Slashdot Mirror
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."
Like the other poster said, you could use something like VMWare to make use of it. Otherwise, if you can run Linux or something on the 'other' machine, you could format the media to ext3/FAT or some other filesystem Linux has support for, which allows you to shift files between different systems supporting Linux/Other OS without a network.
I.O.U One Sig.
Read the article. It's not a drive, you hook a drive TO it. It allows you to read/write different formats.
It reads 800K's just fine! Where've you been, under a rock? =)
How big do they think a market for this will be?
The company has been selling similar stuff for years. Move on.
Yes, it reads Apple II disks, all MAC disks, all Amiga disks, Atari, hell you name it. Even reads hundreds of CP/M formats.
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.
but you people have NO CLUE about anything not Linux or Windows related, and it irks me most of the clueless comments that are being made.
Preach it, brother! I moved from Amiga to Linux in 1998, and while it was in some respects a step forward, in others it was a step back. (I considered Windows, but decided that it seemed to do too many things for Microsoft's benefit and not enough for me.)
Well it looks like you may access 800 k floppies but technically you can't, at least not without modified hardware.800 K Mac floppies are read/written at a variable rotation speed, which is impossible to simulate with a standard PC floppy controller.
"Naughty, naughty, naughty, you filthy old soomka !"
The swedish(?) company Elecktron makes a gadget called the SIDstation based around the c64 SID chip. It's intended for use in electronic music.
Despite this, for some unknown reason, it was at least an order of magnitude slower than comparable PC drives. I had to pay good money for an aftermarket ROM cartridge that had no function other than speed up the floppy interface by 5X by fixing the serial communication protocol.
That drive is just about the finest example of overdesigned hardware I've ever seen.
I've seen people confuse "there" and "their" so many times that I'm practically immune to it now, but confusing "their" and "they're"?? One is a contraction, the other is possessive. Come on!
-Gabe
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/
The only thing that ID's a floppy as single sided is not having the extra hole in it (the one opposite the write protect tab), so either drill a hole in the single sided floppy in the right place (not recommended due to plastic swarf getting EVERYWHERE), or get a sacrificial floppy drive and somehow disable the switch that senses that hole.