Just joining the CAT group

[scru...@gmail.com]

Hi all,

I own the CAT and the printer. I have disks and disks of great stories that I wrote on this amazing machine. I used the cat in the US, then France (after finding out how to switch the power over). I have taken it apart many times. It truly has 9 lives.

More later. Glad to see there are people out there still working on CATs and CATs still working.

Simon

Vancouver, Canada.

 

 

 

 

[dwight]

We are still here. There are a number of us that understand the

Forth inside.

If you would like, I have a patch that is easy to use that does PCL5 ( HP ) printer

setups. It supports a number of the funny characters but not all. Any special ones

could be added without too much trouble.

Also, if you haven't done a fix on your floppy drive, it has a failure that is serious.

The guide bar for the heads come loose. The head will hang on the floppies cover

and pulling the disk out will make the head useless.

It requires some disassembly and some epoxy to ensure that the rod doesn't come

loose.

Dwight

---

From: cano...@googlegroups.com <cano...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of scru...@gmail.com <scru...@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, March 6, 2017 1:22:07 PM
To: Canon Cat
Subject: [Canon Cat] Just joining the CAT group

 

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[Simon Crum]

[Simon Crum]

[Simon Crum]

If only I had read your warning first! Serves me right for not checking back to this site.

I really fear that I've messed up the disk drive.

Will report back.

On Monday, 6 March 2017 13:31:46 UTC-8, scru...@gmail.com wrote:

[dwight]

If you forced the disk out without taking it apart, yes, I believe you have destroyed the head on the drive.

The nylon piece holding the back of the rail used to guide head assembly cracks ( from age ). The head no longer clears the disk when ejecting. The result of forcing the disk out is to rip the head of it mount, at worst. It can also bend the spring mount that the head sits on.

In either case, you'll need to find another drive. If you can find a drive with the drive ready, it can be wired in. These are rare. Most of these also have a jumper for 720/14.4. It will need to be in the 720K mode, although, the Cat only uses one side.

The code can be modified to use both sides but I've never fully debugged it.

As Charlie has said, I've made a circuit that does work with a normal 14.4/720 drive.

Dwight

---

From: cano...@googlegroups.com <cano...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Simon Crum <grobw...@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, November 7, 2017 1:51:34 PM
To: Canon Cat
Subject: [Canon Cat] Re: Just joining the CAT group

 

--

[Simon Crum]

Crap. That's about all I can say. It was working. 

Sad.

[Hannu Aronsson]

Hello,

In addition to the "lucky" people who have a fixable original drive, we probably have several people in this group with already broken Cat disk drives (I'm one).

Maybe we could try help each other to make a working drive for out Cats, e.g. look for suitable models of available disk drives, and build Dwight's circuit if needed? Any pointers to suitable drive models?

It would be great to get my Cat to work with disks again, could save something, not just play until power-down.

Yours,

  Hannu 

--

h...@iki.fi http://www.haa.iki.fi

[Jonathan Gevaryahu]

What I'm imagining here is a newly made pcb with a flex cable connector which connects to the original cat mb with a new flex cable, and the pcb has dwight's circuit on it (or a variant of that) and a 34 pin floppy connector socket on it as well as a 4 pin berg socket.

This adapter could be connected to any 720k or 1.44mb floppy drive, which should 'just work' although 1.44mb drives will only work reliably with 720k disks, due to the lower "DD" format density the cat uses and the different oersted of DD media vs HD media.

The adapter might also be useful (if it has a 34 pin connector for the 'computer' side, in addition to the flex cable connector) for other devices which require a TRUE_READY signal, such as certain yamaha and roland synthesizers, as well as MAYBE amiga machines...

-- 
Jonathan Gevaryahu
jgeva...@gmail.com
jgeva...@hotmail.com

[Alan Davies]

Has anyone tried the HxC or Gotek solid state floppy drive replacements with the Canon Cat?

I have both and a Cryoflux for ripping disks but don't have a Cat myself so can't try it out, have been on the lookout for several years...

--Alan

On Thu, Nov 9, 2017 at 2:06 PM, Hannu Aronsson <h...@iki.fi> wrote:

Hello,

In addition to the "lucky" people who have a fixable original drive, we probably have several people in this group with already broken Cat disk drives (I'm one).

Maybe we could try help each other to make a working drive for out Cats, e.g. look for suitable models of available disk drives, and build Dwight's circuit if needed? Any pointers to suitable drive models?

It would be great to get my Cat to work with disks again, could save something, not just play until power-down.

Yours,

  Hannu 

On 8.11.2017, at 05:32+0200, dwight <dke...@hotmail.com> wrote:

If you forced the disk out without taking it apart, yes, I believe you have destroyed the head on the drive.

The nylon piece holding the back of the rail used to guide head assembly cracks ( from age ). The head no longer clears the disk when ejecting. The result of forcing the disk out is to rip the head of it mount, at worst. It can also bend the spring mount that the head sits on.

