on the lowest possible niveau. This includes CPU and custom chip emulation allowing software written for the emulated machine to be run without notice. A good emulator will run most of the software intended for the emulated platform without trouble.
The key to emulation is to simply do those things with a software program, the emulator, that normally chips would perform. So you have an CPU emulator that basically consists of a large loop that does exactly what the real thing would do:
The typical von-Neumann CPU can be emulated very fast, stable and error-free using such a simple loop system.
But in most cases the CPU emulation is the simplest part. Correct emulation of the various custom chips and hardware parts of the emulated system is much trickier.
This is a little compilation of what Atari software does work in Hatari. It is by no means finished.
| Game | Working | Sound | Comment |
| Eliminator | yes | perfect | |
| Speedball | yes | perfect | |
| Xenon | yes | music ok - fx dodgy | bullets and explosions sound weired |
| Bubble Bobble | yes | ||
| F15 Strike Eagle 2 | yes | ok | keyboard emulation seems to be dodgy |
| Rick Dangerous | yes | perfect | |
| Slayer | yes | ok | raster fx at highscore entry dodgy |
| Lethal Xcess | no | crashes while loading, sync scrolling will not work properly | |
| Star Goose | yes | music ok - bullet sound dodgy | |
| Xenon 2 - Megablast | yes | nearly perfect (including sampled intro) | |
| Metal Mutant | yes | seems ok | some color effects in the lower screen seem buggy |
| Defenders Of The Earth | yes | ||
| Nebulus | yes | music ok; snowball, balls and trapdoors dodgy | otherwise working to a playable extend |
| Leander | yes | ||
| Navy Seals | yes | ||
| Armalyte | yes | ||
| Wings Of Death | yes | ||
| Toki | yes | ||
| Alien World | yes | Only works with "--slowfdc" | |
| Skweek | yes | Does not work with cartridge / HD emulation |
| Demo | Working | Sound | Comment |
| Fantasia (by Dune) | yes | Only works with "--slowfdc" | |
| Oddstuff (by Dune/SectorOne) | yes | Only works with "--slowfdc". Enable "frameskip" to avoid the flicker. | |
| If pigs could fly (by Syndicate) | yes | Only works with "--slowfdc" | |
| LongScreen (by X-Troll) | yes | Only works with "--slowfdc" | |
| Overdose (by Aggression) | yes | Does not work with cartridge / HD emulation |
| Application | Working | Comment |
| DevPac 2.2 | yes | MonST crashy |
| Turbo Assembler | yes | |
| GFABASIC 3.6TT | yes | MENU.PRG does not like harddisks. Use diskimages for compiling. |
| ST Basic | yes | |
| Neochrome | yes | rasters sometimes unstable |
| Crackart | yes | Harddisk access does not work with GEMDOS emulation - fine with disk images |
| Tempus | yes | |
| Sagrotan | yes | |
| SidSound Designer | yes | |
| MusicMon 2 | yes | |
| Protracker | yes | |
| Teradesk | yes | |
| Qed | yes | |
| Everest | yes | |
| Speed Of Light | yes |
| Matthias Arndt December 18 2004 |