Atari810 1.1 Readme, Nov. 29th 2001


Atari810 is free software (under the GNU/GPL software license) for emulating an Atari 8-bit floppy drive or hard disk on your PC.

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.

You can always (I hope!) find the most current version at http://www.bitsofthepast.com/atari.


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 templates stored in an xml database


Installation notes for Windows 2000 and XP
Unzip all files into a single directory and run setup.hta. If any additional components need to be downloaded and installed you will be provided with appropriate internet links to do so.


Installation notes for Windows NT 4.0
If you use Internet Explorer 5.0 or greater, follow the directions for Windows 2000 and XP users above. Otherwise, download and install (in order) the following components from Microsoft:
1. Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 SP5 runtime (0.99 MB)
2. Microsoft Installer 1.1 (1.5 MB)
3. Microsoft XML Parser 3.0 SP1 (669 KB)


P.S.
My plans are to continue to improve Atari810. I'm currently working on a system, much like APE's "PC Mirror", that gives the Atari access to the PC filesystem. I would also like to get "Happy" high-speed (or greater) emulation working soon.

Keep in mind that although this is free software, I may need a little encouragement from time to time to keep working on new features and fixing the bugs! (hint: donating an Atari 8-bit cart would be greatly appreciated)

You can mail me with questions or suggestions; however, I have a wife and four small children, plus a full-time real job, so please be patient.

contact information:

email:
dan@bitsofthepast.com

-or-

snail mail:
Dan Vernon
Safeco Plaza
Seattle WA 98185
html-ized by Dan Vernon -- April 2001