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Hatari UI

Hatari for:
- N900
- N800/N810
- N770

Debian packaged Atari games and demos

Hatari emulator for N900 phone

Contents:

• Installing Hatari
• Updating the ROM file
• Hatari UI usage
• Keybindings and usage notes
• Making Hatari run faster
• Building Hatari from source

Installing Hatari

Hatari is available from the device "extras-devel" repository which you need to enable in the device package manager before the package(s) show up in it.

For N900 you can install both Hatari emulator ("hatari" package) and Hatari Python/Gtk UI ("hatari-ui" package). For N800/N810 only the Hatari emulator package works. More information on them is here:

• http://maemo.org/packages/view/hatari/
• http://maemo.org/packages/view/hatari-ui/

Note: because "extras-devel" repository contains a lot of unstable software and is very large, it's advisable to disable the repository after installing the software you're interested about. Software in there isn't going to be anymore (in 2012/later) updated so you won't be missing any updates because of this.

Updating the ROM file

Hatari package pulls in a GPL licensed 512kB EmuTOS ROM which is freely usable. If you own on Atari ST(e) i.e. have legal rights to use TOS ROM in it, I would recommend extracting that and using it with Hatari as real TOS is more compatible with many of the games. There are instruction on the net how to extract your TOS version.

If using real TOS isn't an option, I recommend getting the latest EmuTOS version from upstream as it has fixed many bugs and compatibility issues compared to the old EmuTOS version available in Maemo repositories. EmuTOS release contains many variants for different machine configurations. The 256kB UK version is most compatible with ST/STE games and demos, it's in the 256k zip file: http://sourceforge.net/projects/emutos/files/emutos/0.8.7/

After you have the TOS ROM .img file, just copy it to the device (preferably to your home directory there) and select it in Hatari ROM option menu, then save Hatari settings.

Hatari UI usage

Before you can use Hatari (Python/Gtk) UI, you need to save Hatari configuration. Just start Hatari, press AltGr+o (AltGr = Blue arrow key on left of keyboard) and tap on "save config" and then quit.

(In newer Hatari UI version this is done automatically, but in this older version you need to do it manually.)

Keybindings and usage notes

Keys in N900 phone differ from the keys in earlier Nokia 770, N800 and N810 Internet tablets.

Instead of the special keys like "fullscreen" that those had, on N900 you need to use keyboard combinations. The blue arrow key on the right side of the keyboard corresponds to the PC keyboard AltGr key.

I.e. use that key for AltGr for the keyboard shortcuts like:

AltGr+q

Quit Hatari

AltGr+o

Open the Hatari options dialog

AltGr+f

Toggle fullscreen mode

AltGr+x

Toggle fast forward mode (has effect only if there's free CPU)

AltGr+c

Do cold reset

AltGr+d

Open fileselector to change floppy in drive A:

AltGr+j

Toggle between joystick modes (disabled, cursor emulation, real/USB joystick) for joystick in port 1

Cursor keys

In cursor mode outputs cursor keys and Return key to the emulator, in joystick mode emulates joystick

Before switching away from Hatari, I would recommend opening the Hatari options dialog so that the emulation is stopped while you don't use the emulation. When using Hatari UI, you can just pause tap the pause button. This should save battery.

NOTE! Never enable both "Zoom ST-low res." and "Use borders" Screen options at the same time. If you have both of them set, you cannot disable them (because screen config dialog OK button doesn't fit into screen) and SDL doesn't allow Hatari neither to start in fullscreen anymore nor to switch into it when its window is larger than screen. Only way to recover from this is to edit the ~/.hatari.cfg file by hand or replace it with a better working version of the config file.

For more information on normal Hatari features, see: the Hatari manual.

Some notes about making Hatari run faster

The main Hatari bottleneck is the 68k CPU emulation, but there are some things that you could do to decrease the emulation load otherwise. The items are listed in the order of priority.

• In the Screen options:
  • Use (large) frame skip, and/or
  • Don't zoom ST-low res, or
  • Select TV as monitor (draws only each other line)
• In the Sound options:
  • Disable sound completely, or
  • Select lowest playback quality
    If games have background music, that usually skips pretty annoyingly, so it's best to switch it off from the program you're running. Sound effects work quite OK in many games and in sound effects minor glitches are not so irritating
• Disable more compatible CPU option, if the programs you run work without it

(Besides performance, another annoyance is the device "5-way rocker", it's not even close replacement for a joystick as diagonal movements are very hard with it.)

Building Hatari from source

If you want to build the Hatari package yourself for the device:

• Get the latest device SDK and install it
• After starting Scratchbox, get the Hatari package sources and extract them with something like: dpkg-source -x *.dsc
• Build the package like any other Debian package, installing deps it complains about when you do something like this: dpkg-buildpackage -D -b -uc -us -rfakeroot

NOTE: because Hatari switched from GNU Autotools to CMake based build system in the next Hatari v1.4 release, packaging in Maemo repositories cannot be used for building newer Hatari versions. For that, you would need to:

• take latest Hatari package from Debian
• remove or port separately dependencies that are missing from Maemo repositories (like portaudio that's needed only for Falcon emulation) and add to control file dependencies missing from there (like python-gtk2 for Python/Gtk UI)
• Add Maemo packaging features and configuration options from the current Maemo package:
  • Disable DSP emulation and tracing (in debian/rules)
  • Install default options suited for less powerful machine from etc/-dir
  • Depend from separately packaged GPL EmuTOS ROM package
  • Add libx11-dev dependency for (Hatari Python UI) window embedding and sharutils for uudecoding icon image
  • Add package icon image to control file
  • Add .desktop files for both hatari and hatari-ui package
  • Replace XPM icon with correct sized package and app launcher PNG icons
  • Add debug package