USB Catweasel

Is there a echnical reason for the non-existance of said device, or is it just a lack of potential buyers?

[orange]

usb floppy??? why not just go on and make usb cassette recorder and use tapes.. ahh the lovely "R Tape loading error"
  :-D

[redrumloa]

How'd you connect floppy drives? Free air, sitting on the desk?

[dnelsonfl]

I think he meant the catweasel card itself in a USB form. Just imagine a big box like an external SCSI enclosure with space to insert your floppy drives. Internally, where the floppy cables connect, instead of SCSI guts you have the catweasel's guts. Instead of a SCSI cable to connect to the host computer, it has a USB cable to connect it to the host computer. Doesn't sound very pretty or desk-space friendly, but then again it'd work with those desktop-replacement laptops that are slowly becoming the rage. Plus newer slim-line computers are having fewer free slots inside, some only have one or two free slots after the video/sound stuff is added on the factory floor. I'd personally still prefer it internal rather than USB, but those are some thoughts for what it's worth.
-David

 

redrumloa wrote:
How'd you connect floppy drives? Free air, sitting on the desk?

Haven't you seen external USB floppy drives?

The device I have in mind would just be a passthru device with a box of tricks in the middle.

[redrumloa]

nicholas wrote:
The device I have in mind would just be a passthru device with a box of tricks in the middle.

Never in my life have I seen an external USB 5.25 floppy drive. Link?

[Thomas]

The device I have in mind would just be a passthru device with a box of tricks in the middle.

That's not possible. There is a standard PC floppy controller inside the floppy case and just like the PC floppy controller on the motherboard cannot handle Amiga disks, the USB floppy controller cannot, either. There is nothing you could put in between, it won't work.

You rather have to rip the floppy controller from the external floppy case and replace it by a catweasel. This might be possible but also rather expensive as it needs a complete new design (USB instead of PCI). And very small as it needs to fit into the floppy case.

Additionally, there are not even useful drivers for the PCI catweasel card, who should write drivers for the USB version ?

Bye,
Thomas

[redrumloa]

@Thomas

I wouldn't go so far as to say not useful, there are useful drivers. I do agree that all of it's potential has not been tapped, which is a shame :-(

[Doobrey]

Didn't Ole-Egil say on AmigaWorld.net that he was working on a USB->Amiga Floppy project?
 There's another guy doing the same, I've read his blog a few times and it seems fairly advanced, wish I could remember the URL :roll:

-Edit- Found it..Amiga Floppy Blog

[amigagr]

i have connect for test reasons a nec usb floppy at subway on my a1200 and it works fine with fat95 and usbscsi.device using pc formated disks at 720kb and 1.44mb

[Trev]

A Cardbus-based enclosure would work with the existing Catweasel PCI cards but would be prohibitively expensive. (Same goes for a PCI-PCI bridge.) Has anyone seen any kind of PCI-USB-PCI bridge?

Before any of that, however, I'd like to see Jens add a set of drive-type jumpers to the card to make drive detection simpler. (You know, something similar to the drive-type settings in a PC BIOS.)

Trev

[InTheSand]

orange wrote:
usb floppy??? why not just go on and make usb cassette recorder and use tapes.. ahh the lovely "R Tape loading error"
  :-D

:laugh:  Ah! Another fellow Spectrum user!

As for the USB Catweasel, I wouldn't say it's not possible, just technically challenging!

I guess a small case could be produced that would accept a standard 3.5" drive - this would need to contain a board with some sort of autonomous processing capability (via a CPU or FPGA?) to directly interface with the floppy electronics and process the data in the same way that the PCI Catweasel does, plus some RAM to temporarily store information being read/written, plus a USB interface to connect it to a PC. And the PC itself would then need drivers and appropriate software.

Does anyone remember the external RS232-based floppy drives produced for the Psion Series 3/3a and Amstrad NC100 handheld computers in the early 1990s by Cumana? These contained their own Z80-a-like CPU, 8Kb RAM, 32Kb ROM, floppy interface (using a standard floppy controller rather than the custom electronics of the Catweasel) and serial interface hardware. Physically, these are not much larger than the existing USB floppy drives - they're a bit thicker, due to using a standard desktop 3.5" drive, and a bit longer so that the circuit board can be housed in the case.

So I'd say it's definitely possible!

 - Ali

[irishmike]

Hi All:

My two pennies worth is that this would be a great idea.  The unit could be the size of an external floppy (like the kind that were for earlier Macintoshes) if we don't care about the external ports that are on a Catweasel... but electronically speaking, it could be done USB and smaller than the card.

I think it is a grand idea.

[gizmomelb]

USB interface/control chip to buffered memory/68000 CPU/whatever -> relevant floppy control chips emulated by the miniMIG (when/if the source code is released) on an FPGA -> Amiga to PC floppy conversion circuit to a real IBM PC floppy drive (either 3.5 or 5.25).

I fully expect something like the above after the miniMIG code/circuits are released.