Retrocomputing: Altairduino

I picked up this Altairduino unit back in 2017 or 2018 I think. The original came with a narrow bamboo case, and I ran into fitment issues and took a break from the project, although I had gotten the electronics portion working. At its core, the project uses an Arduino Due, and simulates the loading of 8″ floppies from files on a micro SD card.

Recently, a blue and white case was made available to simulate the original Altair 8800 case. It’s a bit deeper as well, and comes with an expansion board with a hardware terminal emulator, external serial port, VGA, PS2 keyboard socket, etc. I finally got around to put my Altairduino into a box.

Now I’m struggling with the serial port functionality and/or the SD card reader. But even without those, I can play kill-the-bit and pong with the switches and LEDs on the front panel.