Project thoughts

LDA#$AF · January 26, 2004

I just ordered the SIO2PC adapter to connect my Atari800 to a PC.

I am considering using the case from my failed 1050 floppy drive as a case for the PC to which I would attach the Atari800.

It looks like you can get embedded 486 cards that would easily fit into the 1050 case, but I've never done anything like this so I don't really know if or how it might work.

Has anyone tried using these embedded cards to do anything similar and are there any reasons that I wouldn't be able to do this? Are there any resources that you're familiar with that might be useful.

I appreciate your thoughts.

Curt Vendel · January 26, 2004

I did something similar a couple of years ago with an Intel 386 embedded board, a small P/S I bought from digikey.

Today its some much easier, you can get much better embedded boards from a 486 upwards to a Pentium and have a flash boot rom or better yet, get an IDE2CF converter or an embedded controller with a Compact Flash port on it, then you can copy a DOS boot image to it, autoexec running the PC side of the SIO2PC on it and run from there... Some of the embedded controllers even have an ethernet controller and if you really want to get crazy, load up a stripped down copy of Win95 off the embedded board and autorun VNC (From AT&T, free remote control software) and from another PC you can always go into the embedded controller and change some settings.... or just stick with a strickly DOS environment and not worry about VNC or remote consoling... Its been a looooooooong time since I've done this, but in the older PC/MS DOS' like 3.31-5.0 there was a TTY command and you could run DOS commands off the serial port as a terminal. OpenDOS (which was DR DOS should still have that command and its freeware)

CF's are so cheap now, you could even get one of the 1gb IBM microdrives and use that inside the case, its a really fun project and a nice way of keeping your set-up looking all Atari.

Curt