Hello from China

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Sprinter
ROM Dongle
Posts: 3
Joined: Sun Jul 12, 2015 2:10 am
Location: Shenzhen & Germany

Hello from China

Post by Sprinter »

Hello to all members!

First of all I wish to say thanks to the forum operators, which created and maintain this nice environment. One can see how much passion and hard work went into this forum!

I am a German expat in China, in his mid fortieth. I was an enthusiastic QL user back than, did BASIC and 68K assembler (with the GreenHill?? assembler). I enjoyed that time very much. I learned a lot, even though, the QL was not very popular in that bit of Germany, I grow up in. Which led me later to the AMIGA 500. However, the QL is that piece of >>in-between<< of computer generations, which makes him quite interesting. On one side, powerful enough to support meaningful word-processing and spreadsheets, on the other versatile and easy enough to understand (not much inside).

I am sitting here in China, and from time to time I get bored. Not much to do here besides work. Thus I decided, that I need a hobby. I looked some time around and I figured, that I actually like what I do at work, just the stuff I am working on, mostly industrial things with its natural lack of charm, makes me bored. I need something, where I can put my heart in. Where I can play and tinker with and have some fun. Thus, I browsed ebay on the search for a good old QL. What for prices...!
Well, I am not willing to pay that kind of money for it, I am not a collector. On the other hand, I am an engineer and have the means to build one by myself. As there was some kind of commercial interests around the QL, I waited, reading books instead. When the QL turned 30 I saw, that most commercial emulators, and hardware became freeware or obsolete and thanks to the work of Dilwyn Jones, Urs Koenig and others a huge database of information was released. What a pool! Great!
In the fourth quarter of 2014, ingenic came to me asking, if we would be interested in one of their new SOCs for wearables. M150, 128MB embedded mDDR RAM, Gigabit Ethernet and a Gigaherz clock rate. I liked that little feller on the spot and we designed some of our's and customer's products with it. Great! I like MIPS, it comes fully documented to the very last bit. And that is, what you can not take for granted these days, esp. not on ARM. Even the video decoding unit is documented, incl. source code for popular codecs, whoa!

So what I would like to do, as a strict hobby project, meaning _without_ any commercial interests or _time pressure_, would be to build a QLish board using that M150 SOC and port uQLx to it, first hosted on Linux, later embedded into uBoot, with direct hardware access. I would like to have it as open hardware, for everyone to see and copy under GPL2. At the end of the hardware endeavour I see a box looking like the MDV section of the QL, where I can attach PS/2 keyboard & mouse, Ethernet, Systembus, GPIOs and a VGA (or HDMI), with two SD Card slots as MDVs.

If one would be interested in joining, helping or even criticizing, I would feel happy.

Thank you guys for your time


-----------
cheers

Sprinter
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vanpeebles
Commissario Pebbli
Posts: 2815
Joined: Sat Nov 20, 2010 7:13 pm
Location: North East UK

Re: Hello from China

Post by vanpeebles »

Many thanks and a warm welcome to the forum. You almost didn't make it as I'm always suspicious of accounts from China in case they are spam :lol:

It will be worth making a post about your project on the hardware section which is usually quite busy :)


RWAP
RWAP Master
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Joined: Sun Nov 28, 2010 4:51 pm
Location: Stone, United Kingdom
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Re: Hello from China

Post by RWAP »

Welcome to the forums - it is always good to see more people returning to the QL :)


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1024MAK
Super Gold Card
Posts: 592
Joined: Sun Dec 11, 2011 1:16 am
Location: Looking forward to summer in Somerset, UK...

Re: Hello from China

Post by 1024MAK »

Welcome to our Forum Sprinter!

:D :D :D

Your project sounds very interesting. I see you have already posted about it in a separate thread 8-)
Do keep us updated ;)

Mark


:!: Standby alert :!:
“There are four lights!”
Step up to red alert. Sir, are you absolutely sure? It does mean changing the bulb :!:
Looking forward to summer in Somerset later in the year :)

QL, Falcon, Atari 520STFM, Atari 1040STE, more PC's than I care to count and an assortment of 8 bit micros (Sinclair and Acorn)(nearly forgot the Psion's)
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