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All-In-One Interface For All Your Retro/Legacy Drives
An anonymous reader writes "Individual computers have announced a new version of they're multi-format floppy controller the Cat Weasel. This new version (Catweasel MK3 PCI/Flipper) has a few surprises such as 3 different interfaces to connect it to the host computer and a socket for an original C64 SID chip :). 'The main purpose of the Catweasel has always been to allow access to non-standard disks using normal PC-disk drives, even if you usually need a completely different computer for that. The capacity of the drive does not matter in this case: A 5.25 inch drive with 1.2MByte capacity will read and write a C-64 disk with 170KByte as well as a 3.5 inch drive with 1.44MByte can access a 1,76MByte Amiga disk. Together with a company that has specialized in data recovery, we're working on the implementation of more than 1100 different disk formats, and it does not matter that this has been classified impossible by others before. Even the 800KByte disks from older Macintosh computers can be used in standard 1.44MB drives, although the original drives have rotated their disks at variable speeds.' Find out more at the Catweasel MK3 PCI/Flipper page."
I have a big box of 800k floppies from an old-school Mac... this could come in handy.
It's all very well the drive being able to read the data. Where do I get the 1100 filesystems needed to interpret it?
I don't even have a floppy on my computer, funny I never thought I could survive without the things. I got rid of 500 to 1000 5 1/4s about 5 years ago, and just got rid of most of my 3 1/2s just recently.
Buy sweet Macintosh Apples, they taste good and go down easy (look good too).
What we see depends on mainly what we look for. -- John Lubbock Now search for that bug slave!
awwwwwwwwwww yeah
Since when did Slashdot start posting free advertisements from corporations .. I mean, anonymous readers, for the corporation's product... ?
--
Vote for your hopes, not for your fears - Vote Third Party
While the windows drivers are a given, I think it's interesting that companies like this will provide linux drivers and support, but no Mac drivers or support. The Mac desktop market is significantly larger than the linux desktop market, so it's not a marketshare issue.
But then, I guess Mac users are used to just throwing their computers away when it's upgrade time, and buying another one that "just works" (until new hardware comes out).
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Oh wait, they weren't mentioned. ;-)
Does anyone know if this will read Apple ][ disks?
Speaking of reading Apple disks, anyone still got a working Copy II PC board laying around?
Cheers
Ideally, OS and even software developers would look at the latest technology out there and design for that, and then work out legacy issues; the currently seem to do it the other way around.
Development of device like these may help change that because it demonstrates the possibility for developers to look forward first and perhaps outsource the looking back.
How useful... this is exactly the piece of technology that I was waiting for.
talk about specialize. More power to them. But I wonder if they can sell many of these. I mean, except for a few data recovery people, I don't see any real use for this. You need SCSI for your system, you get SCSI...you need IDE, you do IDE...change filesystems, stick it on a distant server tar-red up, then transfer it back down.
Just my $.02
JoeLinux
I dont buy that it can read 800k disks, people have been tring to read them in normal floppy drives ever sence it came out, I can sure as hell bet that apple has tried in order to reduce costs
and whats up with the C64 audio, I used to be realy into emulation and most of the fun was that it was, well emulating hardware,
What am I going to do with that HUGE BOX OF WAREZ?! :-)
Is it just me, or is the crackpot image of this group enhanced by the way they use alternatingly larger and smaller fonts throught the web page linked in the article?
The list of features here remind's me of Tom Waits' Step Right Up...
Come on... I mean, I have a C64 sitting in the closet, right next to my C128 and my ol' Atari. I even have a working TRaSh-80. I keep them because I loved them back in the day and I don't want to toss them.
It's called memorabilia. As in "something worthy of rememberance." How big do they think a market for this will be? I don't even think you'd find enough consumers to call it a niche market.... please correct me if I'm wrong.
-- El Sacarino tiene gusto de la chocha
With a name like "Catweasel" it has to be good.
And I'm sure that if an individual had developed a similar device, the story would be posted.
Dig yourself out of your parents basement, shut off your linux b0x, and GO OUTSIDE!!!!
We can assume your Windows machine is in the attic then?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Please to enjoy our new CatWeasel Flipper, yah!
