Retro Monday night - Atari ST

well.... I couldn't leave it there could I?

After a bit of head scratching and Duck-Duck-Go-ing last thing last night, I found a little MS-DOS program called makedisk.exe v1.5.  I downloaded it to my phone at 1am or whatever it was, so that I could copy it over to my old PC laptop and try and use that instead of the Windows based app.

It turns out, that I have an old PC (well, Mrs.Geeks old PC that I stole about 10years ago) that just boots into MS-DOS, but has a built in 3.5" floppy disk drive and well, would you look at that... it actually had a disk in the drive that said.... oh...I think I've been here before?!

After checking out the date time stamps on some of the files, it looks like I've repeated this same exercise in 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017 and yet again now in 2021.... seems like I have a 2year cycle of doing retro-goodness and then get very distracted by work/work and then remember again and repeat the same thing over and over again - except this time, I'm not going to stop as I've got a decent Atari ST machine and I now have the proper C compilers to do something useful with it.  I also have all those extra's, like a NetUSBee so I can connect to the network and plug in USB devices too... I say all this, but y'know Feb 2022 will come around and then I won't touch this stuff again until 2023, a bit like the P1 Elonex PC I have sitting on the desk over there, waiting for me to code some Microsoft C++ 7 on it!

anyway, after finding that I have a D:\ATARIST folder that contained the makedisk.exe and lots of .st files, I then wen about testing it out.  It works GREAT! it even formats the disks in the special 800K format that is needed for some of the disks too.

I even thought I'd try out the Rick Dangerous .st file from before - it did format correctly and did copy over.... when I looked at the disk from Aari ST it appeared empty.  So I switched off the HDD and rebooted and would you believe it, the game actually boots up and is playable!

I couldn't resist and I tried it with XEVIOUS as well - ah, now THAT took me back to the big arcade game that we had of this... not quite the best re-creation, but it was okay for a 10minute blast!

...and whilst I was there, is that Mr.Do!  No....surely not... well, I was too correct there, it wasn't the Mr.Do! from the arcade, but again a close clone.... this was still proving that the mechanism was working though.

It was a bit hit & miss though when copying to the UltraSATAN HDD, some would work fine, some would not.  Oddly some would run absolutely fine when just booted from A: drive - and that is what eventually happened with The Secret of Monkey Island!  It was in English too, I was sooooo excited, until... well, until.... it then got to the screen where I could play... and the mouse target icon just stayed in the top left hand side of the screen.  I thought maybe it was my new USB mouse, so I swapped it over for the old proper mouse - no difference.  I found an old QuickShot Pro (autofire) joystick, plugged that in - it had a fault (left didn't work), I found another one! the back of the cupboard that just keeps giving!  I have no idea when I got these, I think they were in a bundle with some other stuff about 10years ago - anyway, the new joystick works fine - except Monkey Island controls still don't work - nothing I could do would force it to use the arrow keys either..... SO CLOSE!

As you can see, I distracted myself with getting a few other games copied over, just to test the process - it now takes about 6 minutes to do this task and it is soooo simple now.  I may eventually end up transferring over all 1.8GB, who knows?!

Ah, ha! Then I found a folder named HD_GAMES - looks like these one's were specifically modified to run from the HDD, they are not .st files, but the actual files - so after a few disks worth of copying over manually, some of them worked a treat.  There are a few, like DragonsLair that have 900Kb files in them - not sure how I get them over using a DD disk?  I'm thinking they will only run on the later machines with a 1.44MB disk drive.

anyway - PROGRESS HAS BEEN MADE, if only a small amount.  I'm still no closer to Monkey Island - and there is no way I am paying the prices on eBay to be able to play a 1990s game!  Yes, you read that right... absolutely SILLY money and this isn't just, "let's stick it up at silly price just to show off", these actually sell.  It is really annoying as I know for a fact I had the original of this game on Atari ST & PC as I was playing them at around the 1991 time of my life when both Atari ST & my first 286/286 machines were overlapping.  I still have my original copy of Day of the Tentacle for the PC - I installed it onto the Elonex, still runs fine!

anyway, another long-ish night, another minor success.... maybe I'll actually start writing some code on these things and do something useful?....