Posted on

Cat Weasel v4 Running in an XP VM

I’ve managed connect my PCI Catweasel card to pass-though on my ESXi server. I took a bit of work and it’s not perfect (ie no Joysticks or Mice work) but the disk subsystem works great. I added to my server a Multi-Function 3 1/2 drive with USB reader, which I thought was a stretch to get working — but in the end, it was fine. I also added a TEAC 5 1/4 drive which reads and writes perfectly. The Disk Imaging tools work reasonably well but get stuck sometimes.

I tested some Amiga, Apple and C64 floppies and was surprised how fast they imaged or transferred down.

Stability was an issue initially, but after making some adjustments to processor and memory layout of the VM, XP and the Catweasel card are working great. The other subsystems on the card are not used, but what I really wanted was a multi-format disk reader and writer.

Click on the thumbnail to see the desktop in action.

Posted on

Fun with Turbo Chameleon 64: Minimig Core

xCards2* Update *

It’s not a matter of compatible cards by the looks of things. My TC seems to have some timing issues. I’ve had this problem before with a firmware update — but fixed in a later update.

Speaking with Alastair about what the issues could be it ended up that the latest version of the Minimig core wasn’t working — but older versions did. He mentioned a new build sometime in the future to test out the timings.

* Old News * 🙂

Well as of today, I still can’t seem to find an SD card that will run the Minimig core correctly. A while back I had one, but it got crushed. I threw the card out and started fresh (had backups), but nothing I do seems to work. So these are the cards I have tried, formatted FAT32, FAT16, exFAT, with various clsuter sizes and with smaller partitions (for the 8GB cards) or using the complete size of the SD card.

The same cards will work with MSX core, or load files for the TC64’s C64 file browser. A few other people have mentioned issues with particular cards. I’m looking around for other cards to try…