Atari800 vs Holani

Atari800 emulates Atari 8-bit computer systems and the Atari 5200 game console. It supports cycle-exact emulation of the 6502 processor and the NMI, POKEY, ANTIC and GTIA components. The emulator handles ATR, XFD, DCM, ATR.GZ and XFD.GZ disk images, with up to eight emulated drives. It can load Atari executable files and BASIC programs, emulate cassette tapes, and save files to the host computer through the H: device. Users can connect real joysticks or emulate paddles, light pens, light guns, mice and trackballs. Atari800 can save screen snapshots as PCX or PNG and write sound output to WAV files. It runs on Linux, Windows, macOS and Android; source and binary packages are available through GitHub releases, with Linux package instructions for Debian and Fedora. The project describes Atari800 as freely distributable, with source under GPL version 2. Its release notes describe NetSIO and FujiNet support for network SIO over UDP. Atari800 is written in C, and a BIOS is required.

Holani is a free, open-source Atari Lynx emulator for Linux and Windows, released under GPL-3.0. Its cycle-stepped 65C02S emulation began from the design idea of chips’ 6502. The project can also operate as a library for other frontends and links to a libretro core for official games and homebrews. Holani-retro works with libretro frontends such as RetroArch, providing save and load states plus RetroArch cheats. Holani-gtk is a GTK4 frontend for loading cartridges and overriding ROMs. Holani-min provides a command-line interface with button mapping, display filtering, mute, and Comlynx options; multiple instances can connect through Comlynx. The project also lists holani-debug, an Atari Lynx debugger. Holani embeds the Free Lynx Boot ROM and BLL uLoader blobs, so no BIOS is required. GTK builds require Rust, Cargo, and GTK4; Windows libretro use requires the Microsoft Visual C++ 2015 Redistributable.