MyIDE/Flash, Internal MyIDE and MyIDE 2 Soft Drivers For SpartaDOS X
In 2010, I was experimenting with an original MyIDE cartridge and not getting anywhere fast with it. The custom OS needed to run it was incompatible with SpartaDOS X at the time, and the partitioning software was buggy and difficult to use. Then I read that Kyle Dain had written a MyIDE driver for SpartaDOS X. With Kyle’s agreement, KMK sent me the source code, and I set about making modifications and trying to address some of the problems Kyle had encountered. The most obvious issue was hardware instability, but once I had the interface working fairly reliably, I was able to start making changes to Kyle’s code and add functionality to the driver. Matthias Reichl and I designed a partition table format for it, and I set about writing a partition editor. The initial software release was extremely well received.
Some time in 2011, Candle heard about the MyIDE driver and noticed the troubles I was having getting the hardware to work dependably. He soon came up with some exciting new hardware (the SIDE cartridge) designed especially for the SDX driver, and invitied me to write the software for it. The result was the SIDE driver, completely rewritten to be the first to support the new APT (Atari Partition Table) format.
The following year, Atarimax released the MyIDE II cartridge, which finally addressed the hardware stability problems of the older hardware, as well as introducing some new features like hot-swappable media. I adapted the new SIDE driver to work with MyIDE II, and had the driver with hot-swap support released within a few days of receiving the new hardware. A little later, SIDE2 was released, which also supported hot-swapping, necessitating yet another flavour of the soft-driver. Eventually I also ported the new driver back to the original MyIDE/Flash cartridge, bringing all the benefits of APT to the older hardware.
The current SDX soft driver is based on a sub-set of the PBI code for Ultimate 1MB and Incognito, ported back to the original hardware on which the earlier IDE drivers were developed. Drivers for SIDE, SIDE2, MyIDE, and MyIDE II are all built from the same core source code. When SpartaDOS X is using BANKED memory, the driver consumes only around 1KB of conventional RAM.
Special thanks to Kyle Dain, KMK, Trub, Hias, Phaeron, Candle, Larry and Prowizard.
Downloads
MYIDE Flash and MYIDE 2 SDX ROMs with APT Drivers and Tools (April 2020)
Don’t forget to download the APT toolkit and user guide: