Catweasel MK2 and Atari ST floppies

[dalton]

Hi,

does anyone have any experience with reading and writing atari disks using the Catweasel MK2 (anniversary edition) on Amiga 1200?

Many atari disks are just 720KB disks compatible with MS-DOS, and they are no problem. But it's also common for Atari disks to have different topologies to accomododate for instance 800KB or 820KB.

I do not wish to read files off the disks (so no filesystem needed), I just want to read and write image files (.st/.msa). I suppose I need special files for my DOSDrivers folder?

Any help appreciated.

Cheers

[prowler]

Page 5 of the manual for your Catweasel MK2 Anniversary Edition floppy controller explains how you can create new Dosdriver files for use with non-standard geometry disks by editing those in the DEVS:Dosdrivers directory.

Atari 720KB disks use the 9 sector MS-DOS DD geometry, while Atari 800KB and 880KB disks use 10 sector and 11 sector geometries, respectively, and standard DOSdrivers for those are provided.

I would guess that the 820KB format you mention is achieved by using 82 tracks. However, this format is incompatible with the Catweasel MK2, which is restricted to 80 tracks because some disk drives are damaged by trying to position the read/write heads beyond this limit.

[idrougge]

If it's MSA, you can write that on DF0/PC0 using Xadundisk.

[dalton]

Thanks! I guess I need to spend some time fiddling with the mountlists.

Didn't know about Xadundisk or that it could handle MSA files. Nice!

[idrougge]

You may have to write it to PC0: instead of DF0:.

[prowler]

Originally Posted by idrougge

You may have to write it to PC0: instead of DF0:.

If you're using Xadundisk, then you would have to write it to PC0:.

However, if you're using the Catweasel MK2 anniversary edition then, using the DosDrivers provided:

Using the Catweasel-drives
The drives on your Catweasel are not referred to as dfx:
There’s a name for every disk format that you’re going to use.
The names are:
TD0, TD1   Amiga-DD-disks in 3,5" drives (880 Kbytes)
TH0, TH1   Amiga-HD-disks in 3,5" drives (1760 Kbytes)
PD0, PD1   MS-Dos-disks in 3,5" drives (720 Kbytes)
PH0, PH1   Dos-disks in 3,5" drives (1440 Kbytes)
OH0, OH1   MS-Dos-disks in 5,25" drives (1200 Kbytes)
EX0, EX1   HD disks in 3,5" drives (2380 Kbytes)
CBM0, CBM1 Commodore 1541-disks in 5,25" drives