Total beginner needs help getting Atari to PC going.

[alpostino]

I have unearthed the family's old Atari 800 system and peripherals. There are two 800XL's actually, two 1050 drives, and an 810 drive. (Also a tape player and printer, and the various cables needed to connect them.) As a child, I was a wizard with these tools, as was my mother; she transferred her family's entire recipe collection onto 5" floppies.

 

Here's the rub: I don't really want to play old games, relieve old programs I wrote, or any of that. All the nostalgia I need can be gained by downloading ROMs and using MAME and MESS. What I really want to do is transfer my mother's recipes onto the PC so they can be reformatted or printed. She still holds a grudge that my late father never bothered to do it.

 

My aptitude for jiggering up hardware was at one time high, but in the twenty years since last using the Atari, I've lost all such knowledge. I've scoured several sites, including this one, and see much made of the 800 emulation programs and SIO2PC cables, but there's little for the complete beginner to grab onto. I have the hardware listed above, and the floppies containing the recipes, but at present cannot locate the one with the program she used to enter and store them. At minimum, I'd like to know if such files could be transferred to the PC as, say, .txt files, and I could then be obliged to comb out the various codes and save the imbedded text. At maximum, the recipe program (whose very name is unknown to me) could be downloaded as a ROM, run on an emulator, and the recipes could be plugged in and saved on the PC as plain .txt files.

 

Maybe none of this is possible. I've no idea. A beginner, I said. Hopefully someone on this board knows of a start from scratch webpage to help me out, or (dream come true) can simply tell me what's needed to get it done.

 

Much obliged in advance,

 

Christopher Morlock.

[deathtrappomegranate]

Here's a good place to start:

 

http://www.atarimax.com/sio2pc/documentati...tion/index.html

 

There are links at the bottom of the page about how to set it up, and other documentation.

 

It should be possible to retrieve all of the information, as long as the disks are still readable. How easy that will be depends on the format that was used to store it, but if you can get the SIO2PC setup working, that will be half the battle.

[Bryan]

Sounds like you need to make ATR's of your floppies so you can manipulate them quickly on a PC.

 

-Bry