Use Your PC to Create a Bootable Atari ST Game Disk
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- Опубликовано: 5 фев 2025
- Full setup instructions:
www.jamesfmack...
Atari ST disk images are freely available on the web, but how can you play these games on physical ST hardware?
One way is to use your Windows PC to prepare a bootable game disk. Once it’s done, pop the disk into your ST floppy drive, power-on and you’re good to go!
Here’s how.
I've done this with a modern system and USB floppy drive by:
- Leaving the ST file as a zip
- putting it on a 720KB floppy disk
- Using ST ZIP on the ST to extract it (to a RAM disk or mass storage)
- Using a disk imaging prog - TrackCopy is what I use on the ST - to write the disk from the ST to floppy disk.
It's what you can do, if you don't currently have a PC with a built in floppy disk drive - but you'll need enough RAM or a mass storage device on the ST to extract the image to.
It would be great if an ST disk imager could handle extracting ZIPped images to floppy in one step, but I haven't found one that will.
STzip and the other disk utilities are tiny and can be copied to a floppy directly in Windows 10 using a USB floppy drive.
Yours is a very nice method to use with an old computer available with a floppy, though.
With mass storage you can chuck loads of images on there, and image them at will, or use another utility to run the image directly from the SD / CF card or hard drive.
Great tip! I really like this idea 😎
@@jamesfmackenzie
I was looking for methods that didn’t force me to use an old PC.
This one is useful :)
"Because it's rick Dangerous, I die straight away". Haha, yep . great info. Thanks
Works with dosbox too
Great to hear! I don’t have a floppy drive on my DOSBox machine - glad it works 😎
So I dont know if it is my drive, my diskettes, or the computer itself, ive been trying this for a while now with a big stash of DD diskettes I had, but the thing is, the program usually hit me with either a read write error or unknown error (AA), for the weird instances where the program actually worked, it would usually get stuck at 51.25 or 81.25 percent, never at a random spot, ive checked and my usb floppy drive does say that is HD and DD compatible. I do think that it may be the diskettes as they are from a garage which has humidity and that probably damage them, but I dont think so, as inside, the diskettes look fine. And for the last thing, I noticed that the diskettes that did work (and ended on 51.25 or 81.25 percent), when I reinserted them onto the drive to retry rewriting the game, it would then give me a read write error, BUT THEN, when I reseted the computer and tried with the same diskette writing the game, it would actually do it (until the percent it was stuck in), so I really dont know whats going on, I am going to try though with a compaq laptop I have which has a diskette drive, thankfully that works, but in the mean time I ask if theres any other programs or any other things I could do to make it works, necer the less, this is a very well explained tutorial, specially because ive seen you even made a written guide! so at least I appreciate how well explained it is.
Thanks for the kind words!
Although some USB floppy drives do support 720kB DD, I haven't ever found one that supports other DD disk formats (e.g. the 800kB format that some ST games use). Recommend you try with the built-in floppy on your Compaq laptop. Very interested to hear if it goes better. Good luck!!
im trying to use a program called omnidisk - never used it before - anyone have any tips for me to create a cubase disk for my atari 1040 ST? ive downloaded a few files that are .st extension 720k in size; i have some 2DD disks; just need to know how to use omnidisk (omniflop for win95)
at least post the link to the installers for the makedisk app?
Chris Nova777 follow the “more info” link to my blog and you’ll find everything you need there
emulatari.free.fr/zip/makedisk_v15.zip
Cool