The History of Atari 5200 Emulators - Part 2

JUM52 (2000)

JUM52

The Jum52 project was created in 1999 by James Higgs to emulate Atari 5200 games. The project had help from Dan Boris, creator of the Atari 5200 VSS emulator, Ron Fries and Neil Bradley with their sound and processor emulators, and Richard Bannister for his ports for MacOS and MacOS X respectively in February and March 2001, among others. Its first release occurred in February 2000 for MS-DOS, with a version for Windows in October 2000. The emulator is complete. It has joystick support, has a save state, its own interface, and runs in its default state of 60 frames executed from a Pentium 200MhZ, as was seen at its launch.

JUM52 (Win32/SDL)

In addition to the Macintosh ports, the emulator was ported to BeOS in March 2001 by Caz, as Jum's Atari 5200. Ports to QNX in March 2002, Linux and Ubuntu in February 2010, for the Playstation 2 consoles in June 2002 and PSP in April 2008. In addition to having versions for the portable systems iOS and Windows Phone. The emulator is updated from 2000 to 2004. After that, it has a long hiatus and receives its last update in February 2010, along with the latest versions of PSP, Linux and Ubuntu. The project ends with 90% of the console's games running. After the 2010 update, Bannister still updated the Mac version in March 2018, rebuilding the emulator with the Cooca APIs. The last update for Mac came out in December 2019. In addition to creating Jum52, James also ported Colecovision's ColEm emulator to the PS2, called ColemPS2 in 2002.

Kat5200 (2005)

Kat 5200

The Kat5200 emulator, created in November 2005 by Brian Berlin. Like the Atari800 emulator, it ran not only the Atari 5200, but also Atari's 8-bit computers, the 800, XL and XE, which were supported from the October 2008 version onwards. Kat 5200 was released for Windows and Linux, and is considered the best emulator for the console alongside the Atari800. Kat5200 had help from a variety of people in the 5200 scene, such as Dan Boris, creator of the Virtual Super System, helping with its debugging; the Jum52 emulator, helping with mapping tables; the Atari800, with its very useful emulator and debugger; and the AtariAge website with important posts on the subject, which is the most important website about the Atari franchise. The emulator was updated until June 2009, returning only in February 2017. The emulator was always released for SDL, which could be ported to other systems, and this time it is updated to the SDL2 model. It also begins to bring support for MacOS X. In December 2017, it begins to support more modern OpenGL and becomes part of the RetroArch multi-emulator. Its latest version was released in January 2018. On the same date, it releases a test version for Android, which has no continuity.

Other Emulators

Rainbow and XL-It!

There were other Atari 5200 emulators, such as Rainbow (also ran Atari computers) in 1995, XL-It!, created in March 1996, Pokey in 1996, Xformer Classic in December 1998 (an Atari 8-bit PC emulator, which claimed to also run the Atari 5200), as well as the Altirra emulators (which also emulated Atari computers), Emu7800 (which also runs Atari 7.8k), Atari++ and A8E. There were also emulators for other systems, such as JXD-a2600 for Android (made from the Stella source code, and also ran the Atari 2600) and a5200DS for the Nintendo DS. From 1998 onwards, it was included alongside the Atari 800 in the multi-system emulator, MESS.