Giving an old Atari computer a much needed upgrade

April 4, 2012 By Leave a Comment

As a kid, [Boisy] cut his teeth on the TRS-80 Color Computer. It was a wonderful machine for its day, featuring a relatively powerful Motorola 6809 CPU. Although his CoCo was theoretically more powerful than its Commodore and Apple contemporaries, the graphics and sound capabilities of [Boisy]’s first love paled in comparison to his friends 6502-based machines. A little jealously and thirty years go a long way, because now [Boisy] is adding a 6809 microprocessor to the 6502-based machines Atari put out.

[Boisy]’s goal for his Liber809 project was simple: Put a 6809 CPU in an Atari XEGS and get NitrOS-9, the Unix-like OS for the TRS-80 CoCo running on his Frankenputer. After a few months of work, [Boisy] completed his goal and more so: the Liber809 also works on the Atari 1200XL.

To put [Boisy]’s work in perspective, it’s like he took a Macintosh from 1993 and made it run on an Intel 486. While that’s not a terribly accurate analogy, we hope our readers will understand the fortitude needed to make a computer run on a completely different processor.

After the break, you can check out a neat demo app written by [SLOR] from the AtariAge forums showcasing a 6809 running in a machine designed for a 6502. Awesome work for all involved

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Loading programs onto a TRS-80 Model 100

March 5, 2012 By Leave a Comment

We’d guess that you don’t have a TRS-80 Model 100 computer sitting around. But we’ve heard that the decades-old hardware is built like a tank so if you search around you can probably get your hands on a working unit. The Model 100 boasted some nice features, one of which was a 300 baud modem allowing you to transfer data onto the device. [MS3FGX] wanted to give it a try but had to do some work to get the Model 100 to communicate with modern hardware.

This could have been a much more involved process, but since the Model 100’s modem uses common communications standards it’s really just a matter of hooking it up and choosing the right COM port settings on a computer. In this example a Linux box is used with the program Minicom. It is configured to communicate at 300 baud 8N1 (8 data bits, no parity bit, and one stop bit).

With software in place you’ll need to make your own cable. [MS3FGX] does this using a DB-25 connector for the Model 100 side, and a DB-9 connector for the serial port on the Linux box. He’s got a pin-out for the cable on the second page of his guide. It sounds like it should be no problem to use a USB-serial converter if you don’t have a serial port.

Once everything is in place you’ll be able to transfer BASIC programs from your computer to the Model 100.

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