Gemulator 96 Demo Atari ST/STE Emulator For Windows Version 4.50, Sep 3, 1996 Gemulator 96 version 4.50 is the latest release in the Gemulator series of Atari ST emulators for MS-DOS and Windows. Gemulator 96 combines the functionality of our hardware based Gemulator product with that of Gemulator for Laptops into a single version, allowing it to run both TOS ROM based and disk based Atari operating systems. Gemulator 96 is the only Atari ST emulator that supports all versions of Atari ST TOS (1.0, 1.2, 1.4, 1.6, and 2.06) and all versions of MagiC, including MagiC PC. Up to 16 different Atari ST operating systems can be installed on your PC at once, and Gemulator 96 will switch between them with the click of a mouse. Gemulator 96 runs on all versions of Windows - Windows 3.1, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, Windows 95, and Windows NT. It also runs on all 32-bit Intel x86 processors (386, 486, Pentium, and Pentium Pro). Gemulator 96 has many improvements over previous versions: smaller memory footprint, faster load time, faster execution speed (up to 30% faster than previous versions), super fast full screen video, MagiC PC support, and a redesigned user interface to make it easier to use. The smaller memory footprint allows Gemulator 96 to easily run on a 6 megabyte Windows 95 computer while using much less swap file space than before. The new DirectX support (for Windows 95 and Windows NT) allows Atari programs to run full screen, as well as in window. The faster execution speed means that almost any 486 computer runs at full Atari 1040 ST speed, and a 75 MHz Pentium runs at full Atari TT speed. Absolutely the fastest Atari ST emulator available and ideal for turning a 486 or Pentium notebook computer into a portable Atari ST! The best feature of Gemulator 96 is the price, now only $69.95 for the emulator itself, with various combination packages available that combine Gemulator 96 with either MagiC or with TOS ROMs. A complete list of prices is given below. This free demo version has most of the functionality of the retail version, allowing you to see for yourself just how fast Gemulator is and how well it performs. We even encourage you to compare Gemulator against competing products, just to see how bad the other products are. The Gemulator 96 demo has no time limit or expiration date, and does not put up annoying messages every few seconds to remind you that you are running a demo. We don't believe in silly games like that. What the demo doesn't support are some of the more advanced features, such as 4, 8, and 14-megabyte support (you are limited to emulating at most 2 megabytes of Atari memory). It also does not support the blitter emulation, sound, the full screen mode, the 68000 debugger, and some of the acceleration options. But you are only a phone call away from ordering Gemulator 96 right now! For the very latest information on Gemulator 96, browse our World Wide Web page at http://www.emulators.com/. It can be accessed directly from any Internet account and from most online services including CompuServe, America Online, and the Microsoft Network. Installing the GEMULATOR 96 DEMO The Gemulator 96 demo software comes in a single ZIP file called GEM96DEM.ZIP. Extract it with PK Zip and you will find the following files: GEM96DEM.EXE - The Gemulator 96 Demo emulator WIN32VER.EXE - Utility to display Win32 version GEM96DEM.TXT - This documentation file GEM96DEM.HTM - This file in HTML format STHDBOOT.SEC - Atari hard disk boot sector CDRIVE.VHD - Sample Atari C: partition DDRIVE.VHD - Blank D: partition EDRIVE.VHD - Blank E: partition FDRIVE.VHD - Blank F: partition QINDEX22.PRG - Quick Index 2.2, Atari ST benchmark utility INSTMAG2.BAT - Installation script for MagiC 2 INSTMAG4.BAT - Installation script for MagiC 4 NT.ZIP - Windows NT drivers for the Gemulator card Before anything else, make sure that you have a computer capable of running the demo. You will need: - Windows 3.1 with Win32s, Windows for Workgroups with Win32s, Windows 95, or Windows NT 3.51 or 4.0 - If using Win32s, version 1.2 or higher - A 386, 486, Pentium or Pentium Pro processor - At least 6 megabytes of RAM with Windows 95, 8 megabytes with Windows 3.1, or 12 megabytes with Windows NT - A Gemulator card with TOS ROMs, a version of MagiC, or MagiC PC Win32s is an extension to Windows 3.1 and WFW that allows those operating systems to run 32-bit Windows programs such as Gemulator. You can download