Catweasel and newer Macintoshes

I am currently using my Catweasel MK4 in my PowerMac G4 computer. The card is not compatible with the PowerMac G5 computers. The G5 does not provide the 5 volt power and signaling the card requires. It turns out the previous statement isn’t true. There are three types of PowerMac G5s: PCI, PCI-X and PCI Express. I just tested a Catweasel MK4 card in a PowerMac G5 PCI-X machine and the floppy I/O functions worked just fine. I did not test the SIDs or the keyboard/joystick functions.

The Catweasel MK4 is not a PCI Express card. So it work work in late model PowerMac G5s or any Mac Pro.

Catweasel in my Mac

I’ve been wanting to attach a 5.25 inch floppy drive to my Mac for a very long time. I have many disks that need to be saved. Including some disks people have sent me. I have been using an ISA Catweasel on an old PC I have (a Pentium 90). But now I can finally recycle that monster. Last week I ordered and recieved my brand new Catweasel MK4!

Here is a picture of the card inside the Mac:

Catweasel Card
Since there is no room in my Mac for a 5.25 inch floppy drive I run the cable thru an unused card slot and have the drive units resting on top of my Mac:

Floppy on Mac

Currently I’ve ported Tim Mann’s cw2dmk software suite to Mac OS X. It required a driver to be written. Since I am still using a PPC Mac, I had to add some endian detection to Tim’s code.

I plan on extending the driver to allow the use of the MK4′s joystick and keyboard/mouse port. And also ad an interface for the SID chips. Maybe I’ll finally understand why the SID is so popular.