[gulliver]

Hi, for a lot of time there has been some rumour about the Macrosystem Casablanca being an Amiga sort of clone. Well, since WinUAE 2.7.1 we can now actually manage the contents of the Casablanca´s HDD. It can accept Draco Casablanca partition table identifier (CDSK instead of usual RDSK).

The interesting thing, is that the Casablanca is to put it easily, a low cost, slightly modified version of the DraCo that has some potential to do some Amiga-like interesting things. I believe that for example, a compressed audio player is easily doable since the audio hardware is just an integrated toccata.

There are many drawbacks, from an Amiga perspective:
-It has no Amiga chipset (no OCS, ECS, AGA or even RTG support). Graphics are pushed to its digitizer´s video output, by some unknown method.
-It has quite some hardware and software protection schemes to avoid piracy and duplication.
-It is little documented
-It cannot load workbench or start a new cli (seems it is a graphics issue, related to the absense of an OCS/RTG like compatibbility mode)

But there are also some notable advantages it offers:
-It is a low cost high processing power 68K unit
-There about 45.000 units out there
-It has 16 bit stereo sound sampling and playing capabilities which are toccata compatible (they may even be AHI compatible)
-Has a built-in scsi interface
-It has a nice LCD to hack
-DraCo Motion compatible video capture hardware is also included
-It can probably offer some new professional grade programs to Amigas and DraCo´s

So, unshelve your Casablancas and turn them on.
Share your HDD images so we can start hacking!