Mercenary / FuijiNet issue

[Sirius7]

I am trying to play Mercenary and the game loads fine, but when I try to save my game it makes the sound like it is saving to a cassette tape rather than a disk.  Eventually it does seem to successfully save, but when I try to load a save game it doesn't seem to work at all.  Is anyone else having this problem?  

[Beeblebrox]

2 hours ago, Sirius7 said:

I am trying to play Mercenary and the game loads fine, but when I try to save my game it makes the sound like it is saving to a cassette tape rather than a disk.  Eventually it does seem to successfully save, but when I try to load a save game it doesn't seem to work at all.  Is anyone else having this problem?  

not an expert on Fujinet but probably it's defaulting to saving to emulated cassette rather than disk. I'd imagine it's a Fujinet config setting tweak?

[Peri Noid]

It's rather a Mercenary setting - save to a tape by default.

[Peri Noid]

3 hours ago, Sirius7 said:

I am trying to play Mercenary and the game loads fine, but when I try to save my game it makes the sound like it is saving to a cassette tape rather than a disk.  Eventually it does seem to successfully save, but when I try to load a save game it doesn't seem to work at all.  Is anyone else having this problem?  

Did you properly prepare your savegame disk? (https://www.gamingalexandria.com/highquality/atari8bit/Mercenary/Mercenary - Manual.pdf)

I assume, you must mount it at the second slot. After the game is loaded, before you want to save current state, you should press the disk swap button on your FN so that the savegame disk lands in the first slot, and only then save (Ctrl+S and a slot number).

[Sirius7]

On 9/25/2023 at 3:39 AM, Peri Noid said:

Did you properly prepare your savegame disk? (https://www.gamingalexandria.com/highquality/atari8bit/Mercenary/Mercenary - Manual.pdf)

I assume, you must mount it at the second slot. After the game is loaded, before you want to save current state, you should press the disk swap button on your FN so that the savegame disk lands in the first slot, and only then save (Ctrl+S and a slot number).

Yep.  That is exactly what I did.  Used Fujinet to make a new ATR, then formatted it with DOS.  When I try to save & load a game with Mercenary it sounds like it is treating it like a cassette drive.  Is this a problem unique to Mercenary?  Has anyone here ever played it with a save disk and had this problem?

[Peri Noid]

I tried to save a game state but failed. Out of 4 different ATR images, two of them printed only something like "Do you want to save?" while the other two showed slot selection message. In all cases, in the next step the computer rebooted. It was the same for FujiNet and SIO2SD, so I think, I was doing something incorrectly. Or was it maybe my Atari 800 with Incognito installed? Maybe.

[Wrathchild]

does the process work fine under plain 800XL emulation under Altirra? if not your chasing ghosts

[Sirius7]

10 hours ago, Wrathchild said:

does the process work fine under plain 800XL emulation under Altirra? if not your chasing ghosts

So I just tried it with Atar800Win and it's doing the same thing.  So the next question is, why, and is there any way to make it work?

[Peri Noid]

What if you set the machine to an original 400/800 (with 48K of RAM)? Maybe it's the matter of OS version?

[Wrathchild]

This ATX crack just worked for me under emulation, was able to load and save to a blank disk

Mercenary - Escape from Targ (1985)(Datasoft)(US).atr

[Sirius7]

6 hours ago, Wrathchild said:

This ATX crack just worked for me under emulation, was able to load and save to a blank disk

Mercenary - Escape from Targ (1985)(Datasoft)(US).atr 90.02 kB · 2 downloads

Thank you!  You just made my day!  I must have only had cassette versions.  This version works perfectly.