15 June 2009

Canon Cat

By searching over some google groups, I have found a source and dumps for Canon Cat, a realy nice old machine. And in few days, we have keyboard working, posibility of going into diagnostics mode, video is emulated fine. Here are some screens to show how it all looks :







And image of Swyft, a machine that made Canon Cat possible, kind of prototype :

6 comments:

Unknown said...

Awesome work! I'm having a good bit of fun playing with this now. Any plans for disk emulation? There's been need of a proper Cat emulator for a long time.

Nick M said...

Excellent work! I was considering writing an emulator myself for this, as I'm very keen to have a working Cat emulator. Would there be any possibility of me being able to download what you've achieved so far? I'm willing to work with you on this project if you want, I have quite a bit of Cat technical documentation.

Thanks in advance,
Nick.

Unknown said...

Is there any way to download what you have so far?

Orthogon said...

Did this ever progress? If you're bored with it, can I convince you to consider releasing what you've created so others can poke at it? As far as I know this is the only working Cat/Swyft emulator in existence-- it would be a great service to the community!

Nick M said...

Hi Þeodriċ,

I never did write an emulator in the end - I just managed to get the MESS emulator going with the ROM dumps from the Canon Cat Google Groups. Although this did work, it had problems like regular slowdowns and other gaps in the emulation. Nevertheless, it gave me a taste of what the 'Cat was like. If I ever decide to write an emulator in the future, I'll let you know - my current commitments elsewhere leave me with very little free time.

Thanks for getting in touch,
Nick.

i336_ said...

Hi!

Where's that Swyft screenshot from, and how did you get that? Was it part of the Cat ROM dump that's floating around now (boulth?.ic?, r240h?.ic? r74__0*.ic?), or have you found extra files?

Very curious to know! :D

Also, if you happen to have any other Cat-related files floating around from when you poked this, by all means point me at those too - not much is floating around nowadays, most links are dead.

(PS. To anyone who sees this who is interested in trading files / info, by all means get in touch. I'm trying to collect stuff myself.)