After a long time of little activity, all of a sudden, the world of emulation on the Atari ST family seems to be picking up a new momentum! (Most recent news at the bottom.)

The Joysoft Atari 800 emulator slowly continues development, now at v1.3 for the TOS version. We are also finally seeing its full potential with the availability of the CT60 since 2003.

There has been a reasonable attempt at a generic Gameboy emulator ported from SDL sources by Patrice Mandin. This is the Gngb Gameboy emulator, originally for Linux. It really needs a high end Atari to work, and also needs the Mint O/S to work to best effect. Some of the documentation suggests it supports colour Gameboy ROMs?! Other SDL ports may still be to come from Patrice Mandin?

The CBM030 has been discontinued, Oliver Heun did not feel he could do the Plus 4 emulator justice on a stock 16mhz Falcon '030. However, he is considering a CBM060 to cater for lucky CT60 owners. There should be more than enough power there!

This site! A major reorganisation ensued, especially to take things like the CT60 into account. Then I took the opportunity to redo the whole thing in a nice clean top-menu format. Looks a lot better than the uglified previous effort, don't you think?

Peter P. has been engaged in a porting frenzy with his CT60. He has come up with a working version of the Commodore 64 emulator 'Frodo'. Also, he has recently ported the Sega Master System and Game Gear emulator 'SMS Plus'. Finally, for now at least, he has ported an early version of the 'V2600' VCS console emulator for the CT60 Falcon. I'm sure there are more to come!

And finally, for now, "Knox" is working on a hand-coded Intellivision emulator which should be able to run the base STFM/STe upwards. The latest news was, that it was nearly complete apart from some work on the video part still needed. At the moment, sprites don't collision detect, which can be a major impairment to game

This one falls into the 'rumour' category for the moment, but it looks like Oliver Heun has been working again on his CBM '030 Commodore C16/Plus 4 emulator. Contradictory accounts float around as to what the likely target hardware is, more information as we get it!

In the dying minutes of February, Peter P. strikes back yet again. This time, he's brought us a CT60 version of the Atari Lynx emulator 'Handy' . This is fairly unoptimised, and will need everything that even a CT60 has to give. There's no sound (yet?) but the better news is, that it seems to be pretty compatible. What will he come up with next?

It's been a while since I did anything with these pages, but I had a recent discussion with the author/porter of many of these emulations, Peter P. or PeP. He has added one other to his impressive portfolio recently, namely a preview of his ZX Spectrum 128k emulator X128 which will need a faster machine to run it. Further optimisations are planned, and this will be reviewed in due course. Even more encouragingly, he has not exhausted the possibilities of emulators to transfer to the Atari TOS platform, but time is currently against his coding hobbies right now. Ah well, we're patient folk!