Last year (Y2K) I had a big spring clean. I wanted
to throw away a lot of the old computer and electronic junk which I had
accumulated over the past 15 years. One large box which took up quite some
room was full of my old Atari 8-bit computer stuff. I ended up getting
the computers out, repairing my broken Atari 800, typing in old BASIC listings,
and reading old Atari magazines. Over the past few years I have been given
a large number of diskettes containing Atari software from people who have
got rid of their systems and the old 5" floppies take up quite a lot of
space. It occurred to me that if I could put all the software onto a small
hard disk then I could throw away all the diskettes.
Atari Emulators
Around the same time I started reading the comp.sys.atari.8bit
news group. From there I found and downloaded all the Atari 8-bit emulators.
In particular I was interested to see if I could play my favourite game
- Spelunker. Indeed I could. I was very impressed, however the emulators
are not perfect.
Earlier Atari Hardware Projects
This isn't my first project to connect a microprocessor to the Atari SIO
bus. Back in 1986 I designed my own printer interface. More recently I
used a PIC 16C84 to display the SIO commands on a LCD display. Have a look
here.
http://www.pjrc.com/tech/8051/
- Paul's 8051 Microcontroller Family (Tools, Projects and Free Code Offerings).
On this excellent web site there are details of how to connect an IDE hard
disk drive to a 8031 type processor <here>,
but the use of a 8255 40 pin IO port chip is required (too much soldering
for my liking!).
http://www.inipi.org/~madmage/atari/ide/atari_ide.html
- Hard disk interface by Konrad Kokoszkiewicz. No hardware details or software
available, just an overview of the DOS. A further email <here>.
Software and utilities believed to be associated with this project <here>.
http://www.asw.cz/~kubecj/asio.htm
- Excellent description of the SIO and all the commands including those
peculiar to the non Atari double density enhancement drives (Happy, US
Doubler, etc.).
