Is it possible to have TD0 as a bootable drive on the Catweasel MK2? I read in the instructions that you can use the Beta/BootCat utility however when I run this and reset my Amiga afterwards, TD0 drive will not boot, does the Catweasel support booting of floppies?
Booting Disks?
- jd64
- Thread is Unresolved
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Don't Panic. Please wash hands.
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The "Bootcat" tool never left beta state. We did not follow up on that, as it was too little of a use case for any Catweasel owner: Practically any Catweasel owner has a harddrive to boot from, so booting WB is already taken care of. Booting from floppy is mostly required for games and track-loading demos, where a "boot utility" will only get as far as loading the boot block, then quickly crashing, as the trackloader will access the hardware directly, not knowing that it's been launched from a completely different hardware.
So the solution back then was the "Kylwalda" adapter that lets you connect a single drive to two controllers at the same time: After a reset, the drive is df0: and can be used as a standard 880k drive for booting games and demos. Once the Catweasel drivers are loaded, it takes over the physical drive, and Kylwalda will tell the internal controller that the drive is still there, but the disk has been removed. Worked really nicely, but was sold out like... 20 years ago?
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I had completely forgotten about the Kylwalda adapter, that was a useful adapter. I don't suppose you'll ever consider releasing another batch sometime in future?
I don't see much business in that - and the design uses a GAL chip that is hard to find these days. I'd have to re-design it to work with TTL chips only, otherwise it couldn't be made fully RoHS compliant. What surprised me back then was that many people bought it without ever owning a Catweasel. To these people, it was just a very compatible adapter that lets you use a 1.44M PC disk drive as an Amiga-880k drive. I guess this wouldn't work today, as PC floppy drives aren't made any more, and there are DIY-instructions out there for anyone who wants to tinker.
I wonder is it possible to have a floppy disk drive attached as normal to the Amiga's floppy disk drive header operating as DF0 whilst also having a second floppy disk drive attached to the Catweasel via clockport operating as TD0 or would this create a conflict between the two drives?
That's totally separate - you can have four Amiga drives (df0: to df3:) and two more disk drives on the Catweasel. As long as your power supply has the juice, it'll work. Kylwalda was just meant to consolidate both functions on a single physical drive, saving space and money.
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The last reply was more than 365 days ago, this thread is most likely obsolete. It is recommended to create a new thread instead.
