Ideas for setting up 600XL w/ U1MB and Side3

[Serpentor]

Now that I have my 600XL completed with UAV, U1MB, and Side3, I am looking for ideas for setting it up. I plan to use it for retro gaming with my son, so I am mainly wondering how I should set it all up to do that. I'm mainly looking for suggestions on how my 64GB card should be set up (how many and what types of partitions), what OS would be most useful in the various slots of the U1MB, etc. I've done quite a bit of reading on here and have a handle on how to use everything. I'm just wondering how some of you have chosen to set up your machines.

[flashjazzcat]

For a gaming setup, you could download one of the enormous online archives (from atarionline.pl, etc) and copy the entire directory tree to a FAT32 partition on the SD card. 4GB or so should be enough for almost everything, but you can make the partition as big as you like, spanning the entire card if you want. The SIDE3 loader can be configured to remember the last accessed folder or even file, and you can create shortcuts to favourite games or folders, and optionally maintain a history folder of every XEX, cartridge and disk image launched.

 

Should you want to split the card between FAT partition(s) and APT (perhaps if you want to use productivity software or do some coding), there's a video on this page showing how to do it:

 

https://atari8.co.uk/apt/toolkit/

 

The toolkit user manual on the same page (which you may already have seen) describes the partitioning process.

 

As far as U1MB OS slots go: the firmware has the 800 'Oldrunner' OS pre-installed in one slot, and while this won't be useful for FAT hosted disk images (since the 800 OS has no PBI support), it might allow a few 400/800 XEX or CAR files to run.