exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

It was a while ago now but I didn't have any trouble getting files from the PC onto my BBAN. I didn't use HDDRIVER (although I do have multiple licenses). Are you sure you can't just plop files in the SD card using a PC/Windows?

alexh wrote: 04 Aug 2025 17:12 It was a while ago now but I didn't have any trouble getting files from the PC onto my BBAN. I didn't use HDDRIVER (although I do have multiple licenses). Are you sure you can't just plop files in the SD card using a PC/Windows?

From what I remember it never worked. If it had, I would have mentioned it as a feature. But there seems to be a mixed load results of what works with ICD. I never looked into it all much as I use HDdriver anyway.

GemDrive can autoboot. STM32 chip inject it's own driver at boot and the whole SD card becomes a drive on the Atari. You can then use it as a normal SD card on your PC/Mac and drag-n-drop files on to it. The driver also uses very little ram. So ACSI2STM is a good choice.

Peter Putniks driver is not just IDE. When I bought my version several years ago he asked what hardware I had and I got one driver specific for UltraSatan and one generic that worked for ACSI and IDE.

Both PP driver and HDDriver has compability mode so that you can access it from both TOS and Win.

alexh wrote: 04 Aug 2025 17:12 It was a while ago now but I didn't have any trouble getting files from the PC onto my BBAN. I didn't use HDDRIVER (although I do have multiple licenses). Are you sure you can't just plop files in the SD card using a PC/Windows?

If it's using ICD Pro as the driver, it won't let you work with the SD card directly in Windows (Linux may handle it differently).

I used ICD Pro a lot before I went over to HDDRIVER and I stopped using it for that very reason.

That's really awesome @DoG thanks for the clarification, it's great to know Gemdrive is bootable. It really makes it the most newbie friendly method for sure. I wonder if there are partition size limitations, do you know if it address the entirety of the SD card?

Steve wrote: 05 Aug 2025 10:42 That's really awesome @DoG thanks for the clarification, it's great to know Gemdrive is bootable. It really makes it the most newbie friendly method for sure. I wonder if there are partition size limitations, do you know if it address the entirety of the SD card?

No size limitation but you can only have one partion. You can read about it here.

GemDrive looks to be right up my street, and the SidecarTridge looks like it might be a really neat (and easy) solution. Especially in a 3D case. What's the catch?

VMSZealot wrote: 05 Aug 2025 12:39 GemDrive looks to be right up my street, and the SidecarTridge looks like it might be a really neat (and easy) solution. Especially in a 3D case. What's the catch?

Nothing really... the SidecarTridge really is the best all-round tool for 'most' Atari users, especially people coming back to the platform, or newbies. It really is an excellent device. There are lots of videos on YouTube showing how it works, check them out.