greaseweazle VS RespeQt

Take a look at the Greaseweazle https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle to see what a really high-end solution in this space looks like. It's intended as a from-scratch alternative to the beter known KryoFlux.

If you get yourself a greaseweazle (or have an stm32 blue pill laying around) it will allow you to create a disk image of the disks over usb

https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle

Seems to use an older, non-openhardware solution.

These days, there's GreaseWeazle[0], setting the standard.

0. https://github.com/keirf/Greaseweazle

Any PC floppy drive (they shipped in large numbers, so not expensive or hard to find), connected with GreaseWeazle.

Note that the SCP raw flux format can be read/written with the open source GreaseWeazle[0].

0. https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle/wiki/Supported-Image-T...

Get a GreaseWeazle. They are cheap and well worth the hassle.

This blog reminds me of -me- back in the day. I cut my teeth on programming bad Atari BASIC games, but eventually I learned 6502 assembly and wrote my own disassembler, modem routines, etc... heady days!

And funny timing, this weekend I (finally) plugged in and got working an old 800XL I bought on eBay about a year ago -- but after purchasing the machine, it gathered dust while I got distracted with so many other things. :-)

This Atari came with 100s of floppy disks and a folder with dot-matrix printouts cataloging the files on each disk. Previous owner had the machine for decades and was very meticulous. It also came with a 1050 disk drive which makes scary wheezing noises when the disk spins, lol. I don't think I'll use the disk drive much since everything interesting is downloadable nowadays in seconds in ATR image format; I also picked up a SIO port to serial adapter, so I can link the Atari to my laptop. It's pretty amazing, the Atari sees my laptop as a disk drive using RespeQt [1] on the laptop. It is -so- much faster/easier than actually dealing with the disks like back in the day.

And if you thought disks were slow... this machine also came with a cassette drive (!!) but it needs some lube or something, the rotors don't spin at the right speed. I kinda want to show some of my students the slow speed at which we used to be tortured: ten minutes to load a single game, and that only if you were lucky enough for it to load successfully on the first try...

The most interesting aspect of this experiment is the speed at which technology operates now: I had forgotten just how slow everything was. A simpler time.

[1] RespeQT - https://github.com/RespeQt/RespeQt

Try RespeQt - https://github.com/RespeQt/RespeQt