CATWEASEL FLOPPY CONTROLLER

The Catweasel controller handles Amiga and MS-Dos disks, no matter if they're DD or HD formatted. The HD formats offer higher speeds than Amiga disk drives : PC-HD disks are 2.15 times faster, and Amiga HD-disks are sped up by 1.3 times. This can be achieved because the Amiga-HD drives spin at 150 RPM as soon as you put a HD-Disk into the drive. The PC-drive on the other hand spins at 300 RPM, no matter what kind of disk you insert.

Additionally, a further strength of the Catweasel controller is reading and writing extraneous formats: Macintosh, Atari 10/11 sector disks and Commodore 1581 disks can be used in a standard 3,5" low-cost drive (*).

If you're connecting a 5.25" drive, even more formats can be handled : MS-Dos disks with 360K and 1200K open up to the Amiga-world, and the good old '64 disk is honoured in a special way : A filesystem for the Amiga OS is shipped with the catweasel, so you can copy the files from a 1541-disk using the shell or Directory Opus. Copying files for Emulators is no longer a problem, because a full disk is read within 12 seconds. A virtual file "disk.info" shows an icon on the workbench, and another virtual file holds the .d64 image of the disk, as as it's a standard in '64 emulators.

With a software update (available later in '97), you will be able to use floppystreamers with the Catweasel controller. With this sequential device you'll be able to backup your harddisks with AmiBack, Quarterback or Diavolo Backup. The speed will be about 2MB/minute. This software update will be free.

The controller is connected to the IDE port of the Amiga 1200/Amiga 4000. You can still connect 2 hard disks or 1 harddisk and 1 CD-ROM. If you already use a common 4-drive IDE adaptor, a special adaptor is available for the clock-connector port in the Amiga 1200, and it's fully compatible with all known Accelerators and hard disks. No problems have been found with the clock on accelerator cards.

The current release is for the A1200 only, but a Zorro-II version of the Catweasel will be released. It will include some additional features : 3 (three!) IDE-Ports for cheap CD-ROMS and hard disks, a bootrom for booting from Catweasel drives or a harddrive, and a local expansion port. This expansion port can carry an optional I/O module with 2 serial and 1 parallel interface. A special sysop's I/O module will carry 8 (eight!) serial ports. Each port has a 16-byte fifo to keep the interrupt-load low.

(*): Due to the bad quality of the drives, we don't guarantee the function with Mitsumi D359Tx drives.

Price (A1200 Version): £ 59.95 UKP