Tuesday, September 21, 2021

FujiNet or Where's Jeff?

Over a year ago I fell in league with some Atari people developing a new peripheral device for the 8-bit line. The FujiNet is a nearly all-in-one SIO device for the Atari 400/800/XL/XE line of personal computers. It is capable of emulating disk drives, cassette drive, printers, and modem while providing a new network (N:) device. It is based on the ESP32 wifi-enabled MCU. Thom is our ring leader and Mozzwald our hardware designer. I'm grateful for being included and for my teammates. This project is a perfect COVID survival activity. 

FujiNet is why I stopped blogging projects - all my project energy was directed to FN development. What a huge technical distraction! I've been mainly a supporting developer (e.g., doing initial integration of code into the Platform.IO environment). I made most of the printer emulators, many with original fonts based on real Atari printer output found in manuals or obtained from the community. I collected and/or wrote printer test programs for verifying the emulator behavior. My most recent contribution was the cassette drive emulator; I'm still debugging writing cassette data to a CAS image. 


My collection of FujiNet hardware spanning the first ESP8266 unit to the pre-release version 1.6.