And please to remember, "The capacity of the drive does not matter in this case: A 5,25 inch drive with 1,2MByte capacity will read and write a C-64 disk with 170KByte as well as a 3,5 inch drive with 1,44MByte can access a 1,76MByte Amiga disk." We have skilled english translator, yah?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
that was an April Fool's joke. ;)
It's Windows systems which feel the need to support legacy stuff. New Unix systems pick among the various options for what is needed for the job at hand. Including new types of filesystems or hardware...they merely have to communicate results.
price was so high and a good deal of the internals are proprietary. As for them "lasting twice as long" that is more because people can't afford to upgrade because they have to buy all new software and hardware. And no, I am not a windoze/pc zealot if there really are any. I have a PPC running OSX and Linux and a PC running FreeBSD and W2K. I have played with all the different hardware and software and don't think there are any real better OS's or hardware as it all depends on what you do.
<TROLL>Time to actually think different rather then think like the rest of the Mac Zealots who believe the "Megahertz myth" propaganda about how PPC's have shorter pipelines making them better even though to increase the current speeds of the new G4's Apple has gone and increased the size of the pipelines. And I doubt there are ANY true RISC processors left along with whatever other propaganda recently released by the dope smoking converts.</TROLL>
It reads 800K's just fine! Where've you been, under a rock? =)
I can't even carry a floppy halfways across a room between two drives that are supposed to work with the same filesystem without seeing my data eaten by bad sectors, and now my PC can ruin my old 8-bit collection too. What a deal.
Those puppies held something like 160K and cost $5.00 (in 1980 dollars) a piece.
Acees old data hunh?
[rons@localhost rons]$ cat weasel
cat: weasel: No such file or directory
[rons@localhost rons]$
Maybe it just needs a good driver. Otherwise, I doubt it will live up to it's purpose...
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
is filth!
No, not pr0n, filth as in mould and other miscellaneous cruft.
I hope these guys also provide something to clean the media! Otherwise there are folk who are going to fork out big bucks for this widget only to find that the huge stack of old floppies they were hoping to be able to read are useless! due to mould!! and stuff!!!
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Work (sub rosa) to put together a package of emulators for all the machines your product supports (or as many as you can find), make 'em compatible with your hardware, and have it put up on a server outside the US. Spread word about the package surreptitiously. It'll be an enormous help for driving sales.
But will it read my old 8-inch CPM floppies?
The CatWeasel reads hundreds of different CP/M formats, including the z/80 mode of the c128.
I know a lot of people who are seriously dedicated to the Amiga, and still use their Amigas to this day. I understand there are even more Amiga users in Europe (I'm in the USA).
Look at all tha Amiga-specific features - you can plug this thing into a PC or an Amiga (apparently it has an ISA connector along one edge and a Zorro connector on the other), you can plug an Amiga keyboard into it, etc. etc.
Hey baby, I can accomodate your 8 inches right...
Um, never mind.
"But always she's the spectre of uncertainty I first endured, then faded, then embraced..."
For those who don't know, the real Catweazle was a very eccentric British TV show of the early 1970s. A children's cult classic and no mistake.
Sailing over the event horizon
Take a look at his array of products, and you can't help noticing: the guy is a hardware hacker who just loves making boards of all types for doing -- whatever.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Small intro: The VZ was a Z80 based computer sold around the world, under many names. VZ in Australia, Laser in Germany, and also known as "Texet" and "Salora Fellow" IIRC. :)
We on the vzemu mailing list have been tossing around ideas on how to get the old VZ games up and running on the PC. There's more than one emulator but we could use some more software. We have copied some of the stuff over using some pretty weird processes (like manually typing in memory dumps) but we could use something better. Since these guys are german, who knows?
Shameless plug:
If there's anyone even remotely interested in this machine we would LOVE to have you on the mailing list since the active members are currently very few, and for a machine that was sold to hundreds of thousands of people all over the world, only having 5 or 6 ppl interested in its emulation strikes us as a bit odd.
Anyway you can subscribe by sending a blank email to vzemu-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
I better go and post a link on the mailing list now!
Wow. Neat piece of hardware. But why put the SID circuit on it? A SB Live has superior performance and can pretend to be a better SID than the SID ever was.
If you really need that level of hardware support, put a 6502 on the board, and run that too. Hey, why stop there - put the 64KByte of memory (use some left over 486 cache memory), and hell, put the composite output driver for those who REALLY need the whole 80's experience. Oh, and some acid washed jeans too.
