Atari madness

Well, again a lot happened. Our daughter Marie Emma arrived on this planet and in the wake of this event time for projects has been kind of washed away…. or to put it in another way: A smile from my baby gives me more than soldering some pins to a tiny SMD latch. 😉 Nontheless I am writing here, so the retro bug is not dead, yet; far from it!

I read alot about the early video games, about how it all started (actually reading not much else for years 😉 ) and was kind of keen to see some of my favorite games from the C64 on the Atari. So my latest purchase on the hardware site had been a couple of Atari 8-bit machines. Sadly the Atari 800, along with the Atari 5600 received some really bad cracks in the housing thanks to the post that seemed to have dropped the whole package. Status: 5600 dead and completely broken hatch, the A800 still running but received a major crack on one corner. This all happened four month ago and just yesterday I finally got the money form the Austrian post office back. I try to see it positive. The money I got won’t fix the computer nor is enough to buy a new one as this was a very special deal form a fellow collector. On the other hand I got two machines for no money now… and that is a reason to smile again.

Although having some Atari disc drives at hand, I have no software at all – Commodore fanboy, I am, you know! I was looking for some SD Card drive and after finding most of them too expensive I stumbled across this the Diskwiz project. Using an Arduino and a few parts, this little thing emulates up to 4 Atari drives. A display could be hooked up as well. I rebuild the hardware so far on an Arduino, but could not flash the ATMega 328p. There are some tutorials how to flash the AT using a second arduino, but nothing worked for me. Maybe it is due to the fact that my second arduino is a roboduino and there might be some differences. However I asked someone at the last HomeCon to flash it for me. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

Atari 800 - case brokenAtari 5200 - hatch broken and DOADiskwiz rebuild with arduino

 

 

 

 

 

 

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