Improving the 1050 floppy drive with SpartaDOS and US Doubler

As I mentioned in the Wonderful Atari 800XL, we had upgraded our 1050 disk drives with a US Doubler chip. The purpose of this chip was to 1) bring it up from dual-density to true double density and 2) greatly increase the transfer speed.

The US Doubler was from ICD, a popular maker of hardware peripherals and enhancements for Atari 8-bits. We also had t…