SIO2SD with Atari 800

[Knimrod]

I finally dug my old Atari 800 out of mothballs where it's been hiding for the last 30 years or so. Took it all apart, cleaned everything and re-seated all the ICs. It lives! The floppies were in bad shape with the oxide coming off so I decided to invest in a more modern file storage medium. I ordered and received a SIO2SD from Lotharek which works fine for the most part. However, I am having some issues. The "Turbo Loader" (topdrive?) displays at the top of screen when booting but is completely unresponsive to any keys. I can continue to boot whatever drive I have selected in the SIO2SD by pressing the reset button. I also tried installing the latest SIO2SD.xex in the SD Card root. After disabling topdrive, when powering up, the file catalog appears on the screen properly but it's also completely unresponsive to any keys (except reset).

 

I turned the SIO2SD's high speed mode off in the configuration. The SD card I'm using is an older Transcend 1GB card which I reformatted to "FAT" in Win7. Other than the issues mentioned above, it seems to work fine booting images and loading files as expected. While the SIO2SD is perfectly useable as is, it's still a little bothersome that something may not be right.

 

Is there something I'm missing or some incompatibilty with an 800?

 

Any help or advice would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

[FifthPlayer]

I suspect the Turbo Loader is incompatible with the 800's OS. It's some sort of patch that enables the SIO2SD to load boot drives at high speed.

 

You can turn this off in the SIO2SD settings menu; it's the "top drive" feature. Turn it off.

[Knimrod]

I suspect the Turbo Loader is incompatible with the 800's OS. It's some sort of patch that enables the SIO2SD to load boot drives at high speed.

 

You can turn this off in the SIO2SD settings menu; it's the "top drive" feature. Turn it off.

Thanks. I suspected the same thing. I assume the same for the on-screen loader (sio2sd.xex). It's unfortunate but I can live with it as everything else seems to work properly. Thanks again!

[FifthPlayer]

Glad you got the SIO2SD working on your 800.

 

I've tried the sio2sd.xex loader on my 130XE. It largely duplicates what you can do directly in the settings menu on the device. It does have more features but I can't figure out how to use it and the docs are in Polish. I don't use it, and I don't feel I'm missing out on much.