Hacking the Atari 800 Serial Input/Output to a Raspberry Pi Zero W | #piday #raspberrypi @Raspberry_Pi
Supercool project with some retro-history backstory and project walkthrough over at blog.lmorchard.com:
That brings me to the SIO port on the Atari 800. Where most 80s computers had a handful of parallel & serial ports of proprietary & standard flavors – the Atari 8-bit computers had just this one port for talking to disks, cassettes, printers, modems, or whatever. If that sounds familiar, the SIO port could be considered a predecessor to our modern USB port. Oddly enough, Joseph C. Decuirworked on both technologies, so I think the similarity is more than coincidental.
In my idle googling on how to get new data piped into my old Atari, I found this 2013 post on AtariAge entitled “SIO2PI -> Raspberry Pi as a floppy” by TheMontezuma.
In that post is a simple circuit: It used a logic level voltage converter, a diode, a Raspberry Pi, and some wires. I didn’t really know all that much about voltage levels and serial ports before this, but this seems handy for all kinds of things and well within my ability to build.
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