Catweasel opinions, sources of info etc.

Jules Richardson wrote: ... There are now four generations of catweasel cards -- the fourth is just coming out now. It is an FPGA design where the FPGA gets set up via software, so the developer can actually fix bugs and add features. The mailing list was quite busy for a few weeks there but has been strangely silent for a couple -- maybe I got unsub'd somehow. The MK3 and earlier were OK for soft sectored/unsectored disks, but reading hard sectored disks was significantly harder and writing them much harder yet. The MK4 supposedly has/will have features to make reading/writing hard sectored disks reasonable. The "3rd party drivers" for TRS-80's that someone else mentioned in this list was written by our own Tim Mann. I think people have the wrong idea about this product. There isn't corporation behind these cards -- it is a labor of love by one individual supported by a number of hobbyists. It is a real company making them, just a tiny one. Yes, you will have to write your own software if you are expecting to read/write disk formats that aren't already supported. To give you some idea of the ethics of the company/individual (jens), I bought a MK3 card a bit over a year ago. I wrote software to decode some PTDOS disks that I have. I fed back some information to Jens about how the MK3 fell short for reading/writing that particular format. He had to spin the MK3 design to make the MK4 anyway (one of the key parts was end-of-lifed), and he is incorporating some of that input into the design. 9 months goes by. I get an email, apparently sent to a few dozen people, saying: "What is your home address? I'm going to mail you an MK4 card." A $100 card for free. My only regret is at the moment I don't have the time to work on the MK4 card, but I will soon. One pain about using the card was that I had to use it on an Win98 machine so I could do simple I/O to the thing. XP doesn't allow it without drivers. Apparently under linux is isn't so hard. Anyway, this time around they are working on a driver with a mostly common API between linux/XP/otherthings so that you don't have to mess with the low level IO and just program the thing without jumping through hoops. Supposedly it will also be able to drive MK3 cards. There are no hard real time constraints to programming it, making it very simple. On MK3 boads you manually step it to the track you care about then you tell the controller to read or write a track. All the transition information gets captured in a RAM. When it is done you read out the data or write the next track to the RAM. MK4 adds more logic to tell apart the index hole from sector holes plus a state machine and some other control bits to allow reading/writing individual sectors on hard sectored devices. If you expect it to be plug & play for some oddball format, you will be disappointed. If you don't mind spending a week of evenings writing a decoder/encoder in software, then it is a great card.