Win32s from Microsoft's ftp site or from our web page. To see if you have the correct version of Windows installed, run the WIN32VER.EXE utility provided. It will display which version of Windows you are running (Win32s, Windows 95, or Windows NT) along with the version number. If you get that far, you are ready. If it doesn't run, you are most likely running on Windows 3.1 and you don't have Win32s installed yet. The next step is to install one or more Atari ST operating systems. If you don't already have a Gemulator ROM card installed, and you don't have MagiC, download the MagiC PC demo from the Internet. You most likely fall into one of these categories: If you are running Gemulator Classic Gemulator Classic refers to the MS-DOS versions of Gemulator (versions 1.0 through 3.04). If you are currently running this version of Gemulator, then you already have a Gemulator card with ROMs installed. All you need to do is run GEM96DEM.EXE from Windows. If you have virtual disks set up, you may wish to copy the file GEM96DEM.EXE to your existing Gemulator directory and run it from there so as to detect those disks. If you are running Gemulator 95 Gemulator 95 refers to the Windows versions of Gemulator (versions 4.0 through 4.15) which Gemulator 96 replaces. If you are currently running Gemulator 95, then again all you need to do is run GEM96DEM.EXE. Similarly you may wish to install it in your existing Gemulator directory to use any virtual disks you may have. If you are running MagiC 2 or MagiC 4 If you don't currently own Gemulator but are using the MagiC operating system on your Atari computer, then you need to install MagiC on your PC. This can be done either manually or using one of the supplied batch files. To use the batch files, first determine which version of MagiC you own. MagiC 2 comes on a single floppy disk while MagiC 4 comes on two disks. Both install to your hard disk the same way. In the root of your PC's C: drive you need the file MAGIC.RAM which contains the MagiC operating system. You also need a folder called GEMSYS which contains support files for MagiC, such as the desktop program. Use one of the two batch files INSTMAG2.BAT and INSTMAG4.BAT to install MagiC 2.0 and MagiC 4.0 respectively. You will be prompted to insert the MagiC master disks and in a few seconds the installation will be complete. To manually install MagiC, or if you have some other version of MagiC, copy the MAGIC.RAM file from your MagiC installation disk to your C: drive. Create a folder called GEMSYS and within that folder create another folder called GEMDESK. From the MagiC installation disk, copy the files GEMDESK.APP, GEMDESK.RSC, and GEMDESL.RSC to this GEMDESK directory. If using MagiC 4.0, you also need to copy the file OFF002.OSD. If you wish to run Gemulator and MagiC from a floppy disk, install MagiC to your hard disk as described, then copy the MAGIC.RAM file and GEMSYS folder to a blank 1.44M floppy disk. Then copy the GEM96DEM.EXE program to the floppy. You now have bootable Gemulator 96 floppy disk that you can carry with you and run on any Windows computer! If you are running MagiC PC If you downloaded the MagiC PC demo or purchased MagiC PC, you follow a similar procedure as for installing MagiC. Instead of MAGIC.RAM, the MagiC PC operating system is contained in a file called MAGIC_PC.OS. Copy that file to the root of your PC's C: drive. Copy the GEMSYS folder from your MagiC PC disks to your PC's C: drive as well. If you are running the MagiC PC demo, you will first need to run that demo to copy the GEMSYS folder from their virtual demo disk to a real floppy disk. Then exit MagiC PC, and use Windows to copy that GEMSYS folder to your C: drive. Optimizing your VGA driver for fastest screen redraws Gemulator has been optimized for use with 256 color Windows 95 and Windows NT video drivers. For best results, run Gemulator in a 256 or 65536 color video mode. Do not run in a 16 color VGA video mode, as most VGA drivers and cards are not optimized for that mode. Since Gemulator is very graphics intensive, it is preferable to use a localbus video card. Avoid older 8-bit and 16-bit VGA cards. Running the Gemulator 96 Demo Once you have installed Gemulator 96 using one of the 4 methods above, go ahead and run it. You will then see the Gemulator 96 main menu dialog, which contains an Options menu, an Exit menu, and a Continue button. Press Continue to go into the First Time Setup dialog. This is required to