Atari810 - A Disk Drive Emulator
Atari810 is free software (under the GNU/GPL software license) for emulating an
Atari 8-bit floppy drive or hard disk on your PC.
Ever Seen a Stack of Eight 810 Drives?
What this means is that your PC, connected to the Atari via a serial port,
appears to be a giant Atari disk drive, or rather, up to eight disk drives.
Instead of using real disks, the emulator uses disk image files which are just
binary files containing a copy of each sector of a real Atari disk. The
emulator supports .ATR format files from tiny single-sided, single-density,
5.25" disk images (720 sectors or 92KB) to whopping hard-disk images up to
16MB. Read more in the manual here.
Screen Shot: (click to enlarge)
New features in 1.4d
* UI improvements, including several selectable "skins" (some resizable).
* improved error reporting on setup
* fixed disk image creation "missing dll" message
* status window improvements
* the Delete key now will clear the status window
New features in 1.3b
* Now supports Ultra-Speed Disk I/O (3 times standard I/O speed). This has been
tested works very well with SpartaDOS 3.2g and also the
Ape Warp+ OS Upgrade by Steven Tucker. The CSS Ultraspeed OS is
currently not working well with Atari810, due to some small problems to be
worked out in the next few releases. I highly recommend these OSes for Atari
users, since you can then enjoy Ultra-Speed Disk I/O at all times -- not just
when duplicating disks or copying files, but even when playing games, viewing
demos, compiling code, etc.
* Please let me know of any other incompatibilites that you find with other
"High-Speed" OSes, DOSes, or other software.
* Atari810 now supports setting the Atari clock, and is compatible with the
standard set by APE, and existing utilities (APETIME.COM).
* The stack was being corrupted in the driver and causing the program to crash
in rare cases; this is now fixed.
New features in 1.3
* more bug fixes. Now supports High-Speed Disk I/O (2 times standard SIO
speed), when using a high-speed capable DOS, such as SpartaDOS.
New features in 1.2
* many minor bug fixes in the ui, emulation, and disk image creation.
New Features in 1.1
* High performance sio driver, running as a realtime process
* Graphical UI (in the "shape" of a real Atari810)
* Session management stored in an xml database
* Disk image creation with customizable templates stored in an xml database
Credits
Many thanks go to Nick Kennedy who designed and developed the orginal cable and
SIO2PC program, and for graciously posting his source code. Atari810 derives
many of its algorithms and data structures from Nick's original SIO2PC source
code written in 8086 assembly language. Visit Nick's page
here.
Note About the SIO2PC Cable
To use this emulator for any practical purpose, you need an SIO2PC cable.
The parts you will need are mainly this cable since the driver and other parts including the resizebale skin are built in features,
so if you are a Parts Geek like I am,
know most of those are included now; instead of Atari, you may need to find a hobby in fixing
a car like a Ford or Ranger with multiple pieces.
Instructions for building one yourself can be found here
or here. Thanks to
Rick Cortese and Clarence Dyson, respectively, for documenting this simple, yet
effective, hardware interface.
It is also possible to order a very reasonably priced, yet expertly made cable
from j131 on ebay. Check
here for his current acutions or visit his web page
here.
Downloads
 Download
Atari810 1.4d binaries for Windows NT/2000/XP
Download Atari810 binaries
for Windows 95/98/ME (not available yet)
Download Atari810 binaries
for Linux (not available yet)
Download
Atari810 1.4d Source Code
html-ized by Dan Vernon -- April 2001
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