Catweasel online manual for the Amiga versions

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This is an addendum to the mask-value. The parameter defines the largest block to be transferred at a time. Again, this can be used to simplify a DMA hardware design or to forbid too large DMA transfers. The catweasel software can access all of the Amiga memory and the size of a block can be as big as you want. Due to disks not being larger than 2,38MB at the moment, the given value (4MB) is more than large enough.

Interleaving is a very old technique to increase the performance of a mass storage medium. The idea is to place some blocks that are not needed at the time between two blocks that are read successively. During the time the "at the moment not interesting" blocks are passing, the data can be transferred to the computer. After the transfer is finished, the next block is "near", so idle times are reduced to a minimum. The Catweasel controller is a product of the 90's, it always reads a complete track at a time. The interleave-value is only used by the filesystem, but a change will not alter any speed ratings.

These are the physical borders of the disk. Values between 0 and 79 are allowed. Some diskdrives allow positioning the read/write heads to higher tracks than 79, but other drives are damaged by this command, so we decided to introduce these borders to protect your hardware.

This is the number of buffers in memory. The last accesses to the disk are stored in these buffers to increase the speed if the same blocks are read again.

With this value, you're telling the filesystem what type of memory to use for the buffers. There are three choices:

1= Any (public)
Uses any memory that's non-virtual, beginning with the highest priority memory.
3= Chipmem
The graphics and sound-memory of the Amiga system is rather slow compared to fastmem performance, so using chipmem doesn't make any sense.
5= Fastmem
This is the default value. Fastmem is memory that can only be accessed by the CPU, therefore it's the fastest memory available in the system.

Every process in the Amiga OS has got its own Stack and priority, you can enter the values here. The values are perfect for multidisk.device, you shouldn't change them.

If you enter this line, your dosdriver is activated directly after mounting and the catweasel drive starts clicking. If you leave out this line, the drive is not activated until it's referenced directly, for example by changing the current directory to this drive in a shell.

This document © Copyright 2000 Jens Schönfeld, individual Computers.