Atari ST emulator ported to RISC OS

Hats off to Hatari!

Franck Martinaux of NO RISC – NO FUN – a new name in the RISC OS world – has released a port of version 1.62 of Hatari, an Atari ST emulator.

Only available for computers running RISC OS 5.18 or later on at least a Cortex-A8 processor – which currently means systems based around the BeagleBoard and PandaBoard – Hatari has been compiled with an optimised version of SDL 1.2.15, and is able to emulate an 8Mhz Atari ST or STE at 100% of the original computer’s speed.

The Atari ST was a 16/32bit computer, running on a Motorola 68000 CPU, that appeared in the mid-1980s and remained commercially available until the early-1990s. Like its main competitor, the Commodore Amiga – a computer that shared some of its development history – the machine became very popular in that period and, as such, there was a very healthy games market.

According to the Hatari website, “Unlike many other Atari ST emulators which try to give you a good environment for running GEM applications, Hatari tries to emulate the hardware of a ST as close as possible so that it is able to run most of the old ST games and demos.”

Also available from NO RISC – NO FUN is FastDosbox, a version of x86 emulator Dosbox, suitable for the same platforms as Hatari, and which is capable of playing most DOS-based games. This version is apparently 250% faster than the one found on riscos.info. However, FastDosbox isn’t available for download from the NO RISC – NO FUN website; it’s exclusively available on PlingStore.

What’s PlingStore? If you head along to the London Show at the St Giles Hotel in Feltham on Saturday 27th October, 2012, there’s a very good chance you’ll find out.

Related posts

One Thought to “Atari ST emulator ported to RISC OS”

Comments are closed.