Atari Falcon Game Loading Help Please

[StarshipUK]

I recently bought an Atari Falcon 030 with CF HDD. I have never owned one before but they seem quite easy to use.

 

I have found a load of games at: http://atari.8bitchip.info/fromhd.php and have tried loading them on, but some of them which should be working are not.

 

For example: Axels Magic Hammer http://atari.8bitchip.info/ASTGA/A/axelmh.php The Chart shows this will work with a Falcon and I have downloaded the Hard Disk version. I have copied the game onto a floppy disk and then onto the Falcons CF HDD on Partition D. I am clicking on START.TOS to load the game. I get a cursor appear in the top left hand corner of the screen for a few seconds and then just a blank white screen and nothing else. The only way to get back to the desktop is to switch the machine off and back on. Quite a few games I have tried are doing this.

 

Another game called Atomix is showing a message:

Too much low RAM occupied.

Read usage how to fix it.

 

I am using a VGA adaptor but have also tried using a SCART cable and the same thing is happening.

 

If anyone could please help out or offer any adise I would be very grateful.

[ParanoidLittleMan]

If it says that too much RAM is occupied, then surely problem is not with VGA or RGB mode.

Try with games of later release - those with HAGA and green background on pages with pics. and DL link. There is over 250 of such.

And yes, you should read usage - it is made to help, and you can set less RAM occupied by hard disk driver.

[StarshipUK]

Could you give an example of a game to try please? As most of them say they should work with Falcon, I was guessing they would all work.

 

Where is Usage to read it? Is it a file on the Falcon? The Falcon has 14MB RAM so should have enought to run all games.

 

Or perhaps another guide somewhere which explains how to fix the problem?

[ParanoidLittleMan]

Just go from top of the table (what is sorted from latest date to earlier ones): Spaceball, Beam, Ruff and Ready ...

They should work on your config too - if not, you need to give more infos - used Hard disk driver and its settings, installed SW ...

Where is + for Falcon, it works on Falcon, but nobody said that will work on any Falcon with any SW installed.

Where is usage ? You really need that info ? Link to it is some 10cm from top of page.

Please don't ask obvious things. And there is something called e-mail ..

[StarshipUK]

Thanks for the help but sorry for being a newbie, not knowing what I am doing and obviously being a complete cunt asking for some help on here!

 

FYI no files I found on the website explain how to free up low memory errors or none I could find. E-Mail who? What the fuck is this forum for, if its not for asking for some help when one has a problem?

[+CyranoJ]

http://dbug.kicks-ass.net/patch.php

 

System friendly, no wierdo-you-must-replace-your-HD-driver required patches here...

 

Guaranteed 100% yodatalk free.

[ParanoidLittleMan]

Thanks for the help but sorry for being a newbie, not knowing what I am doing and obviously being a complete cunt asking for some help on here!

FYI no files I found on the website explain how to free up low memory errors or none I could find. E-Mail who? What the fuck is this forum for, if its not for asking for some help when one has a problem?

 

On start page http://atari.8bitchip.info/fromhd.php

all is well visible and easy to find . There is e-mail contact at Homepage too .

 

 

Setting Hddriver means not replacing it. Wierdo ? Here we say it Weirdo , Mr. english professor

Edited November 16, 2013 by ParanoidLittleMan

[StarshipUK]

That page menions nothing about Low Ram or how to fix it - just how to parttion hard drives which is not the issue here as they are already partitioned.

 

I am not being stupid - go to that page and search "LOW". the term does not come up once - nothing, completely sod all. I am not taking the piss or being think or stupid but there is sweet fuck all on that page about LOW RAM errors.

[StarshipUK]

The Hard Drive driver being used is ICD Pro 6.5.5 but there does not appear to be any tools to adjust RAM usage on the machine for this driver.

[StarshipUK]

So I found an ICD Driver disk with HDUTIL.PRG on it which I ran - Went into Config and displayed a screen of info which means bugger all to me. RAM used was showing as 385KB so I changed Number of TOS Data buffers from 10 to 5 and Number of TOS FAT buffers from 10 to 5 which reduced RAM used to 225KB. Saved this and Exited.

 

Sensible Soccer which was showing the LOW RAM error now loads.

 

So then after a few reboots the LOW RAM Occupied started showing again when trying to load Sensible Soccer. Checking the Hard Drive ICD settings those have not changed, so I am not sure why this is happening.

 

So is the only solution then to change the Hard Drive driver to a different one? If so will I need to reinstall the Atari OS and is there anywhere I can find a copy of that or a guide on how to reinstall it?

[+CyranoJ]

No, you can use the patches on the link above. The ones by D-Bug and Klaz work without installing dodgy drivers.

 

 

So is the only solution then to change the Hard Drive driver to a different one? If so will I need to reinstall the Atari OS and is there anywhere I can find a copy of that or a guide on how to reinstall it?

