Atari 130XE disk menu'ing help

[Draugr]

Hi All,

I was wondering if any of you might be able to help me with this one. I have a 130XE and a 1050 drive with US doubler. What I'd like to do is recreate some of the disks I have here that have gone bad over the years. Origianlly, I thought that perhaps my disk drive was bad, so I went and bought this 1050 / US doubler drive, but I get the same problems. Anyhow, I have the APE cable and software. I downloaded some of the classic games off the websites. What I want to do is make my disks self bootable that will bootup with that typical Atari 800 menu listing the games and you hit the number that corresponds to the game you wish to load. Lots of my disks do this. I was a Commodore user back in the 80s and sadly didn't even know of the Atari computers. I got my first taste in 1995 or so when I bought my friends setup for $50.00. Anyhow, I can do this on the C64 but haven't got a clue how to do it on the Atari computer. Can anyone help me? I also have a few questions related to the above question.

 

1) Is there any menu creating software out there to make your own bootable, menu driven disks?

 

2) Is it possible to create these disks as images on a PC via emulation and then just take the whole rom image and copy it to disk via the APE cable?

 

Well, thats all for now. Please let me know if you can help. I'd appreciate it.

 

Sincerely,

[+Sheddy]

Not quite the answers you're looking for, but I thought I'd write something since no one else has replied yet!

 

Home's Site has many "mega image" collections of games already created, which use a menu selection program to access them. You may find the games you want already on some of these

 

Also he might explain how you could use his "DOSMENU" program yourself if you drop him a line - there's a mail link there too.

 

Certainly doing it all manually would be a bit of an effort. Dumping each of the games into a different area of a "mega image" disk in binary load format, then telling the menu loader (somehow) where to find them on the disk.

 

Hope this helps a bit

Sheddy

[+rdemming]

Also Homesoft has a lot of menu disks. He also has a utility called "Atari Boot Manager" under tools to create menu disks.

 

Robert

[smf_4ever]

There is (off the top of my head) about 8 or more menus that are boot up listings... Where ever you are looking for disk images.. they should have some "Utilities" and I think on the APE disk CD Rom.. there is a menu or two on there.. (I haven;t looked in a while.. so dont hold me to it)

[classics]

If your already using APE then just copy all your atari EXE files into a directory, set the pc-mirror to that directory on Drive 1 and boot from the pc-mirror.

 

APE has a built in exe loader that will load pretty much anything since it takes up no memory on the atari (it hides in the 6502 stack).

[+rdemming]

quote:

---

Originally posted by classics:

APE has a built in exe loader that will load pretty much anything since it takes up no memory on the atari (it hides in the 6502 stack).

---

 

If it 'hides' in the stack, why can you set the Ape Loader base address then?

 

Robert

[classics]

In case you want to put it some place else.