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
last time I checked you could install two SID chips for 6-way sound. not counting getting 5-way sound from a single chip, I still cannot imagine how they did that!
ato
It's probably translated from german. Consequently, caps look bad translated too.
Oh goody, soon I'll be able to have a wank with all my old 80's ASCII pr0n!
Er, except back then it was called "porn", not like this modern "pr0n" crap.
I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious. --Albert Einstein
I had an Amiga 1200 (060 50MHz, towered) that I was trying to use a PC drive with. (Sold the Amiga to fund the purchase of an iBook 700 recently...) I purchased a Catweasel for the Amiga and could never get it working properly. The reason I went this route is that I was under the impression that the floppy in the A1200 was configured such that certain software would not run on the machine. (It was a very recent A1200, do a google search to find out what I'm talking about).
Anyway, I was talking with the main guy behind the Catweasel (can't recall his name right off) via e-mail and giving him my situation and photos of different parts of my mobo and he was walking me through the process of getting the drive wired properly w/ the Catweasel, etc. but it was not working. Turns out he had incorrect information regarding the configuration of these late-model A1200's and that my whole wiring, soldering, and Catweasel experience was for naught. As this was being discovered, the guy got tired of going through the back and forth in trying to get Catweasel working on my Amiga, and stopped responding to me.
Left a sour taste. Wasted $$. I'm sure most people won't have this need for support or this less than ideal experience. My $.02.
blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
iPod Hacks.com
I've still got some data on those I'd like to get off... -dB
"It if was easy to do, we'd find someone cheaper than you to do it."
Do you remember that scary kids show with Catweasel in it. I can't remember what it was called, but he was like a scarecrowe that came to life with a bad cockney accent. Some crazy BBC produced thing. He looked like some kind of alcoholic street bum.
Meat is murder, I eat chicken.
I have to admit, I was speculating there. I quit using windows about halfway through windows 2000's lifespan, so I've only seen XP from afar.
I also have to admit that OS X only gets really useful with 256MB or more of RAM.
But still, it's windows...
--
pants ahoy
oh you mean that crap of storage media? anyone still uses them???? wow
they got broken so easily...
It's capable of reading more than 400 formats. (About the only thing it couldn't read was Apple IWM disks, which use group code recording.) A brilliant piece of work.
The swedish(?) company Elecktron makes a gadget called the SIDstation based around the c64 SID chip. It's intended for use in electronic music.
See what I've been reading.
I think you mean mac.
That's the mac philosophy--design the ahrdware to run the software. Only the latest technologies will we support yada yada yada...
Windows has to support anything wierd you throw at it, and it should be able to run without being tied to hardware for a particular version (though arguably it usually does require an upgrade). There are people installing it on "legacy" systems that must be supported.
Not everyone has the $$$ for a new PC every time a new piece of software comes out. I had my previous PC for four years before I replaced it a month ago. Not everyone can afford "the latest and the greatest" just to run recent software...
Brian
All right! It's finally here! Screw Windows 2000 and Linux, I'm going back to using GEOS!!!
Here's a link to the original TV series :
Catweasel
See what I mean about scary?
Meat is murder, I eat chicken.
that this 'cat weasel' also has a 'spellchecker' (or better, 'grammar tutor' option)? I don't mean to flame, but reading "they're" instead of their makes me totally cringe...
-- the cake is a lie
An anonymous reader writes "Individual computers have announced a new version of they're multi-format floppy controller the Cat Weasel.
According to frink,, that would be $10.98 today.
'Course, I only paid $10.50, so I guess it's not that big a deal.
Well, it won't do C64 disks, but in the past week, I've found this awesome software tool to help me get access to my old Amiga disks on my PC. It's called DISK2FDI, and uses a neat floppy controller trick to read Amiga disks using regular PC floppy drives, all through software. You do need 2 drives for it to work, though, but it works great making .ADF files that UAE can use.
http://www.oldskool.org/disk2fdi/
Meanwhile, a couple of years ago I gave my brother my then-8-year-old 386 machine. It worked just fine for Telnet and Netscape 2.x, and he wanted a machine that he wouldn't mind if somebody stole, as long as they didn't get injured carrying the 60-pound thing out the door.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
This means awesome things to come for
the Amiga emulator community on the PC !!!
