Atari 8-bit emulator atari800 for Fedora Linux 27

atari800 is a GNU GPL licensed Atari 8-bit emulator that runs on many operating systems. It was written by David Firth and the Atari800 Development Team. As of this writing (January 28th, 2018), atari800 is not available for Fedora Linux from the official repositories. So I decided to create source and binary RPM packages for easy installation. This is to help Fedora Linux users.

I know next to nothing about Atari 800 and the related Atari 8-bit computers, but after some minor C source tweaking and SPEC-file editing, atari800 SDL version compiled and the emulator seems to run just fine. I tested it by loading Blue Max disk image and by playing the game.

NOTE: This is a version I cloned from the atari800 GIT repository. So it contains lots of changes to the base version 3.1.0! Please do not send bug reports to the developers telling them that this is a vanilla version 3.1.0, I repeat, this code is a snapshot from the GIT repository's master branch!

atari800-3.1.0-git20180128.fc27.1.x86_64.rpm (binary RPM for Fedora Linux 27, most people will want this!)
atari800-3.1.0-git20180128.fc27.1.src.rpm (source RPM, get this only if you want to compile yourself)
atari-system-roms-1.0.0-1.noarch.rpm (Atari 8-bit system ROMs, you need this package so that the emulator will work!)

To install atari800 emulator, become root and issue command:

dnf -y install /path/to/downloaded/atari800-3.1.0-git20180128.fc27.1.x86_64.rpm

To install the required atari800 system ROMs, become root and issue command:

dnf -y install /path/to/downloaded/atari-system-roms-1.0.0-1.noarch.rpm

To run the emulator and automatically load Blue Max game, drop root priviliges and issue command:

atari800 -stretch 2 /path/to/downloaded/bluemax.atr.gz

Be patient. You need to wait for a while until the game has been loaded from the virtual disk drive.

atari800 recognized my Logitech RumblePad 2 USB controller without problems. I could use it like Atari joystick, cool!

On a real Atari 8-bit computer, you would press the START key to start Blue Max. But PCs do not have such a key! No worries, here is the atari800 emulator's keyboard mapping table:

Atari key	PC key
OPTION	F2
SELECT	F3
START	F4

So to start Blue Max under atari800 emulation, just press F4 on your PC keyboard.

If you do not have a USB controller, atari800 has "keyboard joystick" mapped to Atari joystick port 0:

Atari joystick port 0	PC key
LEFT	Numpad 4
RIGHT	Numpad 6
DOWN	Numpad 5
UP	Numpad 8
BUTTON	Right CTRL

GAMING TIP: In Blue Max, you can drop bombs by pointing joystick DOWN ja pressing BUTTON.

Have fun!

Best regards,
Kalevi Kolttonen <kalevi@kolttonen.fi>