After many months without any fruitful activity, this Christmas I ordered my little storage room and an Amiga 500 with hard disk and memory expansions appeared. Fortunately I also found an old Catweasel MK1 (ISA bus). I bought it many years ago but my fun project I did never work. The main problem was writing floppies in 880KB Amiga format. I never got to run the Catweasel. In his time the driver was for MS-DOS in reading mode only. It had a driver for linux and I think a little later there were new drivers for Windows 98.
This time I decided to try again before throwing it all away. The Amiga worked properly with Kickstart 2.05-350. I reread the hard drive (SupraDrive 500XP) manual and discovered I had to disconnect the external power supply since the drive get the power supply from the Amiga's expansion bus. And it worked correctly with Workbench 1.3 installed and a couple of games.
Then I added the RAM expansion 500RX SupraRAM and it also worked properly so the next step was logical, to move programs and games from PC to Amiga. There is the possibility of a serial or parallel cable with special soft but having a Catweasel it did not seem normal to buy something else. Also a while ago I recovered a Pentium II with ISA bus ports so I could try it with something more modern operating system (formerly I had an old 486 running very slow with Windows 95).
After looking for information on the card I found the new wiki Individual Computers, makers of the Catweasel and several different products like several accelerator cards and others for Amiga computers:
So for my test I needed:
The second part is the installation of the driver. For this start create a new folder called 'C:\Catweasel\' and unzip the driver inside and then follow the next steps. NOTE: sorry for the pictures but my windows is in Spanish, although the buttons are the same in English.
Then you have to open the 'New Hardware Wizard' from the 'System properties':
Once there select 'Add new device' and 'Select the hardware from a list':
The next step is to choose the type of device as 'Other Hardware' and on the next screen press the button 'Have Disk ...' to be able to type the folder where you have unzipped the drivers in the previous steps.
At this time a new screen appears where you can choose which of the three included drivers is needed. Logically choose 'ISA Catweasel controller'.
Now a new window appears containing a warning message because it is not a self configurable Plug & Play card. Now it's time to tell the driver the range of input and output addresses chosen by the jumpers on the card. To modify this parameter choice 'range of input / output' and click 'Change settings ...'. After a new window appears press the up or down buttons until the desired range is selected:
After this is complete only accept and finish the and reboot.
Once you have restarted the computer and if everything is connected in place, Windows will detect new hardware 'floppy on Catweasel '. The process is similar but this time it is only necessary to indicate the drivers folder we have created earlier:
The third part is the installation, configuration and use of the Catweasel Tools software that will allow us to read&write disk images and Amiga (among other formats) floppys. As before unzip the softwarein the previously created 'C:\Catweasel\' folder.
If all has gone well use 'cw_config' to verify that the card and drive are detected by the operating system.
The third point is the configuration software. This requires some modifications in the file 'cw_config.ini'. First you have to define the type of card you have installed by changing the 'version' parameter to 1:
Then you have to specify how many drives the system has. In my case I only have one so I changed the 'drives' parameter:
And this is the look while an .adf image is being written on one disc!
The last part is a very special one. I put stickers on the Floppy drives of my PC.... my memory starts to fail!!!!!
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| My old Amiga 500 with SupraDrive 500XP hard disk, 500RX RAM expansion and external floppy drive. |
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| With the HD expasion opened in the tests. |
This time I decided to try again before throwing it all away. The Amiga worked properly with Kickstart 2.05-350. I reread the hard drive (SupraDrive 500XP) manual and discovered I had to disconnect the external power supply since the drive get the power supply from the Amiga's expansion bus. And it worked correctly with Workbench 1.3 installed and a couple of games.
Then I added the RAM expansion 500RX SupraRAM and it also worked properly so the next step was logical, to move programs and games from PC to Amiga. There is the possibility of a serial or parallel cable with special soft but having a Catweasel it did not seem normal to buy something else. Also a while ago I recovered a Pentium II with ISA bus ports so I could try it with something more modern operating system (formerly I had an old 486 running very slow with Windows 95).
 |
| Catweasel MK1 package. |
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| Catweasel MK1 side. |
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| Catweasel MK1 rear side. |
After looking for information on the card I found the new wiki Individual Computers, makers of the Catweasel and several different products like several accelerator cards and others for Amiga computers:
http://wiki.icomp.deSo from this wiki you can download new drivers for all Catweasel cards and new software to read and write various floppy formats so that a priori the thing seems easy, but the documentation says was not tested in the old Catweasel MK1 ISA bus.
So for my test I needed:
- A computer. I used a PC with Pentium II with 320 MB of RAM.
- Operating system. I decided on Windows 2000 because it is last OS this PC can run enought fast and it is within the list of tested operating systems.
- Driver for the Catweasel card from the wiki: http://wiki.icomp.de/w/images/9/9b/Cwdriver-32bit-free-snapshot-091116.tar.gz
- Catweasel Tools 3. This is the Floppy Image Software from the wiki: http://wiki.icomp.de/w/images/e/ed/Cwtools-snapshot-091116.tar.gz
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| Catweasel MK1 jumper settings table. Important!!!!! |
Then you have to open the 'New Hardware Wizard' from the 'System properties':
Once there select 'Add new device' and 'Select the hardware from a list':
The next step is to choose the type of device as 'Other Hardware' and on the next screen press the button 'Have Disk ...' to be able to type the folder where you have unzipped the drivers in the previous steps.
At this time a new screen appears where you can choose which of the three included drivers is needed. Logically choose 'ISA Catweasel controller'.
Now a new window appears containing a warning message because it is not a self configurable Plug & Play card. Now it's time to tell the driver the range of input and output addresses chosen by the jumpers on the card. To modify this parameter choice 'range of input / output' and click 'Change settings ...'. After a new window appears press the up or down buttons until the desired range is selected:
After this is complete only accept and finish the and reboot.
Once you have restarted the computer and if everything is connected in place, Windows will detect new hardware 'floppy on Catweasel '. The process is similar but this time it is only necessary to indicate the drivers folder we have created earlier:
The third part is the installation, configuration and use of the Catweasel Tools software that will allow us to read&write disk images and Amiga (among other formats) floppys. As before unzip the softwarein the previously created 'C:\Catweasel\' folder.
If all has gone well use 'cw_config' to verify that the card and drive are detected by the operating system.
The third point is the configuration software. This requires some modifications in the file 'cw_config.ini'. First you have to define the type of card you have installed by changing the 'version' parameter to 1:
;###################################################################################################
;# general settings
;###################################################################################################
;---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
; version
; 1 catweasel mk1 (isa)
; 2 catweasel mk2 (amiga, not supported)
; 3 catweasel mk3 (pci flipper)
; 4 catweasel mk4 (pci) - use also for mk4 plus
;---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[controller]
version=1
Then you have to specify how many drives the system has. In my case I only have one so I changed the 'drives' parameter:
;---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Finally exchange configuration between the two units preconfigured. By default, the first unit is a 5.25" drive and the second is a 3.5" one but I only have one of 3.5".
; drives
; 0 no drive connected
; 1 one drive connected
; 2 two drives connected
;---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[floppy]
drives=1
[drive1]<->[drive2]Now we have everything you need. Create a shortcut on the desktop to imagetool3.exe and we can start the software. If everything is correct, this is the window you will have:
And this is the look while an .adf image is being written on one disc!
The last part is a very special one. I put stickers on the Floppy drives of my PC.... my memory starts to fail!!!!!
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