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In article <1989Dec21.201152.4270@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca> barry@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca (Barry Lay) writes:
>I have the following problem.  I have a Mega 4 ST with a dead internal disk
>drive.  Fortunately, my hard disk autoboots, so I am not out of business,
>but I occasionally like to play a game which has to boot from a floppy disk
>(Falcon).  Is there a way to get the Atari to think that an external drive is
>
Too bad about your floppy drive...

>So, does anybody have any ideas for what to do while waiting for the drive
>to be fixed?  If someone has figured out how to get Falcon to run from a
>hard disk, that would be nice, too.
>
>Barry

All you need to do to run Falcon off your hard drive is to copy the floppies.
It runs with no trouble, as long as you run the startup program from your
AUTO folder. (Can't have *anything* else in memory. Kind of a drag, sometimes,
coldboots are inconvenient...)

Actually, it's not *quite* that simple, if you want a convenient setup.
Falcon doesn't specify any directory pathnames when it looks for its data
files, so all necessary files must be located in the default (or "current
working") directory. When programs run from the AUTO folder, the default
directory is the root directory of the boot device/partition. Obviously
you don't want to clutter the root directory of your hard drive with a
lot of junk, you'd like to have the Falcon files stored in a subdirectory.
(Like, D:\games\falcon, as an arbitrary example...  }-)

The solution I use is two-part. First, Falcon *must* be started from an
AUTO-boot. So, I have two AUTO folders on my hard drive. I have to rename
the one I want to use to "AUTO", then reboot, to get things going.

I stick all the Falcon files in a subdirectory. In my Falcon AUTO folder,
I have a 3 line program that calls Dsetdrv() and Dsetpath() to set the
default path to my Falcon directory, then Pexec()s FALCON.PRG.

This works for Falcon 1.0, 1.1, and Operation Counterstrike. I keep Falcon 1.1
and Operation Counterstrike in d:\games\falcon nowadays, and select which to
start with the AUTO program.

Falcon takes about 3 seconds to load on my Mega 4. It's quite nice, not having
to deal with inserting additional floppies & such to play a game... Also, you
don't need the code-wheel when you boot from the hard drive. (I hated the
damn thing anyway!) 

Last note - I have a sneaking suspicion, if I grabbed TopDown and installed
it, I wouldn't have to worry about loading Falcon from the AUTO folder. The
Falcon loader program is non-relocatable, which is why you can't have much
else in memory when it starts up. It also won't run with the ICD boot code,
because they try to use the same memory space.
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