Catweasel

A standard PC floppy controller only understands the PC's own format and gives up on the Amiga's track layout or Commodore's GCR encoding. Catweasel, from Jens Schönfeld's Individual Computers in the second half of the 1990s, got round that by timing the flux transitions itself and leaving the decoding to software. An ordinary PC floppy drive could then read a long list of foreign formats.

The card went through several generations, for both Amiga and PC, and later versions even gained a socket for a real SID chip – a detail that says a lot about who was buying it. For years it was the obvious tool for rescuing old disks, until KryoFlux and later Greaseweazle took over the preservation role.