BRAVO !
"They're multi-format floppy controller"?
This is getting towards the point where I can't fscking read the article because of grammatical errors!
Is it really that hard to write the most basic English? Even if you've spoken it all your life?
Yep, I'm one of the many who still use their Amigas. And I use mine for my digital photography business.
And I'm fixing some Amigas for a gentleman who has a wedding and event video business, he still uses Amigas with Toaster cards.
At the risk of being /.'d, Polymorph Digital Photography.
I was interviewed several years ago for Amiga Format magazine. The mag is gone now, but before they dissappeared I got permission to reprint the article. Scans of the pages are in the "About Us" section.
No, so that he can communicate in writing in English, without being misunderstood or look retarded to the reader.
;)
I don't think the submitter speaks another language than English natively, as us damn foreigners usually know what the words we choose to use actually mean when we write in a foreign language, since we have to concentrate a bit more than a native speaker, and thus won't do stupid mistakes like this.
We write far too long and incomprehensive sentences as well.
What I really want is for somebody to get a bank of these, and some cheap labour (teenagers or overseas or whatever) to just slot floppies into them. With a nice program that would read the floppy, figure out what type it was, and copy it to hard disk.
I would love to be able to ship my many hundreds of old floppies off to such a service and get back some CDs with all the data. Duplicates removed, ideally.
There are probably business services which will do this for dollars a floppy, which is too high, but if all you need is a teenager who can insert 200 floppy disks an hour for $6/hour, you can do it cheap, and I would happily pay 50 cents/floppy to get that stuff read.
I have a lot of formats though. Every type of PC floppy. Commodore PET and C64 disks. Atari 800 disks. Atari ST disks. Apple ][ disks. Disks hard written from Xenix with tar and cpio archives in 720K format as well as 1.2MB format. Lots and lots.
Anybody going to start up such a service?
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Now I finally have something that can read all the disks I've thrown in the garbage over the past twenty years... no wait... aw, shit.
RTFM; please, I beg you.
I recently tried out some of my old C64 discs (1985-1995), and they all worked OK.
I has always been my impression that the 5,25" (C64) discs where more stable then 3,5" (Amiga). Yes - I know part of this is because of the lower data-density on the C64 discs.
I sincerely hope that this new gadget will help me.
You see, many, many moons ago, when I still have my hair, I used the IBM PS/2.
One day, I bought a batch of SINGLE-SIDED 3.5" floppy, and formatted them in the PS/2 floppy drive.
Instead of formatting the SINGLE-SIDED floppy diskettes as SINGLE-SIDED, the PS/2 machine formatted them as DOUBLE-SIDED.
Now, the "still-have-full-head-of-hear" younger me didn't really care, and proceeded to store data on those diskettes.
Okay
I wanted to get the data off those floppy disks, and was horrified to find that the disks were SINGLE-SIDED disks. And of course, ALL the non-PS/2 floppy drives refused to recognize those disks as DOUBLE-SIDED, and thus, I can't retrieve the data I stored on the disks.
I did try to find old PS/2, hoping that I can retrieve the data from the disks. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any.
So the disks languished, along with the data.
Has anyone used the gadget ? Can anyone tell me if that gadget can turn any plain-vanilla 3.5" floppy drive into PS/2 floppy drive that treat single-sided disks as double sided ?
Thanks for any help that you can give me.
Thanks again !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The only difference between Amiga drives and standard 1.4MB drives is the /CHNG (Diskchange) line, which is Pin 2 on Amiga and Pin 34 on PC drives. I used PC drives when replacing Amiga drives because they were 2-3 times cheaper. Just swap the lines on the drive cable and it works perfectly.
Do your best, hope for the best, suspect the worst.
The SB Live (like the one in my pc) cannot pretend to be a better chip then a real one. Take these samples, recorded from two real sid chips:
v .mp3. wav.mp3
c /Mueller_Markus/Mechanicus.sid
http://homepages.ihug.com.au/~johnt/temp/mech3.wa
http://homepages.ihug.com.au/~johnt/temp/r1-mech3
and compare it to the latest SID emulator (be it LittleSID 2, sidplay2, etc.) They dont come close to emulating real filter saturation as you can hear from the two mp3s. The mp3s also make it easy to realise why people say 'every chip sounds different' as these two chips definitely do.
