EVERYTHING on ATR? Is It Possible?

[+SoulBuster]

I started a project way back in the 80s.  The premise was to get all software on disk (must have been after I acquired my first disk drive).

 

Later I continued that project on my new Black Box. I set up 720 sector mini hard drive disks and sector copied software to them for easy access.

 

Recently, I have been converting cassettes to disk with a lot of success, both ML and BASIC.  

 

With the advent of ATR's, I am now going to continue that project that I wanted so bad in the 80's.

 

So my plan is to get all software on easily bootable ATR's (those that can be) and have them implemented on my TNFS server (see sig). This will satisfy the project I started so long ago.

 

I want the cleanest copies I can get, so I will be following these procedures:

 

• A8SP is my source listing for getting all programs.
• Only one copy and the latest version of any program will be used.
• Unprotected versions will be preferred
• I will not use menu disks, if possible.  "Greatest" and "Hits" disks will not be used.  The individual programs will have their own ATR's.
• Source programs will come from these places only, and in order of preference; [cr CSS],Other Cracks by SB(me), A8SP,TOSEC,AtariMania,AtariOnline.pl, (ABBUC)
• Anything can be modified to make the booting easier, this is one of the main goals.

 

I added some indicators on each file I am using. They are the last indicators in the filename:

 

• [A8SP] - Sourced from A8SP
• [TOSEC] - Sourced from TOSEC
• [AM] - Sourced from www.atarimania.com
• [AO] - Sourced from AtariOnline.pl
• [CC] - Sourced from CharlieChaplin (Games 20)
• [RRA] - Sourced from AtariAge member rra (Anschuetz-Weisgerber-Anschuetz Games)
• [SB] - Sourced from SoulBuster, provided to A8SP
• [MRGH] - Mr Robots Game Hacks Collection
• [ABBUC] - Sourced from ABBUC
• [A8MAG] - Sourced from Atari 8-bit Magazine
• [U] - Uknown Origin
• [K XXXX] - K-File extraction
• [B2B XXXX] BAS2Boot Extraction
• [XEX XXXX] XEX Extraction [mostly BASIC programs]
  [X XXXX] - Sourced from an ATX, XFD or other ATR variant.
• [B XXXX] - Changed to boot program, or changed method of booting
• [O XXXX] - Changed AUTORUN.SYS, or other change, to remove "OS-B/OS-A/BASIC Rev A/BASIC Rev B" requirement(s)
• [CA XXXX] Sourced from a COM (or XEX, or EXE] to make an AUTORUN.SYS for an ATR
• [C3 XXXX] Sourced from a COM (or XEX, or EXE] to make a 3 sector boot ATR.  This is done when it does not load under CA above
• [cr CM XXXX] - Cracked by me and Chipmunk
• [cr CM1.61] - Cracked by me and Diaperboy's Chipmunk (Games)(Chipmunk 1.61D.025)
• [cr CSS] - Cracked by CSS, sourced from A8SP
• [cr DM5] - Cracked by me and Duplicator Module 5.0, sourced from A8SP
• [cr BM3] - Cracked by me and Backup Master 3.0, sourced from A8SP
• [X CSS] - Fixed by CSS
• [T XXXX] - Sourced from a tape, menu may have been made by me or modified to load and save to disk.
• [F XXXX] - I fixed the ATR to a full single density ATR, whether it had more or less than 720 sectors, or other alteration of the ATR
• [R XXXX] - Removed Crack Screen/Notation

 

I have finished programs that begin with numbers through the letter 'S'. When I finish another letter, I will post another file.

This zip file mirrors my TNFS server, hopefully these are useful for others.

