Atarimania Forum

Hello all, I'm just getting into the A8 scene after I found an 800 XL with a 1050 floppy drive at a local thrift store for 15 bucks. My question is, do you need the original atari dos disk to play anything in the floppy drive? I picked up Phantasie II and jewels of darkness, and I can't get either to load- BOOT ERROR over and over again. I read that phantasie had a copy protection in it that would fry your disk if you didn't put in a code from the manual, but I cant get Jewels of darkness to work either. I'm curious if I need to boot the dos disk before I boot up any other programs, or do I just have a bad drive? any help would be appreciated. thanks!

Try holding down the Option button when turning on the disk drive. This disables BASIC (which a large number of programs do not require). You don't need DOS to run these games. If the Option thing doesn't work, it could be a disk drive issue (dirty head, etc.). I've never heard of a program frying any hardware... sounds rather urban legendish to me

Roger

Thanks, Ill try that. now that you mention it, I can't recall where I saw that thing about the disks getting fried.

Most likely dirty disk drive or bad disk. I had a few 1050s sitting around and recently when I was testing some disk software, some had problems loading the programs until I gave the drive a good cleaning. Fortunately, I kept the disks in their sleeves and in a box, but the disk drives I kept without any covers.

Hi folks
you could try turning by hand the disk in the sleeve to free it up a little and then loading the game holding the disk drive level open a little to relieve the pressure on the disk
trbb

How would he revolve the disk at around 300rpm and wouldn't he have to first drill a hole from the bottom of the drive so he can put the disk on his finger to spin it with the lever open?

Anyways, I don't think the speed of the disk being an issue is remote.

You know, it's a small world. I know a user with same id as you in another forum.

he he I couldn't resist joining another forum! How's it going?