Friday, March 23, 2018

Hacking the Atari 800 Serial Input/Output to a Raspberry Pi Zero W | #piday #raspberrypi @Raspberry_Pi

Supercool project with some retro-history backstory and project walkthrough over at blog.lmorchard.com:

That brings me to the SIO port on the Atari 800. Where most 80s computers had a handful of parallel & serial ports of proprietary & standard flavors – the Atari 8-bit computers had just this one port for talking to disks, cassettes, printers, modems, or whatever. If that sounds familiar, the SIO port could be considered a predecessor to our modern USB port. Oddly enough, Joseph C. Decuirworked on both technologies, so I think the similarity is more than coincidental.

In my idle googling on how to get new data piped into my old Atari, I found this 2013 post on AtariAge entitled “SIO2PI -> Raspberry Pi as a floppy” by TheMontezuma.

In that post is a simple circuit: It used a logic level voltage converter, a diode, a Raspberry Pi, and some wires. I didn’t really know all that much about voltage levels and serial ports before this, but this seems handy for all kinds of things and well within my ability to build.

Read more.


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