The Atari800Win Plus 4.0beta release introduces several key improvements over the older 3.1 version. The most important upgrade focuses on the visual emulation engine, aiming to completely eliminate long-standing graphical rendering errors.

You can clearly spot the precision of these rendering fixes in a couple of specific cases:

• Master of the Lamps: In the original game, when you reach the lamps, there are 8 of them, each featuring a distinct color. Version 3.1 of the emulator had a bug that reduced this palette, rendering the 8 lamps using only 4 colors. The 4.0beta completely fixes this.

• Demonic Laughter (by Virus): This demo utilizes a notoriously difficult GTIA hardware trick where one quarter of the screen runs in a completely different graphics mode than the rest by changing the video mode mid-scanline. The new emulator engine finally handles this timing perfectly and renders the effect correctly.

Other improvements in this release focus on upgraded sound emulation, new hard drive handling features, and general system stability.

Unfortunately, it’s not all good news. I stumbled upon a new issue—there appears to be a bug in the PMG (Player-Missile Graphics) collision detection. I noticed this while testing the recent game Mahna-Małysz; it doesn’t run properly at all on the 4.0beta, whereas it works completely fine on the older 3.1 version.