Here's the link for the sid tune to load into an emulator:
http://gallium.prg.dtu.dk/HVSC/C64Musi
And here's the best emulator to date, http://sidplay2.sourceforge.net/
I sincerely hope that this new gadget will help me.
You see, many, many moons ago, when I still have my hair, I used the IBM PS/2.
One day, I bought a batch of SINGLE-SIDED 3.5" floppy, and formatted them in the PS/2 floppy drive.
Instead of formatting the SINGLE-SIDED floppy diskettes as SINGLE-SIDED, the PS/2 machine formatted them as DOUBLE-SIDED.
Now, the "still-have-full-head-of-hear" younger me didn't really care, and proceeded to store data on those diskettes.
Okay
I wanted to get the data off those floppy disks, and was horrified to find that the disks were SINGLE-SIDED disks. And of course, ALL the non-PS/2 floppy drives refused to recognize those disks as DOUBLE-SIDED, and thus, I can't retrieve the data I stored on the disks.
I did try to find old PS/2, hoping that I can retrieve the data from the disks. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any.
So the disks languished, along with the data.
Has anyone used the gadget ? Can anyone tell me if that gadget can turn any plain-vanilla 3.5" floppy drive into PS/2 floppy drive that treat single-sided disks as double sided ?
I'd appreciate any help that you can render.
Thanks again !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The other side is zorro and the other side is PCI.
:-)
The reason the new Catweasel is cool is the PCI feature - it used to be either a zorro version or an ISA version - no-one has ISA slots any more.
--
Jope
Individual Computers is also organizing this year's big German Amiga fair. Next to the Catweasel MK3 PCI/Flipper board, new AmigaOne, Pegasos and even a new ATX c64 successor motherboards, called the c-one will be sold at this fair!
To see what last year's main German Amiga Fair was like, watch this great video coverage. The upcoming big German Amiga fair will be held on the 7th and 8th of December 2002 at the Eurogress in Aachen.
It's not always possible to mount the images as native filesystems under a modern OS, as some of the attributes don't map to modern features. e.g.:
- A BASIC file might be stored with an auto-run line number.
- BASIC files might be tokenised, and not readable as plain text
- Saved screen files are not common image formats
etc.Fortunately there are generally utilities to manipulate the disk images, extracting or inserting files and performing any conversion needed.
It most definitely can't. The SID was, and is, a masterpiece of a chip. The main reason that it is impossible to emulate well is its analog filters.
That's why gear like the SIDStation exists - it's a professional music tool to get analog synth sounds that the current digital tools just lack.
Cheers,
Ian
(Oh - for proof? Try listening to Ghost and Goblins on a real SID, then on an emulator. They have never got it right)
Linux
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Sorry about the mistake ... I do realise its meant to be "their".
But really , its no wonder some of you guys can't get laid if you spend your days moaning about this sort of crap.
Bye for now , i'm off to give it to my girlfriend.
Oh, come on! I think the author is on to something!!!! Mod him back up!!!a
remember that this is the Version 3 Catweasel - this puppy's been about for a long time - it was originally developed as a soloution for Amigans to the scarcity of Amiga compatible HD Floppy drives... back when there was something approaching a viable Amiga hardware market...
I guess the dual interface thing on this new version is a twofold attempt to maintain some kind of a market: firstly it opens the device up to a new market of people with x86 based hardware set-ups and secondly it ensures compatibility with new Amiga hardware (should it ever surface, you can bet it won't use Zorro)
shame there's no Mac drivers otherwise I might have bought one...
I just found out about this tool and use it in the past week. It works great. You do have to run it in DOS, so non-DOS based Windows versions like NT, 2000, and XP won't run it. Give it a try!
I have a million old disks in a Babel of formats, and I bought a Catweasel several years ago from Jens and his friend Norbert. I believed all the hype, I was ready to start the months-long process of imaging all my disks onto PC before too many of their bits shifted and they became unreadable.
The problem is that the Catweasel doesn't live up to its hype. Or at least the one I got.
