Best way to play Alternate Reality on REAL Atari today?

[eegad]

When I got back into occasionally playing games on my old 800xl, 8-10 years ago, I ordered a half dozen or so Maxflash Carts and loaded them up with games. I've been very happy with that method except for one issue - two of my favorite games, Alternate Reality City and Dungeon, won't work that way because of multiple disk sides/swaps. A couple of times I've hooked up my old 1050s and played it the "real" way. Ideally though it would be nice to play it via a modern storage system that doesn't rely on me using 30+ year old floppies, and which may also load faster. I'm thinking that going with one of Lotharek's SIO2SD's is probably the best bet, but I figured I'd ask if anyone else recommends an alternative. Thanks for any input.

 

 

[mimo]

check out SDrive-max

 

Edited October 24, 2019 by mimo
spelling

[Gunstar]

Any device that let's you either swap ATR's or have multiple virtual drives: SDrive Max, SIO2PC with APE/aspeQT/RespeQT, SiDE2, MyIDE II. I think SDrive max allows 4 virtual drives at once, I know SIO2PC does, I think the others might require ATR swapping.

 

I personally still use 2 real drives with ARC and 4 real drives with ARD. Because I have them and as long as I can, I like to use my drives and floppies and play it old school, but with minimum swapping (once from side 1-1 after load to 2-1 and when you want to save a character). I've also done it with a combination of SIO2PC virtual drives and real drives.

Edited October 24, 2019 by Gunstar

[eegad]

Thanks for the tip about SDrive max. I was just looking into it and think I'm going to get one. Love the look of the case on this one :

 

https://www.vintagecomputercenter.com/product/atari-1050-sdrive-max

 

[JagChris]

So have you tried this? I'm about ready to get into AR: The City. I never beat this because I burned out my 1050 playing Phantasie 1. I started on Phantasie 2 and AR when 1050 died. I got an XF551 but was always leery of disc intensive games after that.

 

Got an SD Max now.

 

Edited May 28, 2020 by JagChris

[BillC]

On 10/24/2019 at 11:54 AM, Gunstar said:

I think SDrive max allows 4 virtual drives at once, I know SIO2PC does,

The SIO2PC device itself doesn't have a maximum drive limit, you may be thinking of SIO2SD.

The SIO2PC drive emulation software on the PC does have a limit, for RespQT it is 15 drives.

 

[+CharlieChaplin]

On 5/30/2020 at 6:12 PM, BillC said:

The SIO2PC device itself doesn't have a maximum drive limit, you may be thinking of SIO2SD.

The SIO2PC drive emulation software on the PC does have a limit, for RespQT it is 15 drives.

 

 

The SIO2PC software on my PC (SIO2PC.exe, Version 4.21 for 16Bit MS-DOS by Nick Kennedy) is a bit more limited - 640KBytes RAM only you know... that could be 7 diskdrives with 90k, but it only allows four diskdrives max. But hey, AR (the Dungeon) does not support more than 4 drives anyways.