Catweasel success stories?

[Schoenfeld]

LoadWB:

The 1541 and 1571 drives have limited access to the raw data that comes through the PLL. It's enough to make a good guess about the head alignment, but that's all you have: An "educated guess", but not the true information. Please double-check if you're really doing head alignment, or just motor speed adjustment.

The Catweasel moves more signal processing into the software, giving more raw information to the computer, so the computer can calculate a "quality of signal" that you can use to judge if you're moving in the right direction with your adjustment.

The Amiga on the other hand has no access to the raw information at all. Writing some software that allows you to adjust your drives is impossible. I do remember a program that lets you adjust the motor speed of the old NEC1036 drives (on some very early FredFish disk!).

Jens Schönfeld

[Schoenfeld]

Just to let everyone know: There has been another update to the Catweasel drivers. Some more error messages, finally a retry button in the imagetool, and two types of "PLL" to choose from if you have disks that refuse to read properly. Not the full forensic functions that we're working on, but already a good point to start from.

Troy Davis made a lot of suggestions to improve the Imagetool, thanks for that. Most of those features need to wait until some more major re-builds of the driver have been accomplished. At this time, the decoders are located in the Kernel driver, so the Imagetool can only pass on information like "checksum error" to the user. After moving the decoders into the imagetool, it "knows" a lot more, and can run all the forensic algorithms that we have developed.

On another note, would anyone be interested in high-speed Amiga disk reading? I have an idea of speeding up drives and making batch conversion much faster. However, if nobody is willing to pay for such modified drives, I might as well skip on that development.

Jens Schönfeld
 

[amigadave]

Schoenfeld wrote:

On another note, would anyone be interested in high-speed Amiga disk reading? I have an idea of speeding up drives and making batch conversion much faster. However, if nobody is willing to pay for such modified drives, I might as well skip on that development.

Jens Schönfeld
 

Depending on price, I am interested.  The downloading and conversion of as many original Amiga disks as possible before they go bad, to adf's on my PC has been something high on my list of things to do for a long time.

Thanks for keeping up the good work of supporting the Catweasle devices. :-D

[guest3217]

Warning Catweasel NewBe post.... :crazy:

Very interesting posts!


I just finished reading all of them as, earlier today, I ordered my first MK4 from Software Hut.  I asked Joe there about it and he answered most of my questions, though not all; perhaps someone might know if....

I'm installing this is an Xp system (I'm only an emulator these days...) and I was wondering if there are any C-64 emulators that support/access the hardware directly (in other words, do I read disks of the drive or just images created previously?) As far as I understand,  AF 2006 does read disks through Catweasel, right?

Joe also mentioned that Catweasel had 2 spaces for SID chips. I ended up ordering 1.  I read later that having 2 provide for sterophonic sound....ummmm...I don't remmember any stereo sound coming out of my C-64....only 3 voices..(if I recall, which I don't since it has been over 18 years since I burned my last C-64  :madashell:  :madashell: ...)
 I guess the important thing for me is to be able to re-experience the sound programing I did back then....again...this feature is accessed by some emulator with hardware capabilities?
And lastly, after I try to salvage my last remaing C-64 disk, I am planning to utilize the board for its connections to mouse/joystick/keyboard (AF2006 emulation.) Now...if I only hadn't donated my last keyboard to Good Will last year....  :lol:
I guess I'll be looking on Ebay....

Wizardo

UPDATE: Found answers and some interesting posts on these issues on http://eab.abime.net/forumdisplay.php?f=5

[Dwyloc]

Schoenfeld wrote:
On another note, would anyone be interested in high-speed Amiga disk reading? I have an idea of speeding up drives and making batch conversion much faster. However, if nobody is willing to pay for such modified drives, I might as well skip on that development.

I would also be interested in buying a modified drive with high speed reading capabilities as like a lot of other people who purchased a catweasel PCI card one of its main intended functions was to allow me to backup my large collection of more than 200 Amiga disk, as long as it could also function as a normal drive to write the images back.

I suspect a lot of other catweasel purchasers would also be interested in purchasing a new drive that was guaranteed to work with the Catwaseal instead of the current trial and error approach that is required.

[Kin-Hell]

My Z II S CLass Zorro version absolutely ROCKS....until you go online. I had a PC Floppy drive that NEVER worked from New....but it was fine reading Amiga Disks & PC Disks via the Catweasel.
Needless to say, I had to remove the Catweasel from my A4KT & now wonder if IDEFix would resolve the issue!?

[pdgable]

Hi Jens,
I am having no luck getting the new drivers to work with my Mark III installed in a 1ghz PIII running XPPro SP2. The Amiga side appear to work fine but the C64 side does not work at all.My floppy drive is a Teac FD-55GFR HD drive that works perfectly with the old(2002) drivers. Any suggestions? I would really like to be able to turn this computer off without having the hold the power button down(this part of the drivers is very nice.)
Thanks
Paul

[Daniele]

Well I made the opposite ,what I mean is usind Catweisel to write on floppy disks to be used on a real Amiga but the experience it has been very bad.Only 10% of games workes so I decided to buy an ADF trasfer kit with Compact Falsh to see what happens!