tell Gemulator which Atari operating system you have installed. The First Time Setup dialog has two options: Search ROM Cards and Search for MagiC. If you have an existing Gemulator card installed, click on Search ROM Cards. If you have MagiC or MagiC PC installed, click on Search for MagiC. Then press Search. All the Atari operating systems which are detected will be listed. At that point press Close. Gemulator will now reboot using the first operating system it found. Congratulations, you are running Gemulator 96! Because GEM maintains its own mouse pointer independent of Windows, you will at this point have two mouse pointers on the screen. Click inside the Gemulator window to deactivate the Windows mouse and make the GEM mouse active. To re-activate the Windows mouse, either press F11 on your keyboard, or click both mouse buttons at once. You can press Control+F11 to activate the main menu dialog. Configuring the Gemulator 96 Demo Gemulator's default mode of operation is 2 megabytes of Atari ST memory, monochrome mode, serial and printer ports off. If you wish to change this, or switch between Atari operating systems, you do so in the Properties dialog box. You do this by pressing either Alt+F11, or by choosing the Properties menu item from the main menu. The Properties dialog has the following options. Note that changing most options, such as the amount of memory or the monitor type, will require rebooting the Atari operating system. DirectX (full screen) This option is not available in the demo. It activates full screen mode using DirectX (also called DirectDraw) allowing your Atari programs to use up the whole screen and run much faster than in windowed mode. Zoom pixels Due to the low resolution of Atari screens (320x200, 640x400, etc) and the high resolution of most VGA cards (1024x768, 1280x1024, etc), the Atari desktop can appear to be quite a small. The Zoom pixels option stretches the size of Atari pixels so that the Gemulator window occupies more screen space. If this is still too small, or too slow, use the DirectX mode. Fast Refresh By default, Gemulator is set to refresh its window about 10 times a second. On most computers this is a reasonable tradeoff between speed and smoothness of the video, but you may notice some jerkiness in the mouse motion and text scrolling. To smooth this up, activate the Fast Refresh option. This will roughly double the screen refresh rate and give much more realistic video at the expense of the emulator running slower. This is really of concern on 386 and 486 computers. On most Pentium computers the tradeoff is minimal and you should always have this option turned on. Model This option selects between emulating an Atari ST, Atari STE, and Atari TT. Gemulator 96 does not currently emulate an Atari TT but this feature will be added shortly in a later release. In the demo there is little difference between the ST and STE modes since the features that this option affects are mostly disabled. Set it to either ST or STE mode. Memory This sets the amount of Atari ST memory. The demo supports 512K, 1 Meg, and 2 Meg. The retail version also support 4, 8, and 14 Meg configurations. Serial Port This selects which PC serial port is to be used as the Atari ST serial port. By default this is set to None. Change this to the correct port if you wish to use your modem. Printer Port Similarly, this option selects which printer port to use. The default is none. When you activate a port, that printer port becomes unavailable to other MS-DOS or Windows programs while Gemulator is running. Also make sure that the printer is connected and online. Otherwise Gemulator may appear to hang when no printer can be found. Share printer When using a printer port, this option tells Gemulator to release the port after 30 seconds of printer inactivity. This allows you to share the printer port with other programs. However, if your print job pauses for more than 30 seconds (such as a when laying out a complex Pagestream document) the printer port will be released prematurely. Only use this option if necessary. It is disabled in the demo. Blitter This activates the blitter chip emulation. Disabled in the demo. Sound This activates the sound emulation. When in ST mode, only the Yamaha chip is emulated. When in STE mode, the stereo sound chip is also emulated. Sound is disabled in the demo. Monochrome This turns on monochrome monitor emulation. To use color modes such as ST Low and ST Medium