Is this the best Atari 8 bit peripheral ever made? I think it might just be! #amazed!

hi everyone and welcome back to the shack it's been an incredible six months since we last took a look at this atari 800 xl after cleaning it all up good as new and fixing the disk drive as well it's been sitting on one of my desks just waiting for a bit of love and today we're looking at an amazing peripheral for the atari 8-bit range that well quite simply has blown my tiny little mind and is the perfect blend of cutting-edge modern technology joined seamlessly to atari's 1979 hardware so what is this piece of kit that's exploded my noggin and made me dust off the old girl for another video well let's find out [Music] here at the shack we'd like to give a huge thank you to the sponsor for this video pcb way they help us out with all of our pcb fabrication needs and make fantastic boards at amazingly competitive prices and it's not only pcbs that are on the menu apart from other fabrication services like cnc machining 3d printing sheet metal fabrication and injection molding pcb way also have a great projects library of cool stuff to build from people all around the world oh and if you don't like waving a soldering iron about they can even assemble your pcbs for you that's the pcb way right on with the show all right first a bit of history we all know what this is of course it's a universal serial bus or usb cable specifically a usb type a which famously always needs three attempts to insert correctly the usb 1.0 standard launched in 1996 and through various iterations has become ubiquitous as the method of connecting well firstly computers to peripherals and lately anything to anything and in doing so has largely rendered serial and parallel ports on the backs of pcs almost entirely redundant at least for the average home user usb 1.1 launched in 1998 did away with most of the early issues with 1.0 largely centered around timing and power limitations and it helped to bring about this era of legacy free pcs and true consumer hot swappable plug and play where devices didn't need to be present at boot time to have resources allocated in only a few short years devices using usb interfaces flooded the market and those big bulky serial and parallel cables all got chucked away so what's this got to do with our lovely atari 800 from 40 years ago well this port on the back of the 800 xl is an atari sio or serial input output port and to all intents and purposes this is a very early iteration of a usb port and i'm confident in saying this because this port and the interface standard it supports were designed by a chat called joseph c de cure and i think i'm pronouncing that correctly but correct me if i'm wrong who is also one of the designers of the usb standard and credits his early work on the atari sio as the basis for modern usb now that's a very interesting little nugget of information but so what i hear you cry well unlike a lot of the other machines of this era which had multiple and different ports for their peripherals the atari range had only one this one so whereas on the back of the c64 for example you have the serial port for connection of a floppy drive or a printer the cassette port for the data set and the user port for other things on the atari you've got this and only this and like usb it's really clever most devices for the 8-bit atari range come equipped with two of these ports such as here on the back of this 1050 disk drive and here on the back of this 1030 modem what you could do was daisy chain these devices together with cables in any order you like and when powered on the os in the atari will see what's connected on this serial bus and assign resources and ids to each now you can't have two of the same thing on the bus such as two drive one devices so in that example the 1050 drive comes with a switch on the back to determine whether it should be recognized as drive one two three etc the 410 data set will identify itself as such as would a 1030 modem and so the atari would have one cable coming out and there will be a load of other stuff going along down the chain all individually identifiable and all working together for the most part so all of those devices send all of their information along the one cable to be picked up by the atari's sio port to be dealt with by the atari os and now we understand that we can take a look at this mind-boggling piece of technology this is the fujinet 1.6 and when plugged into the atari it utilizes that atari sio bus to pretend to be ready for this an atari 410 cassette recorder identified as device c up to eight concurrent atari 1050 disk drives identified as device d1 d2 etc an atari 850 modem identified as device r a virtual atari printer identified as device p with anything sent to the printer being saved as a pdf file on the unit's sd card and as if that wasn't enough this device will also connect to your wi-fi and provide a transparent network layer that allows you to access the internet using standard tcp udp protocols and it has a web interface built in so you can control various aspects of the device remotely from your web browser to for example pick up that pdf file you created on your virtual printer oh and there's a real time clock text to speech network gaming and you know what i think that's enough talk let's just take a look at it working booting the atari with the fujinet attached we get this rather funky looking loading screen and then we're immediately asked if we want to join a network or we can rescan or skip this part if we want to but of course network access is one of the big reasons for choosing this device so we'll join my local wi-fi and when connected everything turns a lovely green and we progress to the main application screen now this screen is divided into two parts a list of hosts and a list of drives let's start with adding our first host which will be the internal sd card simply putting sd in the host list will activate that and we can now navigate to our program and for me it's going to be robotron 2084 which is my all-time favorite atari game the system asks what drive we want to assign it to and then we're back with the program list pressing escape we get back to the main screen we'll tab down and press and hold the option key