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STX support
Posted: Sat Mar 20, 2021 7:51 pm
by RascalUK
Hey, is dev still ongoing with this core? Anybody know if there are plans to implement STX disc support. Selfishly, a couple of games I loved back in the day are only dumped as .STX.
Have them working on my Gotek and real STe, but I'd ultimately like to pack her away for posterity.
Re: STX support
Posted: Tue Jul 13, 2021 11:08 pm
by dakbluemonkey
STX support would be great. With only ST and MSA support, the core cannot load copy-protected disks, which precludes playing any games which feature it.
It seems that there's an adaptor called "PASTI" which can add STX support to Windows and to various emulators on Windows, but that's about the limit of my knowledge. Currently, if I want to play any of my copy-protected disks on the ST core, I have to use a hacked, cracked and packed version, but many of those bomb out, either due to some randomness of the TOS / Core or just that it used to bomb out anyway, even on the original hardware
Re: STX support
Posted: Thu Jul 15, 2021 8:55 pm
by Chris23235
STX support would require a cycle exact simulation of the ST. Mistery is not cycle exact as far as I know (even if it has a very high compability with ST/STE/Mega STE even when it comes to several very demanding demos). There is an attempt of a cycle exact ST simulation on MiSTer called FX Cast, but at the moment it doesn't support STX (not sure if it this core still is in active development):
https://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=34554
Re: STX support
Posted: Fri Jul 23, 2021 9:06 pm
by Tackemon
Chris, thanks for the info. You answered the question I was going to post.
I have a single STX game I was looking forward to trying on the ST core; at least I know that's not a thing yet.
In the meantime, there is an ST emulator on RetroPie that works well enough to be playable. The game (Sundog) supports keyboard and mouse, which are both supported by the emulator. I seem to remember getting some scrambled rendering at times though. Sounds like a physical ST is the only way to be 100% compatible at this point.
UPDATE: OK, after a pretty convoluted process (I'm new to MiSTeR, which doesn't help I guess), I was able to convert a .msa floppy disk image to a .st file via a French utility from 2004. The game seems to be running fine, so that's pretty cool. Got killed about 5 minutes after getting out of my space van though.