resolution, turn this option off. Note: since this is a frequently used option, there is a keyboard shortcut to toggle this option. Press Shift+F12 to switch from color to monochrome or monochrome to color modes at any time. This of course will reboot the Atari operating system. OS "OS" as in Operating System. This drop down list box selects which of the TOS or MagiC versions to use. Quick ST emulation Gemulator has most of the functionality of the Quick ST (now known as Warp 9) screen accelerator built in. When TOS 2.06 is your current operating system, activating this option will patch TOS 2.06 to use the faster Quick ST code. This speeds up screen redraws considerably. If you are running MagiC, MagiC PC, or have NVDI installed, you can leave this option turned off. Boot disk This tells Gemulator which disk partition to boot from. Mainly this tells it which drive has the AUTO folder. Typically you will leave this option set to C:. Note, this option only applies in Windows disk mode and is ignored for Atari disk mode. Fast Baud Rates This feature is disabled in the demo. What it does is activate baud rate mapping to get around the Atari ST's upper limit of 19200 baud. This option remaps slow baud rates, like 110 baud and 300 baud, to faster baud rates beyond 19200 baud. Fast BIOS Printing This feature is also disabled in the demo. It patches the Atari ST BIOS to speed up printing from programs that use the BIOS. Pagestream is one such program that benefits greatly from this option. Calamus SL, which writes to the printer port directly, is unaffected by this setting. Atari disk mode This option determines which of two methods is used to access the floppy disks and hard disks – Atari disk mode and Windows disk mode. They are described below. Atari disk mode and Windows disk mode Atari computers and Windows computers format their disks in almost the exact same way. Most disks formatted on an Atari ST can be read on a PC running MS-DOS and Windows, and similarly, any disk formatted by MS-DOS or Windows can be read on an Atari ST. This is not always true. Atari disks formatted by TOS 1.0, TOS 1.2 and some buggy disk formatting utilities do not create an MS-DOS compatible disk. Also, some Atari games use boot disks, which are disks formatted to run automatically when TOS is starting up. Similarly, hard disks are not always formatted the same way. Atari hard disk partitions cannot grow to more than 32 megabytes in size. So trying to run TOS on your PC, which may have a 300 megabyte or 500 megabyte or even larger hard disk, means that the hard disk cannot be used by TOS. This was true in earlier versions of Gemulator. Gemulator 96 offers the best of both worlds, by providing both an Atari mode and Windows mode of disk access. The modes work like this: Atari disk mode - All Atari ST floppy disks can be read, including boot disks, 360K, 800K disks, and TOS 1.0 formatted disks, except copy protected disks. - Uses 4 virtual partitions to emulate 4 32-megabyte Atari ST hard disk partitions. These virtual partitions are stored on your PC as the files CDRIVE.VHD, DDRIVE.VHD, EDRIVE.VHD, and FDRIVE.VHD. No actual reformatting of your hard disk is required. - Atari disk mode behaves exactly how a real Atari ST floppy disk and hard disk behaves. Windows disk mode - All MS-DOS formatted floppy disks (including 1.44M high density disks) as well as compressed floppy disks can be read. - All of the PC's hard disk partitions and CD-ROM drives are available, including network drives, compressed partitions and non-MS-DOS partitions. - Windows disk mode is compatible with most Atari software except some disk utilities and AUTO folder programs. If a program does not work in Windows disk mode, try it in Atari disk mode. Most major Atari ST software runs fine in Windows disk mode, including Calamus SL, Pagestream, Magic, Neodesk 4, GFA Basic, Data Manager ST, FLASH, and others. The two disk modes cannot be mixed. Files stored in the virtual partitions (the .VHD files) cannot be accessed outside of Gemulator. What you may want to do is install all of your Atari software on virtual partitions first. Then re-install the software in Windows disk mode. Try running the software both ways and see which way you like best. If you have old Atari disks with non-MS-DOS boot sectors, you can use one of many utilities (MOSDOS, DC Formatter, etc) to write proper MS-DOS boot sectors to those disks. Then the disks will be usable in Windows disk