GreaseWeazle V4 available at Amiga Kit Amiga Store

[amigakit]

Keir Fraser's excellent GreaseWeazle V4 adapter board is now available from Amiga Kit Amiga Store

Read/write various disk formats to floppy disks from a Windows or Mac using this adapter and a PC floppy drive. Supports ADF too!




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[First Ninja]

Read/write various disk formats to floppy disks from a Windows or Mac using this adapter and a PC floppy drive. Supports ADF too!

Unfortunately, this is only partially true. AmigaOS 4.1 isn't supported at all, which is a total dealbreaker to me. I'd love to order a GeaseWeazle, but that assumes that OS 4 has full blown support. @amigakit - how soon can we expect AmigaOS compatibility?

[klx300r]

Read/write various disk formats to floppy disks from a Windows or Mac using this adapter and a PC floppy drive. Supports ADF too!

Unfortunately, this is only partially true. AmigaOS 4.1 isn't supported at all, which is a total dealbreaker to me. I'd love to order a GeaseWeazle, but that assumes that OS 4 has full blown support. @amigakit - how soon can we expect AmigaOS compatibility?

If you want full OS4.1 support I'd recommend you get a Catweasel MK4+

[First Ninja]

If you want full OS4.1 support I'd recommend you get a Catweasel MK4+

Thank you for your reply. Unfortunately, the Catweasel is out of stock since years ago. When they did show up on various auction sites, the asking prices are usually with a markup of several orders of magnitude. That is exactly why the Amiga platform should embrace initiatives like this one - buying the GreaseWeazle not only supports hardware developer, creating brand new hardware, but the distributor as well. It's a win-win for everyone but the scalpers.

@amigakit - I'm eagerly awaiting an answer. Thank you in advance.

[klx300r]

@ First Ninja
sad to hear about the Catweasel MK4+ shortage as it's just an awesome product that works great under OS4.1 for quite some time now...wonder my Individual Computers wouldn't have them in stock for so long...as they are the manufacturers after all ?

[amigakit]

@First Ninja

Hi

We are always prepared to re-invest in these type of software development projects.  The profits we make from our sales routinely get ploughed back every year into new Amiga hardware and software.

First a review of the dependencies would be needed.  I can see that Python 3 and pyserial libraries are required.  This is not going to be a straight forward port.  More investigation is needed.

[Matt_H]

@ First Ninja
sad to hear about the Catweasel MK4+ shortage as it's just an awesome product that works great under OS4.1 for quite some time now...wonder my Individual Computers wouldn't have them in stock for so long...as they are the manufacturers after all ?

This surprises me, too. It certainly seems like the demand is there for another production run. I wonder if it's an RoHS/EOL component situation.

[First Ninja]

@First Ninja
We are always prepared to re-invest in these type of software development projects.  The profits we make from our sales routinely get ploughed back every year into new Amiga hardware and software.

First a review of the dependencies would be needed.  I can see that Python 3 and pyserial libraries are required.  This is not going to be a straight forward port.  More investigation is needed.

Thank you for answering. Your general stance about re-investing in Amiga support is potentially good news for the GreaseWeazle. While most solutions would be welcome, building a native AmigaOS version that fully exploits the OS would likely do the GreaseWeazle even more justice.

Implementing the support as a trackdisk.device compatible AmigaOS device, allowing Workbench to access FFS formatted floppies, is strongly encouraged. Even with a basic, read-only version it would make the GreaseWeasle an instabuy item for me. Thank you for considering it 👍.

[AmigaOldskooler]

Hi AmigaKit,

I was wondering if you've had a chance to do investigation concerning making GreaseWeazle working on AmigaOS 4 setups?  Thanks in advance for answer.

[Vanilla]

Implementing the support as a trackdisk.device compatible AmigaOS device, allowing Workbench to access FFS formatted floppies, is strongly encouraged. Even with a basic, read-only version it would make the GreaseWeasle an instabuy item for me. Thank you for considering it 👍.

I agree. I would have expected there to be a mass storage protocol used. Or at least appear as a floppy device as well as the serial device. A USB floppy drive can be plugged into an OS4 machine and works out of the box. The firmware would need to identify itself as a floppy drive and support associated commands.

What I've noticed lately is a trend for Windows only support. The modern Amiga people tend to use use Windows. Within emulation or using a PC to both partition an Amiga drive or update firmware for an Amiga device. Not even a real Amiga is being supported any more! Too much dependence on the PC these days, the Amiga used to survive on its own and do it's update firmware itself.

But even here the OS support apart from Windows looks slightly atrocious. On the Mac you need to install an SDK then download files and compile it yourself. On Linux it's not much better. What if you are just a normal user? Normal Mac users don't have X-Code installed!

[kolla]

What’s to compile?
From what I recall, it’s all just pyhthon, and Windows is the oddball (as always) because it doesn’t ship with python built in.

[amigakit]

@AmigaOldskooler

We have looked into it.  The source code is Python 3 AFAIK so would take a lot of work to port to OS4.

[Spektro]

Hello AmigaKit,

If you need a coder, I'm available for Python projects.

[Vanilla]

We have looked into it.  The source code is Python 3 AFAIK so would take a lot of work to port to OS4.

I think that's too complicated. That would need yet another program compiled with a GUI. It should be as simple as a DOS driver.

[kreciu]

It would be great to have a driver for Amiga os4.1 and MorphOS.