to mount and boot that drive we've just selected now the fujinet is emulating the 1050 drive so we've not got an instantaneous load but robotron isn't a large game so we'll load up pretty quickly and we're in the way i've got my screen capture set up here overlaid onto the static background you can't see my frantic joystick waggling but this does have the looks and sounds of the arcade original need to figure out if we can play with two joysticks though so our first host is pretty straightforward the local sd card but let's take a look at something really cool for this we're going to be adding a new host to our list and this time we're going to be pointing to a tnfs or trusted network file system in this case one supplied by the fujinet team fujinet.online and this has a number of directories to trawl through but we're going to select galaxians because it's a great game and it's quite small so it should load quickly assigning the disk to drive 1 fujinet will download the file from the host and mount it ready for playing press and hold option and we're suddenly able to play a game on a local atari that we've pulled straight off the net very nice as well as the pre-established tnfs hosts the fujinet reference in their documentation you can also create your own in that way you can create a repository of your favorite software that's always available to you wherever you happen to be as long as you've packed your 8-bit atari of course anyway let's take a look at how the fujinet handles multi-disc games and for this we're going to use gauntlet because it's just a brilliant game we'll put both of the discs in their respective drives and again press and hold the option key to mount and boot from drive one now this is a bit of a bigger game as you'd expect so we'll whiz through the bulk of the loading there's something about this gauntlet music that just brings back so many memories of pumping coin after coin after coin into the arcade game anyway choose our character think we'll go for the warrior and then we have a bit more loading to do now when the game asks us to swap disks there's no navigating a menu we just press the left button once and we're here and that was disc two if he didn't quite catch it if we pressed it again it'd cycle back to disc one or if there was a third disc inserted it would go on to that one you get the idea so as far as discs are concerned you've got full control over these virtual 1050 drives as if they were the real thing it's extremely transparent and very simple to use now what about printing i mentioned that earlier well again that's a doddle and it starts by jumping to the web interface for your fujinet which is located at the ip address allocated to the fujinet when we connect it to our network and you can find this out by pressing c for config on the main fujinet interface about halfway down that page you'll find the printer section and you can select the printer you want to be attached to the atari from the drop down list we'll select the atari 1027 and ensure we've got p1 set as the printer port then on the atari itself we'll load our little printing test program which is on the atari app errata online host we'll pop that in drive one as read only and we'll hold option to boot off that disk we'll now copy the gpl80.tx file on that printing test disk to the p1 device which should be our virtual atari 1027 printer this does take a few minutes to do because while computers were very slow back then but when it's done we can flick back to the web interface and click to download your current printout which is a pdf version of the atari 1027 output and this works for any software that supports any of the printers in the drop down list very nice indeed another great feature of the fujinet is that because it can emulate the atari modem transparently to the atari os just like all the other devices it means you can use your atari to access bulletin boards to do this we first need to mount a disk with some terminal programs which are easily found on the fujinet tnfs host under the comms area once that disk is mounted we'll do our usual and hold option to boot that disk once booted we'll select the classic terminal software bob term and wait for that to load once in we'll change the terminal emulation to ascii up the baud rate from 1200 to 2400 board be steady my beating heart and then we'll press return to enter terminal emulation mode a quick at command gives us a healthy okay which means the modem is responding so let's connect to an internet-based bbs which is pretty amazing when you consider the internet didn't exist at the time this machine was built [Music] once connected to the bbs we can sign in and do well bbs things all very clever and very transparent there's also the ability to map the end device to a trusted network server and then use a limited number of controls to drop and get files to network locations but that doesn't seem to be working for me at the moment so i may need to level up my brain to get that bit going in any case that's the main features of the fujinet and considering this thing costs around 60 pounds uk i think this must be an essential purchase for anyone with an atari 8-bit computer it really does open up the world to your machine i really can't recommend it highly enough right that's it for this episode and as always we hope you've enjoyed it if you like the channel please subscribe and hit the bell for notifications of new content please leave your comments below as we always love to read them and if you have or get one of these devices we'd love to know what you think of it if you've got anything you'd like to donate and see featured on the channel please drop us an email and if you'd like to support us jump to our coffee page to find out how there's a link in the description well until next time in the retro shack it's goodbye from me [Music] you

Channel: The Retro Shack

Views: 45,816

Keywords: Commodore 64, Commodore, c64, c64 games, c64c, computer literacy, zx spectrum, spectrum, spectrum next, retro, retrogaming, retro computer, bbc model b, computer history, nostalgia, Epyx, Fastloader, pi1541, cartridge, atari, sinclair, the 8 bit guy, lgr

Id: ySgUuWtRt4c

Length: 14min 28sec (868 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 19 2022