Altirra cr*pping out on me

[Guest]

so today I was enjoying a nice nostalgic run thru with Galaxians - all going well...until i decide to try other games

 

first up starbowl football

 

disk activity, blue screen

 

then after 15 seconds...disk stops and

 

 

settings exactly as they were when Galaxians loaded successfully

600/800XL > PAL > 64k 800/1200XL

and disk drives have been anything between IS Plate, stock 1050, happy 1050

all produce the same result.

 

i've even tried different ram settings - same result. changing to to NTSC brings up a self test screen

 

any help appreciated

 

thanks

 

 

Edited May 21, 2018 by Guest

[R0ger]

Try settings reset, and then try again. You most likely just turned something on or off, happens to me all the time.

[flashjazzcat]

Ongoing Altirra thread here:

 

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/273633-altirra-300-released/

[Wrathchild]

The image on AtariMania is a cassette and works fine as does the k-file ATR on AtariOnlinePL

[Mclaneinc]

so today I was enjoying a nice nostalgic run thru with Galaxians - all going well...until i decide to try other games

 

first up starbowl football

 

disk activity, blue screen

Capture1.JPG

 

then after 15 seconds...disk stops and

Capture2.JPG

 

 

settings exactly as they were when Galaxians loaded successfully

600/800XL > PAL > 64k 800/1200XL

and disk drives have been anything between IS Plate, stock 1050, happy 1050

all produce the same result.

 

i've even tried different ram settings - same result. changing to to NTSC brings up a self test screen

 

any help appreciated

 

thanks

 

 

 

You sure you are getting rid of Basic as it boots?

 

The best test is to go to profiles, pick the default ones like XL or 800, make sure there's no other additions like unwanted or possibly conflicting devices and try it from there, if it works there its something that you added later..

 

The trouble with profiles is that its very very easy to add a device that becomes standard to that profile ie VBXE, Ultimate 1MB etc etc just when you play around looking at the devices, if you don't clear them from a default profile then it gets added all the time until you disable it...

 

Its nothing to ask Avery about as he's aware of the issue and its an inherent part of the profile make up at this time, hopefully it will get adjusted in time but its not the most pressing thing.

 

You would be stunned what you enable when messing around getting stuff to work, just start from a factory machine build, add and make that a default profile..I've got loads, NTSC and PAL versions of both XL / XE and 400 / 800, memory different versions, Happy addition versions and VBXE ones..I don't play much with HD's and so don't have a Ultimate 1mb one as yet...

 

Its not likely for obvious reasons to be the drive unless the software had disk protection on (Galaxian..er nope)

 

Normally its machine type then OS firmware or memory, next on the list is Video setting to try, a rare one is write enable and even rarer is boot up memory pattern cfg....Drives themselves are rarely the issue bar the one I mentioned earlier...Edit: one last rarity is a menu that uses BASIC to load (they are out there), they normally give themselves away by making the rasperberry blower sound and then locking up..

 

One thing I've found weird is XL os version two firmware, there's a weird one out there that I sometimes add by mistake which causes problems, Altirra will scan the OS roms for known good ones so there's a safety net there..

Edited May 21, 2018 by Mclaneinc

[Fox-1 / mnx]

Looks like the wrong O.S. is active.

 

The colors... that's just the attrac-mode kicking in.

[phaeron]

Remove all full disk emulations from the Devices list along with any other devices that might have PBI disk support and boot using standard disk emulation.

 

The problem is that the disk image you are using is a short disk (<720 sectors). Currently, using a short disk image will cause the rest of the disk to appear unformatted to the disk drive. Two of the full drive emulations you are using are track buffering drives, which means they will attempt to read all sectors on the track instead of just the requested sector. The pink screen occurs when the loader encounters a disk read error.

[Guest]

the reset option does work..but why does Altirra crap out so easily in the first instance?

[flashjazzcat]

Avery already explained the reason for short ATRs causing read errors with track buffering drives. Remember it's not Altirra 'crapping out', but the emulated machine encountering a problem because of a malformed disk image.

[Fox-1 / mnx]

Load the ATR with Altirra.

 

Save the image from the disk drive menu and you'll end up with a proper sized ATR.

[phaeron]

That won't work since the ATR image is valid, it just has less sectors than a normal disk. It's the same as a partially formatted disk where some tracks are unformatted. Some commercial disks did come that way, though. You would need to create a new 90K disk image and copy the data over to it. The emulator has a built-in feature to do that for DOS disks, but not for custom booter formats.

 

Track buffering drives have trouble with missing sectors because they cheat: they only scan for sectors on track 0 and reuse that pattern on other tracks. This is needed since the FDC is unable to both read sector addresses and sector data in one pass. This means some compatibility issues, however. In general the full disk emulation should be considered an advanced feature, since using it inhibits the emulator from handling some portions of the drive emulation and thus it can't assist as much with issues -- if you stick a disk in the drive that it can't handle, the emulator can't necessarily detect that because it's all hidden by the drive firmware. Some of the drive types are quirky because of the way they were designed and can fail unintuitively, like the XF551 with its density detection problems.

 

In general, problems like this arise from turning on non-default features in the emulator and forgetting about them. That's why I'm slowly adding features like the missing firmware warnings and compatibility list, to indicate when the setup has problems. Nevertheless, if the emulator is set up to emulate a frankenmachine, it will dutifully do so. You just can't see the pile of wires and mods coming out the back of the machine like you would with a physical computer.

[Fox-1 / mnx]

Of course. Now I see. Mixed it up with the way I save .DCM's as .ATR's.

 

For K-Boot ATR's I use the, now 20 year old, AtrUtil 95 from Ken Siders. Despite being a 32bit Win95 tool it still does the job, even on Win10 64bit.