imaging original Canon Cat floppies (and new Cat software)

[Cameron Kaiser]

Joining the group for the first time and hopefully there are some folks still
listening to it, even though I've had a Cat for a number of years.

Very recently I was able to reliably duplicate Cat disks with a Greaseweazle
and a regular PC floppy drive (a Teac FD-235 series, very common, 720K
capable). The key seems to be the right format so that the oddities are
properly duplicated, and the Amstrad CPC Extended DSK ("eDSK") image format
does the job.

The bonus is that you can now edit the images, so I wrote up a program to alter
the saved 68K registers in the idblock, which lets you divert the ROM during
the restore process. I used that to make three demonstrations: a Jef Raskin
picture disk which instead of the usual preview shot displays his picture,
waits for a key, and then enters Edde; a simple asynchronous terminal program
that autostarts; and a two-disk slideshow demo that loads Cat images from a
second floppy. They are all written in tForth and use a small 68K trampoline
routine and "freefloating" tForth that I sneak into the last sector of the
preview image to springboard into previously defined tokens.

Here is a writeup (you can skip down to Hack No. 1 if you don't care about the
Cat tour, which most of you know well, I'm sure):

https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2024/07/pretty-pictures-bootable-floppy-disks.html

and here is the patcher programs and ready-to-write floppy disk images:

https://github.com/classilla/catbox


Now that it looks like remastering Cat floppies can be done reliably, does
anyone have the original disks around that can image them? (I'm willing to do
this if you don't have a Greaseweazle.) This page

https://randoc.wordpress.com/2020/02/23/a-few-remarks-on-the-canon-cat/

documents five: CATFORM ("a Cat program that allows to manage forms on a Cat
and to print them out"), CATFILE ("allows [you] to manage name and address
lists on the cat and to use them for mail merge"), CATFILE Utility Disk ("used
to create and customize the Catfile Application Software disks for your
customers"), a “Secretarial Workstation” demo disk, and Family Tree v2.1, which
may have been a one-off the previous owner was working on.

It would be nice to copy these for posterity!

In the meantime, I am strongly considering building Dwight's PC floppy
conversion circuit and then seeing if a Gotek will work with it ...

--
------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * cka...@floodgap.com
-- You can't fool me: there ain't no Sanity Clause. -- Chico Marx -------------

[Dwight Elvey]

My Cat quit on me about 2+years ago. I've not had a chance to fiddle with it.

I do have a disk that boots with the patch to the printer table to use HPL5  ( at least I think it is 5 level )

printer commands. It uses the printer select for the COMMON printer ( which was FX I think it was, anyway, the common dot matrix printer ).

It replaces that with the commands for the HP printers.

I didn't do all the various custom fonts but I did do a few.

This can be useful for those that don't have a Canon printer.

So Cameron, that might be worth copying.

I also have the most current revision of the Cat code in source. One needs more RAM memory than a standard Cat to assemble it but it has

all the source code. It is split onto Cat standard single sided disk. I did that myself from images that used larger disk drives.

These would clearly be worth saving. This is stuff Sandy Bumgarner gave me before he passed away. He wanted this stuff saved.

Dwight