[Charlie_]

Thanks for the help but sorry for being a newbie, not knowing what I am doing and obviously being a complete cunt asking for some help on here!

 

FYI no files I found on the website explain how to free up low memory errors or none I could find. E-Mail who? What the fuck is this forum for, if its not for asking for some help when one has a problem?

There was nothing wrong with your post, or asking for help.

 

I haven't played around with ICD drivers in along time. Basically you have to use the config program and set all the buffers and extra folders to as little as possible.

[ParanoidLittleMan]

Now, this becomes really interesting ...

StarshipUK, are you serious ? Has your girlfriend recently left you, or what is the problem there ?

"For correct work we need that RAM is clean from unnecessary things. In other words, hard disk adaptations and Gamex require clean boot. No any Desktop ACCessory, resident programs. Especially not other OS, shell. Only hard disk driver - but with limited cache. RAM alloc. under 65KB if only 1MB RAM .Gamex util PRG will show low RAM occupation" - this is quote from usage page. Funny, I see there 'low RAM' . And your problem is certainly not too much cache by ICD Pro. Sensible Soccer can work with more low RAM occupied than 1MB . DId you run it ? Did you post here what it shows ? I don't see that, only complaining and coursing.

So, maybe you will understand this if I use your style: clean up your C partition from fucking RAM eating stuff. Make that fucking clean boot by holding down fucking Ctrl. key. Pardon left Control key.

 

Yeah, there is nothing wrong with asking for help. But there is saying: 'help yourself, and God will help you' - do I really need to explain (draw arrows) where is e-mail link on my pages ?

Official Ninja: I guess that you are aware of saying above, and that's why you did not reply to me when I asked little help in testing on NTSC ST

 

P.S. You can not reinstall TOS - it is in ROM .Remove, or better deactivate resident SW from C AUTO folder and possible ACCessories. How to do it ? Someone will help you for sure, I'm too busy with patching next game ...

Edited November 17, 2013 by ParanoidLittleMan

[+CyranoJ]

Starship, feel free to pop by the dbug forums and we'll get you running without any drama or soldering or re-flashing your TOS or installing drive destroying drivers. You'll be fine on ICD, our patches were tested against that driver.

[ParanoidLittleMan]

Nice pile of crap, as is usual by C.J.

Should we take seriously someone talking about soldering, TOS flashing, destructive driver ? All what I will say is that people still buying my driver and nobody mentioned any damage.

Some more experienced people may use free versions too.

There is everything important explained on usage page and main DL page. HAGA adaptations are compatible with ICD drivers, or any decent driver. But there are limits about low RAM usage. If someone has 1.8 MB RAM allocated with diverse drivers, ACCessories, then it slowdowns overall work, hard disk access during playing games, etc. Instead supporting it I did other, more useful things. Certainly do not need all those drivers and similar at once. In case of Falcon there are some RAM usage schemas because of PMMU usage.

Instead drama, people can ask me to update older ones to HAGA, what I did in several cases, and at moment I'm about to do next one, on request. Certainly more useful and more fun than wasting time here with slanders.

[+CyranoJ]

I've offered to help the guy, you insulted him. Let him decide.

[GadgetUK]

Personally I've never had a problem with PP's driver. It's likely ICD Pro causing some of your memory issues. Whilst the dbug games can be a little more forgiving they haven't done every game. For the ST I use PP's driver (in my sig), and get the best of both worlds from PP's amazing number of patched games, and the amazing number of dbug patched games - it all works fine for me. I am not sure if the PP driver works on Falcon - ask before you buy.

Edited November 22, 2013 by GadgetUK

[+CyranoJ]

You'll never have a problem, until you have a problem. Then you won't have any problems anymore because you won't have a partition.

 

Also, if you have any issues with any of our patches, we can't follow them up for you. We have absolutely no support for his driver.

 

Personally, I'd rather boot a game off floppy than run his code.

 

Either way, good luck

 

Edited November 22, 2013 by CyranoJ

[+orpheuswaking]

Holy crap, did I walk into the Jaguar forum by accident?

[Christos]

Holy crap, did I walk into the Jaguar forum by accident?

 

No, no, no, it's easy to spot actually. Paranoidlittleman, releases stuff, in much less than 7 years I might add, and they don't cost $80 +S&H.

[ParanoidLittleMan]

The problems of StarshipUK were caused because he had installed Multitos for Falcon. I never tried it btw. But it certainly eats lot of RAM - it was main reason to get 'too much low RAM occupied' messages even with HAGA, which is pretty tolerant with RAM usage.

