Alternative Hardware Design for Floppy Interface dwight elvey dkelvey at hotmail.com <mailto:cctalk%40classiccmp.org?Subject=Alternative%20Hardware%20Design%20fo r%20Floppy%20Interface&In-Reply-To=000001c8133f%244fb839c0%24a903a8c0%40andr ewdesktop> Sun Oct 21 22:47:07 CDT 2007 * Previous message: Alternative Hardware Design for Floppy Interface * Next message: Alternative Hardware Design for Floppy Interface * Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] ________________________________ [snip] Hi Most of us have older PC's that will read most standard formats. That isn't the issue. The Catweasel is the closest thing out there but it is, as Dave D. says, not open documented. [snip] Unless I were to get something like the CatWeasel, I can't read the double density hard sectored disk I currently have that I'd like to archieve. I don't know of anything else that will plug into a PC that will do the job. Dwight ________________________________ -----REPLY----- Dwight, There seems to be a lot of misinformation about the Catweasel circulation about. Hopefully this can clear some of it up. These are things I believe to be true about Catweasel: The Catweasel is well documented. The design is easy to write software for. F/OSS Linux drivers exist. F/OSS MS-DOS & Linux software exists. The Catweasel is documented at the register level. There is a developers forum available. The developer of the Catweasel is accessible and very helpful. There are experienced developers on CCTALK which can answer questions. The Catweasel is commercially available from stock in both PCI and ISA versions. I do not know for a fact, but I am confident based on my dealings with Jens that if you needed additional information about the FPGA firmware for some reason you could just ask and get what information you need. True, software development has not been integrated and is fragmented but that is mostly organizational issues. The content does exist. Here is a recent post on CCTALK which lists some of the many Catweasel resources available on the internet. (not by me but other another respected CCTALK member) http://www.classiccmp.org/pipermail/cctech/2007-April/077150.html As an aside, if it were me designing a small portable floppy reader, I would use something like to this in a small case with a 5.25" floppy drive and CF for storage: http://www.windowsfordevices.com/news/NS6085572550.html It is only a small stretch from what I am presently using: an old PC with a Catweasel to read NorthStar (DSDD, SSDD, SSSD, and mixed) and Heath (SSSD and DSSD) hard sector disks. The Tim Mann CW2DMK software pretty much covers the soft sector format. There are many other formats supported. My whole Catweasel station cost less than $200 is working right now in my basement. It has Ethernet, PCI, USB, IDE, serial, parallel, VGA, PS/2, floppy drive interfaces in addition to the Catweasel. It can run several Operating Systems. There are still slots available to add more interfaces if you'd like. There is another machine next to it with ISA slots, a different Catweasel, and SCSI interfaces. I have had ST506/ST412 interfaces working on it. All parts for both systems are commercially available for low cost. Yes, Catweasel is restricted to PCI or ISA but if you "wrap" it with a dedicated PC you do not have to deal with it. Also, the raw format the Catweasel produces is literally magnetic flux transition times and whether an index hole is present or not. It doesn't get much more basic than than when reading a floppy disk. The hard part of ANY universal floppy reader will be the writing of the specific format decoders. That is where the investment is truly needed. My only wish for Catweasel is for it to be supported by excellent software like ImageDisk in an open and documented format like ImageDisk does. I believe the extensions to at least ImageDisk would be trivial to implement once the specifics of the interface were well known. Thanks! Andrew Lynch