individual Computers: new address, Catweasel driver update

[Schoenfeld]

In May of this year, we have moved to new premises with more than three times the space that our office in Aachen had to offer. Since we still don't run a retail shop, we have moved to the pictureque area of Simmerath, located in the natural park of the northern Eifel region. With this new location, there's also a change in our shipping partner: Parcels within Germany and the EU are now shipped with DPD.

new drivers for Catweasel MK4
The new drivers V 2.5.0.0 for Windows 2000 and Windows XP (32-bit versions) are fixing a few bugs in handling 5,25 inch drives. The new imagetool V3.1 can now read and write three new formats:

    * VersaDOS HD
      these disks have been provided by Perfint tech from India. They are used to store medical imaging data. With new, faster computers now being able to retrieve data from older medical equipment, lots of money can be saved, and up-to-date medical service with modern image processing algorithms can be provided at lower cost. We're especially happy about this use case, as it has extremely high value to threshold countries.

    * VersaDOS 3HDDI
      these disks have been provided to us by Matisa from Switzerland, a company that makes machines for railroad track construction and maintenance. The disk was mangled and obviously written on a very bad drive, but we managed to retrieve enough data for implementing this new format.

    * HP4145
      this disk was provided to us by Bosch (Hildesheim, Germany), where it is used in semiconductor test-equipment.

Another new feature of the imagetool is the possibility to save d64/d71/d81 images of Commodore disks with additional error information. The automatic recognition of disk formats now gives a list of possible formats instead of stopping at the first positive try, which makes the function a lot more useful. You can find more details in the readme-files of the archive:

Download: CWMK42500.zip (385 KBytes)

New Catweasel MK4 controllers will be back in stock in august of this year. To bridge this bottleneck in supply, we have cleared our safety-stock of Catweasel MK4 controllers. To our knowledge, all pre-orders are served now. Our retail partners are taking orders that will be shipped as soon as the new production run is available.

individual Computers Jens Schönfeld GmbH
Im Zemmer 6
52152 Woffelsbach
Germany
www.icomp.de

[Schoenfeld]

Amiduffer,

threshold countries are those countries that are "almost as industrialized as the western world". Things that we take for granted, like medical services, a working educational system, clean water in every household and enough food for everyone are "in the making" in those countries.

Building an infrastructure with all that (and more) takes lots of money, but since the economic strength of those countries is healthy, it's predictable that they will make it "someday", but in my opinion, they should not start wasting money like many western countries do.

Why buy new computer tomography equipment if the old one still delivers the data, but just doesn't have the CPU horsepower to apply modern algorithms?

Jens

[Schoenfeld]

Darrin,

routing the PC's floppy controller signals through the Catweasel is optional, meaning, it is not required. However, it's desirable, as the Catweasel does not give you access to the disks with a drive letter (no A: drive). Only specialized software (like the included imagetool for reading/writing ADF, D64 and other images) can use the drives "the Catweasel way".

Jens