Atari800MacX Help
Preferences Window
Display Tab



The Display Tab is the heart of the graphics control of the emulator.  From here you can change the:

Display Size

    Display Mode:
These radio buttons allow you to choose to display the emulator in a standard Aqua window, or to use the entire screen for displaying the emulator.  When in full screen mode, the Screen Size and Display Width parameters below still apply.  On most Macs, to fill the entire screen, you will want to choose Fullscreen, 2xAtari Size, and Narrow Width. (640x480).  You can also change this setting from the Display Menu.
    Screen Size:
These radio buttons allow you to choose betwen the standard Atari Screen Size where one Atari pixel is mapped to one Macintosh pixel, or 2xAtari Screen size (Doublesize), where one Atari pixel is mapped to four (2x2) Macintosh pixels. The screen sizes in default width for this mode are 336x240 and 672x480.   You can also change this setting from the Display Menu.  Note, on slower Macs, you may want to change your video depth to Thousands of Colors to achieve full frame rate when in Doublesize mode.  (Don't change this while running the emulator!!!).
    Display Width:
These radio buttons allow you to choose betwen narrow, default, and full widths of the Atari screen.  These correspond to 320x240, 336x240, and 384x240 respecitvely.  You can also change this setting from the Display Menu.
Show Frames Per Second In Window Title
This checkbox lets you choose to display the Frames Per Second (FPS) that the emulator is running at the moment.  This can be used to check that your Macintosh is fast enough to run the Atari at full speed.  It should indicate 50fps for PAL, and 60fps for NTSC.  FPS Display is not available in Fullscreen mode.  However, since Fullscreen mode always runs in 256 colors, speed is usually not an issue.  You can also change this setting from the Display Menu.

TV Mode
These radio buttons allow you to choose to the refresh rate of the emulator, either NTSC (60 frames per second) or PAL (50 frames per second).

Refresh Ratio
This pull down allows you to choose how often to redraw the simulated Atari scren.  You can choose to do it every Atari frame, or every 2nd, 3rd, or 4th one.  On very slow Macs, this could be used to bring the frame rate up to full speed (50 or 60 frames per second).

Artifacting Mode
This pull down allows you to choose how the emulator simulates Artifacting, which occured when the original Atari used a TV for displaying its video.  Some games depended on the colors these Artifacting effects produced.

Color Palette
These options allow the user to customize the colors used by the Macintosh to Emulate the Atari's color palette. 8-bit Atari machines have 256 colors, and the emulator can either generate a palette, or use a pre-generated palette stored in a file.  By default, it uses the real.act file stored in the Palettes folder in the application directory.  

If the "Use Palette from File" checkbox is checked, then you can choose the palette file with the Choose.. button.  If you wish, you may then also check the "Adjust File Palette" checkbox to adjust the Black Level, White Level, and Intensity parameters described below.  These adjustments do not affect the file itself.

If the "Use Paletee from File" checkbox is not checked, then the emulator will generate a palette using the values you enter for the following 4 parameters:
Each parameter must be an integer within range 0-255.