ROM Collection for Incognito?

[Tempest]

Does anyone have a good collection of game roms for the Incognito?  I know there are several rom sites out there like atarionline.pl and atarimania.com, but they don't seem to have whole collections, just individual files.  Specifically, I'm looking for NTSC games (or PAL games that run on NTSC hardware) that will work with the SIDE loader on the Incognito board.  I'm also looking for cartridges that have been made into .xex files that will load with the SIDE loader.  Has anyone made a collection like this? 

[+Philsan]

Not especially made for Incognito, but the best website to download always updated and clean game's XEX is Homesoft (click on Download all on the right).

[erichenneke]

27 minutes ago, Philsan said:

Not especially made for Incognito, but the best website to download always updated and clean game's XEX is Homesoft (click on Download all on the right)

I second the Homesoft site suggestion!  "download all" is the easiest way to go,  and they all work.  And it's actively kept current and updated. 

[mimo]

My go to is http://a8.fandal.cz/

Top right there is a download zip button 

[+Philsan]

4 hours ago, mimo said:

My go to is http://a8.fandal.cz/

Top right there is a download zip button 

That website is awesome for demos and to find authors real names.

But Homesoft files are continually improved (no crack intros, no loading glitches...).

[Tempest]

Wow, that's... everything I guess.  I don't suppose someone has stripped out all the PAL stuff or attempted to put the games into genres?  The collection is a little overwhelming, but a good place to start.

[Wrathchild]

I appreciate the OP wanted to do this via Side Loader but elsewhere on AA was posted a set of 4 x 16MB ATR images stuffed with titles with some PAL specific titles on Disk 4.

 

I set these up as partitions on the CompactFlash card I used in my Incognito but wanted to launch the MyPicoDos menu from a boot drive and then from there change disk number as required.

As booting Incognito in SDX, these images had an issue as certain titles' filenames began with an illegal character, e.g. 3DTICTA.COM for 3D Tic-Tac-Toe.

So I manually tidied these up in a hex-editor and re-blew the partitions and the menu behaved fine afterwards.

 

 

Patched disks (only 1 & 4, 2 & 3 were OK) included here.

 

[Edit] my memory is coming back in regard to this... I think the name issue was possibly something that occurred if I used a recursive copy tool to take the files from the disk image (mounted via an SIO2SD unit) to the partition that I had formatted as SpartaDos and not MyDos.

 

Mark

Disks1-4.zip

Edited November 26, 2019 by Wrathchild

[Tempest]

1 hour ago, Wrathchild said:

I appreciate the OP wanted to do this via Side Loader but elsewhere on AA was posted a set of 4 x 16MB ATR images stuffed with titles with some PAL specific titles on Disk 4.

So these are mountable disk images (basically hard drive images) for SpartaDOS then?  What's the advantage of loading games through SpartaDOS vs Side Loader?  I've been using Side just because it seemed easier.  Also do you just put these images on the CF card or do you have to partition the card through SpartaDOS first?  With Side I just dumped the images into folders and that was it.  

 

Sorry for these beginner questions, I never really did anything advanced on my Atari back in the day, I just stuck with cartridges and tapes.  This is all new to me.

[Wrathchild]

Side loader would certainly be the easiest for any beginner as you are just coping files from your PC/MAC direct to the FAT partition on the CF card and so support the long name format directly and FJC's cool code handles the displaying/wrapping and the searching of them.

 

To use images, you would partition your CF card and the max size of a partition is the 65535 sectors (not sure why that isn't 65536?). So once setup and allocated to a drive number you can use a disk copy tool to transfer the ATR image. There are some PC tools too I think that let you work on a raw CF image and then write the whole image to a CF card.

 

I am guessing that many of the files in the ATR collection came from the 8.3 Atari DOS days and kept as-is and so there was a better chance they ran from DOS, even if it overwrites it later. To the most part I would expect the same file in a collection which has a nice long name to actually be binary equivalent.

 

The MyPicoDos menu loader utilises a file (PICONAME.TXT) to handle the long name translations but required you to manage a file per folder.

If anyone is a good script writer then the folder structure and files could be extracted from the 4 ATRs and then the text files used to rename files with their long names

Then you'd have one big folder to copy to a FAT partition and load using the SIDE loader... but then you are probably better off compiling your own from the bulk-downloads already mentioned.
 

[Tempest]

5 minutes ago, Wrathchild said:

To use images, you would partition your CF card and the max size of a partition is the 65535 sectors (not sure why that isn't 65536?). So once setup and allocated to a drive number you can use a disk copy tool to transfer the ATR image. There are some PC tools too I think that let you work on a raw CF image and then write the whole image to a CF card.
 

I assume I can have both the partitioned drives for SpartaDOS and a partition for SIDE?  So in this case I'd set up four 65535 sector partitions (16MB right?) and the rest for a SIDE partition?

[+Philsan]

It's important to use archives that are often updated, especially if you like homebrews.

Not only tens of them are released every year, but sometimes they are updated many times after their release.

[Tempest]

11 minutes ago, Philsan said:

It's important to use archives that are often updated, especially if you like homebrews.

Not only tens of them are released every year, but sometimes they are updated many times after their release.

Yeah and I'd like to find one that has all the new hacks that have been happening like Popeye and Moon Patrol

[Wrathchild]

25 minutes ago, Tempest said:

I assume I can have both the partitioned drives for SpartaDOS and a partition for SIDE?  So in this case I'd set up four 65535 sector partitions (16MB right?) and the rest for a SIDE partition?

 

Yes, using FDISK, maybe check this video

[Tempest]

16 minutes ago, Wrathchild said:

 

Yes, using FDISK, maybe check this video

Thanks, that answered some questions.  So once I get those partitions made I use a copy tool to copy those disk images over?  Any tutorials or instructions for that?  Do I just put the disk images somewhere on the CF card?

[Wrathchild]

Anything larger than from, say, a physical floppy in an 810 or 1050 would require use of an SIO2PC or SIO2SD type device where the ATR image is mounted.

 

Others could comment better I think, but you could actually use Altirra setup with an CF image file (maybe even direct) and manage things through that, then take the card to the 800.

[Tempest]

So have all the cartridges been converted to xex files by now?  If so then I might be able to stop using my TheCart! cartridge which currently won't fit in my 800 anyway.