Catweasel or Kryoflux?

[linuxlove]

After having tried and failed many times to get a Workbench disk for my Amiga, I've decided that the only way I'll get one is if I buy an expensive floppy disk controller. So what's better to get, the Catweasel MK4 PCI or the Kryoflux? Both seem to be similarly priced and both seem to be able to write Amiga disks from a generic Windows-based PC.

 

[carlsson]

I've never seen, much less tried to use Kryoflux. On the good side, it is a rather new product which means everyone are excited about it and support should be good. On the other hand, Catweasel has been around for much longer so in case you find useful software, chances are most bugs have been worked out. I know software support for Catweasel was improved the other year, shortly after I sold my unit. Possibly though Kryoflux has newer hardware and higher resolution in sampling the disks, so in the long run it would be able to do more.

I would begin with researching which or if both products today readily handle reading and writing Amiga floppy disks. Are there any limitations to operating system, floppy drive hardware, phase of moon? What is "best" often depends on your application. In your case, you have pretty much defined your primary need and can work from there.

I don't know what the Amiga market looks like over there, but is it out of the question to find a cheap Amiga 600? It would have a PCMCIA slot that can take a CF adapter to transfer software from your PC. Then you could write Amiga disks on the Amiga to be used in whichever Amiga 500 you otherwise would play on. Of course that kind of solution wouldn't help you if you get additional foreign formats to handle, so perhaps you're onto the right track after all.

 

[barythrin]

If I'm not mistaken I don't think the Kryoflux has write support yet, or if it does you have to image a disk, email it to them, wait for them to convert it to a not yet published tool/format that you CAN burn. That's my impression when I was eying it though and I could be wrong. I think a dev or two from those forums posted about it here too, maybe they're open for comment or the forums there would let you tell us more about it

It looks promising *IF* it can start writing disks and not just ripping them, although I do appreciate the conservation effort.

 

[Chuck(G)]

Different concepts. Jens put together the CW primarily to handle Amiga floppies. That it'll handle all sorts of other formats (read and write) is less interesting to him than to others like me. The idea between the two is basically the same--acquire timings between the pulses that come off the floppy, or generate pulses to write to the floppy. All the rest is software.

In the case of the CW, it's primarily in the PC; in the Kyroflux or Deviceside devices, there's code in the integrated microcontroller.

Also, have a look at Phil Pemberton's DiskFerret.

 

[tezza]

LinuxLove if you manage to get someone to kindly make you a copy of Workbench and post it to you (I'd offer but there must be people closer than me), you could always use this method to get more software. It works really well for my Amiga 500. You have to have a spare drive though, and a serial comms cable.

Tez