All ATR Thread v.19.zip

Full Directory Listing v.19.txt

Edited March 10 by SoulBuster
Update the [X XXXX] to include other ATR Variants

[Ray Gillman]

I love the A8 menu interface - I love the idea of having a database (MS Access MDB in the case of A8) to store which emulator to use and which Atari OS - not using compilation disks is a good idea for how to avoid junk hacker exploit trainer type files.  I think it could should be expanded to include utility, operating system and educational programming type disks - not just games. I see some overlap between these two ideas A8 menu and your idea

[Ray Gillman]

The ALL ATR zip thread appears incomplete or corrupted many categories have just A or A H S and each letter has more or less nothing except the A folder which has dozens of disks starting with A?  At first I expected A to have A-G and H to have H-R and S-Z files but then if you look in each folder there is nothing in there

Edited August 26, 2023 by Ray Gillman
expanded idea

[+SoulBuster]

10 minutes ago, Ray Gillman said:

I love the A8 menu interface - I love the idea of having a database (MS Access MDB in the case of A8) to store which emulator to use and which Atari OS - not using compilation disks is a good idea for how to avoid junk hacker exploit trainer type files.  I think it could should be expanded to include utility, operating system and educational programming type disks - not just games. I see some overlap between these two ideas A8 menu and your idea

Take a look at the folder structure, there are more than just games.

5 minutes ago, Ray Gillman said:

The ALL ATR zip thread appears incomplete or corrupted many categories have just A or A H S and each letter has more or less nothing except the A folder which has dozens of disks starting with A?  At first I expected A to have A-G and H to have H-R and S-Z files but then if you look in each folder there is nothing in there

I just re-downloaded it and it looks ok to me. Anyone else?

[_The Doctor__]

Regular old windows uncompressed it and shows something a bit strange, perhaps a different zip utility might fair better.

What zip utility are you using? This sort of thing can happen when certain zip programs are used.

[+SoulBuster]

2 minutes ago, _The Doctor__ said:

Regular old windows uncompressed it and shows something a bit strange, perhaps a different zip utility might fair better.

What zip utility are you using? This sort of thing can happen when certain zip programs are used.

Using Windows 11

 

I will rezip and repost. Let me know if it works.

[+SoulBuster]

Go to to post ONE and try the rezipped one.

[_The Doctor__]

Not using Windows 11 and it's still not right, I'll try some other zip utils when I get home.

[+SoulBuster]

Sounds good.  Let me know.

[Houdini]

Works fine for me using Winrar. (I thought everyone uses that? Or maybe that just shows my age...)

 

[Ray Gillman]

This appears to be another good source here I found for filling in missing gaps in an "A8 preservation collection" - most are ATR format when you drill down to "Show All" files 
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_atari

 

[Ray Gillman]

Tried Winrar, 7Zip and Peazip and they all look like this - Like only 0-9 and A's under applications.  Are you running an antivirus?  Mangled files managing systems can sometimes indicate compromised by virus.

 

[_The Doctor__]

Ray that is exactly what I am seeing, and in the other folders outside of not just this one you go into a folder 2 layer deep and it is empty.

[+gnusto]

6 hours ago, SoulBuster said:

This zip file mirrors my TNFS server, hopefully these are useful for others.

 

All ATR Thread.zip 28.3 MB · 14 downloads

 

Rezipped:

atr.zip 28.3 MB · 12 downloads

 

These two zips are the same; they have the same SHA-512 hash.

Just offhand I observed that tnfsroot\Applications\A has some games in it (Axis Assassin, Aztec, Aztec Challenge). Probably flagged incorrectly in your DB I suspect, and then you copy into dirs based on DB info.

 

I feel it's important to note that TOSEC, while a really great naming convention that helped out collecting enormously, is a pretty iffy source of A8 material. I stopped using it some time ago as I was able to identify titles that were poorly cracked, missing content, etc. I realize it's your third string, just giving you the heads up in case you weren't aware.

6 hours ago, SoulBuster said:

Anything can be modified to make the booting easier, this is one of the main goals.

 

I'm curious if this is a goal why the Homesoft collection isn't in your list of sources (or at least, converting the XEXs from Homesoft to ATR). He goes through a lot of effort to make those cracks run on any OS, he loads routines used from BASIC into the executable so you don't need the cartridge inserted, merges in TurboBasic etc. In terms of "click and it run it" it's a pretty spotless collection. It's not as squeaky authentic clean as @DjayBees cracks with nothing touched except protection removed, but it is super convenient.

