The History of Atari 7800 Emulators

V7800 (1999)

V7800

The Virtual 7800 was created in 1999 by renowned Atari console emulator creator Dan Boris, creator of the VCS emulators for the Atari 2600 and VSS for the Atari 5200. The intention of creating the emulator was to be part of the MESS multisystem emulator. As the latter had not yet had its own version in 1999, Dan decided to first release the V7800 as a standalone emulator in May 1999 for MS-DOS. The emulator was built with Ron Fries' TIA sound emulator, Shawn Hargreaves' Allegro multimedia library, and Carlos Hasan's Seal sound library. In the second and final release of the emulator in June 1999, he improved the emulation of the same by replacing the processor emulator for Neil Bradley's Multi-6502. This version has some improvements, such as a debugger, pause button and bugs. Despite this, the emulator was a bit slow.

V7800 (Galaga)

The V7800 operated on a command line basis, ie, MS-DOS commands, without a GUI/front-end to facilitate access. Given this, around 1999, Todd Lawrence created the Regal Beagle 2000, which created an interface for the V7800 of the Atari 7800, in a Windows version. Other front-ends were created for the emulator, such as Psyman's Offend in November 2000, which later wanted to support other consoles, and the Brazilian Atari 7800 Frontend, created by André in August 2001. After June 1999, the emulator migrated to MESS, being released in 1999, most likely in the November version. In 2003, MESS created a port of its multi-emulator for Dreamcast, and in the same year Ian Micheal removed from MESS only the Atari 7800 emulation for Dreamcast and released the DC7800 fork, also known as a7800new. In August 2004, XPort made a port of MESS's Atari 7800 emulator for Xbox.

Emu7800 (2003)

Emu7800 (Interface)

Emu7800 was created by Mike Muprhy in 2003 and runs with support for Microsoft's .NET Framework platform. It works well from Windows XP SP3 (service pack) onwards. In addition to running Atari 7800 games, it also runs games from the 2600 console. Most of the titles that run on the ProSystem 7800 and VCS 2600 emulators run on the V7800. The authors of the Stella, Z26 and V7800 emulators, consecutively Bradford W. Mott, John Saeger and Dan Boris helped him with the project, as did Ron Fries with his sound library, TIA Sound. Later he also had help from the creator of the ProSystem Emulator, Greg Stanton.

Emu7800 (Desert Falcon)

Its first version was released in October 2003 for Windows directly on SourceForge. The emulator has had 20 updates in total. Among them, we highlight the January 2004 version that replaces the Managed DirectX API with the SDL library, the January 2011 version that brings support for 64-bit systems when running on those systems, and the January 2012 version that supports Windows Phone. Its latest version is dated March 2012.

ProSystem Emulator (2005)

ProSystem Emulator

ProSystem Emulator (derived from the original name of the console it emulates) was the last and best-known Atari 7800 emulator. It was created in 2005 by Greg Stanton. Its first release was in February 2005 for Windows, as version 0.1. The first version already made the documentation (and not the source code) of its emulator available. To use the emulator, it was recommended to have at least a Pentium 400MhZ, with 128MB of RAM, an 8MB graphics card, and sound and video with support for DirectX 6. The second version of the emulator, 1.1, came out in January 2007, with color palette corrections and joystick support made by Brian Berlin, who began updating the emulator from then on. From this version forward, he also began releasing its source code. In the next version, 1.2, from April 2007, Brian worked mainly on the menus and command lines.

In December 2008, it was updated by Leonis. He was looking for a good Atari 7800 emulation, and the ProSystem was the best. From then on, he decided to modify it, because he wanted to capture screenshots of his games. At the time, Greg did not answer him about this modification and Brian said he did not know how, because he could not change the source code. So Leonis ended up finding out by himself. Because version 1.2 of the emulator had been modified, it initially came as 1.2 LE, by Leonis, and later changed to 1.3. Days after this version, it was updated to 1.3a.

ProSystem Emulator (Galaga)

Starting in March 2008, the emulator began to be updated by Gdement with version 1.3b, followed by versions 1.3c, 1.3d and 1.3e respectively released in March, April and June 2008. Among several updates, version 1.3e fixed bugs for several games. Greg's website posted all of these versions, both his own and Brian's, and the first one by Leonis. The other versions of the emulator, from version 1.3a onward, are only posted on the AtariAge forum. In March 2015, Greg created an account and page on GitHub and posted Leonis' December 2008 version 1.3. It seemed that Greg would update the emulator again, but that never happened.

Regarding ports, there were versions for PSP in 2007 and GP2X Wiz in 2009, both by Ludovic Jacomme, known as Zx-81, called PSP7800 and Wiz7800, for Nintendo Wii in 2010, by raz0red or razored, called Wii7800, which had elements of versions by Leonis, Gdement and Ludovic, for Nintendo DS in 2011, by Alekmaul, called A7800DS (also with ports for Windows, MacOS programmer, Dan Boris, wrote on his website that ProSystem had excellent Atari 7800 emulation accuracy.