In either case, you'll need to find another drive. If you can find a drive with the drive ready, it can be wired in. These are rare. Most of these also have a jumper for 720/14.4. It will need to be in the 720K mode, although, the Cat only uses one side.

The code can be modified to use both sides but I've never fully debugged it.

As Charlie has said, I've made a circuit that does work with a normal 14.4/720 drive.

Dwight

---

From: canon-cat@googlegroups.com <canon-cat@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Simon Crum <grobw...@gmail.com>

Sent: Tuesday, November 7, 2017 1:51:34 PM
To: Canon Cat
Subject: [Canon Cat] Re: Just joining the CAT group

If only I had read your warning first! Serves me right for not checking back to this site.

I really fear that I've messed up the disk drive.

Will report back.

On Monday, 6 March 2017 13:31:46 UTC-8, scru...@gmail.com wrote:

Hi all,

I own the CAT and the printer. I have disks and disks of great stories that I wrote on this amazing machine. I used the cat in the US, then France (after finding out how to switch the power over). I have taken it apart many times. It truly has 9 lives.

More later. Glad to see there are people out there still working on CATs and CATs still working.

Simon

Vancouver, Canada.

 

 

 

 

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[dwight]

The HxC is very format specific. The CAT is like the Apple II in that it uses some form of GCR encoding. Most of the drives HxC supports are regular FM or MFM. You do one and the rest are done.

You'd need to get the developers interest in doing the work to handle the CAT format. Since the volume is small, it is unlikely that they would show much interest.

I've considered using the Gotek myself for another project but my knowledge of the STM32 processors and the USB interface used ( On-The-Go ) would require some time to learn.

As for the circuit I made, I think, even though it did work for single sided, it would be cool to get double sided disk working. There are changes needed to the circuit. Looking back on it, I'd use either a PAL or GAL to replace the logic.

The disk problem is not too hard. The new disk all hold the index pulse off until the unit is ready. Any change of disk or motor state can be used to reset a flop that would be clocked or set by the index pulse.

Dwight

---

From: cano...@googlegroups.com <cano...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Alan Davies <alan....@ualberta.ca>
Sent: Thursday, November 9, 2017 11:25:40 AM
To: cano...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [Canon Cat] Just joining the CAT group

 

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[Jonathan Gevaryahu]

What might be an issue with a floppy emulator is that while the canon cat does use mfm format for the disk, it is not a "standard" mfm layout:
* It is single sided (side 0 only)
* the sector numbering in the address marks for each sector is base-0, while the mfm standard is base-1 (this effectively means the first sector is sector 255, second is 0, third is 1, etc)
* track 0 has 9(?) copies of sector 0 on it, (which may be all identical?) [I believe this is the disk 'fingerprint' which the cat uses to tell apart disks]

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-- 
Jonathan Gevaryahu
jgeva...@gmail.com
jgeva...@hotmail.com

[dwight]

Jonathan

Have you actually looked at the disk data, directly or are you looking through the Cat's interface?

I've not actually looked at the disk data and I'm only going on what I was told by one of the developers. The Forth inside has the ability to see the disk in a block format but that doesn't seem to be compatible with the text images.

It has been a while since I played with it but I never looked into what the compatibility was.

Dwight

---

From: cano...@googlegroups.com <cano...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Jonathan Gevaryahu <jgeva...@gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, November 9, 2017 11:58:33 AM
To: cano...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [Canon Cat] Just joining the CAT group

 

[Jonathan Gevaryahu]

On 11/9/2017 2:54 PM, dwight wrote:
> The CAT is like the Apple II in that it uses some form of GCR
> encoding. Most of the drives HxC supports are regular FM or MFM. You
> do one and the rest are done.

Incorrect, the format is definitely MFM, and using the common MFM CRC
function as well. Its just 'weird MFM'. The source code for the floppy
routines explains it, I think?

[Jonathan Gevaryahu]

I have a raw flux dump of a canon cat disk, which I've been picking at decoding with cwtool.
I could upload a copy somewhere if someone else wants to look at it.

[Charles Springer]

I might have the docs and code from developing the disk encoding. It went through several variations inspired by Woz's RLL Group Code on the Apple II. Mino probably remembers all the details. I have a couple dozen Cat and Apple II 3.5" diskettes. Some is code for Swyft and some is Cat, and some is from Redshift (me and Paul Baker) with PAL equations for the Apple IIe/gs frame grabber.

  Hannu 

From: canon-cat@googlegroups.com <cano...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Simon Crum <grobw...@gmail.com>

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Jonathan Gevaryahu
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[Jonathan Gevaryahu]

I'd love to see the swyft code, always wondered what was going on under the hood there, so to speak.

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[dwight]

Jonathan

 Are you sure it is MFM. The recorded densities are only single density or FM?

I'm not saying one couldn't record at a lower frequency and use MFM, just that it seems unusual.

Dwight

---

From: cano...@googlegroups.com <cano...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Jonathan Gevaryahu <jgeva...@gmail.com>

Sent: Thursday, November 9, 2017 1:52:20 PM