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 1.3b
* 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. 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
1.3b binaries for Windows NT/2000/XP (145 KB) Download Atari810
binaries for Windows 95/98/ME (not available yet) Download Atari810
binaries for Linux (not available yet) Download Atari810
1.3 Source Code (265 KB)P.S. Anyone want to help out with unavailable ports? (i.e. Linux?)