The Atari ST Romulator

The Romulator I picked up at VCF midwest gets a test-drive in my first PC.
00:00 Romulator infomercial
01:29 Overview
07:54 Look at the Romulator and documentation
16:01 Installation
17:53 Booting up Windows 95 and trying the emulation
19:24 SUCCESS booting
19:48 failing to boot Ultima IV
27:26 Running 1st Word!
30:00 Successful boot of one game, Empire
32:43 Conclusion

#retrogaming
#vintagecomputing
#atarist
#atari

[TLang-elsk]

There also were more complex boards, e. g. the Janus Board which I still own. Contains the TOS ROMs, RAM, the 68000 and some support logic around. It's a 16 bit ISA card. I used it only for a very short time because PCs became quickly more powerful so that the M68K could easily emulated in software and furthermore the ISA slot more and more were missing on new mainboards.

[paulwratt]

The last version of GEMulator (v9?) is available on GH and does not need ROM Card (since v5/6). ROMulator is a seperate product.GEMulator is like TOSbox (for DOS), it allows "well written" (read: no direct or hardware specfic) code compiled for Motorola 68000. On GEM (mostly AtariST), all hardware is abstracted away via well documented API calls to VDI, AES, ROM Function Jump Tables, and (sometimes) Cookie Jar. Most none GEM software will use at least _some_ direct or hardware specific code (because its _not_ using GEM), and as mentioned in the manual, any Timers are _not going to work on GEMulator_ .

[jda]

Oh thanks for this Gemulator vid, not that i entertained buying one back in the days, i kept my Mste all this years not to !
As for Empire, i love that game and remember playing it for 48 hoours non stop (work in monochrome, in colour, works in 16mhz mode too) it is a the true ancestor of Civilization (stripped down from research and set in a last phase of the game).

[timcross]

I was wondering when this video was going to come out! Great seeing this working!

Along with Ultima (III on the Apple IIe was my favorite but I played through most of IV), MOO2 was also an early game I loved! Recently I couldn't remember the name of it and tried MOO1 but I found that 2 was the one I played. Sounds great with the MT32 as well!

If there are no PAL chips on the Gemulator, maybe a modern recreation can be engineered if one isnt already available.

[Atamigaputer]

Back in the day for me, dungeon master was tops and populous, but the game that blew me away was ulitma underworld

[madigorfkgoogle]

This is a GEM-ulator, not ATARI ST emulator, there is a lots of stuff that will not run. What will or lets say might run are so called "well behaved programs" that run in GEM, since that is whats being emulated. I never had this board/emulator, but I remember reading about it back in the days.

[zarjesve]

You wrote Putin ! 😂 I expected some Sarmats and not ST in video... 🤣

[ecdhe]

I dabbled with emulation back in the day. Got the Mac ROMs and emulated it, but realized there was no Mac software that I really needed as the ST had everything I wanted. I tried PC Ditto but it was painfully slow. And when I moved to the PC I just left my ST software behind without too much regret. But if this setup has some issue with copy protection have fun with FTL games (Dungeon Master or Sundog) as they are famous for their tricky protection. Also, many games really pushed the limits of the ST by using tricks which may be difficult to emulate.

[arifeldman]

I had this and was pretty cool then dedicated software emulators like Pacifist and Steem came out with game compatibility.

[ShamanKish]

PC hated floppy disks while Atari could format them in various formats, 10 sectors and 81 track easily.

[mattsworld]

The problem running Ultima IV is likely to be TOS 2.06, as for compatability with games and a lot of software I am running TOS 1.62 in both my STE's now.

[Atamigaputer]

Well thanks for the view, i was interested in gemulator back in the day but seem to remember it was expensive. I always thought it was a software only emulation, but now all is revieled

[ecdhe]

FYI, if there were dozens of 8-bit micros back in the day, there were way less 16-bit systems, most of which didn't last long. Aside from the Mac/ST/Amiga there was the Texas Instrument TI-99/4 (the first 16-bit micro, released in 1979), the British Sinclair QL (which bombed), the Apple II GS and the MSX Turno R (only sold in Japan). Also, Acorn released the 32-bit Archimedes (sporting the first ARM chip) in 1987.

[xnonsuchx]

There are 8 sockets because you can have multiple ROM sets, TOS and Mac.

[MistaMaddog]

I've always wanted to get a Gemulator board for whenever I'd get a 486 PC, but it was very expensive. I knew games wouldn't work much like they wouldn't work on a TT but I still wanted a super ST that doubled as a DOS PC. Imagine running a multitasking system like Geneva on a 800 x 600 screen...

By the time I finally got a PC it had Windows 98 which did the multitasking thing better and I replaced my ST applications with Windows versions anyway. But I was still able to play my ST games under PacfiST and later Steem.

[TzOk]

Later versions of Gemulator could work without this card, simply reading TOS image from hard disk.

[Mange]

Changing it to ST-emulation might work. I remember my 1040 STE had some problems with older games. I know this is an emulator but it might be worth trying anyway.

[ms-exem]

hello do u know much about dragon 32 or 64 or bbc micro machines at all?? i need to know because i type in programs from listings from magazines and books

[sevennld]

I have this gemulator but no software.
Any tips where i can download the software ?

[AbeStephan]

I think there's an ATARI Jaguar infomercial on YouTube .