Atari Falcon Auto-Byte-Swapping IDE adapter

Sponsored by https://www.pcbway.com


The Atari Falcon IDE interface stores its data in Big-Endian format (as was natural for a 68030-based computer), but unfortunately it quickly became the standard to store IDE data in Little-Endian format.

Using modern removable media such as CF cards and SD cards with adapters on the IDE interface to your Falcon is common, but it's inconvenient to mount them in modern machines because of the need to image the media and byteswap it in software even though common Atari hard disc drivers, like HD Driver allow the partitions to be read on Windows and MacOS as well as the Falcon.

This board dynamically swaps the bytes in hardware without the register-breaking changes that a traditional 'twisted cable' approach applies. This means that you can auto-boot HD Driver from a byte-swapped SD or CF card, partition it with dual Atari/Windows partition compatibility and load the same SD card directly in your Windows or MacOS machine to copy files at pace.

  / thetechnoshed  
https://github.com/dh219/IDE_Adapter_...
https://www.pcbway.com/project/sharep...

This is open-source hardware, available at my GitHub and on my PCBWay profile

On-screen twisted wire speed measure in my old video:    • Atari Falcon Dual Internal IDE Adapter  

Third party links:

https://emutos.sourceforge.io/ Emutos. The premium Atari OS replacement that does it all
https://hddriver.net/ Uwe Siemet's HDDriver, the premium Atari Hard Disc driver
https://atari.8bitchip.info/DOS_IDE_f... Pera Putnik's Free PC-formatted IDE driver
https://forum.atari-home.de/index.php... CZietz' smart-swap IDE adapter for IDE-40 interfaces


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