Catweasel MK 4????????

[InTheSand]

Hi,

I get the same problems with the Catweasel MK IV when under WinUAE, e.g. it doesn't work!

The CAT: device is mounted, and the drive even clicks periodically, stopping when a disk is inserted just like it would with a real Amiga drive.

Doing a "dir cat:" from the shell when no disk is present brings up a "No disk present in device CAT:" prompt as expected.

However, doing a "dir cat:" with a known working Amiga OFS or FFS 880Kb disk in the drive brings up a "Not a DOS disk in device CAT:" prompt, even though the Windows-based Catweasel image program is able to read this disk.

Formatting a blank DD disk with "format drive cat: name test noicons ffs" goes throught the formatting process (very slowly!) right up to where the disk is initialised, and then states "Format Failure: not a valid DOS disk".

Anyhow, despite all this, the very basic Windows-based imaging tool works fine, and allows the creation of ADF files from Amiga floppies, and the creation of Amiga floppies from ADFs which then work fine in my real Amigas.

One point I have about the imaging tool is that it doesn't wait for the disk to be spun by the drive before it starts reading/writing. E.g. it's already started reading but the drive hasn't yet rotated the disk and aligned the ... err... "pointy thing" in the drive with the corresponding slot in the disk's metal spindle to rotated it. Because of this, I usually have to start the read or write process, then stop it and restart it once the disk has been grabbed by the drive.

I'm using the Catweasel with a Pentium 4, and the drive connected to it is a Sony 3.5" HD, this being the sole drive and connected to the middle connector. The drive is for the Catweasel's use only (I've not used the passthru feature from the motherboard's drive connector).

My UAE configuration for testing this is roughly A1200-ish, 2Mb chip, AGA, 32Mb RAM, 68040, with KS 3.0 and WB 3.0.

Finally, in response to a question above about Amiga hard disks - you don't need a Catweasel to do this. Instead, you can just read/write Amiga hard drives with UAE. Search the forums for one of the existing threads on that topic.

 - Ali

[InTheSand]

[InTheSand]

Having everything available through A: would be nice, but I guess that'd require seriously complicated driver development... Besides, UAE expects the Amiga side of things to handle the drive access and decoding, so this probably wouldn't be the solution.

Although it doesn't talk to the Catweasel, you may find ADF View of use, if you've not already got it. I've created and modified quite a few ADF files with this, prior to using the Catweasel to write the ADFs out to real disks.

The most recent Linux drivers seem to be here. Unfortunately, my Catweasel is in my Windows machine rather than my Linux one, so I'm not really in a position to try it.

Mounting an Amiga disk appears to be possible (assuming the Linux distro being used has "AFFS" (Amiga FFS) support built
in).

The documentation states that the Catweasel drive can be used as DF0: within UAE: "Start uae with the parameter "-0 /dev/cw0amigadd".  Don't forget to eject the disk using the UAE GUI before actually removing it from the drive!"

Next time I reinstall Windoze on this PC, I'll leave some space for a Linux partition... But in the mean time, has anyone else had any success with the Linux / Catweasel / UAE combination?

 - Ali

[InTheSand]

If you're after using the Catweasel from the Amiga (emulated or otherwise) to access PC disks, it might also be worth looking at XFS as this allows proper long filename access, and not the mangled 8.3 files of CrossDOS.

I have a Zorro-based Catweasel in my A3000 and XFS works really well with it.

 - Ali