Farb

Thanks for kind words, RodCastler. The project is in a resting state until I get the time and motivation to work on it again. I mostly accomplished what I wanted to with it, namely PRO image support and as much ATX image support as I could implement without the format being properly documented. As for what's next, I don't know. I think the video overlay idea is cool but I'm not knowledgable enough to get something like that working. I'd still like to toy with 850 emulation at some point. One of the reasons I made the firmware open source is so others could jump in and contribute. I've only ever heard of one other person attempting to build SIO2Arduino and he never let me know if he was successful. If you get yours working, please let me know!

I've tried twice over the past couple of months to submit my collection of 200+ Kryoflux Atari images to SPS and never got any sort of confirmation they were received.

I remember having some correspondence with Vulcan Software back in the day. I believe it was run by Paul R. Todd out of Manassas, VA if that helps at all.

I just finished reading Ernest Cline's Ready Player One and I was surprised it hadn't been mentioned in this forum yet. It was a pretty entertaining book and had A LOT of classic game and 80's pop culture references. Atari 8-bits were mentioned a few times but the 2600 and Atari coin-ops were significantly more prominent. If you haven't taken a look at it, I suggest grabbing a free excerpt online. The first 30 or so pages will give you a pretty good gauge for whether you'd enjoy reading it all the way through.

I just picked up an Ario FE2270 for $170 at my local Microcenter. The picture quality is decent when using the 130XE over composite.

I'm glad you guys like it. I'm working on adding a save capability so it can be used as a file converter. It's been interesting to convert some ATX images to PRO and have them work :-)

Correct, as mentioned in the first post it only supports SD images at the moment.

Here's the download link: http://www.whizzosoftware.com/forums/files/category/19-applications/ Make sure you have Java 1.6 installed before running.

Cool, I'll work on getting it a little more polished and release it. Perhaps. At the moment, I want to improve ATX support in SIO2Arduino (which is one of the reasons I wrote the disk browser in the first place).

Ah, what I meant by "sector map" is simply a visual representation of all sector statuses (e.g. good, empty, bad, duplicate, missing). Bad choice of terms... it doesn't try to make sense of the data on the disk.

What do you mean by a non-DOS image?

In the course of reverse-engineering / understanding the PRO and ATX disk formats, I wrote a program that allows me to view sector data and get a visual representation of a disk's sector map. It currently supports SD ATR/PRO/ATX images. If anyone feels they might benefit from it's use, just say so and I'll clean it up and release it. It's written in Java so I could create application bundles for Mac and Windows.

Oh, and here's the command-line I'm using for flippy imaging: dtc -ftrack-stream -g2 -y -b-8 -k2 -i0 -ftrack-raw -g2 -y -b-8 -k2 -i2 -fdisk.xfd -g2 -y -b-8 -i3a

Success! I've imaged my first flippy disk! One thing I discovered from the Kryoflux guys is that the current Mac version of their software doesn't support flippy imaging. You have to use the latest Windows or Linux version.

I've completed the mods to the JU-475-4 and, unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work. I've posted to the Kryoflux forum to see if they might have some troubleshooting tips.

One is a JU-475-4 and the other is a JU-475-5 (the one used in the video). I am doing the -4 before touching the -5 :-) There's nothing secret... just eBay. There is a JU-475-5 up there right now. I paid around $30 each shipped. If you aren't able to get one, let me know and we can work something out to get your disks imaged once I get my setup working.

I managed to get two Panasonic floppy drives that I'm going to modify for flippy imaging. I've just re-watched the youtube video on how to do it... I had forgotten that it looked like a PITA :-)

I've added preliminary support for SDrive directory navigation as well as added support for a "reset" button that automatically mounts a file named "AUTORUN.ATR" in the root of the SD card. There doesn't seem to currently be an easy way to go to the current working directory's parent directory so navigating up one level in the SDrive software takes you back to the root directory for now. These changes should now make the SDrive software fully usable to control SIO2Arduino. There is, however, still a lot of work left to make SIO2Arduino fully compatible with the SDrive software. Whether that's necessary or not is an open question :-)

I found a cool option in APE's ProSystem tool to interrogate a drive (which includes some timing information). The seek times on a 1050 is shown as follows: Track to track: 201 ms Half Rail: 716 ms Full Rail: 1121 ms

How did you submit? I opened a ticket on the SPS website (and contacted them through AtariAge) and have heard nothing back.

That's what it looks like: ftp://ftp.pigwa.net/stuff/collections/nir_dary_cds/Tech%2520Info/DOS.HTM

XEX support is now added and checked into GitHub!

Thanks for all your suggestions! I tried both fox's and kenfused's suggestions. I've decided to go with the KBoot header since it was easy to implement and reminds me of when I used to download ATR images from the Internet many years ago and wonder why there was a 'k' in the upper-corner of the screen during the boot

I'd like to add XEX/COM support to SIO2Arduino and am unsure of the best way to wrap one so it can boot like a disk? There's very limited space on the device so I can't store much in memory. Any ideas?

The changes to support ATX are now up on GitHub. It currently doesn't do accurate timing, uses a simple flip-flop algorithm for duplicate sectors and ignores weak sectors so some images will not work. The ones I've tried thus far all seem to work ok. Once the way the ATX format stores weak sectors is documented, I will implement support for them. Accurate timing will be more of a challenge as memory is getting tight.