Scott3555

Hey Farb, Thanks for the very informative reply!!! Have you looked on the CBMSTUFF.COM site lately under the a8 forums? There is a post dated September 3, 2015 that says the new software update does it all. Any comments? I noticed that there was a user named Farb on that site in the a8 forum and I assume that you and he are the same person. Therefore from what I read there, I know that at one time you were using a SuperCard Pro trying to work with the ATX files. Do you still have it? Still use it? Do you think I took the wrong street ordering up a couple of Happy clone boards? I ordered them primarily to get my new 1050 drives to working with double density disk. Back in the 80's with disk protection that was the best way to go.

Anything with "ArtSoft" on it came through Waterloo, Iowa. ArtSoft had the habit of stealing credit for hacks and I know that he really did some of what he took credit for. However, our little group of about 6 pirates had an old man with connections in Australia, New Zealand, UK, and Sweden. I contributed to one of the hacks but, I relied on two Happy drives and a Duplicator drive. Then came the breaker program from the maker of the Duplicator and it removed the protection from almost everything which took the fun out of making copies. I read the entire thread and I can relate that the real game wasn't playing the software as much as it was the Protectors VS the Pirates. I always bet on the Pirates to crack/hack/copy it within two weeks of release.

To Supergun, I just bought a MyIDE II from Atarimania.com. Here is how I worked it. Atarimania also has a video. *** hardware note: The MyIDE II is a Atari game cartridge. There is a slot in the top for a SD card. Bought the MyIDE II and a SD card at the same time from Atarimania. Someone at Atarimania got the card setup to play on the Atari 800XL before they mailed it to me. It came with a couple of games already installed. I have a Windows 7 PC with a SD card reader/writer. I downloaded games from the web onto my hard drive and unzipped them into a directory called, "Atari Rom". (those files are so small I don't know why anyone went to the trouble to zip them) On the SD card, I used windows to make a subdirectory called 'My Favorites" and copied my favorite games into that subdirectory. I put the MyIDE II cartridge into the 800XL computer and put the SD card into the MyIDE II cartridge then turn on the 800XL. It takes the 800XL about two seconds to boot to the first menu. I select the FAT32 Loader with the joystick and press the fire button. The 800XL reads the directory and displays it on the TV. It shows the subdirectories on the disk. I choose 'My Favorites' with the joystick. The games in 'My Favorites' are listed in alphabetical order. Using the joystick I select which one to play. When I am finished playing I simply turn off the 800XL. There you go. No wires/cables connecting the two computers just as you requested. A cartridge with subdirectories to make searching easier. Everything is kept in alphabetical order to make things as quick and simple as possible. MyIDE II runs both cartridege images and disk images. I am new at this and so far I have only had about half the stuff load and run on the Atari. There seems to be some really good experts on these forums that really know hardware. I've been communicating with them and reading their postings to learn more stuff. *** Note that there is a problem in the FAT 32 loader where as some games needs a patch to run. There is a forum thread on Atariage that address this problem and a patch file with instructions are included in the thread.

A ATX file is an image of the a disk and any copy protection on the original disk is included in the ATX file. So can a ATX be run from the image file or does it have to be copied to a floppy disk? I know enough about copy protection schemes and the Atari 1050 drive to know that there were many copy protection schemes that cannot be copied by the standard 1050, therefore we enhansed our drives with the Happy card. Is it safe to assume that to write these disk image back to a floppy it requires a Happy 1050 drive to write them? Nobody has mentioned anything about what software to use. Does it come with the SIO2PC cable? As I learn this stuff, I'm going to update the original postings so that others that follow will only have to read the first posting to get the meat that this forum branch offers.

I've downloaded about a hundred ATR files and put them on a MyIDE II SD card. Only about a third will run when I attempt to load them. Am I using the wrong hardware? Do they not run because of copy protection? Do they need to be put back onto a floppy disk in order to work? Is it a game of luck and I'm low on luck? I downloaded all of them from EMUParadise.com I have had better luck with XEX and COM cartridge type files.

For the newbees that come back from the past. In the 1980s we didn't have such things, otherwise I'd had some. ATR files are image files of old Atari self booting single sided disk. What equipment and software is required to make ATR files? Usually a SIO2PC cable and required software in necessary. Can a ATR file be used to re-create a workable floppy disk, assuming that we can find some blank disk? YES All of the physical copy protection is removed from the original disk before the ATR is created or the original disk never had any physical copy protection schemes. An ATX file is an image of the a disk and any copy protection on the original disk is included in the ATX file. See Farb's responses about ATX files. Nov 26, 2015 edit: ************************* Special thanks to Farb for the following ********************** Scott3555, on 25 Nov 2015 - 5:40 PM, said: So can a ATX be run from the image file or does it have to be copied to a floppy disk? I know enough about copy protection schemes and the Atari 1050 drive to know that there were many copy protection schemes that cannot be copied by the standard 1050, therefore we enhansed our drives with the Happy card. Farb's reply: You can run ATX images with appropriate software or hardware. For example, you can use Steve Tucker's APE program with the VAPI DLL available from Atarimania. I don't know what other software packages have support for it. On the hardware side, SIO2Arduino is the only hardware solution I know of that has support for ATX although it is somewhat limited since it doesn't fully emulate drive timing. There is no publicly available software that allows writing an ATX with a Happy 1050 that I'm aware of. The only available option I know of is using a SuperCard Pro, a PC floppy drive and phaeron's a8rawconv tool. And even then, that setup will only let you do single-sided disks as the SuperCard Pro doesn't support double-sided disks yet. There are quite a few software solutions out there -- the aforementioned APE, AspeQT/RespeQT, SIO2OSX and a number of others. Some are available freely while others must be purchased. I would suggest searching on these forums as there are many threads that talk about these tools. They all have different requirements for type of PC, operating system, etc. Some are more limiting than others and/or may require some technical savviness to get working. I don't believe there's really a "silver bullet" solution. ************************ end of Farb's enlightening reply ********************************************** I went to the SuperCard Pro website, CBMSTUFF.COM, and there is an update as of September 3, 2015 that says the software for the SuperCard Pro now does the conversation without the need for phaeron's a8rawconv tool. Is this the "Silver Bullet" solution? stay tuned...

