Catweasels and two sids!
 

Ok I finally got my mitts on the catweasel today :)

Im getting ready to fit it, need a couple questions sorted:

1. on the back of the board there is a solder bridge, lools like it was done after it was built as some kind of fix? just checking thats right!

2. I bought two 8580 sids, but looking at the cat's document's it says only one sid is supported at the moment! anyone know when this second sid will be supported or shall I just not bother to fit both?

think thats about it, going to fit the card in a bit and hawk out all my amiga disk's (all 2500 of the dam things lol)

:)

Im also stuck lol, how do I hook the floppy drive up?
from what I can suss out it looks like I have to put one of the cables between the card and pc's drive controller and then plug the pc disk drive into the card... Is this right?

erm... ok... one cable from your pc floppy goes into the black connector on the CW.. and the other cable from the white connector goes to your motherboard FDD conn.
I think both SID sockets work.. just that there isn`t any stereo SID progs that use it atm ( someone confirm or deny ) ?? someone said the author of ACID64 has a beta stereo version or summat!! hope this helps ya :)

thanx m8 :)

I decided to leave the pc floppy controller lead off and just use the pc drive for the amiga side, hope this works...

I also discovered another annoying thing! the motherboard in the pc i chose to use has bits that get in the way of the card so it wont plug in fully, had to move up the pci slots until i found one that didnt stop the card from plugging in fully.

The latest Catweasel 1.0.9 drivers fully support two sid chips onboard. The beta version of Acid64 also supports dual sid output but requires the three main drivers to be installed. That is catdri2k.sys; catsid2k.sys and catwea2k.sys. So you need to plug in all the cables to active the installation of the catdri2k.sys. This is for FIFO control, which Acid64 needs to identify your Catweasel MK4, otherwise it will revert back to Catweasel MK3 status and only output in mono format. Unfortunately the beta version has difficultly properly identifying my Catweasel MK4 on XP. Currently it only displays Catweasel MK3. I hope Wilfred can fix this because stereo sid is awesome. There has been a new hardsid.dll that works with the Catweasel released by Simon White for use in Sidplay2/w. Although a new version has yet to be released that incorporates the new dll. So we have to wait, as Sidplay2/w is only updated once in a blue moon.

On another note! I was told about the workaround to get adf`s back to floppies.. but I`ve had one result against about 20 failures :( pressing write, then cancel, then write again doesn`t work at all.. well it did once :) but once ain`t good enough really is it?

:D well I can read amiga disk's and play c64 tunes :D
but not in stereo yet as im getting the same problem with acid64 thinking the catweasel is a mk3! im itching to get stereo out of this thing! I forgot how dam good that c64 sid chip is!

Im just about to try writing an adf back to disk!

Also one of the cables in the box of bits is damaged, the one that goes from the controller to the pc's floppy port, hopefully somebody at amigakit.com can help me out, until then I will just make do with the drive being amiga only. Also does anybody know if I can make this drive appear as DF0: on winuae?

You can`t make it appear in WinUAE as DF0: because they are emaulated.. you can make it appear as Cat: by introducing multidisk.device to DEVS and CAT to dosdrivers. Also remember to check the catweasel box under `misc` in Winuae to use the joyports :)
Sids and reading disks are fine here.. it`s the writing to which has the problem..
Apparently the imagetool starts writing to the floppy before it`s ready... so I was told to press write, wait until the progress bar moves.. then hit cancel.. then hit write again.. but I`ve only got this to work once!!!!

m8 do you happen to have the CAT: dosdriver already done? Im pulling all my old amiga stuff together at the moment, I prefer to use a certain text editor on the amiga and I just cannot find the flipping thing... arrggghhhh

Icq....

Cool m8! I got your pm :)

Also Im happy to report the disk writing option works without any problems at all :D

but have you tried it the disks on a real Amiga ??

No but I have read the disk's back into adf's again and popped them into winuae! everything seems intact

I should try a gamedisk tbh, I shall do that now and report back :)

Ok update time! I grabbed the first game disk I could find and that was a fairlight crack of Micromachines. Slapped it onto adf using the imagetool and then got another real disk, wrote the adf onto that!

It boots with a standard a1200 with no problems, then I imaged it back onto adf again and ran it with winuae, so far so good!

My catweasel was a slight pain to install btw! the most recent drivers didnt work for some reason? so I used what was on the supplied cd. I also had XP suddenly reboot the first time it was installed?

You really need the latest 1.0.9 drivers installed, because of an error in the image tool program.

Its seems to be ok after that sudden reboot! xp complained about a serious crash.

I manually installed the latest drivers and all seems ok :)

Last major thing for me to do now is send back a fualty cable and amigakit.com will send me a new one :D

I have noticed this (or bluescreen) always happens after first install..

Yeah, the same happened to me when first install of the windows drivers.
Stainy, haven't you solved your writing of the disks?, the write-cancel trick works ok for me, and every game i had write onto disk has worked well on my real 500.
Elcectroblaster you write the disks perfectly with the diskimagetool without problem? let me know.

Well every time I boot Windows moans that it`s recovered from a serious error :(
EB: think your lucky with that image tool.. I can get it to work for the life of me!!
I`ve tried every conceivable way.. letting the tool write a bit before I cancel and start again.. cancelling and writing as quick as I can.. it`s a real bugger! I have still only made one disk :( :(

Ok here`s a thought!! If the floppy isn`t connected to the motherboard !! can I attach a real Amiga floppy to the Catweasel ??