18 Feb
2010
18 Feb
'10
1:18 p.m.
On 18 Feb 2010 at 14:58, Brian Lanning wrote:
On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 2:49 PM, David Griffith
<dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu>wrote:
> I'm rather disappointed with my catweasel. The hardware is very
> nifty and full of promise, but drive support is terrible. I wonder
> what prevents the deviceside gizmo from writing to disks. If that
> could be added and then extend the thing to handle 3.5" and 8"
> disks, then I'd be very happy.
The big problem that I see with this deviceside widget is that it has
limited current drive capability. 8" drives use 150 ohm pullups in
their terminators and present a 1 TTL UL. That's asking a lot from
a little uC. I'm also not sure how well the device handles the
higher densities.
Jens has a habit of outsourcing the software
production to other
people. Someone else wrote the software that gets distributed with the
catweasel. I agree that it's terrible. I asked him whether the
source code was available, but apparently it's not. He says that
adding read/write support for a new device is easy, yet it never
happens.
I still prefer the simplicity of the CW MK 1 run under DOS. Fully
documented and easy to program. Can be made to handle just about
anything. When you get to the MK3 and MK4, there has to be provision
made in hardware for running on multi-tasking OSes--the CPU can't
always be right there to interact with the card.
There's no reason that the CW couldn't handle both reading and
writting Apple IIe floppies, but Jens comes right out and says that
he doesn't write software for these things. So you're depending on
the kindness of strangers. The disk encoding format is well-
documented in "Understanding the Apple IIe". It's not rocket
science. I still have a Microsolutions Matchpoint PC card around
here somewhere and it's scarcely more than a dozen SSI TTL packages.
--Chuck