Richard wrote: I think Jens was happy enough with version III of the catweasel, but some component (I think it was the PCI interface chip) became unavailable, and he was forced to redesign it. Since he was redesigning, he added more features, including some that make reading hard sectored disks easier and makes writing them possible. I have a mark IV version, although I haven't yet tried to use it. :-(

On 3/10/2006 at 6:30 PM Richard wrote: IV Catweasel ISA or PCI?!? It's PCI--the original Catweasel was ISA. Cheers, Chuck

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

On 3/11/2006 at 6:11 PM Lance Lyon wrote: I stand corrected. They keyboard connector interfaces to an Amiga keyboard, but the SID is strictly C-64 and 128 territory. Cheers, Chuck

Chuck Guzis wrote: 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.. 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... 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) 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

Philip Pemberton wrote in reply to Jules Richardson: ... Register level description of the MK3 card: http://www.schoenfeld.de/inside/Inside_CWMK3.txt That file is 3 to 4 years old. ... I realize that for many people they have to watch every penny, but I would guess they would be in the minority on this list. For most I imagine the value of their time to write the software for the card is at least 10x the cost of the card. My biggest complaint with the card is that it doesn't come with a 50 pin connector. Ideally it would have a wiring block just before the 50 pin connector to accommodate the usual 8" peculiarities. I would have gladly paid another $30 to have a compact and ready solution to the problem vs having to wire up my own kludge to do this.

Chuck Guzis wrote: Confirmed; all of my option boards fail on any machine faster than a 386-40. Through some debugging, I've found the reason is two-fold, both timing-related: - Any ISA bus speed that differs significantly (ie. faster) from the norm causes the board to ignore input - The software uses loops for timing in places, so any CPU faster than a 386-40 will overflow and confuse the software. -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/ Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/ A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/

On 3/11/2006 at 5:22 PM Richard wrote: A little Google search will confirm beyond the faintest shadow of a doubt that the MK 4 is a PC card. Not only that, but it even conforms to compact PCI outlines! http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=206 Cheers, Chuck

Zane H. Healy wrote: I thought the original CatWeasel was an inline adapter for the 600/1200? Doc

Chuck Guzis wrote: The Intel Macs don't have slots. Neither the Mini nor the iMac are internally upgradeable except for memory. ISTR that the MKIV is supposed to have Mac drivers in the next release, and is 3.3V compatible which makes it a player in the G5 systems. And... a quick check says yes indeedy. Doc