Hi,
I'm trying to improve on WinSTon. The author of WinSTon gave some hints beside the source, and I'm (slowly) working on them, beside making it a more C++ (even MFC) program, and of course understanding the whole thing.
I asked some simple questions at atari-forum but could get no answer, so I try my luck here just in case, with the same handle.

- What I'd like to get is some examples of games or demos that don't run in WinSTon but run in Steem.

- Is it a good idea to replace the 68000 emulation with Fame or Mame emulation (Hatari took the WinUAE, apparently)? Is WinSTon's 68000 notoriously broken? My first choice is to work on the WinSTon core, adding somehow the missing timing info.

- Is it a good idea to (try to) replace sound rendering with something like sc68? Is there a kit somewhere that sounds as good as Steem?

- Do you think an Assembler emulation isn't necessary with fast computers? (mine is a 1,7 GHZ Pentium M laptop) Do you know if Steem emulation is C++ instead of assembler?

Why not contribute to hatari instead?

This is the same answer I got on atari-forum.

Yep, it's a popular answer. It also makes quite a bit of sense for two reasons. Steem is pretty close to perfect and everyone uses that. So it's kind of unlikely anyone remembers or is willing to try what you want. Secondly hatari is being actively developed, is based on the winston sources and it emulates a lot more things. I believe it makes more sense to work from hatari sources than winston's. Also a good idea for something to work on is hatari's gui.

Or add steem's Boiler Room to hatari.

But again, without a nice GUI, why bother?

In short: Hatari is lacking a good GUI for Windows so that could be a starting point for someone to invest coding resources like time and man power.

A few months back, ggn told me, he had thought of reactivating the old Winston GUI for Hatari. Maybe that is a starting point?

I'm using Linux myself and I'm ok with the SDL gui. But that is a personal choice.

Until the Hatari team produce something that doesn't look and feel like a bad end of term programming assignment it'll always be third place in the ST emulation race behind Steem and Saint.

It's emulation may be good (even great... I don't know, it's too clunky to use and the debugger is horrible compared to Boiler Room, so it has no real interest for me), but its presentation is terrible.

I'm a bit late to this discussion but I agree that the GUI of Hatari is not very user friendly. But the emulation is great. It at least support 0-byte lines that Steem lacks.

Of course a MS Windows GUI could be made for Hatari but I think a better idea is to make a GUI in QT. The QT library is freely usable and has implementations for many platforms like *nix, Windows, Apple and even mobile devices.
So if Hatari uses QT, it could have a nice and fast GUI while still being cross platform.

Robert


QT library:
http://qt.nokia.com/products/