Finally gave my 8-bit some real capacity

[Gunstar]

quote:

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Originally posted by Albert:

That's awesome, I really need to get an SIO2PC and 1050-2-PC cables. Where did you get yours, or did you build them yourself?

 

I'd love to play Alternate Reality using the setup you described, especially since the virtual disks and additional RAM should speed it up considerably. There are tons of other disk-based games I'd like to play on a real Atari 8-bit and while I still own many of them, it'd be great to just load 'em from a PC.

 

..Al

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Just go to the "I got my sio2pc and a lot more" message on this board, it has the e-mail address of the person I got my setup from, and more...I payed just over 50 bucks for everything, including a brand spanking new 1050 drive that the cables are permanently connected too(so as not to take up an SIO daisy-chain spot) for that price! a 1050 (refurbished) alone cost close to $100 at the online retailers!

[Gunstar]

As many of you know, I've been talking about my SIO2PC/10502PC&1050 drive combo lately, especially with using the 1502PC side to get back real atari floppies. Well, I finally got around to hooking my 8-bit up to the PC with the SIO2PC side of the cable. It's great having a 16meg virtual disk on my 8-bit, actually up to 8 of them if you want, but one is plenty of room for now. With the A.P.E program running on the pc and a disk image mounted on the program, you just turn on your 8-bit like loading from the real drive one (holding option in most cases). Instantly a sparta dos directory comes up with the contents of the 16meg drive. You just select the letter or number of the file you want and "Bob's your Uncle." I do have my system set up with a mix of real and virtual drives (by the way, you can access files on any PC medium with the virtua drive's pc-mirror function, including 8-bit files on cdr off of the PC's cd player), When I'm not playing Alternate reality or a similiar, multi disk game, I have a virtual drive set as D1:, two real drives set as D2:&D3: and the rest, if any, are virtual drives through D8:. But if I am play AR the Dungeon, I switch my D2: physical drive to D1:, and my virtual drive to D2:. This way I can boot up the game and load&save character disks on a real drive, but all the other disks are fast-loading .atr images on the PC's hard drive. The only time I swap is to load and save my character. If you don't know, AR the city is able to accept 48k and 64k memory configurations and up to 2 drives. AR the Dungeon accepts memory configurations from 48k-128k+ and up to 4 drives. The programs check this and adjust accordingly on the fly, all you have to have is the memory and drives connected. Disk access and disk swapping are greatly reduced the more you have of both memory or drives. With the A.P.E program it is possible to run the whole AR program from virtual drives, but you'll still have to point and click on the PC to "swap" disk images since both AR programs have more disks than drives supported, plus the character disks. That's why I use drives 1&3 physical drives, and just swap a couple real disk and my PC can just sit and watch (literally, it keeps track of even the Atari's real drives and anything else hooked up through the SIO daisy-chaining network). Pretty cool experience to say the least, I've given my 8-bit much of my PC's power, without having to use an emulator and spoiling the experience.

[Albert]

That's awesome, I really need to get an SIO2PC and 1050-2-PC cables. Where did you get yours, or did you build them yourself?

 

I'd love to play Alternate Reality using the setup you described, especially since the virtual disks and additional RAM should speed it up considerably. There are tons of other disk-based games I'd like to play on a real Atari 8-bit and while I still own many of them, it'd be great to just load 'em from a PC.

 

..Al