 

Anyway, I think this idea is so great I am doing a variant of it myself =). My version is aimed at emulation though, and has different goals - I'm trying to collect pretty much everything that is game flavored (I'll do Demos afterwards). I wrote some conversion scripts for Farb and crew to use with the a8pres software, which automatically figures out load lines in Altirra and what disk order, OS version, cartridge config and all that and build a Launchbox XML for the whole thing. Works pretty well so now I'm combining in all of Homesoft, all of Fandals stuff, and everything outside of all three that would otherwise be missing. There's duplication but the storage for XEX is so tiny it doesn't much matter, and oddly enough Homesoft and Fandahl collections have very few files that are actually the same. I realize it's a bit redundant to other collections (shout out to @Mclaneinc and others for best of collection) but this is more of everything I can find, and then I'll create playlists for best of and other interest sets. Launchbox can be operated for free and even in that form provides some interesting capabilities as a modern front end.

So in summary, I realize this is a lot of work because I've been doing some of it myself, and thanks for tackling it Soulbuster. When I'm on real hardware I'll be using yours for sure!

[TGB1718]

6 hours ago, Houdini said:

Works fine for me using Winrar. (I thought everyone uses that? Or maybe that just shows my age...)

Same here, works fine with WinRAR, extracted one game to try (Archon) and it ran perfectly

[Jfcatari]

3 hours ago, TGB1718 said:

Same here, works fine with WinRAR, extracted one game to try (Archon) and it ran perfectly

No problems here with the files either. 

Thanks

[bfollowell]

10 hours ago, Houdini said:

Works fine for me using Winrar. (I thought everyone uses that? Or maybe that just shows my age...)

 

I think it probably does. I used to love Winrar and hate  changing but I've been using 7-zip for ages. Best around IMHO.

 

[+SoulBuster]

6 hours ago, gnusto said:

 

These two zips are the same; they have the same SHA-512 hash.

Just offhand I observed that tnfsroot\Applications\A has some games in it (Axis Assassin, Aztec, Aztec Challenge). Probably flagged incorrectly in your DB I suspect, and then you copy into dirs based on DB info.

 

I feel it's important to note that TOSEC, while a really great naming convention that helped out collecting enormously, is a pretty iffy source of A8 material. I stopped using it some time ago as I was able to identify titles that were poorly cracked, missing content, etc. I realize it's your third string, just giving you the heads up in case you weren't aware.

 

I'm curious if this is a goal why the Homesoft collection isn't in your list of sources (or at least, converting the XEXs from Homesoft to ATR). He goes through a lot of effort to make those cracks run on any OS, he loads routines used from BASIC into the executable so you don't need the cartridge inserted, merges in TurboBasic etc. In terms of "click and it run it" it's a pretty spotless collection. It's not as squeaky authentic clean as @DjayBees cracks with nothing touched except protection removed, but it is super convenient.

 

Anyway, I think this idea is so great I am doing a variant of it myself =). My version is aimed at emulation though, and has different goals - I'm trying to collect pretty much everything that is game flavored (I'll do Demos afterwards). I wrote some conversion scripts for Farb and crew to use with the a8pres software, which automatically figures out load lines in Altirra and what disk order, OS version, cartridge config and all that and build a Launchbox XML for the whole thing. Works pretty well so now I'm combining in all of Homesoft, all of Fandals stuff, and everything outside of all three that would otherwise be missing. There's duplication but the storage for XEX is so tiny it doesn't much matter, and oddly enough Homesoft and Fandahl collections have very few files that are actually the same. I realize it's a bit redundant to other collections (shout out to @Mclaneinc and others for best of collection) but this is more of everything I can find, and then I'll create playlists for best of and other interest sets. Launchbox can be operated for free and even in that form provides some interesting capabilities as a modern front end.

So in summary, I realize this is a lot of work because I've been doing some of it myself, and thanks for tackling it Soulbuster. When I'm on real hardware I'll be using yours for sure!

files in the wrong directory; that can happen. point them out and I will fix it for the next file upload.  Thanks and fixed.

