Catweasel MK2 Anniversary Edition

[Harrison]

Amigakit have the Catweasel MK2 in stock for £33.29 which seems quite a bargain in my view. It can be found here.

The ability to connect it up to your Amiga to give you high density PC and Amiga disk access is nearly worth the money alone.

Has anyone used an Amiga version of the Catweasel and if so would you recommend it?

I'm considering one for my A1200 project and the diversity of how you can connect it to the system is great. However I have a question I hope someone can answer. If I connect this up to the A1200 would I still need the original DF0: floppy drive in the system to boot games and other original Amiga software? I've assuming I would as the Catweasel would need drivers?

It also states that you can connect it to the IDE of either the A1200 or A4000. If you do this can you still use HDs? and buffered interfaces? Obviously in the A1200 I would just hook it up to the clockport but I was just wondering.

It can also be used with the A600 which is quite cool.

[Demon Cleaner]

Never used a CW for Amiga, only for PC. There are also new drivers now released for the MkIV.

The fastest way to give a HD diskdrive to your Amiga! Compared to a standard Amiga-HD drive, Catweasel-drives are up to 2.6 times faster! This peak value is reached when accessing PC 1440K disks. The performance on Amiga HD disks is also very good: We have cracked the speed barrier of 50 seconds for reading a whole Amiga 1760K disk. A HD drive by any other vendor takes more than 80 seconds for the same operation. The Catweasel software is programmed totally system-conform: Programs like ReOrg, Shapeshifter, Fusion, PCx, Frodo, CrossDos and CrossMac work fine with the Catweasel. The latest version of Diavolo Backup also supports the Catweasel, so you can make backups on XTRA HD disks with 2380K per disk!

There's two ways for connecting the Catweasel MK2: In the A1200, it fits to the clock-port. That's the small 22-pin header located between the Kickstart Roms and the memory chips. The function of a real-time clock located on an accelerator board or a memory board is not harmed.
In the A4000, the Catweasel MK2 is connected to the internal IDE port. Again, the function of the IDE port is not harmed in any way: The pass-through of the Catweasel can still be used to connect two IDE devices: One master and one slave. When connected to the A1200 clock-port, the local expansion port is also activated. This port is meant for the Silversurfer Limited Edition.

The Catweasel MK2 is shipped with all the necessary cables and the software on disk, including a filesystem that lets you access C-64 disks as if they were Amiga-disks. You can either directly access files, or make the popular .d64 images. If you feel like writing a .d64 image back to a disk, it's no problem with this filesystem. The disk can then directly be placed into your old C-64 drive!

[Harrison]

Cheers for that info. Definitely gave me some more of the info I was looking for.

The big increase in Amiga HD and PC HD floppy disks would be a great reason for me to buy this unit, and the price isn't that expensive. However I'm going to hold off getting one for the moment as I want to get the other upgrades in the A1200 installed and working first.

[burns flipper]

I have an Amiga Catweasel - I connected it via the clock interface and used it so I could access HD PC floppies when I was at Uni (downloading things in those days meant using a PC to download it to a floppy, then put that in the Amiga). It worked well, although I only used it for the one function.

[Harrison]

So am I right in thinking that I still need to keep the original DF0: floppy drive in the A1200 as well as one connected to the Catweasel?

If so, then I am going to have to work out how to squeeze a second floppy drive into the A1200 case. I'm thinking a laptop floppy drive will be smaller than a standard one.

[Zetr0]

@H

just be careful m8, as a lot of laptop drives have a proprietary interface.

[Harrison]

That is true. I do however have a couple of dead Laptops I'm using for donor parts at the moment so I might be lucky. Otherwise I might be able to get a converter.

[burns flipper]

Don't quote me but I'm fairly sure it can't replace df0: , it's just for adding an additional drive. I have a feeling I had the same query or tried it myself, and I must have read somewhere that it didn't work. If you were able to do it I doubt it would work with a lot of demo's and custom bootblocks that use the floppy controller directly.