I had about a 90% failure rate across the board. 100% failure with 1581 disks. 75% with Amiga. 90% with 800k Mac disks. ~90% with 1541-style Commodore. Absolutely abyssmal. Their rudimentary software (un-abortable without forcing open the drive door while it was in operation) would dump a mountain of German error messages on me. I would then take the same disk to a real Commodore/Amiga/Mac and read it perfectly.
I talked with them a bit about the problem. At their instructions, I tried different computers (4), different floppy drives (9), different floppy cables (5), all from different manufacturers, different speeds, and including a cable Jens himself said would work, etc... As you can see, I satisfied myself beyond all normal means that this was a problem with his card, and nothing else.
Eventually I sent my card back to Jens, and a month or two later, I received the exact same card back in the mail. He "couldn't find the problem." However, I still had a useless card, and then they stopped answering my emails.
The card did read a couple of disks - though not even reliably enough to make it a curiosity. This leads me to believe Jens is not a scam artist, and that he actually just still has (or had) some major bugs in his system. But not even trying to replace the card, and then just dropping me and keeping my (what was it? $50? $100?) money... He struck me as a hobbyist who'd gotten in over his head. So I'm very surprised to see him still in the business.
We're on the road to Tycho.
Those puppies held something like 160K and cost $5.00 (in 1980 dollars) a piece.
You store information on *puppies*?!? Sick bastard.
Mind you, back to the original topec: this is nothing new. I've got a TransCopy add-in board from Central Point Software (remember them - PC Tools, etc) that will copy any disk you can fit into the drive - 5-1/4 or 3-1/2 - copy-protection and all.
Well, look at his web site, he has mostly Amiga hardware products listed there. So he's used to low-volume sales. Adn this thing is PCI on eone side, not ISA, with aparently the Amiga Zorro connection on the "other side". I'd love to see a picture of how this works out.
.ASF of .AFS or whatever the popular image format is called via a real Amiga/Amiga drive.
Other than the data recovery folks, he'll probably sell mostly to Amiga fans. People using Amiga emulators on PCs like UAE or Amithlon can now use their Amiga floppies directly instead of ripping them to
It'll also likely be popular with AmigaOne and Pegasos computer users, the new and "real soon now" to be released powerPC based motherboards for Amiga users, as they use more standard chipsets that cannot natively use Amiga format disks, so this will be useful to those of us left that will upgrade to these PowerPC machines rather than emulate on X86 boxen. (These PowerPC machines will run the newer PPC native Amiga software and PPC native operating systems soon to be released, with won't work on either the older 680x0 hardware or the X86 emulations right now, as those only emulate 68K's.) It would also allow people to use their current Amiga keyboards with their new PPC Amiga hardware, and save them the US$5 or so of buying a USB keyboard. Whoopty crap, yea, but $5 is $5 you could be buying beer or pizza with. And give you use of old Amiga joysticks that you might like to keep around, while we wait for USB controller driver support.
I'm actually suprosed to see this appear on slashdot, considering the company and it's products mostly being related to the Amiga community, and slashdot's strong disinterest in such a "dead" platform, as most comments allude to when an Amiga-related post shows up here. No, the guy won't get rich with this thing. Most of you guys probably won't have much use for it. I'll probably end up getting one, so I can use Amiga disks with my future PPC Amiga hardware. And I probably won't use it very often, but it would be nice to pop in an older floppy game now and then, or have easier access to Mac floppies as you can get certain older versions of MacOS free from Apple's ftp sites as floppy images, for use with Mac emulators. (I played the Mac versions of 7th Guest, Doom2 and Duke Nukem on my Amiga, great games that just weren't available on Amiga natively, and they ran great. X86 emulation would surely give me more choices, but I have a PC and having to translate between instruction sets would be a lot slower)
It's not going to change the world, but he'll surely sell in the numbers he's used to from his other Amiga products and be happy with it. You don't need to sell in the zillions to be successful...
I wish there was a way to rent something like this. I could really use one for a week or two, until all my old Amiga disks were copied over to CD.
After that, it would just be another useless card in a box in the attic...
I think one reason that Macs last longer is that Mac users tend to use a lot more RAM than PC users. I think it's not uncommon to find Mac users running a desktop with hundreds of MB of RAM, whereas PC users often have less than a hundred MB. This probably has a lot to do with manual memory management in the classic Mac OS, so users where much more aware of the memory needs of their computer.
