Can I burn roms from disks?

[Atari Scorpio]

I ahve a bunch of common carts and blank eproms and a burner. How hard is it to take the files from a disk and burn the files onto roms to put in carts? I would like to do away with my disks and put everything in cart form since carts will last longer. Thanks for any help.

[Rybags]

Fairly easy.

 

For compliant .ROM images you have to strip the headers.

 

Same deal with binary loaded carts although they often have extra program code.

 

Possibly the easiest way would be to just use Atari800Win, run the game and dump the relevant area of memory to a file.

 

If a .ROM or .BIN file is exactly a multiple of 4096 bytes long, then its a 99.99% sure thing that it's a raw image.

[Wrathchild]

Hi,

 

Just to clarify to this, the games you'll find on disks are typicaly going to be in three forms. The original game - e.g. with its own loader, a DOS disk with a typically cracked/packed binary loading version of the game and lastly a menu disk, e.g. RobC

 

Sometimes within the last two types you'll will find the binary version of a ROM (cartridge) game, e.g. PacMan, where it has been wrapped with a loader that typically relocates the data into the ROM area and makes the system believe that the cart is there, initialises and runs it.

 

As Rybags suggests, for these you need to obtain the raw image in order to burn that to an Eprom, i.e. the 4K or 8K below $C000. This could be obtained through an emulator but you'd be better off finding the raw image on the internet.

 

If what you are wanting to do is to transfer a .COM or .EXE (etc) binary file to run from a cartridge then unless you are using an AtariMax Flash-cart then this would be a lot of work as you'd need to write additional code for the initialisation of the cart to relocate and run the binary. Also, depending on the game, if it needs the RAM under the cart to run then a standard cartridge board will not permit you to switch out the cartridge and so these games cannot be done.

 

Hope that covers things.

 

Mark

[ataridog]

back in the day i had a cartridge dumper that spit the cart out on a disk.