The Sinclair QL Forum

ABS (case) melts at 105C. Nylon (spool) melts at 220C. Polyethylene terephthalate (tape) melts at 260C.

I think I'm good at 75C.

Here in Texas, close to the Gulf Coast, typical humidity is >65%. Some microdrives get kind of "lumpy" and don't turn smoothly - there are fluctuations in the friction. Also, the capstan sometimes slips and picks up magnetic material. I know this is what is happening as I can measure the a...

I did an experiment of putting a couple of dud microdrive cartridges in my reflow oven and set them to bake at 75C for 2 hrs.

They did read!

...---===* The more you know!

[Edited, because "back" is not the same as "bake"

The 8302 question has been nicely answered and given rise to some insightful discussion. For the issue 8 I'll be leaving serial mostly alone, except I'll only be installing one socket for SER1. Ser1 and Ser2 will be a small header on the PCB compatible with the Aurora layout so it will be available ...

In some cultures, the use of quotes in the way they were used reads as extreme sarcasm. I can see that it wasn't intended as sarcasm but as clarification and explanation, but I can also see how if someone took it as sarcasm they might be very offended at what they saw as your superiority and preachi...

It's a process. After the Issue 8 will be the Issue 9, 10 etc... There will be some developments in video, for sure. That said, here's where I am at with the Issue 8: I deleted the modulator and supporting components. Composite video using the MC1377P requires 26 components and it's lackluster at be...

So, microdrives and UHF output would be GONE . Serial and RGB are SAFE . I am including QL-net, certainly - it is too useful and the cost of having it is almost zero. The ROM port is tricky. It requires the PCB to be much larger than it needs to be, which adds a lot of cost. As I am including the ab...

That is a thing of beauty! We will pass through that point but in a much less crowded fashion! The plan is (since we're talking very small quantities, like maybe 20-30 of each version) to continually evolve the board through Issue 8, Issue 9 etc. Start with the basic QL mainboard replacement and evo...

I'm fine to live without the Microdrives and the UHF support. Both I haven't used for at least 15 years anyhow... I would like to see either the serial ports (doesn't hurt if they support higher baud rates, though ...) or a compatible network port. We're doing some investigating about a fast serial...

The reason I asked what features you're willing to lose is because it's a very different question to which features do you want. We have talked at length about what we'd like to do to improve the QL, but we never really talked about what it is time to leave behind. For me, dropping microdrive suppor...