Catweasel

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The Catweasel is a specialty hardware floppy drive controller designed originally for the Commodore Amiga computers, then later for PC, Mac, and the PegasOS and AmigaOne computers. It allows computers equipped with both 3.5" and 5.25" floppy disk drives to read from and/or write to various disk formats. Disk formats can include the following:

Atari 8-bit Apple II Commodore 64/128 Atari ST Apple Macintosh Commodore Amiga IBM PC

Later revisions of the Catweasel allowed for the installation of the C64's popular sound chip: the SID (Sound Interface Device), so users of special music trackers or emulators could listen to the sounds of the C64 as they were meant to be.

The latest model: the MK4, also allows for two digital Atari-style joysticks to be used in a way similar to normal joysticks, as well as mice and keyboards for the Amiga series of computers.

The most important change is that the joysticks can now be used as input devices for any Windows program (for example emulators). A new configuration program eases the use of the imagetool, and a few files for developers have been added to the archive, so direct access to disks is possible for other programs.

Latest version of the drivers ( Sept 15th 2006 ) The most important change of the recent release of the Win32 drivers for the Catweasel are visible in the imagetool, which now supports many new disk formats and has new graphical functions. After a long wait, the Apple floppy formats of older Macintosh computers (400KByte and 800KByte per disk) and the Apple IIe series are now supported. Two more formats of Commodore classics can now be read, but this requires special disk drives with 100tpi. Regular floppy drives have a track spacing of 96tpi, so there will be read errors on most of the tracks of Commodore 8050 or SFD1001 disks.