Buying an Ultra Satan need help

[howerton]

Hi

 

I am buying an ultra satan and am wondering if the standard files from planetemulation will work with it? Similar to how a gotek works. Just want to know before I buy?

[bfollowell]

Hopefully, @ParanoidLittleMan will pipe in, since he's the developer of one of the two HD driver packages that are used for this and other hard drives for the ST.

 

First of all, the US is not a floppy drive replacement like the Gotek or Goex. These are completely different animals. As such, no, most games, etc, will not just work right out of the box, or right off a download site. You're taking games/apps that were meant to run from a floppy drive and putting the in a directory on a hard drive. Some may work, some may not. That being said @ParanoidLittleMan also has tons of old titles that he has fixed/patched to work from a hard drive, as well as fixing many incompatibilities with later versions of TOS.

 

Finally, if you choose to purchase @ParanoidLittleMan's HD driver, his comes with a virtual floppy emulator which will let you run many of the ST disk image files that are available on many site. Hopefully, he will join in to correct anything I may be mistaken about and will give a lot more detail than I have.

 

[howerton]

Thanks, this is more complicated than I thought. @ParanoidLittleMan has helped me before in another thread. One that led me to buy a ST monitor.

[ParanoidLittleMan]

Things with Atari ST are much more complex than with some 8-bit micro. In case of games main reason is actually that games were distributed on floppy disks. By 8 bitters it was ROM cartridge (consoles) and tape - very slow, not possible to jump to any section of tape by computer control. Only user can rewind it. So, most of games, and I would say some 98% was single file.  Size of 40 KB needed about 4 minutes to load.

What is here relevant is single file - that is very easy to redirect to hard disk, even if there is copy protection (another thing what complicates it a lot).

I dealt with Sinclair Spectrum games - with bad word 'converting' them from tape to floppy disks. Actually it was just using different loader in it's OS ROM .

And doing RAM snapshot save was what made it easier - some had encryption, and then is best to save RAM after decryption. Possible only with modded ROM . So, I had in modded ROM load of usual files (where can specify RAM address where to load) and load of snapshot - that needs special procedure, but still pretty simple compared to Atari ST tape and hard disk loadings.

 

Atari ST games can be with plenty of files, even in case of single sided floppy . Like 100 files. OS and floppy drive mechanic will access specific file in less than second - and load from it (or whole) much faster than tape load - like 2 secs for 40 KB .

Which games are easy to make working from hard disk ? Of course those which have hard disk install option. Number of them is low, I guess max some 50. + those installers are usually obsolete, not good for hard disks with larger capacity. Many of it installs (game DIR) only in root of C . And in most of cases there is copy protection, so user needs original floppy in drive.

 

There is number of those with regular files, and some even without copy protection. So, let's copy all it in some DIR of hard disk, today rather Flash card, and it should work.  Well, my experience says that max some 20% will work that way. Talking about commercial and freeware games.  It will work only if relative path is used in game code for file access.  What is btw. simplest one - just give filename. But from some reason coders liked more something like:

A:\FILEN.EXT . Or  \SUBDIR\MEFILE.MOO  ...  Correcting those is relative simple - with some Hex editor can remove all it before file name. Or just first backslash before SubDIR name - then it becomes relative.

If there is copy protection it needs expert, good ASM and Atari ST knowledge.

One way of copy protection is using so called custom floppy loader, and not TOS functions to load files. Only way to make them working from hard disk is correction code parts in game, where disk access is. That's extremely hard in some cases. Even mentioning diverse ways and possible problems would need lot of space and time ...

Virtual Floppy will not make them work - it works only with those accessing files via TOS functions - so called trap #1 calls for regular files, and XBIOS 8 - accessing specific area of floppy - that will be then area of image file.

 

So, I can recommend that still go with UltraSatan (or something what works with modern storage in hard disk way) instead of floppy emulator.

Practically 95% of quality games are adapted for running from hard disk/Flash card.  And there are benefits which are not possible with Gotek and similar:

Multi floppy games will not need 'disk changes' . There is save state option in most of adaptations, so user can save it, and play later from that pos.

And diverse cheats, jumping to specific levels are often part of hard disk adaptations.

 

Considering success rate of running diverse ST, MSA floppy images from hard disks: it will be not so good. I would say max some 30-35% - talking about cracks in first place. And it stays for single floppy games. In case of multi floppy ones there is disk/image change problem. If game takes over keyboard read from TOS, no way to solve change of active floppy image file, not even with iTOS-es Virtual Floppy function. 

 

Conclusion: mass storage offers lot of benefits, and now is really cheap . Can have thousands of Atari SW on single memory card. It needs some time to become familiar with good way of usage, some money invested, but it pays.