With HDDRIVER and the latest development version of SCSI2Pi 5.0 you can use USB drives with the Atari without special USB hardware and without USB drivers. SCSI2Pi acts as a SCSI-to-USB bridge. This features has been tested with a TT and a USB stick, a USB DVD drive and a USB floppy disk drive. (As usual, with an ST you need an ACSI host adapter.) HDDRIVER can directly boot from a USB drive, and with HDDRUTIL you can format floppy disks. By partitioning with an empty partition table (see HDDRIVER manual) you obtain regular formatted floppy disks. With HDDRIVER, a USB floppy disk drive can be mapped to drive A: or B:, e.g. in order to replace a broken floppy drive or to have a second drive.
By the way, with the SCSI Driver for Linux all this functionality is also available with Hatari and ARAnyM.
When using USB floppy disk drives you need a HDDRIVER with a timing adapted to very slow devices. If required, users of HDDRIVER 12 can ask for a beta vesion 12.52.
With SCSI2Pi and HDDRIVER the Atari now has access to emulated hard drives, CD-ROM drives, streamers, printers, network adapters, real USB drives and, with the SCSI2Pi client tools a realtime clock. Everything with the same external hardware. Image files are simply copied to the Pi via the network and can be managed with the SCSI Control app, for example.

• HDDRIVER: Improved error handling for exotic devices.
• HDDRIVER: Fixed a bug (since version 12.00) related to accessing the Milan's IDE ports.
• HDDRUTIL: Improved support for formatting floppy disks, in particular with USB drives.
• HDDRUTIL: In the "Partition" dialog the capacity display is automatically updated again when scrolling.
• HDDRUTIL: Fixed a bug related to getting the Milan's boot parameters.

Upgrading HDDRIVER 12.0x to HDDRIVER 12.5 is at no charge. There is also an updated demo version.

• Manual: The download of the full version includes the up to date English and German manual as a PDF.
• HDDRIVER: The SCSI emulation for IDE/SATA drives/memory cards supports all mandatory commands of the SBC-4 specification (SCSI Block Commands).
• HDDRIVER: With TT and Falcon SCSI the SCSI Driver supports 32 LUNs (sub-units) according to the SCSI specification. This SCSI Driver extension is backward compatible.
• HDDRIVER: The code for initializing the PMMU of the Afterburner040 was extracted into an external program for the AUTO folder and an HDDRIVER module, resp. The README file in the FIXES/AB040MMU folder provides more information.
• HDDRIVER: AB040FIX (FIXES folder) was renamed to ALTRAMFX. It is required for Falcons with Alternate RAM (Afterburner040, DFB1, CT*) in order to use SCSI peripherals. The README file in the FIXES/ALTRAMFX folder provides more information.
• HDDRIVER: The Medusa Txx hardware is no longer supported. The Hades is not affected.
• HDDRIVER: Fixed a bug in the LBA-48 access mode, which is used with IDE/SATA drives > 128 GiB.
• HDDRIVER: Extended support of GUID Partition Tables (GPT).
• HDDRIVER/HDDRUTIL: With the standard settings HDDRUTIL now installs HDDRIVER without support for the SCSI Driver target interface. This saves about 3 KiB of memory.
• HDDRUTIL: The device check uses an improved/optimized query of LUNs and now also detects non-consecutive LUNs.
• HDDRUTIL: The new function "Drive->Clear Data" clears the FATs and the root directory of a partition. This is equivalent to deleting all files, but is much faster.
• HDDRUTIL: "Edit Partitions" supports changing the boot mask bit. Together with an explicit boot preference (TOS or TT SVR4) this mask determines which operating system is booted by default. Only the values $00 (not bootable, $80 (bootable TOS) and $40 (bootable TT SVR4) were specified by Atari.
• HDDRUTIL: When copying sectors the current sector number and the total sector count are displayed.
• HDDRUTIL: The "Device Check" dialog now has a scrollbar.
• HDDRUTIL: The sector test after formatting is now optional.
• HDDRUTIL: The HDDRIVER configuration export also lists the HDDRIVER version and the path of the HDDRIVER file.
• HDDRUTIL: The bus information displays whether a SCSI Driver supports 32 LUNs for a bus.
• HDDRUTIL: Depending on the bus features the device check now checks for up to 32 LUNs.
• HDDRUTIL: The function "Test Sectors" was renamed to "Read Test" because there is now also a write test for the data of a medium. This test first reads the sectors and then writes them back. Nevertheless it is recommended to save the data before a write test.
• HDDRUTIL: The list of explicitly displayed partition types in the partitioning dialog has been extended.
• HDDRUTIL: Fixed Windows-compatible partitioning of media that before partitioning were in GPT format.
• HDDRUTIL: Fixed a device check crash when no SCSI Driver was installed.
• HDDRUTIL: Support for partitioning with a GPT instead of a Master Boot Record (MBR) partition scheme.
• HDDRUTIL: With "Edit Partitions" the GUID of a GPT partition can be changed.
• HDDRUTIL: "Restore Root Sector" has been renamed to "Repair Partition Table" and also repairs the GPT data, based on the GPT backup.
• HDDRUTIL: The compatibility settings for partitioning have been simplified.
• HDDRUTIL: The partition information exported to the clipboard has been extended.
• HDDRUTIL: Just like for Linux and Minix partitions, with "Devices and Partitions" you can also configure separately whether HDDRIVER reserves drive IDs for FAT32 partitions.
• HDDRUTIL: The "Help" buttons in the dialog windows have been removed. Each user of the full version of HDDRIVER 12 has an up to date manual as a PDF, which provides a considerably better help.
• HDDRUTIL: Numerous user interface improvements and optimizations.

• The SCSI Driver tests have been extended.
• Additional device properties are displayed.
• The raw data returned by the SCSI commands INQUIRY and MODE SENSE are displayed.
• In addition to mode pages of hard drives and removable media drives, selected mode pages of streamers are displayed. With GEMAR you can use streamers with the Atari, also those emulated by SCSI2Pi 4.0.

There is an updated version of the DISKUS mass storage tool. DISKUS (German only) is a powerful tool for maintaining mass storage devices (error analysis, data recovery, sector editor and much more).

The internal host adapter of the MegaSTE cannot use the DaynaPort emulation of SCSI2Pi, PiSCSI or BlueSCSI together with a bootable emulated hard drive: The DaynaPort drivers expect the DaynaPort uses LUN 0, but LUN 0 is required for a bootable drive. The authors of these drivers (both still active developers for the Atari) are aware of this problem. Only a DaynaPort driver update can cleanly resolve it.
For HDDRIVER there is a beta version of a program for the AUTO folder now, which maps ACSI ID 6 to LUN 6 of ACSI device 0. That way the emulated DaynaPort can use ID 0 LUN 6, but the drivers see the device as ID 6 LUN 0. Users of HDDRIVER 12 who would like to test this beta version please send me an email.