8 Apr
2007
8 Apr
'07
3:43 a.m.
Jules Richardson wrote:
...
I'm still concerned about what documentation and
resources there are out
there for the cat though - I mean quite a few must have been sold, and
owners must have thrown together quite a bit of code to drive them - but
every time I've dug around on the 'net it's been unclear as to what kind
of user community exists to actively share code and experiences.
(Plus I really don't want to be driving the thing under a heavyweight OS
like Windows - and God knows what the resources and docs are available
for the alternatives)
Join the following yahoo group: Catweasel-Dev at yahoogroups.com
Jens Shoenfeld, the creator of the catweasel is active there, along with
various people of varying degrees of involvement.
I've written code to read (not write) PTDOS disks, and another to do
hard sectored Wang disks (again read, not write). The code isn't
pretty, but it worked well enough for my purposes. In both cases the
code ran on a win98 box. There is a win32 driver for the catweasel, so
it is possible to write code on a new machine, but I found it easy
enough to poke the hardware directly. Most of the low level code was
stolen from Tim Mann's trs80 disk read/write tool. The driver used to
have a specific list of formats that it decoded, in the driver, but
recently the author changed things to expose the low level read/write
track commands at driver level, and then leave the format decoding to a
user mode program (which is how it should have been all along, for my
purposes).