Happy Computers - Atari 8-bit Products

Atari 8-bit Products

810 Upgrade

This was the first product released in 1982. The customer sent in either their 810 drive or the internal sideboard, and the upgrade was wired in. This consisted of a few extra logic chips, a different eprom and point to point wiring. In addition to the buffered reading and writing with zero latency and faster serial i/o, it made backups of floppies.

810 Enhancement

This version of the 810 Happy board was a plug-in board with a better data separator and used sockets already in place on the 810 internal board without the need for any soldering or permanent modification. In addition to the buffered reading and writing with zero latency and faster serial i/o, it made backups of floppies.

1050 Enhancement

After the 810, Atari released the more reliable, enhanced density (130 KB) 1050 drive. In addition to the extra storage, the serial I/O could be cranked up a notch even faster than the 810 Happy product by the faster speed of the 1050s 6502 processor. The 1050 Enhancement was also a plug-in board, and could be installed without soldering or permanent modification. In addition to the buffered reading and writing with zero latency and faster serial i/o, it supported true double density (180 KB). Additionally, it made backups of floppies. It is to be noted that Atari 1050 drives stopped production more than 20 years ago, and Happy Computers stopped selling products about 18 years ago. In spite of this, the popularity of Happy Computer's products continues and is still being reviewed in 2008. Developers are still writing new software to support Happy Drives. For example, linux drivers.

1050 Controller

The 1050 Controller was a small board that was installed inside the 1050 Happy drive that had 2 switches and an led that allowed enabling or disabling disk write-protect to override the notch in the disk. It also allowed switch selection of a slower mode to provide compatibility with some picky programs. Some commercial software only ran in the original slow speed mode. The controller required a mechanical modification to the drive's enclosure and hence its installation was harder that the happy board.

Warp Speed Software

The software that came with the Happy boards had many options.

• Warp Speed Dos
• Diagnostics for the Enhancement and the drive such as high speed xfer, RPM and read/write testing
• Fast, slow and unHappy mode drive options for compatibility
• Tracer mode for evaluating wasted space on floppies
• Happy Compactor which allows organizing and combining multiple floppies into one.
• Happy Backup for backing up floppies
• Multi Drive, which allows high speed simultaneous writing with up to 4 Happy enhanced drives.
• Sector copier

IBMXFR Program

This program was included with the Warp Speed Software. It allowed transferring files back and forth between an Atari and an IBM disk using a Happy enhanced 1050 drive. Because the 1050 was a single sided drive with only one head, the disk had to be formatted as SS (180K). The IBM disk could even be formatted on the 1050 drive.