CatWeasel card

On 3/11/2006 at 12:03 AM Teo Zenios wrote: DIfferent animals entirely. The DOB was largely a black box type of item, Central Point didn't release any sort of information on it or the workings of the software. But one could make some guesses (e.g., there's a 9216 data separator on the board). I don't know that it'll run on anything much faster than a 386. It came with utilites to read and write Mac 400K and 800K diskettes and a sort of disk editor. 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. Reverse the procedure for writing. Heck, on the I, II and III, there wasn't even a circuit to issue head motion pulses--you did it all with software. Jens has remedied this on the IV, however. 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. 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. 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. Cheers, Chuck