Demos - Ready-To-Run VHDs

[RealLarry]

A small update to the demos..: I took some of the ST-Group demos (namely 1 to 6) into a small VHD to demonstrate how easy it is to assemble such a harddisk. Used tools are mtools, Uwe Seimet's HDDriver Demo Version and the hdmenu

Tested on Hatari only. The new demo VHD is named ST-Group_v01.7z and can be found at my gdrive - see 1st post for the link.

[niallquinn]

HDEmenu, yes, this might work. Need to look around for something like 300dos collection or 0mhz does on the AO486. Ie unzips it and boots it as "the first disk". I can use msaconvertor to convert them all back to .st files, but how to inject them into the core and reboot?

I've also got every game that's been 1 part filed, run from the desktop, but this is going to be one messy looking desktop with 0,A-Z folders. THe filenames match from the menu CSV, so that looks easy to sort out as a VHD.

But it's the demo one, I want to sort out.

Too much work on Mon-Fri, I'll have a look at the ones you've done, and mess with it all at the weekend.

Thanks,

Andrew.

[niallquinn]

Been having a playaround with this, what you've posted so far Realarry. THe VHD with lots of the POV compacts on, All the ones that are marked as "broken" aren't. At least to me with a bit of messing around. Some are for the ST 512k/1meg with an earlier tos. Some are for say a 4meg STE with 2.06 tos or whatever.
Maybe a huge vhd isn't the way to go forward, I don't know how, but it would have to change and apply the mister cores config settings first before running, putting it into drive A, and booting from floppy seams to make a big difference. Probably because nobody had hard drives then, and you could hardly swap them in the post or download from a BBS, so the original .st images get the highest compatibility, if you get the right settings.
I know you can insert an image into wherever, like what Flynn was doing on his dos 300 collection. You selected the game and it would unpack the iso and mount it.
If anyone else can shed on any light on how to change core settings and apply them, do please post how!

Thanks!

[RealLarry]

All the ones that are marked as "broken" aren't. At least to me with a bit of messing around. Some are for the ST 512k/1meg with an earlier tos. Some are for say a 4meg STE with 2.06 tos or whatever.

I'm aware of that fact. "broken" is meant as "can't get it to work in this VHD" here. Testing around 1000 demos with any combination of TOS, RAM etc is a huge task and too much for one old person like me. We can be happy that I did the course in testing all demos one after one with the most common Atari settings

Maybe a huge vhd isn't the way to go forward, I don't know how, but it would have to change and apply the mister cores config settings first before running, putting it into drive A, and booting from floppy seams to make a big difference. Probably because nobody had hard drives then, and you could hardly swap them in the post or download from a BBS, so the original .st images get the highest compatibility, if you get the right settings.
I know you can insert an image into wherever, like what Flynn was doing on his dos 300 collection. You selected the game and it would unpack the iso and mount it.
If anyone else can shed on any light on how to change core settings and apply them, do please post how!

You can get and run all of these demos as a floppy disk and enjoy them. But imho a floppy disk/image isn't an option anymore these days and even we Atari users are having (external) "HDD" drives using a ie SD card for the physical machines. These VHDs are made for a handy usage of all machines, FPGA ones and real hardware, and to get the best and fastest solution with a minor compromise. See: 80 of 1000 broken demos is a good cut and changing MiSTery settings is done in a sec.

But right, a tool like imgset (ao486) would be nice...that way one could take all demos into single VHDs per demo, boot into a shortlist of them, which configures needed settings and reboots to that selected demo (VHD).

If you found a working setting for a demo marked as broken, gimme a sign and I'll re-test and correct them.