Some notes for users: read what stays on my site - this is to make usage easier. You may read 'comments' of C.J. and his followers too, of course. I do it too sometimes, mostly if want to laugh. Because he/they write completely nonsenses, usually not reading about what topic is really - like here. Here I explained that using my hard disk driver is not a must, but C.J. just continues to spit on my SW. Well, I'm actually glad when people like him don't use results of my hard work - made for those with little brain and sense for reality - what means understanding that this is not about some perfection, but doing realistic solutions, which may be best for most of regular users.

Of course, now, when Ataris are pretty old, with average age of some 25 years there are many failures of machines. So, why not to blame someone's SW that it causing failures ?

Even if it is well known that SW can not do that.

 

Little overview of my hard disk adapting of games during last 7 years: in begin I released some of my old stuff, done about 1990. Mostly singleparted, or using RAMdisk. There was need to make system which can load from hard disk during gameplay - mostly interesting for multifloppy games. And there were many TOS version compatibility problems, so I decided to use little modded TOS 1.04 core for both purposes. It worked in high RAM, and was used for hard disk access during game, without RAM swaps. + for games using TOS calls. Solved low RAM conflict very well. Hard disk access was simple and very fast. But whole concept had one weak part: need to reinstall hard disk driver for TOS 1.04 running in high RAM. I made support for my driver, AHDI and Hddriver only, because they are most used, at least among gamers. Another problem was that it could not work with 1GB Falcon partitions,because TOS 1.04 supports max 512MB ones.

So, after some time I decided to make new, more compatible system, called HAGA. (Jan 2012). It can work with any hard disk driver, 1GB Falcon partitions and is more flexible with RAM usage. Since I got one nice TT for testing purposes, I added TT support too, including 24-bit bus mode fix,etc.

However, the concept used in HAGA - what is basically same as WHDLoad's RAM swap concept requires usage of RAMdisk, cache to make disk access faster, what is especially important in case of loading lot of short files (chunks) . Harder is with games using TOS calls. So, gamestate saves for them were solved later. In last days I did code for multiple pexec calls too (with older system it worked fine without special code), so it is now pretty much ready for all game types. Except rare games using GEM (AES) - but they are pretty much hard disk compatible already (always go via GEMDOS), and have save options, work on TT, Falcon too, so can run them without HAGA fine. Usually need only to fix filenames so, that can work from any DIR. Ah, and PLM, don't forget to say that work with any decent hard disk driver

[GadgetUK]

You'll never have a problem, until you have a problem. Then you won't have any problems anymore because you won't have a partition.

 

Also, if you have any issues with any of our patches, we can't follow them up for you. We have absolutely no support for his driver.

 

Personally, I'd rather boot a game off floppy than run his code.

 

Either way, good luck

 

43233521.jpg

 

I don't quite understand why this flame war has started here. Both dbug and PP have contributed a tonne and I mean an absolute tonne to the ST scene. There's room for both, and in fact stuff that PP has done dbug havent and vice versa. When dbug write their own quality low cost HDD driver then they can then start making claims that theirs is better, but I dont see any HDD drivers on the dbug site. I've used the PP driver for quite a while now and not had a single problem. Regards loosing partitions etc, ever heard of backups? I use UltraSatan and so its easy to just dump the whole drive to a single image on the PC. If anything ever happened to the partition due to software, crashes - yes a crash of any kind in any game could mean that something occurs to the HDD that shouldnt no matter what HDD driver you are using, or even the UltraSatan itself or physical HDD if thats what someone uses - all possibilities to cause corruption. Hell, even a dodgy PSU can cause it.

 

So if there's a technical problem with the driver, please feel free to help the rest of the community by posting what you believe is wrong with the code, or at least the symptom, and then maybe we can all get together and help make the community better. Bitching about stupid stuff like this doesnt help anyone, its just trolling imo.

[+CyranoJ]

[deleted]

 

You know what? forget it.

Edited November 23, 2013 by CyranoJ

[StarshipUK]

Sorry if I started something here - I appreciate anyone who offers free help and advice on stuff I know nothing about and sometimes it scares me knowing that I do not know about things and entering a world of experts who know far more than I do and do not tolerate the ignorance of a newbie. Perhaps I should have provided more info to start with but to begin with I did not have a clue where to start and some of what I did and found out was pretty much guesswork.

 

So I have now gone to http://dbug.kicks-ass.net/patch.php

 

and am seeing this message: Oooops, we have a small technical problem! When trying to connect to the database, MySQL barfed and produced the following error (which we proudly present to you, our esteemed visitor): Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2)We will try to fix it ASAP!

 

So have these games been deleted because of what I have said here? If they have I expect I will be hated more than I already am. I really don't deserve to live.

 

Such a shame as I expect a lot of time and effort has been spent on these to make them work and for free with no repayment.

[ParanoidLittleMan]

StarshipUK, you did not start anything bad here. It is clear that on their site there are some troubles with database - what is not so rare case by Internet hosts. It will be back at time.