exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

After reading the txt file on a demo which said "Hopefully the demo will work using Hddriver in "Fast AC... (Text was cut short on the right side)

I'm now wondering if the type of driver you use for the UltraSatan has an effect on which Demos/Games will load?

Well I know that not all games run on HD Driver unless you set the file cache lower, PP's is designed for games as PP himself patches games to run from HDD, so he makes sure it all works. I don't play the old original games, mainly more modern ports etc, so I prefer HD Driver as the partition tool is easy to use and understand.

That cut off text might be referring to hd drivers fast ASCI mode which is an option to enable in the driver.

Steve wrote: 21 Sep 2020 09:43 Well I know that not all games run on HD Driver unless you set the file cache lower, PP's is designed for games as PP himself patches games to run from HDD, so he makes sure it all works. I don't play the old original games, mainly more modern ports etc, so I prefer HD Driver as the partition tool is easy to use and understand.

That cut off text might be referring to hd drivers fast ASCI mode which is an option to enable in the driver.

Okay, interesting. I actually find PP Driver really easy to use thanks to this video:



I literally need things spelling out like a kids picture book. :lol:

As exxos pointed out my TOS version and 4MB RAM probably break some games, so I basically I'm in the gradual process of checking which ones work.

Some Demos simply don't work (some on my SD card have turned out to be for STE which explains some) and some will get half way through and bomb (The most enjoyable graphically tend to do this so maybe that's lack of blitter.)

Is HD Driver as easy to set up as PP Driver is in this video?

I could possibly get it in the future and test it on another SD Card. (Or maybe I should get a life :lol: )

That video is really good, nice explanation. You could try running demos from a floppy just to see if it is the hard disk driver causing the crash, it probably is likely as most demos were designed to be run from a floppy.

And for ease of use, I just find hd driver to be a very professional interface with lots of options, even disk backups. Also I run Mint and Unix apps on my machines so I need to be able to manage EXT2 partitions. Not sure if PPs supports that.

Steve wrote: 21 Sep 2020 10:15 That video is really good, nice explanation. You could try running demos from a floppy just to see if it is the hard disk driver causing the crash, it probably is likely as most demos were designed to be run from a floppy.

I don't know why I didn't think of that?? :lol:

Just tested the MUDA demo on the original bought SD Card and then on bare floppy. Bombs with everything. Think it was 4 bombs if I remember correctly.

Cosmic Puppet wrote: 21 Sep 2020 11:07 Just tested the MUDA demo on the original bought SD Card and then on bare floppy. Bombs with everything. Think it was 4 bombs if I remember correctly.

Muda is an STE demo:
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=60819

Steve wrote: 21 Sep 2020 11:56

Cosmic Puppet wrote: 21 Sep 2020 11:07 Just tested the MUDA demo on the original bought SD Card and then on bare floppy. Bombs with everything. Think it was 4 bombs if I remember correctly.

Muda is an STE demo:
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=60819

Thanks for that. I was under the incorrect assumption that if a demo started playing it was ST. Now I know. :lol:

Some newer demos require not only being run from HD, but also a specific lowest speed as well. As long as your driver isn't doing TOS/DOS partition compatibility byte swapping in software, any ACSI emulating driver and harddrive will probably work.

What doesn't work is the Unicorn USB host adapter (I have one) since it is much slower.

/Troed