abraXXious

Just comes up with an error message when you attempt to play the video.

Whilst searching for a decent pokey audio player for the Atari 8 bit (still have not found one) I came across a proggy called Inertia Player 4.5... which supposedly plays Mod files on the Pokey.... are these Amiga mods it can play? If so, what is the quality like? Also, is there any decent Pokey music player for the 8 bit Atari?

Hey there, are they songs or artists? If artists, can you please name some of their better songs?

Hey guys, now that I have my 1mb Ultimate, Sio2sd and Stereo Pokey on the way for my XE I figure I will shortly be in need of a decent file manager. Can someone please suggest a good, easy to use file manager for the 8 bit series? Also, a good ASMA (thats the pokey sound format?) player and other good utils such as picture viewers etc? Thanks.

Hi guys, I have always loved Sid generated music, Snes, Md, Amiga etc. From what I can tell, the Pokey is almost as powerful as the Sid and is capable of very good audio soundtracks, but as yet Warhawk is the only half decent track I have heard (and its not as good as the C64 version, though still nice). Can someone please name a few good pokey tunes for me? It seems the Atari 8 it games business dried up in the mid 80s as there seems to be very few (if any) arcade conversions of later games (R-type, where art thou?) and very few modern games (I cannot find a single shmup with themed levels, power ups and end of level bosses!) so perhaps this is partly why? Anywho. if someone can name some good Pokey tunes (especially stereo Pokey) it would be greatly appreciated. Also, is there an ASMA song player for the 8 bit Atari series?

I found the cheapest, easiest and most convenient way to play 32X games was to simply invest in an Everdrive MD. For $79.00 you then have all your Megadrive and 32X games on an SD games and ready to go...

PicDesk.prg

Hi GadgetUK. When you get to your TOS desktop go to the top menu and in there will be some options/settings/prefs. One of them will allow you to tick boxes next to your other partitions and save so that the partitions are always visible on your desktop.

No probs. You may want to start a thread outlining what you intend to do and ask for suggestions/requests from people. At the same time you could allow people to make donations to pay for your time in doing this.

Downsample to 5000 hz at 8 bit mono - the sort of sounds in quake lend themselves well to low fidelity and will still sound reasonable. Next go through the list of sound events and you will find dozens that are almost the same - ie two different door opening sounds that are just slightly different. Remove these very similar samples. Some other samples can be made to sound very different by changing the playback speed of the sample. For example, a low rumbling stone door opening sound can sound like a completely different fast opening metal door by simply doubling the playback speed of the sample. A side effect of the downsampling would of course be lower cpu overheads for sample playback, not that this would make much difference, but every little bit counts. Using these techniques you will easily cut the overheads for sound samples to under 1 mb. Of course, concentrating on the audio before you have a basic 3d engine and level storage system in place is a little backwards (no offence intended, just giving my thoughts). I would be more concerned about the ability to hold enough of the current level data in ram at any one particular time to see if the project was feasible. I believe the Jaguar is more than capable of running an optimised/customised version of Quake, however the biggest stumbling block will be system ram. Quake will run on a stock Amiga 1200 with extra ram - so a 14mhz 020 with (comparitively slow) AGA - which does not even have chunky pixel support so there is the extra overheads of C2p. Now, it RUNS, but is COMPLETELY PAINFUL on this spec, but it also not heavily optimised for the Amiga. An 060/66 Amiga will run Quake full screen at a decent frame rate as long as you are using a fast gfx card (AGA is slower and you need to use low red or scanlines). So horsepower wise the Jaguar could pull it off. Ram will be the issue. Getting Quake to run in under 8mb Ram could be a challenge, running in 4mb with no OS overheads, downsampled audio and textures and heavily optimised code (read assembly ) MIGHT be possible. Getting it to run in 2mb would be nigh on impossible. However, stranger things have happened and Im no programmer. Perhaps level data could be bank loaded on the fly from the cart, sort of how they got Quake 2 to run on the PS1 (it loads chunks of level data from the CD as you open doors)?

Geneva gave all sorts of issues on the Falcon - never tried it on anything else. I think it didnt like some of the other proggies I was running. Plus its UI is soooooo ugly.

There should be some utils that can grab a screenshot - there are literally dozens of them on the Amiga - SGrab is one of the more popular ones. They usually give you the option of snapping the entire desktop, or just a specific open window etc and then let you save the resulting image as jpg, bmp, png etc.

