#hatari emulator

Hello once again and welcome back to Linux Life. Well since our last episode I have upgraded the graphics card in the i7 desktop from the GT 630 that was in there to a more modern GTX 1030 although both have 2GB texture memory the 1030 has GDDR5 and many more graphic units the 630 had 64 the 1030 has 512 so a much faster card overall.

The reason I got the GTX 1030 was it was capable of Vulkan as it’s a DX12 compatible card which the GT 630 wasn’t.  So many more games are playable now.  Not that I am a huge games player but I do like to have an odd game or two now and again.

So major graphics upgrade meant I tried a few games obviously I tried a few of the native Steam games and sure enough they work fine.  Things look good in things like Castlevania Lords of Shadow.

OK on to more daring moves.  I used to play Unreal Tournament 2004 a lot in the olden days when I used to play regularly.  I was never good at FPS games but an occasional blast is fun.  So I know Unreal Tournament 4 is free to download but obviously it uses the Epic Launcher which is Windows and Mac only at the moment.

Tried running it with Wine it failed to install.  So off I went looking around the net apparently UT4 has a Linux test application which is 10GB of download.  So I downloaded it read the thread on how to install it and run it.

Sure enough I now can play Unreal Tournament 4 on Antergos.  I have yet to play it online but I am sure having fun getting my skills back with the bots.  

With that under my belt I went one step further... As I mentioned earlier this new card has Vulkan capability.  So I downloaded Lutris and decided to try Path of Exile.  I am a sucker for a good Diablo-style game.  I spent hours with Diablo, Diablo II, Torchlight and Torchlight 2.

Now I tried PoE in its early days in Windows and it was quite fun but got sidetracked and never played it again.  It has vastly improved since I last played it.

I also had to install DXVK which is a tool which converts Direct X calls into Vulkan instructions so Linux can run these games.

So I download the script, install the game using it and set it to go.  I wish I had checked the script as it set the desktop on PoE to 1920x1024 and it was off the edge of my screen.

A few tweaks later I have it running full screen at 1280x960 and I can now see all of the screen.  I also turned off the FPS counter as to be honest I don’t really care.

However the mouse on the menu I have to move under the item I want by quite a bit to select it which is odd.  I get the game going and the mouse is fine in game until I open my inventory screen.  Once again the mouse pointer is out of sync regarding objects.

It seemed it was am issue as the game was not running in full screen.  It still has issues but I can at least correct it.  Bit fiddly but it can be done.  Not ideal but playable once it is sorted.

Moving away from games I have been playing with the Hatari emulator.  I admit, I never owned an Atari machine of any era.  Not at all.  I have used many of them due to other people owning them but I myself have never actually had any.

Now Hatari is an ST/TT/Falcon emulator.   So I managed to get the basic ST setup and games running which is pretty standard and easy to do.  However I decided to attempt running a Falcon Demo.

Having never used a Falcon or a TT but a bit of a read through the manual I tried to run a 68060 demo which I did not get manage to get it working.  However I did manage to get a 68030 demo running.

I have an i7 3770K with 24GB of memory and it struggled to run the demo without frame skipping.

What is odd is I can run an Amiga emulator such as FS-UAE, as a 68030 with no major performance hit so why does Hatari struggle.  Especially since I believe both FS-UAE and Hatari use the UAE core base for their 68K series emulation.  So they should be comparative but not the case.

However I do admit I think the major slowdown factor was having to emulate the Falcon DSP sound processing as opposed to the issue of the processor emulation.  Sound emulation is always a headache in any major project involving emulators and is always one of the last things implemented as it takes a lot of work to get right.

So I may be able to forgive Hatari in that respect as in time someone will figure out the DSP stuff to be optimized.