toddtmw

Hi. I've been looking at what I have in my collection vs what is in Atarimania. I have two disks for Alice in Wonderland, but I cannot get them to boot. They crash in Altirra in 400/800 mode, and they seem to hang in XL mode. I have attached them to this post. Anyone able to get them to work? Thanks, -Todd Alice in Wonderland.zip

I have some old .atr files that I have had since 1997. I'm thinking they may have gotten corrupt. When I try to use them in Altirra, it gives error "Disk Image <filename> uses an unsupported sector size of 43136 bytes" The images seem pretty small too. I have attached one to this thread. Anyone have any ideas if these are salvagable? (I'm not even sure what is on them.) Thanks! -Todd 001.ATR

I'm not hung up on when the Atari is accessing the floppy, the floppy has to be spinning, so I don't think Caching would be bad. I think the big thing would be detecting when a disk had been changed. (Both in Windows, and in the emulator). I'd be happy to buy you a USB floppy drive if you had any interest in even trying to make this work. -Todd

Actually, if it would just allow a "folder" (in this case the entire floppy) to look like a disk image that could be read/write and booted from, it would allow what I am trying to do. To be clear, this is just a pipe dream. I'm trying to get as close the real experience without having to devote space to a real computer. Just playing around with ways to make it closer to the real experience. I miss the boxes of disks and physically putting them in a drive, but I do not miss the bulky size of the 8-bit drives. Just playing around and looking for new ways to make it real.... Thanks all for your comments and ideas.

Unfortunately, this does not work. I created a .ATR file. (Seems like the biggest I can create is about 720k) made it R/W and then saved it to a floppy. Then I wrote DOS to it which was funny because it made all the disk noises and then when it was done, the floppy spun up for a few seconds while it wrote the changes. Then I unmounted the disk and while leaving the slot R/W, I selected it again and it paused to read the whole thing before it let me do anything. I'm assuming this happens with regular images, but they are so small and hard drives are so fast no one notices. Ah well, it was an interesting idea. Guess it was not meant to be. Thanks. -Todd

@phaeron, Thank you! -Todd

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll try a R/W ATR tonight. Is it possible to make an ATR that is 1.44MB in size? Thanks, again!

Is there an updated list?

In Altirra, is it possible to use a 3.5" IBM Floppy disk as a virtual Atari Disk without putting an .ATR image on it. I can point it to a directory, but it appears when I do that, the directory is read-only. If I put an ATR image on the disk, it has to read the entire image before it can use it. I'm thinking it might be fun to use real 3.5" disks with the emulator to get closer to an old-school experience without relying on 30-year-old technology (rather, relying on 20-year-old technology instead.) Thoughts on how I could do this? Thanks.

Glad we could help you out!!! ?

I like #1. It looks the most Atari to me.

That is pretty cool!

My neighbor's 810 in warp speed was a great experience to listen to. The Atari 810, was an amazing floppy drive. I am convinced that if given enough time, it could format a paper plate.

I found this piece very interesting. It is always cool to see the detailed history of a game being made against all odds. Has anyone played this game? How does it stack up? http://www.polygon.com/features/2017/3/21/14937540/history-of-big-bang-bar-pinball -Todd

Man, people on this forum know EVERYTHING. The google was clueless. Thanks!

Sure, it kind of sounds like a drumroll too. So, it was waiting perhaps for a disk read head to get where it needed to be or something?

It is not a sound the actual drive makes, it is a sound the computer speaker makes. Altirra does it perfectly. It sounds like, I don't know how to describe it. When accessing a disk you get beeps for reads and kind of a distorted sound for writes. Then the disk would seem to stop doing anything for a bit and the computer speaker would go FLFLFLFLFLFLFL (It sounded like a fart.) But I never knew what that was supposed to tell me the computer was doing.

So, I set up Altirra to run disk IO at the correct speed with the sound effects. Now I am back in 1983. I remember we used to laughingly call the noise it made during loading that wasn't a disk sound the Atari Fart. I understood the read and write sounds, but I never understood what the fart sound was supposed to represent. Does anyone know what that sound meant? IE, what was the disk drive doing when it was making that sound? Thanks.

So, are they going to publish instructions to do this yourself?

So, back in the day, there was a crudely animated demo called Gigantic Jerry. It was definitely not suitable for work, but I cannot seem to find it anywhere. Anyone have a copy laying around? -Todd

Altirra is by far the best Atari Emulator out there. Highly recommended.

RetroPie works really well for just about everything. The default packages are pretty solid. The optional and experimental are a little less perfect, but still pretty usable. I have mine hooked to a 50" flat screen I got at Wal Mart for $169 and an xArcade Tankstick sitting on top of a keyboard stand. It works REALLY well. I'm having a blast playing old games.

So, you guys loved my last idea so much, I have another one I'd like to suggest. :) This emulator is so powerful and so well-written, that it's hard not to think about ways to make it even better. So, what if there was an option to save x number of states every y minutes? Think about it, I could say, keep 20 save states and take one every 5 minutes. Maybe another check box for save state every time there is a system reset. User would be able to specify where the save states are stored. You could even select to keep 20 save states, but not do them every x minutes and instead only do them when resetting. Maybe something like this: Auto Save State o Yes o No Save states to keep: ___ Create save state every ___ Minutes (0=do not save based on time) Auto Save State during Reset or Reboot? o Yes o No Path for Save States: <Browse> The first Yes/No would grey out the rest of the lines if it is "No" Think about this. If you are developing and something goes wrong and you can't figure out what you broke, you could go back to a save state from 5 minutes ago and get back to where it was working. What do we think? Thanks! Todd

Sigh