On Amiga sites it is inevitable that every couple of months a thread is opened inviting members to show screengrabs of their current Workbench setup. People get to show off their new 32bit png icon sets and ridiculously high res desktop with matching window themes etc. However, there is always some really nicely presented Workbench setups on lowly AGA machines (and sometimes even ECS) in just 16-256 colours with well chosen palette, images, window/button textures etc. You nearly always find out about some trendy desktop util that puts a floating transparent clock/calendar here, or cartoon Mr Banana there etc. Point is (I am getting there), I have yet to see an Atari equivalent. Granted there seems to be far less desktop personalising software on the ST/Ste/TT/Falcon range, but there is still quite a bit there. Until fairly recently I did not know there was a program to allow me to display a nice 256 colour wallpaper to my Falcon Tos desktop. I wonder how many other trendy desktop/system enhancements I am not aware of... So why not post some screenshots of your desktop? Also, why not tell us which desktop utils you use and why? I am sure a lot of us would take some valuable tips away from this.

Have you considered what you are going to put on it software wise? When I got my Falcon, the 14mb board, 32GB compact flash HD adapter and Tos 4.04 upgrade were the easy parts. I tried several of the Desktop and TOS replacements.... MultiTos is slow, Geneva was unstable, EasyMint was anything BUT easy, was slow, horrible to use, incompatible with a lot of stuff and ate a heap of the ram, Thing! was nice, but incompatible with some stuff, Jinnee simply crashed all the time, there was a couple of others I tried too but were not much chop. So I ended up leaving Tos on it with some nice system accessories - the best one is a small program that lets you display a 256 colour image as your desktop wallpaper - very nice. This with a nice icon set gives you a nice fast boot up, stability and compatibility.

Very true. Having two different SD images to get the job done is no problem. Users could simply have two SD cards and swap between them. 4GB cards (smallest you can buy here) are available locally for <$5.00. Average hourly rate for just a labourer here is $30.00 per hour, so the economics strongly favour buying several SD cards. How is the 4gb image going? Oh, and my DMA chip?

Looks good! So those games wil not run from a drive prepared with anything but AHDI? In other words you would need a seperate SD card imaged with driver and partitions just for those games separate from another SD card with a driver like HDDriver etc?

Hey there PLM. yes please! Please PM me with the total cost of your DMA chip including postage to Australia along with your PayPal address!

Could even create 9 partitions - one being a 30 Mb to hold those few older games that will only run from that if newer versions do not exist...

Well, seems like you are the man in the know to get it done. Interested in doing us all a favour and creating a nice 4gb image?

I dunno, 700 games would come close to fitting in 512 MB - most ST games seem to be between 200kb and 800 kb. Some can be as large as 1.5mb or more, but that is definitely not the norm. Still even 700 games over 2 partitions would be cool - one partition A-K, one partition L-Z. It would be great if the two partitions used for games were not the boot partition so it could remain free to for purpose of being a system partition and allowing moving of files from PC (since only the first partition is visible on a PC). So are there 700 games that are presently running from HD?

I just checked out your link PLM - there are a LOT of games there. Are some of them the same as on the DBug site or are they all differently installed/cracked? Are they all able to be run from the Satandisk? If so, a 4gb image with all those games on an 80mb partition would be amazing!

Hi there PLM, I have upgraded my STes to TOS 2.06 which supposedly can handle partitions up to 1 gb in size. I would LOOOOOOVE a 4gb image (it is practically impossible to purchase 1 and 2 gb SD cards here, they pretty much start at 4gb) divided up into 5 x 800 mb partitions (to be safely under the 1gb limit). 1st partition with all HD installed games - I have that 1gb image file set up on an sd card and it IS missing quite a few of the games from the dbug site. So it would be nice to have the complete collection from the dbug site on there. I would then make the 2nd parition AUDIO and put a heap of chip music and a folder with a couple of good players on there. Partition 3 I would make as IMAGES and put some nice ST generated images with a folder containing some viewers. Partition 4 would be UTILS with a bunch of useful utilities organised in folders. Partition 5 would simply be TEMP and would just be a holding partition for files being worked on (unzipping etc). Oh, is there a program like Directory Opus on the ST?

Erm, not much more I can say. Im chasing a good DMA to suit an STe which at present has a faulty/buggy DMA installed.

Hi TNOTG, thats ok, thanks for the offer though. I updated the TOS rom in these STes so that I could access larger partitions - 230mb boot partition is too small to be usable to me as I use a PC to copy across files and i will run out of room too quick. 512mb should be okies though. Thanks for your help.

Thanks for the heads up! I just purchased one!