ScuzzBlog: Diaries December 2019
Entry 6th December 2019: Post 01: Amiga Buddha or Catweasel or both.
Amiga Buddha or Catweasel or both.
Not very up on the 'Amiga Tower Era', that period post 1995 when
users began to realise that it was highly unlikely that the Amiga
would ever become mainstream again and so started to hack their
desktops into towers.
Part of that era introduced some very cool bits of kit to bring
the Amiga and say the A1200 into the new millennium, with cards
like the Buddha or was it Catweasel. I am never really sure. So
let me dig a bit and see what comes up.
The Catweasel MK-II was designed in two versions. The first simply
connects to an Amiga 1200 clockport and the other is a half length
Zorro II card. The card I feature here is a Z-II MK 2 but is pretty
much the same. The card allows for the addition of two floppy
drives and a whopping 6 IDE devices. What appears to be more
stunning is that the card can use PC floppy drives either 3.5 or
even 5.25 of any combination and pretty much any format.
And so it appears that the card I feature here is a combination of
The Catweasel and the Buddha IDE controller. Curiouser and curiouser.
The device also cleverly can read corrupt and failing disks. It also
reads normal PC formatted disks over twice faster than using a native
drive. Reading Amiga disks is also faster.
The supported file systems for the card are pretty impressive, Amiga,
Apple IIe, Apple Macintosh, Atari 800XL, Atari ST, C64 and normal PC.
Added to this it pretty much supports every known disk type.
Incredible really. Best of all it uses the non-Zorro Catweasel MK2
as a piggy back module and features all Catweasel Z-II and Catweasel
MK2 functions.
So why don't I use it. Well first, I don't need to. 2nd is that I
already have a couple of these fitted to my towers, the A4000T and
the A4000d in the tower. And I am most suspicious of the brown
marks on the rear of the card. They look like heat blemishes to me
suggesting the Catweasel 'piggy-back' is getting hot. In the end
it may not even work. Never used it. I guess if I ever got stumped
with reading a drive on an Amiga, that I could use it with, I may
then have a go.
Anyhoo ... that was the Catweasel, or was it the Buddha. I think
the first is a floppy interface and the latter the IDE. More like
a 'Catddha'. I've invented an Amiga word.
Have fun what ever Amiga you are drivin'.
Amiga Buddha or Catweasel or both.
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