AMS - what emulator or prog lets you load them from H:

[MockAnt]

I really want to listen to some ams files I have on the pc, but I cant find any emulated players that will allow

loading because they are not in the same .atr file. Using atari800 plus none of the programs want to let me

load ams from the emulated HD or I would do it that way. Is there a program or method that will let me do this without having to repack my ams files into .atr?

 

Thanks- MockAnt

 

I also remember after the 8bit lost most of its popularity there was another similar music program that played them and sounded much better, something involving attack and decay of notes or somesuch. Any one have a idea what that was? I know the author sold large collections of music for it whatever it was.

Edited April 21, 2008 by MockAnt

[MEtalGuy66]

I really want to listen to some ams files I have on the pc, but I cant find any emulated players that will allow

loading because they are not in the same .atr file. Using atari800 plus none of the programs want to let me

load ams from the emulated HD or I would do it that way. Is there a program or method that iwll let me do this without having to repack my ams files with a standalone player?

 

Thanks- MockAnt

 

I also remember after the 8bit lost most of its popularity there was another similar music program that played them and sounded much better, something involving attack and decay of notes or somesuch. Any one have a idea what that was? I know the author sold large collections of music for it whatever it was.

 

Atari800win is the emulator.

 

The music program is called Advanced Music Sstem.

 

If you cant find that, you can convert them to .amp and run them on the Antic Music Processor which is a later, slightly more advanced music editor/player.

[MockAnt]

The problem is finding a old atari program that will use a emulated harddrive to load a .ams that is not in a .atr archive on a emulated drive. All the old atari programs, including advanced music system, seem to be hardcoded to only load music from simulated D: .atr drives, which disallows me from being able to load a standalone .ams file. I tried atari800win plus, using its H: drive emulator but no atari ams player that I could find would use it.

 

I'm thinking what I really need is a emulator that lets you set a D: drive to be a real path on the pc system, or to find a AMS player that will allow loading .ams from the H: simulated drive. I'm all for whatever gets my AMS files working on the pc without having to put them into a .atr

[Rybags]

Simple - just boot a DOS in the emulator and create .ATRs with your AMS files on them.

 

And, if you can upload the program you're using, maybe someone could look at it - maybe it could be patched to allow loading from H:

[MockAnt]

And, if you can upload the program you're using, maybe someone could look at it - maybe it could be patched to allow loading from H:

 

I don't want to put my .ams files into .atr or any other simulated format, I want them free in a directory where I can easily add and change. How do I make a .atr from dos anyhow?

 

The programs I have tried so far:

 

1. play.com "themusic player" by dan knauf I cant get this to load anything from anywhere, it is supposed to load ams from any drive 1 to 8.

 

2. amp.exe and amp2.exe both give error 130 and won't recognize any drive anywhere.

 

3. ams show disks 1 - 51. plays ams prearranged disks but only from D1: nowhere else

 

4. Advanced MusicSystem 1982 by Lee Actor This only loads AMS from D1:

 

5. Advanced Music Sys "music player" s.p.a.c.e. version 2.2 only loads AMS from d1:-d4: or d8: as a ramdisk

 

6. AMS Synthesizer 2.3 only plays its AMS in its own .atr ever

 

I'd also like to find some pokey player tunes, and non-.atr'ed .amp songs. I think pokey player might be the one I remember being so good back in the day but almost entirely circulating from one BBS

 

The super ultimate goal is having a AMS player that will load my AMS from any pc path I tell it to, with a cherry on top bonus if that program can also edit/compose/save to my pc path.

Edited April 21, 2008 by MockAnt

[+CharlieChaplin]

Well,

I do not know of any PC *.AMS players. The players you are mentioning are all for the Atari 8Bit, thus you must create ATR`s to use them, simply create an ATR image, put some AMS files, a DOS and the player into it and load/boot the image under Atari 800 Win. This should work.

 

Think there are some tutorials out there, how to create ATR images under Atari 800 Win and how to put files from the PC harddisk into an ATR image. If not, well on various internet pages you will find ready-to-use ATR images with AMS files (like UMich and others)...

 

Think there were also some converter programs (like AMS2MMS for the Atari 8Bit) that let you convert AMS files into MMS (Midi Music System) files and then play them with any Midi program on the ST or PC, but I have not tried this...

 

-Charlie Chaplin.

[MockAnt]

thanks for the replies Charlie, Rybags, and Metalguy. One of the main points I am after is to be able to read AMS music into a emulator on pc without putting my files into .atr image format. To do this I need a atari ams player that will load from the emulator H1: hard disk instead of just the choice of D1-D8 emulated drives. I am hoping someone would know a ams program that can do that, or a emulator that can assign one of the D1:D8: drives to be a pc file path instead of a virtual atari disk, or perhaps some different solution that does not involve creating new .atr files.

[Rybags]

You might try this "kludge" solution.

 

Setup your Atari800Win+ with the Hard Drive pointed to your working directory.

Enable the H: device, with write permitted in the emulator options.

