Total Recall Help

[oakcitycomics]

I have been trying to play Total Recall on the ST for a couple months now. I have purchased 3 retail copies of the game off ebay over the past few months and they all behave the exact same way. 

 

I will only get a black screen at boot with no audio. It will just hang there for eternity unless I turn of the ST. I've tried booting from disk 1 and disk 2 and makes no difference on the outcome.  I've tried on both a 520 ST and a 1040 STE with 1mb and 4mb ram installed. I find it hard to believe that three different copies purchased online both are bad. 

 

I looked online to find a ST image I could write to a floppy but everything I found was in the STX format and only one ST image copy on a sketchy website and it was way to big of a file to be a disk image 

 

Any help is much appreciated. 

Edited October 31, 2020 by oakcitycomics

[MasterMotorola]

Your copies work just fine but your memories of playing them were erased.  ?

 

Sorry, couldn't resist.  Wow, that is really odd for three copies on two different systems to behave the same.  I don't suppose you have a way to copy the disks to a computer with an Atari emulator and try different hardware settings.  Games from 1990 should run just fine on a stock ST with 1Mb and TOS 1.04 or higher.  That's got me baffled too.  Hopefully someone who has played the game will respond with some advice.

[ParanoidLittleMan]

I tried game in Steem (3.2), and better version is Hit Squad from 1992 - one DS disk instead 2 SS . As I see no copy protection too - at least game starts and can play level 1 - and yes, I remember game now. It's just that I did not like that fist fight on level one, really not well made by me, so that's all what I played.

Here is ST image file of it: Total Recall (Hit Squad).zip

It's 800 KB, so good for any ST(E) with double sided floppy drive.

 

My opinion is, and it was same 10 years ago, when it was much better with conditions of them:  don't buy original floppies. They are now way too old (often 30 years and more), and we know that life time is not so long.  And yes, I can believe that you bought "3 different bad copies". 

Here to add that condition of floppy drives helps not too - they are old too, so even more chances that some sections on disks will be not read error less. 

I imaged all my relevant floppy disks in period 1998-2005, including original ones (mostly in STX format), and it is now preserved on more reliable medias (and CDs, DVDs are not it !), with redundancy .

 

Ah, you need just to press joystick (1) fire button to go faster thru intro screens, and to start game.

Edited November 1, 2020 by ParanoidLittleMan
w>t

[oakcitycomics]

8 hours ago, ParanoidLittleMan said:

I tried game in Steem (3.2), and better version is Hit Squad from 1992 - one DS disk instead 2 SS . As I see no copy protection too - at least game starts and can play level 1 - and yes, I remember game now. It's just that I did not like that fist fight on level one, really not well made by me, so that's all what I played.

Here is ST image file of it: Total Recall (Hit Squad).zip

It's 800 KB, so good for any ST(E) with double sided floppy drive.

 

My opinion is, and it was same 10 years ago, when it was much better with conditions of them:  don't buy original floppies. They are now way too old (often 30 years and more), and we know that life time is not so long.  And yes, I can believe that you bought "3 different bad copies". 

Here to add that condition of floppy drives helps not too - they are old too, so even more chances that some sections on disks will be not read error less. 

I imaged all my relevant floppy disks in period 1998-2005, including original ones (mostly in STX format), and it is now preserved on more reliable medias (and CDs, DVDs are not it !), with redundancy .

 

Ah, you need just to press joystick (1) fire button to go faster thru intro screens, and to start game.

Thank you for the file provided. I only had a USB floppy so the 800k image I wasnt' able to write directly. But I was able to load it in STEem and copy the files to a virtual windows hard drive that allowed me to drag and drop the contents to a floppy I formatted on the STE. Game works great on real hardware.  I guess I was just having bad luck with the retail copies. Good to finally be able to play. 

[doctor_shred]

Thanks @ParanoidLittleMan I have an old cracked version of Total Recall but it always crashes on the Mars driving level.  Hopefully I'll now get to finish the game!