Question about PP hard disc image/games conversion

[soviet9922]

Hi!,

First has been a long time user for PP, hard disc driver purchased it years ago.

Was told that PP sells some kind of hard disc image that include all his game conversions ?.

Wondering if this is correct, and if theres more information about the disc image pricing ?.

[Petari]

  Hola,

 Yes, and you can read more, see some YT videos here: hd adapted games
 Just to add that I don't like when people call it conversions, or 'patches', cracks . It is much more complex and may need days of work to solve 1 game. Some games have really weird floppy code - talking about those not accessing floppies via TOS functions. And just to understand how it works lot of tracing is needed. Then need to replace parts of it with links to hard disk access code, including needed conversions. Hard disk access is not so simple, as during gameplay that normally works not - there are diverse ways to solve it, and it is not simple.
Then come TOS version compatibility problems, some not so good code in games what need correction, and so on.
Longer story. May read some details on my site.
Then extra functions: state saves, exit to Desktop, unlimited lives and other cheats - and some games really need them. All it costs time - and time is what ? You know it. And time is needed to make all it work from single image file on most common Atari ST(E) models. Yes, single file, but not same for all TOS versions - there is image for TOS 1.04 and higher - 7 GB, now with over 2660 games. And 3.5 GB for TOS 1.00 and 1.02 because TOS v. limits. It has some 1900 games. Other thing is RAM in machine: min is 1 MB. For games needing 1 MB with floppy run 2 MB is needed with hard disk run. And rare case 2 MB for floppy run games need 4 MB. Well, now is not so hard to do TOS v. upgrade and expanding RAM. And to add: overall work with hard disks (now rather SD cards) is much better with later TOS versions - not only accessible size limit is in question - faster and more reliable work.
 There is kind of pricing, and it is not for games self, which are btw. accessible for free as floppy images online. I ask donation for my work in latest 17 years for making them runnable from modern and now cheap mass storage. Imagine how much work is needed to just put together properly so much SW, easy selectable and startable, plus making simple reading additional instructions and like + starting different versions of game.
 Donation is now like 25 Euros, and it may be more soon considering that inflation is still on.
Running from floppies is now really problematic in many cases because old floppy drives and disks getting bad, unreliable - and hardly replaceable, as not manufactured for long time. I don't even attach floppy drive to my Ataris in latest 10 years. Only in rare cases for some testing. So, hard disk adapt must deactivate all possible floppy accessing, because it may cause crash, freezing without floppy drive (or Gotek and like) .That's additional work. And even if source is some crack (what I don't like, but often no
other) they may be remains of copy protection which needs deactivating.
 Other time consuming is finding good image of game - wrote about it here and on other places multiple times.