I've been out of the a8 arena for a while. What does this card do? My gut guess is that if I don't know that I need it then I probably don't. However, I would like to hear about what it does or fixes. I guess that I've become a 50 year old newbee. 25 years ago I was on the cutting edge with 2 Happy drives and a Duplicator. A couple of other questions. what is with little row of joysticks on the left above "subscriber" suppose to indicate? If you want this site to be around please subscribe or donate to it. This thing takes cash to keep it alive. I was extremely happy to find such an interesting Atari site on the web.

I wasn't in the UK in the 1980's. I was a student up in college. I was also in the local Atari pirate group. For me and the rest of the pack it wasn't so much the cost of software but rather, it was the game of "copy the software that couldn't be copied". It became a game of wits between the programmers copy protection schemes and our innovations to crack the code. On two different occasions I did soldering inside my 1050 to make it possible to copy that which couldn't be copied. I had two Happy equipped drives and one Duplicator drive. I remember one disk that had like 235 sectors on track one. For reading this track the drive could take multiple turns to read the single track. However, for writing, the drive had to write the entire track in one turn of the disk. To help the drive do this feat, we slowed the drive down to 44 RPM. I had a lot of software that was nothing but shelfware. I think that in reality there were only about 25 games that we played a lot. It amazed me at what crappy software some companies thought was even worth marketing. After all the software companies said they were no longer doing Atari software releases, I got the idea that our little game had killed our computer. I moved on to the IBM 80-16 and never pirated any software for it. And I guess the software companies got the clue that they had engaged in a game that they couldn't win and software copy protection seemed to disappear. I like being able to make backups.

It was Star Fleet 1. Thank you all. Is there anyway to destroy this thread now that it is fully answered? I doubt that anyone else will ever be interested in this thread.

I'm just now getting back into the Atari XL/XE computers. I've been away for about 20 years. I used to be with a band of pirates while going to college. We never used DOS to load a game. There is a menu program available that reads the directory and you select which game on the disk you want to play from the menu. It is much faster loading than DOS because it is just 3 sectors long. To make a bootable menu disk, we copied sectors one, two, and three from any disk that had the menu program to a blank and then used DOS to copy the new files onto the disk and then DOS was no longer needed to access the disk. My cousin is suppose to be sending me a copy of all my old Atari disk that I gave him twenty years ago and if he does, I'll upload those three sectors or a disk image that has them on it to this board.

Everyone should try to collect all available software for their classic systems. The more people that do this, the more preserved the old software will be. Bad things DO happen; my Atari XL disk collection got stolen back in 1993 when my home was broken into. Replacing the computer and drive was easy on Ebay but not the software. I just got an Atarimania MyIDE II cartridge now and I'd like to fill it up. I know that I won't play hardly anything. Is it still considered pirating software when the original game company is either gone or hasn't sold it in over 20 years? What is the current thinking on this issue? Back in college (1984) when I had no easy/extra money Atari XL computers were all over and software was kind of high priced. But if you didn't buy stuff quick it wasn't widely available the following year. I remember buying the 5.25 floppy disk for over two dollars each to put software on. Yes, there was a small band of Atari pirates in Cedar Fall/Waterloo, Iowa. Back then the real game was to try to make a working copy of the newest software. Usually someone had it hacked within a week. We had crap software that we hacked and nobody ever really played it. Paid 35 bucks to get the newest copy protection so we could just hack it. Might sound dumb, but that was the best time with the game. Never could get the 1050 to write a fuzzy sector. Slowed the drive RPM down to write over 200 sectors per track.

Here is the game play description: Space game. Turn based play. Kill alien ships. Find and protect starbases. Can launch probes to locate stations or aliens, alien ships stops the probes. Game is played on a square grid type playing field. Starbase will request help if attacked but won't give its location. can drop mines and then can use a shuttle to collect them after the battle. Ship needs to refuel (and resupply?) at starbase. Starbase will usually drop shields to refuel your ship, sometimes it won't. My version was on disk but almost everything I had was hacked so it might have been a cartridge only game; no idea. Any help is appreciated. Thanks in advance. I just bought a replacement 800XL, 1050, MyIDE II with one gig sd card, Happy Board for 1050. Do Atari users still use the 1050 happy drives? I haven't tried the MyIDE cartridge drive yet. I gave away from my Atari 800XL system when I got a IBM model 80-16 to my poor cousin about 25 years ago. I was about 24 and I think he was about 15. God, that makes me feel old. I kept a complete copy of all my software but lost it in a house theft back in 1993.