Another reason is that Mac users tend to use their desktops as professional media workstations--and once you have a working production flow, it's better not to disturb it. PC users on the other hand, buy the cheapest possible computer with minimal RAM and processor, which becomes obsolete quickly.
This is another reason Macs are a profitable software market--Mac users often have a full install of Photoshop to do simple image cropping, while PC users tend to go with whatever crippleware came with their digital camera.
Just my observations. Is this OT?
Supposing I want to get those direly important files off my Apple Lisa 1's Twiggy disks!
;^>
I mean, with just a little hardware hacking, I can get at the files on my ProFile hard drive, but how am I to read from the two-windowed Twiggy floppies?
Do you have a
You wasted that much of the guys time by not telling him you had one of the 1200s with the dodgy floppy and YOU'RE pissed off?!
Actually that hole
Sorry temporary insanity there, the hole determines the DENSITY used not the number of sides, still that might be your problem as it effectively doubles the storage capacity.
Who marked that comment as informative anyway?
So this card has a Zorro edge and a PCI edge. Someone needs to get a Pentium motherboard and an Amiga motherboard together, plug the card into both, and get some shots of two nekkid computers boffing - biethnic pr0n, as it were. (Ewwwww!)
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
I have an 8" drive plugged into my Catweasel MK1 ISA card. Works great. I'm sure they'll work fine with the MK3 card too.
Oops, here I am lamely replying to myself.
You do need a 34-pin to 50-pin adapter, but those aren't hard to build, or you can buy one from www.dbit.com.
Actually, if your floppies are 100% double density, you can probably even read them with an adapter cable and a regular PC floppy controller. If they are all or partly single density, you may have problems, because some PC controllers can read single density and some fail to.
If only someone could make a PCI card with
the equivalent of an Amiga 500/4000/whatever
chipset...
Not only would it rule, but whoever does it
has his fortune made.
Why was I modded "offtopic?" I was ONtopic!
RTT
latt
Amigas with Toaster cards were something of an industry standard for inexpensive video editing up to a few years ago, when the TCO on Amgias got too high due to the increasing scarcity of hardware.
/still/ using an Amiga with a toaster card - the whole system cost them a few thousand, and in many ways it holds its own with some $10,000 NT-based systems I've seen.
Heck, I used to work in a video production studio that is
All hail the amiga.
In fact I had an A1200 that did NOT have a dodgy floppy -- it was fine. The boot errors I was seeing were due to the software not working under the A1200's ROM version. I assumed, and the guy behind Catweasel assumed, that it was a dodgy-floppy A1200. It would seem he would stay abreast of the status of A1200 production drive models being the sort to offer something like Catweasel. My time (and money) was wasted.
bp
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
iPod Hacks.com
"It's probably translated from german. Consequently, caps look bad translated too."
Because you're stupid.
A translator uses a language-to-language dictionary. So the dictionary would have to think they "their" posessive form means "they are" when you use it in a different language.
God dammit, YOU'RE fucking stupid, too.
**sigh**
>You realize of course, that typing in
"Of course" should have a comma at the beginning as well as the end.
>as confusing "you're" for "your".
The period belongs in the quotes.
>Furthermore, you failed to capitalize "good"
>and "god" in your fourth sentence.
It was a rant, not an article. If you find MLA standards for a rant, let me know.
> "god" must be capitalized because it is a
>proper noun
God is only capitalized when used in a reverent form or appearing at the beginning of a sentence.
>Please go aquire and consume a cyanide capsule
You could just say consume. Only an idiot would suggest first aquiring one.
I wouldn't claim the Catweasel was in error without also testing the same floppies on a real machine. I have a working Macintosh, Amiga, Commodore w/ 1541, 1581 which can all read the disks the Catweasel rejects. Of course, I've also tried many, many different disks.
We're on the road to Tycho.
"Yo, Mike!"
"Yeah, Gabe?"
"We got a problem down on Earth. In Utah."
"I thought you fixed that last century!"
"No, no, not that. Someone's found a security problem in the physics
program. They're getting energy out of nowhere."
"Blessit! Lemme look... Hey, it's
there all right! OK, just a sec...
There, that ought to patch it. Dist it out, wouldja?"
-- Cold Fusion, 1989
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