Playing Atari ST(E) games in 20-ies of 21-st

ParanoidLittleMan · June 15, 2021

Since this popped up in couple recent threads here, and is overall actual topic, I will write here some facts, thoughts, experience, and will dare to give some advice too, even if I'm by some last persona who should do it ?

Playing in emulators - that's indeed decent solution, and we have some well done emulators with Windows, Linux, MAC versions for that. But I will focus here on playing with real HW, so no more about Atari ST(E) emulators.

Except: HW emulators - yeah - MIST, MistER ... probably that's the future. But we still have original machines working well, so :

Indeed main question here is storage - from what storage device, what media to load, start game(s) ?

1. From floppy disks - that's how it was in Atari years, and games were sold, distributed on floppy disks.

2. Hard disk - it became interesting around 1990, when prices went lower, so even game publishers/programmers added hard disk install option in some cases.

3. Cartridge - not used by game publishers, except maybe in few cases as copy protection. But it is possible to place on limited 128 KB capacity some quality games. Myself did cartridge versions of about dozens of games.

4. HW floppy emulator - indeed very popular now. First was HxC, and it had SD card and USB versions, later was not much popular, even if it was better for some copy protections. Format support is limited, and in case of games it is best to go with cracks, deprotected versions .

Now more complications: from floppy disks :

A: using strictly original ones. This is what is obsolete, unreliable, costs time and money, and worst - disappointment almost guaranteed (sooner or later). Yeah, disks have limited life time.

B: making so called 'flux' copy of original, with specialized device - like Super Card Pro. And it is relative popular now, plus lot of images available online, for free.

Images are btw. of pretty large size - can be 60 MB per disk. Other device, KryoFlux seems getting forgotten - maybe because restrictions, explained with now really complete obsolete copyrights ?

C : using so called cracks, copies with deactivated copy protection. As everything it has good and bad sides. Good is that is writable to floppies with regular Atari ST or even PC, images are short, then there are often some trainer/cheat options.

Bad is that it might be not flawless - some damaged sections of data/game levels, not fully deprotected ( Potsworth & Co. by D-Bug - last level will fail) ...

Then some screens might be spoiled by cracker messages (even on pictures !) ...

Menu disks are special case - packing as much is possible games on single disk, usually with slow depacking, so slow start.

There are few people, crews, who did/does as much as possible faithful to original 'cracks' - so no fancy intro, 'we are best, f* the rest' type messages before game start, no forced packing, etc.

Well, at least all it should work with Goteks and it's clones.

Hard disk, or now rather Flash card adapted games (some call it patch - what is just stoopid. Although, I'm sure it is just taken from Amigaists ? ) .

Why saying adaptation ? Because in big % of games it is not about changing floppy access part with hard disk access code. About 60 % of Atari ST(E) games using TOS calls for file (disk) access, so as is usual to say Trap #1 calls. Some use XBIOS 8 calls (direct floppy sector access - Sundog) - and it is easy to redirect to hard disk. But, disk access is only one of problems what appears in this 'business' . There are TOS version compatibility problems, RAM usage problems. On this page are several details, based on experience with plenty of games: http://atari.8bitchip.info/playfhd.html

More details may follow ...