Building an Atari emulator
OpenAI gym provides an Atari 2600 game environment with a Python interface. The games are simulated by the arcade learning environment, which uses the Stella Atari emulator. For more details, read the following papers:
- MG Bellemare, Y Naddaf, J Veness, and M Bowling, The arcade learning environment: An evaluation platform for general agents, journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (2012)
- Stella: A Multi-Platform Atari 2600 VCS emulator, http://stella.sourceforge.net/
Getting started
If you don't have a full install of OpenAI gym, you can install the Atari environment dependencies via the following:
pip install gym[atari]This requires the cmake tools. This command will automatically compile the arcade learning environment and its Python interface, atari-py. The compilation will take a few minutes on a common laptop, so go have a cup of coffee.
After the Atari environment is installed, try the following:
import gym
atari = gym.make('Breakout-v0')
atari.reset()
atari...
