The Sinclair QL Forum

Today's systems may seem decadent from a QL/Amiga/AtariST user's perspective, just as QL/Amiga/AtariST may seem decadent from a PDP-7 user's perspective...

I'm wondering, is the USB required after programming the Nano? As Tom already said, in the combination with the Pi it's not needed, so de-soldering the USB socket would be a quick & easy option that would give a bit more head room. If not maybe the Nano mounting stuff could be replaced by the m...

Would I be correct in thinking that the new internal Oqtadrive for MDV1, can function with an external device connected to the External Micdrove connector to use an Extetnal Oqtadrive or vDriveQL, ehich can access MDV3-MDV8? Yes, that would work. You could use the internal h/w drive plus external o...

An update regarding the h/w drive shadowing. An initial implementation in OqtaDrive is working fairly well now. At least with the Spectrum. I haven't tested with my QL yet. A couple of CATs is usually enough to get a full, error free copy of the cartridge.

Dave wrote:That's entirely doable.

@Dave I tried to contact you, but it seems you have private messages turned off?

It's encouragement to integrate: not a criticism of what you've created - which is quite wonderful by all accounts! No problem, I did not take it as criticism, just didn't understand right away. Sorry for the confusion! So your question is, would we see a PCB that combines the equivalent of a let's...

Dave wrote:It would be nice to see all of this integrated onto a single PCB.... Possibly using an RP2040?

Do you mean OqtaDrive adapter + daemon process?

It's not going to be fully fledged forensic recovery, and most likely will not work for cartridges in a rather sad state. It's more like h/w drive shadowing, i.e. whatever you do with a h/w cartridge will also be done with a virtual one. So you always have a copy that's in sync with the h/w cartridg...

I've started playing around with capturing actual h/w cartridges into virtual ones using OqtaDrive, and my first experiments show that this is doable. I'm working out the details now. This is going to be the main new feature of the next OqtaDrive release.

My comments were only in jest (using relatively massive computing power for a simple hardware emulator is just too tempting a target - I thought using an ATMega328 for the vDrive QL was a step to far!). No problem! This is actually a good point. When I start a new retro project, I always think abou...