While it’s 100% accurate that the C64 could only address 64K of memory, it’s not quite right to say the RAM Expansion Units (REUs) only operated as disk drives. They were super fast DRAM units that operates via bank switching. So basically you’re swapping the entire 64KB of the machine in and out of the REU at speeds of about 1MB/sec, or basically instantaneous. So if you wrote your software to take advantage of bank switching, you could use as much as you had as far as I know.
While not an emulator in the normal sense, we added Atari 8-bit support to Argon last year. It is a mix of the OS firmware from Altirra (big thanks to them for letting us use it!) and the emulation core is Atari++ by Thomas Richter (thorfdbg on AtariAge). We have had some real fun with it - there is a slider control for paddle games (Rain of Terror is a good one for that!); we even added support to play Koala Pad/Atari Touch Tablet enabled games such as Planetary Defense via touch or stylus/smart pen input.
My 800XL arrived today. 😎
While it’s 100% accurate that the C64 could only address 64K of memory, it’s not quite right to say the RAM Expansion Units (REUs) only operated as disk drives. They were super fast DRAM units that operates via bank switching. So basically you’re swapping the entire 64KB of the machine in and out of the REU at speeds of about 1MB/sec, or basically instantaneous. So if you wrote your software to take advantage of bank switching, you could use as much as you had as far as I know.
And you could use them as RAM disk drives. 😃
I've found Stella for Linux a very useful emulator. I'll have to check out Altirra and Argon.
While not an emulator in the normal sense, we added Atari 8-bit support to Argon last year. It is a mix of the OS firmware from Altirra (big thanks to them for letting us use it!) and the emulation core is Atari++ by Thomas Richter (thorfdbg on AtariAge). We have had some real fun with it - there is a slider control for paddle games (Rain of Terror is a good one for that!); we even added support to play Koala Pad/Atari Touch Tablet enabled games such as Planetary Defense via touch or stylus/smart pen input.