Startup your program as normal without booting DOS if possible

 

Go into the Monitor (press F8).

 

Enter: C 329 44 then CONT

That will fool the Atari into thinking that the H: handler built into the emulator is in fact DOSes disk device.

You'll have to re-enter that if you happen to press RESET (F5).

 

Press RESET or (from the monitor) C 329 48 to revert back to the normal H:

 

If it's the case that you have to boot DOS to use your program, you'll need to change the D: handler to another device letter. In most cases, memory location 32C should contain the letter "D" if you have DOS loaded as well as "H:" enabled.

 

Note: doing this might or might not work for you.

[MockAnt]

Hey that is some pretty slick kludgery, Thanks. Neither trick worked on any of the ams players I have though. I still get the contents of the old D1: instead of what is on H1:

[Rybags]

Did you do it immediately before trying a load/save?

 

Don't do it right at power-on stage, it'll get overwritten.

 

And, there's always the chance the program has it's own disk handler, in which case getting it to use H: might be near impossible.

[MockAnt]

Which OS are those memory locations for? c 329 44 isn't doing anything for me applied before a load or after. All the AMS programs still are sticking to

what was on their .atr and nothing else. I tried a c 559 0 to see if maybe nothing is actually going on when i change memory, and nothing happened- shouldnt the screen have blanked out?

[Urchlay]

I tried a c 559 0 to see if maybe nothing is actually going on when i change memory, and nothing happened- shouldnt the screen have blanked out?

 

I don't know anything about AMS players, but I do know the monitor wants addresses in hex. Try "c 22f 0", that should blank the screen.

[dwhyte]

Why not just use MyDOS... Create a 65535 sector hard drive .atr (doesn't even need to be that large) and copy all your stuff to that? Run it as D1: and everything should work then...

Edited April 21, 2008 by dwhyte

[miker]

A bit off-topic...

 

Alternatively you can go to ASMA homepage, then to PLAYERS section, scroll down do "Tools" and then dowload Sap Maker 5 (there are 2 versions - for win/linux). It will allow you to turn AMS files into SAPs and then play them on some player supporting this format. Well... it's experimental support a bit but many files work well.

Edited April 21, 2008 by miker

[MockAnt]

Why not just use MyDOS... Create a 65535 sector hard drive .atr (doesn't even need to be that large) and copy all your stuff to that? Run it as D1: and everything should work then...

 

Because I don't want to put my ams into .atr format pseudo disks, I dont want to pull bits and pieces from existing .atr files over and over to make what I want. I want to be able to load .AMS from a pc filepath, adding new ones anytime I want instead and being able to easily move add or subtract them when I want to. That is what the emulator H: drive is supposed to be all about, but no AMS player I have found yet will recognize it. Surely there must be ONE ams player that will work with H: , or a different emulator that will set a pc drive path as one of the D: or SOMETHING.

 

Miker- Thanks. I looked into the .sap thing a few days ago. I want to keep my real atari files in real atari format though.

 

Urchlay- that totally worked (hex instead of numeric). Now I can turn the screen off on the programs that wont play my AMS from H:, heh.

 

If no other ideas come along soon I may see if I can change D: to H: in one of the players manually. After running BBSes my favorite thing in the old

days was working on AMS writing.

[Urchlay]

Urchlay- that totally worked (hex instead of numeric). Now I can turn the screen off on the programs that wont play my AMS from H:, heh.

 

Have you got any real Atari 8-bits? Get an SIO2PC cable... You can do virtual drive support in AtariSIO or use APE's PC Mirror mode to "mount" a directory on your PC and make it appear as a D: device. If you run MyDOS or (maybe) SpartaDOS, you can have up to 16 megs of files in the directory, with subdirectory support.

 

To me, none of the emulators sound quite right anyway, if I were into AMS music I'd want to use the real thing to listen to them.

[Urchlay]

4. Advanced MusicSystem 1982 by Lee Actor This only loads AMS from D1:

5. Advanced Music Sys "music player" s.p.a.c.e. version 2.2 only loads AMS from d1:-d4: or d8: as a ramdisk

6. AMS Synthesizer 2.3 only plays its AMS in its own .atr ever

 

Can you post images of these (the forum software requires you to zip them first and post the zip files, BTW), or do you have URLs where they can be downloaded?

[charliecron]

Well here's the SPACE AMS disks. Looks like it needs BASIC.

 

Charlie

[MockAnt]

4. Advanced MusicSystem 1982 by Lee Actor This only loads AMS from D1:

5. Advanced Music Sys "music player" s.p.a.c.e. version 2.2 only loads AMS from d1:-d4: or d8: as a ramdisk

6. AMS Synthesizer 2.3 only plays its AMS in its own .atr ever

 

Can you post images of these (the forum software requires you to zip them first and post the zip files, BTW), or do you have URLs where they can be downloaded?

 

AMS Synthesizer is at NitroRoms

 

Advanced MusicSystem and half the old APX catalog are available at AtariArchives.org , with AMS being Right Here

Edited April 22, 2008 by MockAnt