On Mon, 2005-03-14 at 21:47 -0600, Jim Battle wrote:
Dwight K. Elvey wrote:
o Simple
to build by anyone with a few electronics skills.
A little tough here. 50 mil spaces surface mount. Some soldering
skills required.
Catweasel wins this one hands down. Just plug it in.
Turn off your running machine, open the case, hope you have a free slot
(I certainly don't on this here desktop), start up, hope you don't have
IRQ troubles (PCs don't seem to handle loaded PCI buses well).
Take case off, unplug board when you want to go to a different site. Go
through previous steps again.
To me that's a lot more hassle than simply plugging in a *simple* device
to the parallel port of a machine. Remember we're not talking about
complex electronics here - couple of connectors, some RAM and a bit of
glue logic and that's it.
(I just thought of another bonus. The parallel - or USB - cable can
probably be quite long, meaning the drives that you want to handle can
be up on the desk, say. With the catweasel, you're limited to floppy bus
length I assume which means hassle every time you want to use a
different drive with it)
o Open 'source' (all schematics etc.
available)
No issue here.
Except that it doesn't exist. A hypothetical thing has any advantage
that you wish to confer on it.
I think Dwight meant 'no issue' as in, no problem releasing any
schematics, source etc.
I don't forsee the hardware design being that complex. Parallel port
interfaces are easy (even I can do that bit ;) and driving the buffer
memory shouldn't be difficult.
Software-wise, remember that primary goal is archive of old media onto
modern systems (and restore back to floppy). It doesn't need
understanding of the data stream on the host machine to do that - it's
essentially just save and replay. Maybe an hour to write and test code
under each OS to do that.
The catweasel design isn't open source, but I
believe just about all the
drivers are.
Good. If at some stage someone writes a layer to take 'our' raw data
stream and do clock separation etc. then we can just use those open-
source drivers for manipulating specific format data.
My own desire that motivated me to buy a catweasel was
to collect and
archive information. The fact that the collection was done on a
"modern" machine (there are isa and pci versions of the card) doesn't
bother me at all.
I'm not knocking the catweasel although I know it sounds like I am. It's
great if you have one or two formats you want to read/write, you know
what drives you want to use, and you're just using a single machine.
But the financial outlay might be discouraging to some people
(particularly given the complexity of the board and lack of schematics).
My goal with a parallel/USB solution is something cheap and cheerful and
portable, primarily designed for archival purposes and not necessarily
complete decoding.
#2 isn't relevant -- what do you mean? Sure, some
people want to tinker
with HW for the sake of tinkering with HW. I have no fear of
electronics but with my limited time, I get more satisfaction in other
activities. I'd rather spend a few $$ and save hours of effort
collecting, building, troubleshooting so that I have time to do those
other things. I suspect that I'm in the majority otherwise this project
would have been done already.
I see it as akin to something like the SGI keyboard convertor that's
been mentioned on the list before (or several other "homebrew" type
projects that are floating around). A bit of simple hardware that anyone
with a few skills can quickly build - but there's potential for offering
a ready-built board too if there's a low-volume market for it.
But yes, it's more for the hardware people among us, not those who enjoy
playing with software or machines in as-is configuration.
As for not being done, I suspect it's because nobody's given it serious
thought and assumed it to be more complicated than it is. We're all
guilty of being sloppy about archival - I suspect a good 80% of
collectors aren't in the hobby for the preservation aspect, they just
want to play around with the machines. A project such as this is for the
other 20% who want to preserve the hardware and software and keep it
going for as long as possible.
[quick snip of things I agree with]
Reading through a lot of the postings on this thread
makes me think of
somebody complaining that "linux is too big, bloated, and complicated,
and redhat charges for their version too. let's write our own version
that will be lean and mean and available to all for free."
Yes. Except that it's a billion times more simple than taking on writing
an OS :-)
Thinking about the design is fun and the one who
actually does it will
have some rewards implementing it, but for most people, the already available
solution will be superior to the proposed design even if it is ever
done.
Agreed on the design front. It'd be nice to build something and see the
data being spat out at the other end; kind of like proof of concept code
at the start of a software project.
As for 'most people' I have no idea. I'm not sure how many catweasels
have been sold and to what sort of people. But I think the catweasel and
this cater for different markets anyway, so it's maybe unfair to compare
the two. The only reason I've brought the catweasel into this is because
I wanted something for the museum to archive all our media - and with a
bit of work a MK4 could probably do the job. But that doesn't mean to
say I'm not going to look into alternatives too.
Spending $60 more for a finished, professionally
done board might
be a showstopper for some people, but futzing with the building your own
will preclude a great many more.
More than likely :) That doesn't stop it from being a worthwhile project
with its own benefits, though.
cheers
Jules