v7800
Atari 7800 emulator by Dan Boris

Pole Position II
Screen capture courtesy of Dan Boris

v7800 is the first working emulator for the Atari 7800 PorSystem.  Despite the fact that this emulator is relatively new, it seems to be very complete.  I have tried several of the Atari 7800 games that I own under this emulator, and they all seemed to run fine.

I have included some of the text from the README file below.  This was written by Dan Boris, the author of this emulator.  It sheds some light on the developemnt of this emulator, and how to get started with it.

v7800 is an Atari 7800 video game emulator for MSDOS.  I originally wrote this code to be part of the MESS multi-system emulator but also decided to release it as a standalone emulator while the next version of MESS is still in development.  This emulator is a pretty quick and dirty hack of my code so it's not perfect and a little slow, but it's playable.

Before you can run v7800 you need a copy of the 7800 BIOS ROM.  For copyright reasons I am not including this ROM image in this archive, but if you can use a search engine, you should have no trouble finding it.  Once you get the image be sure it's named 7800.rom and put it in the same directory as the emulator.

     
Joust, Food Fight, and Galaga emulated under v7800
Click on imgaes to enlarge
Screen captures courtesy of Dan Boris

If you are running under plain MSDOS you must copy the file CWSDPMI.EXE to your root directory.

You will also need cartridge images, but again for copyright reasons I cannot provide these. PLEASE DO NOT E-mail me asking for ROM images!  All messages asking for ROM images, or asking where to get ROM images will be promptly deleted.  The carts must have a 128 byte header to work properly with v7800, see details on this below. ROMS with the extension .A78 will probably already have the header attached.

The following games run almost perfectly:

• Pole Position II

• Ms Pac Man

• Galaga

• Dig Dug

• Many others

Unzip v7800 into it's own directory (c:\v7800 for example) and put the bios rom and game ROM images in the same directory.  To start the emulator goto a DOS command prompt, change to the directory you unzipped v7800 into, then type V7800 followed by the name of the ROM file you want to load. For example to load a file called poleii.a78 you would type:

V7800 POLEII.A78

v7800 supports a default configuration file. This file (v7800.cfg) will be automatically created the first time you run the emulator.  The config file specifies all the default configurations that are to be used by the emulator.  The options in the [config] section of the file correspond to the command line options. For example "fr = 1" in the config file means to use a frame skip rate of 1.  Any command line options you use when running the emulator will override the setting in the config file.   So, for example, if you start the emulator with:

v7800 poleii.a78 -frame=3

the emulator will use a frame skip rate of 3 instead of 1.  If there is not a config file entry for an option and you don't specify a command line option for it, then the emulator will use and internal default.

The only config option that does not correspond to a command line option is the 'path' option.  Path sets the directory to use when loading roms. So if you have 'path = c:/v7800/roms/' in the config file, and you type:

v7800 poleii.a78

the file: c:/v7800/roms/poleii.a78 will be loaded.  If you put a path in the command line then it will override the config file:

v7800 c:/v7800/poleii.a78

will load the file c:/v7800/poleii.a78

v7800 was written using DJGPP a free 32bit C/C++ development system:

v7800
Visit the v7800 support web site

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.