Hatari (Amiga)

Hatari is an emulator of the 16/32 bit Atari machines - the Atari ST, Atari STe, Atari TT and Atari Falcon. The Atari was the main rival of the Amiga during the 1980ies and early 1990ies. The ST family was the biggest competitor of the Amiga. Although they the same CPU only slightly faster, but lacking the additional co-processors for sound and graphics, the ST computers were much cheaper than the Amiga and sold many units to the home computer users and enthusiasts. Great selling point was the built in MIDI port, which for the Amiga had to be purchased separately. Early Amiga games were straight ST ports, which made the computers look almost the same in comparison. Later native Amiga games took advantage of all the Amiga capabilities and moved the Atari ST away from the entertainment area. The demoscene also focused more on the Amiga, where they can expose their talent much wider. The Atari still got some cool games and great demoscene products, and also had some magical attraction like the Amiga. Many gamers were both Amiga and Atari ST owners, thus enjoyed the best of the two worlds. Some games and programs were released simultaneously or only after short delay for the Amiga and the Atari ST. Two such examples are the games below:

The game Obsession Pinball initially STe only, was available several months after the Atari release, done in the same quality for the Amiga. The same is for the Batman The Movie game, which has very similar version for the Amiga. Other examples are Blood Money (Psygnosis), Chuck Rock (Core Design), Ghost Battle (Thalion), Locomotion (Kingsoft), Menace (Psyclapse), Pang (Ocean) and many other.
The emulator gives exact emulation of all the hardware resources of the Atari ST computers with raster interrupts, cycle precise border effects and accurate PSG sound. The Atari Falcon computers had DSP onboard unlike any Amiga model. Hatari emulates the Falcon DSP too, along with 68000, 68010, 68020, 68040 processors and FPU. Blitter emulation is supported as well. Joysticks can be remapped to real Joysticks and Joypads, thanks to the AmigaInput support built in. Atari Hard Disk also can be emulated, via disk image, or by using natively the drawers. For all the gamers, the emulator is must be, and for Amiga gamers, it may give some hard times on the Atari versions of popular Amiga games. In fact some popular Amiga games like Dungeon Master, originate on the Atari ST. For the real retro fan and hardcore gamer, the Hatari emulator is interesting as being an exact representation of one of the main gaming platforms of the period. Now available on AmigaOS as well. Free implementation of the firmware ROM is included in the archive, but most of the old games do direct access to the old ROM, and they won't work. The system friendly games should work without problems. For full software compatibility, obtaining and using the original Atari ST ROMs is recommended.

Older versions of the emulator are available from here.
Screenshots and videos of different Hatari emulation settings and software can be seen here.

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