mode. Ordering Gemulator 96 Now that you've tried the Gemulator 96 demo, it is time to buy the real thing! We offer many pricing options including competitive upgrades. To order Gemulator 96, contact EMULATOR INC. by phoning 206-236-0540 to order by credit card. Or fax us at 206-236-0257 to fax in your order. Or send payment by snail mail to: EMULATORS INC. 14150 N.E. 20th Street, Suite 302 Bellevue, WA 98007 U.S.A. To take advantage of our competitive upgrade pricing, you must currently own either the Janus or MagiC PC emulators. Mail or fax to us a copy of your original sales receipt along with your Gemulator 96 order to prove ownership. If you have lost your receipt, you can also send either the master disk or the front cover of the manual. To take advantage of the $29.95 upgrade price, you must currently own either Gemulator Classic, Gemulator 95, or Gemulator for Laptops, and you must be registered with Branch Always Software. If you never sent your registration card, or you sent it to your dealer, you are NOT registered. To register, please mail in your registration card and/or a proof of purchase (sales receipt, master disk, or the manual cover). Our complete price list is as follows: Item Price ---------------------- ------- Gemulator 96 emulator $69.95 Gemulator 96 upgrade from previous versions of Gemulator $29.95 Gemulator 96 upgrade with MagiC for Gemulator $79.95 Gemulator 96 competitive upgrade for MagiC PC $49.95 Gemulator 96 competitive upgrade for Janus users, includes a Gemulator ROM card $99.95 Gemulator 96 with MagiC for Gemulator $119.95 Gemulator 96 with ROM card and TOS 1.4 installed $149.95 Gemulator 96 with ROM card and TOS 2.06 installed $179.95 There is a fixed $8 UPS shipping charge for orders within the U.S., $12 for orders to Canada, and $15 elsewhere. Gemulator 96 will also be available from Atari dealers in North America and Europe. Dealer prices may vary so shop around. Remember to always check our web page at http://www.emulators.com/ for the latest information about Gemulator 96 and our other products. Beware of our competitors tricks! You will find that Gemulator 96 runs about 3 times faster than MagiC PC, even though the makers of MagiC PC claims to run almost as fast as Gemulator. One trick that we've caught both the STonX and MagiC PC emulators doing is to incorrectly emulate the Atari's 200 Hz timer, making it appear it to run much slower. This has the effect of tricking benchmark programs like Quick Index and GEM Bench into reporting much faster speed results, and in turn, the makers of these emulators then make bogus speed claims. DON'T BE FOOLED BY THIS TRICKERY!!! Put a real Atari ST or Atari TT computer side by side with your PC. Then run the benchmarks and use a stopwatch to time the results. You'll see, as we did on our 90 MHz Pentium computer, that while Gemulator 96 takes only 7 seconds to complete the Quick Index benchmarks, MagiC PC takes a whole 18 seconds. A real Atari TT computer proves who is correct. You'll get similar results running other benchmarks and on other computers. The other trick most of the other emulators use (Janus, MagiC PC, and STonX do this) is to quote speed numbers for a system that is running NVDI or some other screen accelerator. Then they compare those numbers to a plain Atari ST using no accelerator. That's cheating. Our speed claims are based on running bare and unmodified Atari TOS ROMs with no acceleration. The bottom line is this: our competitors are doing everything they can to steal business away from Gemulator, including making bogus claims about their products. Only Gemulator runs at full Atari TT speed on a 75 MHz Pentium. The others don't even come close. They would have you believe that you must buy a top of the line Pentium to emulate an Atari ST, and this is simply not true! Gemulator users have been using 386 and 486 computers for years! Gemulator has been under development for over 5 years, and during that time we have optimized our 68000 emulator using hand written assembly language to make it as fast as possible. The other emulators are mainly written in C which makes them much slower. We welcome your comments about either Gemulator 96 or any of the competing products. Tell us what you like about our demo, what you don't like, and what we can do to improve it so that you decide to buy Gemulator instead of wasting money on some other product. Send your comments to the address above or email to emulators@msn.com.