12 Mar
2006
12 Mar
'06
12:18 p.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
In a nutshell, the Catweasel is pretty much as dumb as
you can get in a
floppy controller. Basically a timer and a counter and a bunch of RAM.
You read a disk and it reports the time between pulses on the drive read
line. It's the software that figures out what the pulses mean.
Although that's all you really need I suppose. I am tempted to order one,
providing the Linux support is there (my last Google on this about 5 months
back suggested that support was entirely by third parties, broken in 2.6
kernels, and not particularly reliable anyway. Maybe that's now changed)
What I want to do is build up a box that incorporates the main drives that I
need and can just be plugged into a network and talked to via that, resulting
in something reasonably portable and that doesn't need a screen, keyboard,
mouse etc. on the system itself. Maybe a catweasel will do that if I can find
a small enough PC motherboard to plug it in to.
Boot Linux on it in read-only mode via compact flash so it can just be
switched off without needing any proper shutdown and doesn't have any rotating
storage. Assume that there's somewhere on site to transfer disk image data
to/from via various protocols..
The interface is completely open. A lot of the
software's been written by
users. If it matters, it'll work just fine under NT and Linux.
It still bugs me that there doesn't seem to be a central place which documents
what support / code / docs are actually out there. I don't want to spend $$ on
a board without knowing what software exists to support it and what I'd need
to write myself, but finding that out was difficult last time I looked...
A slight irritation to me is that Jens incorporates
ciruittry to support
the Amiga SID chip and an extra keyboard. Seems pretty pointless to me and
just adds to the price tag.
Yep, agreed. I just want something to read/write raw disk data on a PC - no
need for other ports and frills. But I suppose given the roots of the
catweasel the designer sees an obligation to keep supporting those extras -
and a smaller run of two different board flavours might result in no actual
cost saving to the customer.
Personally I hate paying for extras that I don't want - I'm like that with any
technology (e.g. it's why I haven't upgraded my phone in many years)
If you wanted to, you could even make your own version
of the Catweasel if
you wanted--it's simple enough that I don't panic about it going out of
production.
There's certainly been talk of it on the list before, but everyone has their
own idea of how complex to make it and what components to build it around, as
everyone has different parts kicking around, or ability to program PIC chips,
EPROMs etc.
But yeah, I'd love something that just did the track buffering side of it,
providing it could be made cheaper than a catweasel.
cheers
Jules