Home Page Forums MAME MAME Xerox Alto / Alto II

The Xerox PARC-developed Alto was the first computer to feature a GUI and "inspired" Steve Jobs to develop the Apple Lisa, the precursor to the Apple Macintosh. Needless to say, the Alto ranks among the most historically significant computer systems. Having used one myself for about a year I can say they're quite fascinating.

Salto, the only usable Alto emualtor in existance today, is no longer actively maintained, doesn't build with compilers newer than gcc-9, and doesn't work on many modern systems anyway (at least it didn't on my linux mint 20.1 test system).

With this in mind, I wonder how close MAME's own alto1 and alto2 drivers are to a useable state? Currently they don't show anything on the screen but I realize that's not necessarily an indication of maturity, and it just seems like an interesting target.

There is also ContrAlto by LCM, but that hasn't been update for a while too and is Windows-only (although there is apparently an Emscripten-powered online version at https://archives.loomcom.com/contraltojs/ which seems to kinda work....)

The alto1 driver is the most bare-bones of skeleton drivers, and the existing alto2 driver is a quite ancient and weird piece of ex-MESS code that has very little in common with anything else in MAME. I took a stab at modernizing alto2 once, but didn't get very far; maybe I'll return to it someday in the not-so-near future.

Josh's Contralto would be the code to look at. There are many subtle oddities in the hardware and it took him a while to find them, like getting the cursor working correctly
His implementation is solid.

alto2 worked and ran software when it was submitted, but I don't know how well.

It would be nice to have running, but it was basically chewing gum and bailing wire on real hardware from what I've seen.

The Alto2 driver looks like someone took another emulator and converted it to a MESS CPU core.

Ah yes the tip-off for alto1 should have been the fact that there's no connected display.

As for alto2, that would have been neat to see running in mame in whatever state it was in. Too bad it regressed, but hopefully that can be resolved someday (thanks AJR).

Had no idea about Contralto but it looks nice (and I love the name), though there must be some local JS interpreter issue preventing it from working in my (Firefox 87) browser. At least the code provides some good documentation of the hardware. From what you say Al, it certainly sounds better than Salto with its jittery cursor implementation and clock issues. As impressive as Salto was, it had a long way to go.