From: Hársfalvi Levente (hlpublic_at_freestart.hu)
Date: 2005-08-07 10:23:36
Hi!,
Yes, it's sold by a couple of resellers (check "Contacts" at
www.jschoenfeld.de ). I bought mine at Vesalia Computer (www.vesalia.de).
I'm still just experimenting with it. My first impressions were a bit...
hmmm... ambivalent. It is a multi-purpose card, incorporating support
for two floppy drives, Amiga keyboard / joystick / mouse, and 2 SIDs.
The floppy interface is very sophisticated; it could handle most,
possibly all floppy formats (it even includes support for some
"tweaking", e.g. writing tracks partially, from a precisely timed
starting point, or reading track data from the buffer ram "on the fly"
while the track is still being read). The digital part of the SID
interface is also very promising; it provides real C64 clock frequency
(PAL or NTSC, programmable) and supports the timing of the SID register
writes by hardware (unlike, for example, the famous HardSid card, whose
SID clock is fixed at 1Mhz, and provides very simple digital
interfacing, with no timing possibilities). ...Contrarily, I feel some
problems with the software here and there. The win32 drivers are O.K.,
just not very versatile. The Linux drivers are pretty experimental
(there's currently no 1541 support for Linux 2.6.x). ...As I feel,
there's much more in the hw than the drivers can / allow one to do at
the moment. Finally, if you're a SID addict, you shouldn't choose the
MK4, because of its poor SID analog "board" (high digital noise floor,
unability to route either of the 2 SIDs to both channels of the stereo
output, and unsuitable SID filter capacitor set -- nowhere near the
digitally weak, but from the analog side, very nice HardSids).
Regards!,
Levente
Richard wrote:
> Is the Catweasel MK4 available for sale again/yet? Last I checked it
> was supposed to come out in Sept. of last year but didn't.
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