PC Atari
The Atari 2600 (VCS) Emulator

The PC Atari Emulator, or PCAE, is an MS-DOS program designed to emulate the famous Atari 2600 Video Computer System on PC's compatible with the Intel 80486 CPU or better.  It accomplishes this with an emulation engine that is written almost entirely in assembly language, with extra features written in Borland Pascal 7.0 for DOS.

I found this to be a good emulator.  However, it is a DOS program, and the command line options are complicated.  There is a menu program built in, but I didn't find it all that helpful.  For some reason, I was unable to use my graphics capture program to get some screenshots, so I took these from the PC Atari homepage.

Berzerk running under PC Atari

This emulator does have a unique feature: it supports the use of REAL Atari controllers, including paddles.  Read on for more
details.

System Requirements:

• MS-DOS, though it will run from within a Windows DOS prompt. Some users have successfully run it from within an OS/2 DOS prompt by setting the "Allow access to hardware timer" flag to ON.

• Intel 80486 or greater, for the BSWAP instruction(though a Pentium is highly recommended for performance purposes)

• 540K free low DOS memory (though 590K or greater is strongly recommended). Also, at least 2Mb of XMS memory is needed to store sound samples (setting a larger sound buffer requires more XMS memory)

• A mouse is required for single-player paddle emulation A 4-button joystick is strongly recommended, ESPECIALLY a Gravis GamePad. Two joysticks are strongly recommended for two-player games To use joysticks to emulate paddles two and three, analog joysticks are required.

• A special home-built board is necessary for connecting real Atari controllers to the PC.

• A SoundBlaster or 100% compatible sound card is required for sound support. To get perfect sound from within a Windows DOS prompt the sound card must be compatible with all Sound Blaster models utilizing DSP versions 2.00 or greater.

PCAE supports connecting real Atari 2600 controllers to your PC if you have either built or acquired a special interface board.  It connects to your PC's joystick port and a parallel port, which must support bi-directional transfer.   (See the PCAE documentation for more information on this interface board.)   Most motherboard parallel ports support this, and are usually configurable for standard, EPP (Enhanced Parallel Port), or ECP (Enhanced Capabilities Port) functionality.   The joystick port should be a fully functional one, supporting two PC joysticks.   If you have the board, you can use it to get the feel of playing an actual Atari 2600, as well as play games requiring more than one paddle.

To use real controllers, first select "Set parallel port" from the popup menu to choose the port number that matches your bi-directional parallel port.  You might have to get this information from your BIOS setup, jumper settings, or Windows configuration, depending on your hardware and software setup.  The emulator will display a list of all detected parallel ports and prompt you to choose one. Once this is done, select "Toggle using real controllers" from the popup menu.  PC joystick and keyboard support will be turned off, and the board will be polled instead for controller information.

Pole Position running under PC Atari

The final step is to calibrate your paddle controllers.  Connect a set of Atari paddle controllers to the player 1 port of the controller board, and select "Calibrate paddles" from the popup menu.  You will be prompted to turn the paddles fully counterclockwise and hit a key.  This tells the emulator the full extent of their travel as reported by your PC and will allow both sets of paddles to be connected and properly emulated by the program.  It is necessary to calibrate the paddles only once, since the information is saved in the configuration file.

Please note that the current board design that comes with this documentation was tested with Atari joystick controllers, paddle
controllers, keyboard controllers, Indy 500 driving controllers, and the CBS Booster-Grip.   In all cases except the keyboard controllers, everything worked fine.  With the keyboard controllers, however, only the first two columns of each controller worked. Perhaps someone else might design a better interface board that will make them work fully.

Go to the PC Atari homepage

This emulator can be downloaded directly from it's homepage.

NOTE: In order to run this emulator, you must have the emulator itself, and a copy of the ROM's from the original system.  The emulator itself is Freeware.  The ROM's are copyrighted by the programmer or the manufacturer. You are only legally entitled to do so if you own the actual game, or a PCB/ROM Cartridge from the game that you are emulating. If you decide to download ROM's to test out an emulator, you must delete the ROM's within 24 hours unless you own the equipment mentioned above.

ROM's may be found at many sites, including EMUCLASSICS.