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

[amigakit]

The new batch of Catweasel MK4 PCI can be purchased from us.  We are now taking pre-orders on our webstore here:

http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=206

Our Prices:

USD $124.12  ( http://usa.amigakit.com )
GBP £74.99  ( http://uk.amigakit.com )
EUR 95.21  ( http://europe.amigakit.com )
CAD $126.83 ( http://canada.amigakit.com )

[Amiduffer]

What in heck are "threshold countries". Is that industry lingo?

[Darrin]

Poster: amigakit  Posted: 2008/7/13 17:45:57

The new batch of Catweasel MK4 PCI can be purchased from us. We are now taking pre-orders on our webstore here:

http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=206

Our Prices:

USD $124.12 ( http://usa.amigakit.com )

You know, you're going to make my wife file for divorce!  Hmmmm....

[Darrin]

I take it that with 2 floppy headers on the card that I could connect 1 3.5" and 1 5.25" floppy at the same time to write files to disk for my Amiga and C128?

Does it come with software to write ADF and D64 files to real disks from the PC (without having to load some sort of emulator like UAE running Easy ADF or similar)?

[amigadave]

@Darrin,

No, I am sure that the second floppy connector is a pass-through to connect to the on board PC floppy drive controller.

[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

[Darrin]

Ah, so if your PC doesn't have a floppy controller then this doesn't work as you have to route the PC floppy through it?  I thought the CW was a floppy controller.

Cheers for the info.  I'll scratch this of my Xmas list.

[Dwyloc]

I have a Catweasel MK4 and it dose work as a floppy controller you can connect 2 floppy drives to it so you can have both a 3.5" drive and a 5,25" drive connected at the same time with the supplied floppy cable.

The pass-through connector allows you to have the same drives connected to your PC's motherboard and boot off them as normal and use them under Windows so when you are not using them with the Catweasel to create or write back disk images of with WinUAE to read Amiga disks you can use them to access PC disks as normal without requiring an extra disk drive connected to your PCs motherboard.

[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

[Darrin]

@ Dwyloc:  Thanks.

@ Jens:

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".

That sounds perfect for me.  I really only want it for writing Amiga and C64/128 format disks on the PC.  If I need an A: drive on my main PCs (which don't have floppy controllers) then I use a USB 3.5" floppy drive which mounts inself as A: when I insert it.

One last question, does it work under Vista?  The PC I intend to install it in is running XP, but I'm wondering what will happen if I upgrade my main desktop to a machine running Vista in the future.

Thanks.

[Ianoakley]

I've got a catweasel installed in a PC running Visa Home Premium and there does not appear to be any issues.

[Darrin]

Cheers.  Everything looks good then.  :-)

[Retro_71]

Dont Upgrade (downgrade more like it) to Vista stick with XP and put SP3 on it... Trust me on this i build and work with PC's all day everyday, stick to XP. Vista is the Windows ME of this decade....

[Darrin]

I know what you mean.  I only have 1 Vista machine and that's my new HP9700 laptop.  I spent a long time making it a dual boot Vista/XP system (1 OS installed in each hard drive) and it was a real pain in the butt with HP actually listing the wrong XP drivers on their site, having to buy a USB floppy is order to install the SATA drivers for XP to install (it was either that or make a slipstream XP disk), chase up beta video driver from nVidia and then finally discover that there are still no audio drivers available!  In the end, I wiped the XP install off in frustration.

To be honest, I'm doing OK with Vista now that I've set it mostly for "classic" operations and disabled a lot of the bells and whistles.  

My major gripe is the endless:

This program needs permission to run...
You must be a Administrator run run this program...
Are you sure you really want to run this program?
Are you absolutely sure you want to run it ebcause M$ hasn't approved the software?
This is your last chance, do you really want to do this?
OK, we'll allow it to run, but we really think you shouldn't.
Fine, ****ing run it then!  See if we care!

:-D