catweasel resources, and other thoughts

Doc Shipley wrote: That is weird -- I definitely get emails from the above address, but like you, if I entry "catweasel-dev" on yahoo groups, nothing comes up. I wonder how that can be. Is it possible that there are "private groups" that don't show up? I'm sure there are other online resources, but here are a few (including code for many of them): Tim Mann's TRS80 catweasel tools: http://www.tim-mann.org/catweasel.html Linux drivers: http://www.soundtracker.org/raw/cwfloppy/index.html Official english MK3 documentation: http://www.schoenfeld.de/inside/Inside_CWMK3.txt Official english MK4 documentation: http://siliconsonic.de/t/CWMK4_english.pdf More linux stuff: http://unusedino.de/cw/ My program (with source) for reading PTDOS disks: http://www.sol20.org/ptdos.html#catweasel Jay Jaeger took bits of my code and wrote a program to read DG 6030 hard sectored disks: http://webpages.charter.net/thecomputercollection/hardsec_cw.tar.gz On the one hand I've heard the complaint that there is no centralized "official" code base, but then I've also heard: I don't borrow code and would write it myself. Both are fine opinions to have, but not at the same time by an individual person. :-) Manipulating the card is really pretty simple (using an unprotected OS like DOS or Win98), so don't be put off by confusion over drivers. You don't need one. Just poke the registers and collect the data. The only tricky part is the code that *you* have to write for your particular disk format to make sense of the data. Jules had mentioned worries about the transition counter overflowing. The counters are 8b (7b if you want to capture the state of the index sensor at each sample). You get to select a sampling rate (14, 28, or 56 MHz). At the lower sampling rate, a transition would have to be greater than 18 uS before the counter saturated -- pretty darn slow. But you are right, if media existed with a bit rate under this, you couldn't capture it exactly.