ANTIC The Atari 8-bit Podcast ANTIC Interview 398 - Dan Noguerol (Farb): Atari 8-bit Software Preservation Initiative
Dan Noguerol (Farb): Atari 8-bit Software Preservation Initiative Two interviews with the same person, recorded more than four years apart. Dan Noguerol is better known to the Atari community as Farb. He is the mastermind behind the Atari 8-bit Software Preservation Initiative, and years ago created SIO2Arduino, an Arduino-based disk drive emulator. I interviewed Farb on August 29, 2019, where we talked primarily about the Atari 8-bit Software Preservation Initiative. That interview took place at the Fujiama Atari event in Lengenfeld, Germany. Our friend Roland Wassenberg sat in on the interview. Shortly after doing that interview, I learned that Randy Kindig had also interviewed Farb, on April 20, 2015, but got busy and hadn't published the interview. So in this episode, two interviews with Farb: my more recent interview first, then we'll go back to 2015 to hear Randy's interview. ... Since this interview was recorded, I received my SuperCard Pro, and have used it to digitize a couple hundred Atari disks. I've also digitized dozens of Atari cassette tapes. With the Software Preservation Initiative web site, the process has gotten a lot easier. The Kryoflux and SuperCard Pro hardware and software still isn't as foolproof as I'd like, but there's been progress on that front for sure. Next, Randy's 2015 interview. In it, they discuss the Software Preservation Initiative, which was at a much earlier stage at that point, and SIO2Arduino. SIO2Arduino is an Atari 8-bit device emulator that runs on the Arduino platform. It connects to Atari 8-bit hardware and emulates a single Atari 1050 disk drive. In the years since this interview was recorded, the project has largely been made obsolete by projects like the S-Drive-MAX and FujiNet. But Farb's work on SIO2Arduino, and making it open-source, absolutely laid the groundwork for those newer hardware projects. Atari 8-bit Software Preservation Initiative SIO2Arduino web site SIO2Arduino at GitHub