3 Aug
2005
3 Aug
'05
10:13 a.m.
On Wed, 2005-08-03 at 11:44 -0500, Jim Battle wrote:
I still stand by my bald assertion that more people would be put off by having
to build it themselves than those who would be put off by the $100.
I'm not so sure - I'd expect that the majority of people who'd be
interested in this for archive use will have at least some electronics
skills. Different if you're talking about the emulator fans as that
sounds like a different scene most of the time.
That is a strawman -- it is possible to write a C library that is tied to a
particular environment, but that is self-defeating. People write portable C
libraries all the time.
That's another thing with an external device - you'd abstract out a lot
of the really low-level stuff such that the code on the host system is a
lot more portable across platforms...
Out of interest, what's actually changed between the catweasel
revisions? I mean, I thought they always buffered stuff at the track
level and did all the decoding / encoding work in software? So I'm
surprised the hardware isn't pretty simple and able to support pretty
much anything without several revisions...
cheers
Jules
The complexity of the formats that people create for
various disk images is
independent of the complexity of the hardware. Why hasn't somebody done an open
catweasel? I think part of the issue is that for the people who would be
interested in it, $100 isn't that off-putting.
I still think there's a lot of scope for something external and that
came with full schematics etc. though. I'm not even sure if I've got any
slots free inside my main PC, plus I'd have to take the board out every
time I needed it at the museum (or take the whole PC with me). Plus of
course it'd mean digging into the case every time I wanted to change
physical floppy drives. You're right in that it seems mean geared toward
the emulator crowd than it does toward archivists.
Last time I looked at the website for catweasel (such as it is) there
was very little information on there about the product, and nothing I
could see of that listed where drivers could be found for different
formats or what formats people were supporting for the card. Seems like
anyone buying one is very much on their own there.
Sure, not everybody will
be able/willing to spend $100 for something like this, but that is far less than
the number of people who would be put off by having to build their own hardware.
On this point I disagree - the board I am thinking of would be very simple,
perhaps a dozen DIP chips - easy to build. I think a lot of the people on this
list would gladly take an evening or two to build one - also if it were to be
done, printed circuit boards, and even finished/tested boards could be made
available at low cost (like the cat), but unlike the cat, fully documented and
you can build it yourself if you like. It would not be "owned" or controlled
by
anyone. Another minor gripe is that each of the versions of
the catweasel (now four)
tries to be register compatible with previous versions while adding new
functionality. It has lead to some arcane programming requirements, which is
sad: a very thin API to hide version changes would have made things much simpler.
But would have tied the thing to one particular development environment (Here's
you VisualC++ library - have a nice day). The best solution is a fully open and
documented description of the hardware and lots of sample code.