 

Real Hardware;  That is one of the main purposes of this project.  I want everything to be easily copyable onto real disks without any special hardware, should the need arise.  Every device can handle ATRs, but that is not the case with other formats.  So I wanted to eliminate .car, .bin, .cas, .atx if at all possible. I know that it is not possible, so there will still be some in the collection.

[ggn]

A couple of weeks ago I had a similarly scoped project but at a much smaller scale: make my own curated list of Atari 800 games and stick it on my TNFS server. For this purpose I mostly used the two massive archives at http://www.atarionline.pl/ (One using TOSEC naming concention and one using "Kaz" convention) as well as atarimania.

 

Just thought it'd be worth mentioning these archives as I didn't see them mentioned, and they were really useful (plus, they might save some @SoulBuster some time).

Edited August 26, 2023 by ggn

[pcrow]

Cool project.

 

I was thinking it would be cool to have a database of all Atari software by release date, but we're lucky to get the year, let alone actual date, for most programs.  That would require going through magazine ads to find the first effort to sell each program.

 

For me, I'm happy with any format.  I mostly use the atari800 emulator, and I wrote a wrapper that identifies the file type and does a database lookup to figure out what settings to use.  I mostly use the year of release, and if it's 1984 or later, run on 130XE, otherwise on Atari 800.  I only have to override that on a very few programs.  I also note the country of release, and set PAL if appropriate (default NTSC).  I should probably make a separate post about my wrapper, as it does other things like saving modifications to disk images separately from the original and adding a scratch disk, as well as allowing tar or zip files for multi-disk games.

 

On a related note: I'm really annoyed by multi-disk games that don't let you use multiple disk drives.

[+SoulBuster]

I looked at Homesoft and Fandel conversions.  I would use them, but they have "Cracked by" screens.  These are not "clean" copies in my opinion. I do not want the booting to stop at a "Cracked By" screen. I want them to just load the program.

[+gnusto]

It may be a while since you've used Homesoft, you might want to take a look. He will pretty much always have two versions when there is an inserted title screen (and usually his aren't really "cracked by", they are rather an art intro the game didn't have originally). So you have the option to avoid anything extra to the original experience.

 

The only reason I bring up Homesoft repeatedly is his dedication to getting convenience right for the user - the whole pulling routines from BASIC or TurboBasic and putting them into the XEX, or the work he does to fix loading time, it's really quite substantial. I admire his effort in the work.

On the other hand I get your direction with always using ATRs. Any hardware, loading device (multi-cart etc) or emulator understands in ATR. So for most of Homesoft you would do an XEX to ATR conversion, but that's trivial.

[+gnusto]

2 hours ago, pcrow said:

I also note the country of release, and set PAL if appropriate (default NTSC).

This is interesting because I've done the same concept (a wrapper with a DB backend that notes origin) but I defaulted to PAL. I wasn't fully scientific about it but a quick survey of all available titles led me to the conclusion there was more PAL stuff - because of the proliferation of those later titles from Czech/Poland etc.

My thing is I'm a stickler for wanting the title in the way it was originally presented. It should be PAL if it was PAL developed, NTSC if it was not, because otherwise (for almost all titles; there are exceptions) colors are wrong, music the wrong cadence, etc in both directions.

 

And artifacting. I know some people hate it but if it was part of the title, it needs to be on damnit. I feel bad for the folks from EU who never knew originally what Pinball Construction Set actually LOOKED like. 😃

[+SoulBuster]

Thought I would share what my desktop looks like when working on these (dual screens):

 

 

[Mclaneinc]

On 8/26/2023 at 7:23 AM, gnusto said:

(shout out to @Mclaneinc and others for best of collection)

Thank you, but it really should be Starwindz who gets the mention, it was his project, I just tweaked some stuff, a mention should go to Phaeron who very kindly added a set of command line options for me that made it more friendly to the gamepack.

 

Credit, where credits due..

 

Paul..