Very Computer

by **Gary Morto** » Fri, 04 May 2001 08:49:16

For the past few months I have been working on a project to connect an
IDE drive (I have several "old" drives which are spare) to my Atari 800
(or 130XE) via the standard SIO bus. I hope to transfer the programs
from all the floppy disks which I have accumulated (as friends have got
rid of their systems). I intend to make some kind of multi floppy disk
emulator.

I now have the hardware working and can emulate a single density floppy
disk drive.

I have named the project BadSector"A" and I have been keeping a diary of
my progress. Web pages giving schematics and source code (GPLed) can be
found at http://www.alma.demon.co.uk/Atari/AtariProjects.html.

With the help of the people in this newsgroup I hope that I can develop
this project further. There is still plenty to do!

The first thing I need help with is to choose which DOS to use with this
system. I need to use one which is really in the public domain. It needs
to support hard disk drives, needless to say. The only reason I am
emulating a floppy at the moment is that I am restricted by the standard
DOS (I'm currently using SmartDOS) as to what I can format and then
access.

Also please let me have some feedback on the web site. I'm not very good
at HTML or web page creation! I'm much better with hardware ;-).

have fun...

--Gary

by Mo » Fri, 04 May 2001 16:28:24

I remember someone on this group posting an IDE hard drive project for the
8bit. They also mentioned using a compact flash memory card instead of a
hard drive. I lost the link to their site but I sure would like an update.
As for the DOS I think I would use MyDOS 4.5, I could be wrong but I think
it allows for unusually large disks. Let us know how it comes along! I
usually just pretend that my old 486 with SIO2PC is a vaporware atari hard
drive that no one knows about <grin>.

Mo

>For the past few months I have been working on a project to connect an
>IDE drive (I have several "old" drives which are spare) to my Atari 800
>(or 130XE) via the standard SIO bus. I hope to transfer the programs
>from all the floppy disks which I have accumulated (as friends have got
>rid of their systems). I intend to make some kind of multi floppy disk
>emulator.

>I now have the hardware working and can emulate a single density floppy
>disk drive.

>I have named the project BadSector"A" and I have been keeping a diary of
>my progress. Web pages giving schematics and source code (GPLed) can be
>found at http://www.alma.demon.co.uk/Atari/AtariProjects.html.

>With the help of the people in this newsgroup I hope that I can develop
>this project further. There is still plenty to do!

>The first thing I need help with is to choose which DOS to use with this
>system. I need to use one which is really in the public domain. It needs
>to support hard disk drives, needless to say. The only reason I am
>emulating a floppy at the moment is that I am restricted by the standard
>DOS (I'm currently using SmartDOS) as to what I can format and then
>access.

>Also please let me have some feedback on the web site. I'm not very good
>at HTML or web page creation! I'm much better with hardware ;-).

>have fun...

>--Gary

Very Computer

Announcing the BadSector"A" Project

Announcing the BadSector"A" Project

Announcing the BadSector"A" Project