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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."
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!
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.
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
What am I going to do with that HUGE BOX OF WAREZ?! :-)
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.
What's so hard about reading 800K disks? My stock linux kernel seems to be able to format and read/write these formats on my toshiba laptop:
fd fd0u1120 fd0u1680 fd0u1760 fd0u360 fd0u820
fd0 fd0u1440 fd0u1722 fd0u1840 fd0u720 fd0u830
fd0u1040 fd0u1600 fd0u1743 fd0u1920 fd0u800
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.
or... was it?
heh.
.sig last updated Jan. 14, 2000
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.
> I dont buy that it can read 800k disks, people have been tring
:(
Hate to burst your bubble, but the ISA version of the CatWeasel has been reading 800k disks for years and years.
This isn't a new product, it's an upgraded CatWeasel.
Jeeze, just do a Google for "CatWeasel" for crying out loud.
Hell, I know I'm going to blow all my karma on this CatWeasel thread, 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. Mod away, I can take it
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.
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
price was so high and a good deal of the internals are proprietary.
:)
You'd think, but it's not really the case, the way PowerMacs hold their value is disproportionate to their initial purchase price.
take a £1,500 x86 box, and a £1,500 Mac, and in 3 years the Mac will still be worth something, chances are the x86 box won't.
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 BTW, if you're going to mock-troll, you should take note that Apple don't do design work on the G4 aka PowerPC 74xx series, Motorola do
Point 1) Macs are upgradable (laptops and i/eMac aside, the PowerMac is upgradable, I've seen G3 towers with 733Mhz G4's in them for example)
Point 2) buying a new mac doesn't mean you have to repurchase all the software you had for the previous one...
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!
My feeling is that if you have some old media with data you need off them you likely are in a whole world of hurt.
Realistically companies should have hired a few summer interns about 10 years ago to go through all those old backups and start copying them to tape. Now days with HDs as cheap as they are, a lot of older systems should have been backed up with the appropriate emulator for whatever platform. (Z-80, Apple][, CPM, etc.)
The question is who has data in those formats that still needs them? More than likely it is mainly scientific facilities with lots of recording data. I've heard that this is a *huge* problem in astronomy where a lot of old magnetic media from the 70's has decayed such that a lot of analysis has been lost.
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.
No, I should have got modded down for calling the original poster clueless. I regret doing that, but sometimes you just hit post and fire away.
I've been using an Amiga for Eons, when you hear someone who's never even heard of an Amiga ("What's an Omega?") "doubting" it can do something you've been doing for almost 20 years, it just rubs you the wrong way.
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."
From another guy with a foot in both camps - about the only thing that's proprietary is the mobo and CPU, both of which you can buy individually these days.
A friend of mine recently built a system himself entirely homebrew - bought a gigabit-enabled mobo and an 800MHz G4 online, and reflashed a GF2MX with a Mac BIOS. Add an IDE HDD and DVD-R drive and a plain-jane ATX PSU, hit the power button, install Jaguar. Tada. I'm running a slightly overclocked Beige G3 on loan from him.
Many models of iMac and PowerBook have been upgradable too. I don't think there's anything out for the current-style, lampshade iMac, but the original iMac series, RevA to Rev E (?) can take G3 and G4 upgrades. I don't think the TiBook's CPU is upgradable (or no one's released an upgrade yet), but I think even the PowerBook G3 had processor upgrades available for it, from companies like Newer Tech and Sonnet.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
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.
Yep, and it's footprint can be around 130MB
:)
My next machine will be a mac, partially due to my continuing distaste at the Microsoft DRM approach, and partially because I'd like to be able to sell a machine a year or so later without only getting 10% of the purchase price back
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.
All right! It's finally here! Screw Windows 2000 and Linux, I'm going back to using GEOS!!!
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
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.
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
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/
"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?
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
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 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 !
Current-production 3.5" floppies aren't worth a sh*t (write 'em today and you'll be lucky if you can read 'em next week), but I have 5.25" floppies that came with my Apple IIe that are as readable now as they were back in 1985. I think I've taken reasonably good care of them...nothing special WRT environmetal conditions (no controlled humidity or temperature), but they've not been sitting in a shed or an attic all these years either. I think the advice on the sleeves that came with some disks (Elephant, maybe?) was something along the lines of "if it's comfortable for you, it's comfortable for your disks"...and that seems to have been the case.
That said, I still think it'd be a good idea to pack up all my disks in ShrinkIt archives and burn them to CD-R as a backup. A fair chunk of the Apple II software I have is already on CD-R (used to have 'em on QIC-24 tape for my BBS), but I still have a fair amount of old data, source code, etc. on floppies. That's one of the things I'll get around to doing eventually, along with scanning/OCRing my Nibble collection.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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 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)
astroturf?... bah, get out!
100% natural grass here!
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.
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.
and partially because I'd like to be able to sell a machine a year or so later without only getting 10% of the purchase price back :)
So you can buy a brand new one that's 100Mhz faster?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
They also don't use MFM encoding...they use GCR, which your average x86-box floppy controller doesn't grok. It's an encoding method Steve Wozniak came up with back in 1978 or so (first implemented on 5.25" floppies for the Apple II) as a means to reduce the hardware complexity of the floppy drive and its controller. (Check out this recent thread in comp.sys.apple2 for more info.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
"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. "
What world are you living in? My ibook has 384mb of ram, and my PC desktop has 512mb. Some companies still try to bum computers off with 128mb new, but you sohuld get at least 192 or 256.
What we see depends on mainly what we look for. -- John Lubbock Now search for that bug slave!
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
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.