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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?
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?! :-)
Dude, since ... always. That's what Slashdot does. I'd cite examples, but I'd be listing just about everything ...
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
I'd say because its an item I've never heard of and I'd say a fair portion of Slashdot's readers are intertested in emulators and this product would help them transfer their old software to their PC.
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.
Since when did Slashdot start posting free advertisements from corporations
Since mid 2002. Where have you been?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
that was an April Fool's joke.
or... was it?
heh.
.sig last updated Jan. 14, 2000
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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/
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 !
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.