Re: [hatari-devel] Adding Aranym features for Hatari?

[Eero Tamminen <oak@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

(As this became Hatari specific, I moved the discussion from
emutos list to Hatari.)

On maanantai 15 lokakuu 2012, Thomas Huth wrote:
> schrieb Eero Tamminen <oak@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> > I might try looking into implementing the basic NatFeats functions
> > (name, version, stderr, shutdown) for Hatari.
> > 
> > Thomas, what do you think?
> 
> I've had this discussion a couple of times already in the past. I
> personally don't like yet another illegal opcode abused in Hatari, we
> already had enough trouble with the others already: Some games or demos
> sometimes use illegal opcodes to trap to the illegal instruction
> handler, and when the emulator does not handle these illegal opcodes
> the program won't work anymore. So NatFeats is fine for an emulator
> like Aranym, which is only designed for running "clean" applications,
> but it just does not fit well to an emulator like Hatari.

I wasn't thinking of having it enabled by default, but as a feature
which one can enable from command line with a "--natfeats" option.
And one of course shouldn't enable it for anything else than clean
applications.

In the long run, I would also consider implementing stuff needed
for natfeats hostfs so that one can use MiNT natfeats driver for that
on Hatari, to make MiNT work also with something else than disk images
which are a real pain to deal with...

That would make utilization of Hatari's better emulation and debugging
features much easier with MiNT stuff.  Which in turn would mean better
testing for Hatari features which get used by MiNT SW. :-)

Would these make it more acceptable?


Or do you see some downsides for Hatari also when --natfeats would
be disabled?


On maanantai 15 lokakuu 2012, Vincent Rivière wrote:
> On 14/10/2012 22:55, Eero Tamminen wrote:
> > Or are there some other advantages on using Aranym with EmuTOS?
> 
> On Windows, ARAnyM has console opened by default.

Hatari doesn't open console on Linux either.  If one wants to see console 
messages, one can run Hatari in console.  On Linux it requires just having
..desktop (menu entry / desktop shortcut) file for this:
x-terminal-emulator -T "Invoke Hatari debugger with AltGr+Pause" -e hatari

As documented in the Hatari readme.txt.

If you tell how to something can be done on Windows (using BAT file?),
I can add also that info to Hatari readme.


> Hatari requires -D, as a side effect it also enables that
> trap-on-exception mess, a pain on each startup.

I'm fairly sure most Hatari users (i.e. ones who aren't developers)
would consider Hatari always popping up a console pretty annoying
feature.


> ARAnyM has NatFeat debug support enabled by default.

This cannot be done by default on Hatari for reasons Thomas mentions
above, but if there would be an option for that, you could enable it
in your own Hatari configuration.


> And of course, ARAnyM is much faster, especially at startup.

Well, Aranym is more of a virtual machine than emulator, i.e. it doesn't
emulate everything and not as accurately, it doesn't try to run things
(especially CPU) at correct speed and it has JIT support.

But if you use right Hatari options[1], EmuTOS boots up to desktop
in about 1 second, depending on how fast your machine is.

[1] E.g. "--fastfdc yes --fast-forward yes --frameskips 16",
    with Falcon emulation one could use also "--dsp none" as
    EmuTOS doesn't have DSP support.

After boot you can then disable fast-forwarding with "AltGr+X".


> > I might try looking into implementing the basic NatFeats functions
> > (name, version, stderr, shutdown) for Hatari.
> 
> That would be great.
> If you add an option to enable/disable it from the GUI, I don't see any
> reason for not doing that.

I'm not adding any of the debug features to the SDL GUI, they
can be enabled from the command line options; either when starting
Hatari, when in debugger, or through the control socket (e.g. with
the Python/Gtk UI).

You can set them in your Hatari configuration file though.


	- Eero