cwfloppy

The cwfloppy is a Linux device driver that caters to the Catweasel Advanced Floppy Controller, which is manufactured by Individual Computers. This controller is a versatile Shugart bus controller that is capable of controlling floppy drives. It can be programmed to read and write almost any floppy disk in the world, making it extremely flexible.

The driver is designed to support all controller versions, including ISA (MK1) and PCI (MK3 and MK4). However, it currently does not support the Amiga versions of the controller. Although adapting the driver for Linux/m68k is possible, no one has expressed interest in doing so. Furthermore, the driver only controls the floppy, and those who want to make use of the additional SID and joystick features present on the PCI cards must use the driver from Dirk Jagdmann and Michael Stickel.

This driver supports multiple formats, including the Amiga 3.5'' DD [880KB] (rw), Amiga 3.5'' HD [1760KB] (rw), Amiga 5.25'' DD [880KB] (ro), MS-DOS 3.5'' DD [720KB] (rw), MS-DOS 3.5'' HD [1440KB] (rw). Its installation process involves making "make devices" as root to create the /dev entries for the Catweasel.

In this release, module.c can now look for the MK4 Catweasel under both PCI subdevice IDs 0x0002 and 0x0003, which serves as a workaround for the MK4 PCI-bridge bug. Overall, the cwfloppy is an effective and reliable driver for those who need to control floppy disks using the Catweasel Advanced Floppy Controller.