Use an Arduino to Build an SIO3SD Floppy Drive Emulator for Atari 8-Bit Computers
The SIO2SD floppy drive emulator makes it easy to load disk images onto your Atari 8-bit family computer.
Most early home computers, including the entire Atari 8-Bit Family, didn’t have any kind of persistent storage. The operating system was stored on a ROM (Read-Only Memory) chip, and there wasn’t any way to store data in RAM (Random-Access Memory) without power. The solution was to use external drives with removable media. Cassette tapes were a common storage medium of the era, but eventually floppy disks became more popular. Going as far back as the Atari 400 and 800, floppy disk drives were available. Now you can use an Arduino to emulate a floppy drive for your Atari 8-bit computer to make it easy to load or store data.
You can, of course, still find original floppy disk drives for the Atari 8-Bit Family of home computers, but actually using them can be a pain. Compatible floppy disks, which came in a variety of 5-1/4” formats, can be difficult to find and are prone to data corruption. Even if everything is working well, you still need a way to get data, such as software that you download from the internet, onto those disks. With this floppy disk drive emulator, you can simply copy disk images to an SD card. Then you can load those images onto your Atari 8-bit computer just like if you were using a real disk drive.
If you want, you can build this emulator on a breadboard using an Arduino Leonardo or Arduino Pro Micro board and the complementary components. But it’s far easier and tidier to utilize the custom SIO2SD PCB designed by c0pperdragon. That has a Microchip ATmega32u4 microcontroller, which is the same one used in the aforementioned Arduino boards. It also has an SD card slot, a pair of buttons for selecting disk images, and two seven-segment LED displays to indicate which image you’re selecting. All of that fits nicely inside of a 3D-printed enclosure that resembles a miniature version of the actual Atari 1050 floppy drive. The cable plugs directly into the port on your Atari, so no modification of the actual computer is necessary. If you’re looking for an affordable way to load disks, this is it!