The Catweasel is a universal floppy disk controller working with standard PC disk drives. The controller is able to work with almost any floppy disk format that you can find a suitable drive for (usually 3.5″ and 5.25″ drives).

The Catweasel software is under continuous development since 1996. Here is the current list of supported floppy disk formats (valid for all Catweasels, Amiga and PC alike):

• all PC formats (180K to 1440K)
• Amiga DD and HD formats (incl. 5.25″)
• Atari 9, 10 and 11 sector disks
• Macintosh 720K, 800K, 1440K (DD, GCR, HD)
• Commodore 1541/1571/1581
• XTRA high density with 2380 KByte per disk
• Nintendo copy station 1600 KB format
• Atari 8-bit (all MFM formats)
• Apple ][ disks (Apple DOS 3.3 or later)
• more 8-bit formats in development

Elaborate error detections algorithms allow to read even very old disks that cannot be read by their original disk drives.

The Catweasel is able to control two disk drives which can be of different types.

Catweasel MK2 for Amiga 1200 and Amiga 4000

The easiest way to provide your Amiga with a high density drive! Compared to a usual Amiga HD drive, the Catweasel drives are up to 2.6 times faster (this peak performance being achieved working with 1.44 MB PC disks). But the Catweasel’s native Amiga HD disk performance is no less impressive, a 1760 KB disk can be read in 50 seconds!

The Catweasel drivers are system friendly, ReOrg, Shapeshifter, Fusion, PCx, Frodo, CrossDos and CrossMac work happily together with Catweasel drives.

There are two ways the Catweasel Mk2 can be connected: In Amiga 1200 computers, it is connected to the clock port, in Amiga 4000 computers the IDE port is being used. Neither has any adversary effect on the computer, the Amiga 1200 can still make use of real time clocks on memory expansions or accelerator cards, the Amiga 4000 IDE controller can still be used with two IDE drives without speed penalty.

The Catweasel Mk2 comes with the required cables and a comprehensive software package. The software package even contains a file system for Commodore 8-bit disks, so single files can be transferred from/to 1541 floppies (besides d64 images that can be read and written from/to disk).