Catweasel opinions, sources of info etc.

[Jules Richardson]

On Mon, 2005-03-07 at 22:12 -0600, Jim Leonard wrote:
> Jules Richardson wrote:
> > OK, thinking about getting a catweasel board for the museum. 
> ...
> > The other option's the Torch Manta board, for which I do at least have
> 
> Do you have a Central Point Option Board (any rev) for your museum?

No, in a word. Unless there's one buried in a scrap PC somewhere (we've
got a few kicking around, but don't make a habit of keeping PCs past the
original IBM AT - the exceptions being anything significantly oddball to
warrant it). We definitely don't have a board on the shelf.

The Manta's reasonably programmable - it includes the ability to play
with some of the drive signal lines to cope with less-common drives, and
it's fully customisable via software for different disk and drive
parameters. It's just limited to FM and MFM recording and soft-sectored
drives. The nice thing is that it's SCSI at the host end, so not too
tricky to program for.

I'll probably put a couple in an external box so I can drive 8 drives
from them; that'll allow a decent range of different drive types to be
catered for without pulling anything to bits!

cheers

Jules