General use

Boot

To power on the board, you can either connect it to one of your PC's USB ports using a USB cable, or directly use a USB power supply.

The ST should boot after less than 5 seconds.

Important: On the Z7-Lite board, you can use any of the two USB slave ports (UART or JTAG) for power supply. However, this board is known to provide reliable power to its USB slave port only when both UART and JTAG are connected to a power source such as a PC's USB port. You may not get enough power for your USB devices (or even, the board may not work at all) if you use only one of UART or JTAG ports to power the board.

Setup menu

By default, the ST starts without any floppy inserted.

Entering the menu

You can get access to the setup menu by pressing either of the Scroll Lock, Page Up or Search (magnifying glass) keys, or using the Meta+Enter key combo. If you are using a USB or bluetooth game controller, you can also press the Start button of your controller. From there, you can access different functions including rebooting the ST, selecting a floppy disk image, choosing the RAM size.

All dialogs use a system of lists: lists of settings, files, or MIDI devices.

You can navigate between the different items in a list using the Up and Down arrow keys. A game controller's direction keys also work. The Page Up and Page Down keys jump up and down by several items, allowing to navigate faster in long lists. The Home and End keys allow to jump to the first and last item in a list, respectively. To activate the selected list entry, press Enter or the South button of your game controller. A multi-value setting can be changed by highlighting it, then using the Left and Right arrow keys or controller directions to navigate the different values.

File selection entries will show a file selector for you to select another floppy, hard disk or ROM image.

Floppy and hard disk image file selection entries are “removable”: this means you can “eject” a floppy disk image, or disable hard disk emulation. This can be done by highlighting the corresponding menu entry, then pressing Del or Backspace instead of Enter. The behaviour is similar with MIDI ports, on which you may decide to disconnect the currently used device on any of the in or out ports.

To exit the setup menu as well as any other dialog, press Esc.

Dialog filtering

In any of the dialogs, including the file selector, you can narrow the search to entries that contain specific characters you type on the keyboard. Seaches are case-insensitive. For instance, if you type DEMO, only entries containing the word "demo" in any case combination will be shown. The current filter is displayed on top of the list window. Use the Backspace key to remove the latest typed character, and Esc to clear the selection filter completely.

File selection

Navigating the files in the file selector is similar to the navigation in the menu entries. Press Enter to choose a file or directory, or Esc to cancel the file selection.

You can also choose a directory to browse its files and subdirectories.

The SD card root directory can be accessed from the /sdcard directory.

MIDI device selection

zeST supports any MIDI device that can be connected to the FPGA board's USB port. To be able to use a MIDI device with zeST, you need to associate or connect it to at least one of the Atari's virtual MIDI in and out ports. This can be done using the MIDI In and MIDI Out entries in the Settings submenu.

The selection process for MIDI devices consists in associating one of the connected USB MIDI devices to either the MIDI in, or out ports of the Atari machine. The same device can be connected to both ports. You can virtually disconnect a MIDI device from any of the Atari's MIDI ports by pressing Del or Backspace when the device selection menu item for the chosen port is highlighted.

Save and Load settings

The Save settings menu entry saves all the chosen settings to the zest.cfg (by default) file on the SD card.

You can also save your current zeST configuration as a new file, and load configuration files from the UI. The corresponding UI entries are in the Tools menu.

Tools menu

The Tools menu is a submenu in the Settings Menu.

Keymap configuration

The keymap configuration lets you choose the keymap that is used when entering text in the different editable text entries.

Timezone configuration

The timezone setting allows you to adjust the local time that is used in the Real-Time Clock implementation in zeST. This enables the implemented ST to set itself up with the correct local time on boot.

Bluetooth device setup utility

This utility allows you to configure bluetooth I/O devices: keyboard, mouse and game controllers. Its use is rather straightforward: it first lists configured and discoverable devices. You can choose any of them, and decide to connect to a new device, or disconnect/remove configured devices.

If no keyboard or game controller is configured, you'll need to either use a USB device to configure your new device, or configure it from the Linux commandline.

Networking setup utility

The Tools menu also contains a "Networking setup" entry to show the network status and configure a Wi-Fi network. The network is useful to transfer files between your computer and the zeST board using SSH, as well as setting up the system clock so the Atari's RTC clock tells the correct time.

The networking setup utility shows the current IP address, as well as the list of available Wi-Fi access points.

You can connect to a Wi-Fi access point by selecting its name. This drives you to a dialog in which you can enter the network's passphrase before connecting.

Other features

Joystick emulation

If you press Num Lock or use the Meta+J key combo, this enables or disables joystick emulation. A LED on the board should light up when joystick emulation is on. An alert message showing the current status of joystick emulation is briefly shown on screen.

When joystick emulation is on, the arrow keys will act as the joystick directions, and the Left shift key becomes the fire button.

Volume control

The multimedia keys Volume Up, Volume Down and Mute allow you to control the sound level.

Supported input/output devices

zeST supports many external devices such as keyboards, mice, game controllers, etc. It also supports USB bluetooth and Wi-Fi dongles.

Input devices

USB or bluetooth keyboards and mice generally work. On boards like the Z7-Lite or Z-Turn, which have only one USB host port, if you want to use more than one device, you'll either need a powered hub if your devices are USB, or you can switch to using Bluetooth devices (see the next section).

About game controllers, generic USB or Bluetooth controllers for PC generally work without any problem. Also, the Sony Dual Shock 4 for PS4 works, both as joystick (using the direction keys and X button) and mouse (using the touch pad and Δ button).

USB MIDI devices also are supported. Note that most of USB MIDI controllers filter the stream of MIDI communication and remove messages that do not comply to the MIDI standard. It is fine when using MIDI instruments, but not for communicating with Atari computers, like for instance in the Midimaze game.

Bluetooth dongles

Most tested generic USB bluetooth dongles directly work.

There might be devices requring firmware files. zeST embeds firmware for Realtek 87xx and 88xx-based devices, which remain mostly untested.

Wi-Fi dongles

A selection of USB Wi-Fi dongles is supported in zeST. These mostly are for devices based on Realtek chipsets (81xx to 88xx), up to 802.11n. Drivers for devices implementing more recent Wi-Fi stardards, are not supported yet.

I2S audio output

You can connect an external I2S-based audio DAC to the zeST board, in the case you need an analog audio output that does not take its sources from the HDMI audio output.

It works on the Z7-Line, TE0726 and TE0727 boards. For the TE0726 and TE0727 that have a Raspberry Pi-compatible GPIO connector, the I2S output uses the same pins as on the Raspberry.

If you want to know more about it, there's been a discussion on the zeST Codeberg about the audio output, how it works and the kind of supported audio output modules.