[NBLUG/talk] Commodore nostalgia

Bill Kendrick nbs at sonic.net
Mon May 11 12:44:19 PDT 2009


On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 12:33:25PM -0700, Jordan Erickson wrote:
> Heh, funny you mention Atari - I told my friend in Chile about my find 
> and he showed me the first computer he had - 
> http://www.heimcomputer.de/english/comp/atari65xe.html

My first was technically the hand-me-down Timext Sinclair 1000 that my
brother gave me when he got a C=64, but a year later I got a 1200XL.
Best. Keyboard. Ever.

I currently have an 800XL upgraded to 256KB RAM (useful for demos, some
games, or as a RAMdisk).  For many moons (since 1991?) I was booting it off
of a PC using an Atari SIO <-> PC serial port adapter.

My laptop has no such port (9-pin serial? guh?), however I recently
purchased a little device that lets me boot my Atari off of disk images
stored on an SD memory card.  (So it replaces the PC, the serial port,
and the adapter cable, all in one tiny unit with a backlit LCD screen and
some buttons for navigating the disk images on the SD card.  SD itself is
FAT-formatted, BTW.)

In both cases, since the thing on the other end (PC via SIO2PC cable, or
now this SIO2SD device; there's also SIO2IDE and SIO2USB thingies out there)
looks and act slike an Atari floppy disk drive, there's no issue with
software compatibility.  (Other hacks, such as internal IDE adapters, CF
card readers, IDE- or USB-through-the-cartridge-port, etc. all require OS
hacks which prevent a lot of the cool demos and games from running. :) )

Gotta run and get back to work.

-bill!



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