Floppy games loading to blank screen?

[Chefgon]

I have an 800XL. For a while I was just playing cartridge games on it, but I recently purchased a 1050 floppy drive off of ebay. The drive came with a big stack of disks loaded with copied games and an auto-booting loader menu.

 

I'm going through the disks and every single one of them properly boots the menu program, and when I select a game it will play the beeping sounds for data loading (and the drive spins), but over half of those games load up to a blank screen, or a screen with garbage characters on it, or some of them even boot back out to the Basic prompt after they finish loading. Some of the games do load and play correctly. It's always the same games that break in the same ways, and the ones that load always load.

 

I'm looking for some advice to help figure out if the problem is the disks, the 1050, or the computer. Is there any way to narrow it down and determine the cause of the problem?

[tgwave]

Your 800XL has BASIC built in. It acts like a cartridge. To disable BASIC, hold down the OPTION key while turning the power on. I expect this will solve the issue with those games that show a blank screen or random garbage characters.

[Chefgon]

Your 800XL has BASIC built in. It acts like a cartridge. To disable BASIC, hold down the OPTION key while turning the power on. I expect this will solve the issue with those games that show a blank screen or random garbage characters.

 

Thank you! That resolved my problem! I had been holding down the Option key when the menu program loads, but it turns out you need to also hold it down when selecting a game from the menu.

[+Nezgar]

Curious which menu loader requires holding option after poweron as well? Not sure I've seen that behaviour before.