Atari 5200 Emulator

[Narcisa Flierl]

TheAtari 5200 was a video game console produced by Atari in November of 1982, It had a MOS Technology 6502C CPU running at 1.79 MHz with 16KB of RAM. It was created to compete with the Intellivision. The 5200 was incompatible with 2600 cartridges until a later revision, making it unpopular compared to existing consoles. Many of its games were simply ports of 2600 titles, but it's an interesting piece of history regardless. Due to their hardware similarity, most 5200 emulators can emulate the Atari 8-bit family (Atari 800 and similar) computers too.

Let's get the first thing out of the way. No matter which way you to choose to emulate the Atari 5200 there are going to be issues. There are 3 choices of emulators, Kat5200, Mess (Mame) or Alitirra and each of them have their own quirks making each less than the perfect choice.

Kat5200 is probably the easiest to get up and running and setup but it is ugly and it changes your monitors resolution when loading and exiting a game which people can find off putting and if you are on a multi monitor setup it moves windows around on the monitors. It also has terrible to non existent shader support. While it does have some screen effects to recreate an old TV look that is pretty much all it has, there are no CRT scanlines or anything else. See update #2 below. Kat5200 is now my recommended way to emulate the 5200 for most people.

Mess (Mame) is the next easiest to setup and for the most part it is pretty good, it has good CRT shaders and easy to setup controls. There is a catch however which makes Mess (Mame) kind of suck, certain games have controller issues and this is baked into the emulator until it gets fixed. I have not tested every single game to figure out all the games with this issue but I can tell you that Moon Patrol and Pitfall have controller issues.

Altirra is widely considered to the best way to emulate the 5200 but it is also the most complicated to get setup. The controller configuration is annoying but I did find a short how to on the Atariage forums here -altirra-26-xbox-360-controller-5200-mode/

Unfortunately the controller setup is the least of the problems when it comes to Altirra. The bigger problem comes when you want to load a game, when you load a game a popup window will appear asking for a mapper. If you don't pick the right mapper the game won't work and obviously in a frontend you don't want to have to pick a mapper each time you load a game.

There is a way around this mapper problem however but it does involve some work converting your roms so they have a header with the information needed by Altirra to auto load the rom with the mapper bypassing the popup window. One option is a java program a user over on the Atariage forums made which lets you drag your rom files into the window and convert them and here is the link to it -atari-rom-maker/

I did find this to not be 100% though and not fully automatic, you had to pick the mapper for each game and if you don't know which mapper each game needs you still need to load the game in Altirra to find out. The defaulted recommended mapper was not always the correct one. There is one other way which also takes some time but it works. You can load your rom into Altirra and then using the Altirra UI you can save out a new rom file headered and ready to go. Once you generate all new roms you can then import those into Launchbox and they will load directly into Altirra without the mapper window. Here is the link to the Atariage forum where I found this information -help-with-altirra-271-and-pop-up-box-of-select-cartridge-mapper/#entry3648699

Update:

Altirra has been updated, as of version 2.90 it now has a built in database reducing the need to guess the chip type which should remove the need to go through the above steps.

Update #2:

Kat5200 has been updated and no longer messes with resolution, it also now has some support for some Retroarch GLSL shader files. I tested some of the CRT shaders and found Lottes is the one that plays best with it and looks as intended.

My Atari 8-bit emulator of choice - Atari 800 - supposedly emulates the 5200 as well but I haven't tried it with any 5200 games. It's great for 800 games though. I'll try it out with some 5200 games and see how well it goes.

So I did some testing and they do work, though you'll run into the same issue with the headers. I believe you can do the same thing as you mentioned above, though the way I got around it was via save states - you can save external save state files (naming them after the game title) so I just saved them post mapper-selection. Then you can just direct the save states to the emulator just like a rom and it boots correctly without any selection. You can actually do the same thing with save states in CCS64.

What issues did you run into ? The emulator asking for which mapper to use ? If you got asked which mapper then you were still loading the original rom, you need to load the new rom that got generated. I converted my full 5200 set last night (90+ games) and re-imported them all and what I have loaded to test out works just fine.

If you got asked which mapper then you were still loading the original rom, you need to load the new rom that got generated. I converted my full 5200 set last night (90+ games) and re-imported them all and what I have loaded to test out works just fine.

You can still load from the original rom so long as you use a save-state post-mapper selection. You load the cart, select the right one, save state and name it as the game title and then use that as your "rom". It boots up normally and won't prompt you to select the mapper. This is with Atari 800. I don't know if this is an option Altirra.

The converted rom shouldn't won't ask for the mapper and I don't like to bother with save states plus this way it's a converted set of roms so if for whatever reason the save states get lost or corrupted like save states tend to do you still have a set of roms.

Yeah I went ahead and tested deleting the actual rom files and they still work fine without them. It calls them a save state but it seems to be a complete dump (I guess that's not too crazy given how small the games are).

Yep, Atari 800 is a great little emulator (and platform). Generally speaking the C64 had better versions of most games (and a much larger library) but there are some notable exceptions like Lucasarts' (at the time Lucasfilm Games) early efforts, which were originally created for the Atari 8-bit and later ported to the C64. They're actually better on the Atari 8-bit despite the somewhat inferior hardware.

You have to press f1 to get to the Atari800 options (if it brings up the retroarch options just press f1 again) from the atari800 options go to emulator configuration > system rom settings > 5200 bios rom locations and set original to your 5200.rom which you should have in your retroarch\system folder. Then press the tab key a couple of times to get back to the emulator configuration menu and make sure you save the config file. Should work after that.

Those can be rearranged via Quick Menu -> Controls but it doesn't show the actual functions above, just "User 1 B" "User 1 Y" etc. so it can be a bit confusing to do. You might want to consider turning on an "enable hotkeys" hotkey if you don't already as a core override because there will be times when you need to use the keyboard and don't want to be activating various RA functions while doing so.

This is specific to the Unity desktop environment used in Ubuntu. In other common desktop environments it is really two clicks away. And it might also be the creator of the .deb package to be blamed. The .desktop file is usually part of the package (in fact, the Unity desktop environment counts on it). But let us not start any flame wars here.

Agreed, I just did the same thing in Ubuntu (12.04) and it was pretty easy. As others have said, fuck Unity. I use KDE and all I had to do was (well, first Google it) right-click on the Kickoff icon (lower left, the Start button basically) and select Edit Applications... which launches a pop-up window. In there I select where I want the new launcher icon to go (there are sub-menus listed like Education, Games, Multimedia, etc.) and then hit New Item at the top of the window. This presents me with a little pop-up window that asks for the name of the new launcher (in this case, atari800) and I hit OK. Now a blank set of lines on the right show up to fill in (Description:, Comment:) including the important Command: line where you put in whatever command + options you were using before on the command line (mine were atari800 -windowed & but not sure if that's right, may need to change it later). There is even a blank square that you can click on that will launch a Select Icon pop-up where you can browse to wherever your icon of choice is. Back in the main window there are check boxes for placing the launcher in the system tray or only showing this new option in KDE. Hit Save and, ta-da, you have the new launcher in the place you will remember to look. No need to dick with a .desktop file, either.

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