Crazy New Hobby - SDrive-MAX!

[Gavin1968]

Ok, I have to tell you all, I built one of these drives for myself a couple of months ago, and fell in love with it! I have my original Atari 800 computer that my dad bought me when I was 12, I am now 50 and this cool little device is a blast! I still have a bunch of 35+ year-old floppies that almost all work, but losing them and the data has always been something that I was worried about. Well, now I don't have to worry about it because they are stored on my SDrive-MAX and now on my Google Drive. My kids are having a blast playing with the old games and I have to admit, it's been fun walking down memory lane with my first computer love.

 

I have started to make them for other vintage lovers like myself and wanted to share how I spent my last weekend. Not so sure my wife is too happy that I have taken over the kitchen with vintage hardware, and now an assembly line, but this has been a blast.

 

Would love to hear from others who use these things as well as other cool little devices I can build for my old 8-bit. I really want to get my old BBS back up, on the original equipment and figure out how to get it up via telnet. I used to run quite the pirate and phreak BBS back in the early 80's and still have all of the disks for it, so it would be a blast seeing it online for "historical" purposes.

 

Anyway, it's great to be here with my fellow Atari lovers and I hope you all have a great one!

 

Gavin

Edited October 26, 2018 by Gavin1968

[+orpheuswaking]

I've been building some for sale too, but yours are far nicer (I don't have a 3d printer so the cases I have on hand are all I have left) and I'm repurposing original SIO cables.

 

It's kind of fun to build them up for others to use.

Edited October 26, 2018 by orpheuswaking

[manterola]

A little off topic... What are the advantages (beside the nice touch screen and the XL style case) wrt the sio2sd I already have. Is it functionally similar? I read and read and I couldn't figure it out. Except for the cas and atx support.

[MrMartian]

A little off topic... What are the advantages (beside the nice touch screen and the XL style case) wrt the sio2sd I already have. Is it functionally similar? I read and read and I couldn't figure it out. Except for the cas and atx support.

 

You've pretty much summed up the additional features. I would say, personally, that the sio2sd is still the more reliable choice.... But I am working on the code to clean it up.. Others probably are too..

[Gunstar]

A little off topic... What are the advantages (beside the nice touch screen and the XL style case) wrt the sio2sd I already have. Is it functionally similar? I read and read and I couldn't figure it out. Except for the cas and atx support.

To me the touchscreen, regardless that it's touch-sensitive, that's just the cherry on top, but because of the larger view area. I have stayed away from the standard SIO2SD devices because the thought of changing drives and trying to scroll up and down a menu/directory with just a couple of visible lines on the screen seemed like far too much of a chore to search for what I want to mount. It's worth it to me to wait for the firmware to catch up.

[SS]

My SDRIVE-MAX works great as a loading device and I do like the relatively large touchscreen. I have had difficulty getting it to communicate properly with other SIO devices in my serial line though; hopefully there will be a firmware fix for this at some point. For now, if I just want to play games the SDRIVE-MAX would be my first choice but if I have to do any writing to real floppies I rely on the SIO2SD. The SDRIVE's ability to run ATX files and cassette emulation are nice fancy bonuses.

Edited October 26, 2018 by SS

[+Nezgar]

Before this device has it been possible to run ATX on real hardware? If so it's a big revolution in the usability side of the preservation initiative.

 

I'm looking forward to receiving one of these units fromGavin1968!