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In september 2004 Chui & Ron decided to port of an Atari ST Emulator. We had this old 16-bit home computer and love it.
We're finding emulators for other environments and two emulators were found using Simple Direct Layer:
Castaway and Hatari.
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Well, based originally in both emulators all code parts were re-written and optimized for Dreamcast,
and DCaSTaway is the result of the effort done to bring to DC this excellent Atari ST emulator in 3 flavours, Dreamcast, Windows and GNU/Linux.
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Currently DCaSTaway emulator is candidate release to final:
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Fullspeed with sound. |
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| Fast and accurated (FAME) Motorola 68000 core by Fox68k. |
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Hardware scaled resolutions. |
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Dreamcast SD-Card support for savestates and disk changes. |
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| Supports MSA & ST disks images. |
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| Mouse & Keyboard Dreamcast supported. |
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| Virtual Keyboard with triggers L-R. |
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| X button Map a ST-key using X button under Virtual Keyboard. |
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| Joystick is emulated with digital pad + A,X buttons. |
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| Mouse is emulated with analog pad + Y,B buttons. |
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| Crystalline sound without lag. |
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| SH4 exceptions catched for stability. |
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| Superthrottle mode for speed up intros and loading time. |
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| Save disks changes to VMU. |
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| 2 floopy drives emulated. |
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| ZIP support. |
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| Filemanager with subdirectories access. |
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| Complete menu with 'start' button: load, frameskip, reset... |
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| 2 joysticks emulated. |
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| Under PAL dreamcasts ask 60-50Hz selection. |
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| Multidisk support. |
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| Overscan bottom border render. |
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| Atari ST video 50/60Hz switch support. |
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| Close to 100 % compatibility. |
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| TV filter using OpenGL (not for Dreamcast). |
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New features have been added to lastest release candiadate version :
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- Save disks changes to VMU
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DCaSTaway can save to VMU disk sectors changed using ZIP compression.
For games as SimCity, now you can save your new cities and continue at future.
A new menu option called "Save Disks" has added for enable or disable this feature.
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- Superthrottle
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Hold right trigger first and left trigger second for automatic sound off and frameskip to 10 for speed up.
This try to avoid large time for intros and loading time.
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- 2 floppy drives emulted
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You can choose on filemanager a new disk for floppy A with A button and a new disk for floppy B with Y button.
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- Savestates
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A SubMenu called "SAVESTATE", in where you can find 4 slots to Save and Load from memory, if you reset the emulator that savestates are losted.
Even using compressioin you will need a memory card with more than 1 MBit, compressed using Zip-9 takes a lot of memory at the moment.
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- CRC Cache
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DCaSTaway File Manager now try to know which games are in every disk image, it's possible quering a CRC database that contains the most typical
Atari ST disk images: automation menues, medway boys, etc...
The CRC calculation can take a while during the loading. To solve this delay, the best you can do is to create a file from GNU/Linux, Windows and MACOS/X with the 'mkcache' executable that its included into DCaStaway.
You only need to copy the EXE file mkcache.exe to the folder or directory in where all your ATARI ST images are, .zip, .st and .msd. Running the EXE will generate a file called stcache.txt.
If DCaSTaway file manager detects this stcache.txt file, will be interpreted and will not calculate the CRC included in that cache, reducing dramatically the files sample time.
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