The Sinclair QL Forum

Derek_Stewart wrote: ↑Thu May 16, 2024 10:10 pm The Tang Nano 20K development board, cost me £29, but the price has dropped to just above £23.

Also see it for 61 € at Amazon and the GoWin chip on it seems already obsolete.
While the Q68 was designed in 2008 and the Lattice FPGA is still available.

I don't understand the hype around those chinese GoWin FPGAs. If I look at authorized distributors, they have already become more expensive than the Lattice chips used on QIMSI and Qzero. The Amazon prices for a Tang Primer 25K and the required extra modules are more expensive than a QIMSI Gold - so...

Wasa wrote: ↑Tue May 14, 2024 12:19 pm So, will it be possible to buy or license the QZero, to put another core on to di another product?

I don't sell my work, it is just hobby. Stephan has the permission to build the Qzero, that's enough.

Wasa wrote: ↑Tue May 14, 2024 12:19 pm Is the Q68 open?

No. Only my QLbase and QL-SD hardware designs are open source.

Well, let's first find out if Peter's qzero and latest work is open source or proprietary? QLbase will be open source, and can serve as example on how to use the Qzero on a different mainboard. The Qzero hardware is non profit, closed source. At the moment it lacks documentation and is only release...

Derek_Stewart wrote: ↑Sun May 12, 2024 11:17 am Whiles the faster SD Card access for the Q68 was a good idea, the feature has caused all sort of problems.

With a big warning in the manual, if a user wants to try at his own risk, I find such an experimental feature acceptable.
But never should this be default on the SMSQ/E website.

Even if Peter says there isn't, here is a working example of how you can make the second screen usable in QDOS machine code programs. I didn't say there isn't. Just that I can not remember - which is a difference over 50 ;) I wonder how much room your procedure would leave for the actual code and d...

Saving the screen area somewhere else and restoring it before re-enabling interrupt and going back to user mode also works. Which means 96 KB of 128 KB used for the dual screens and the save area. And further memory also needs to stay untouched. Depending on the mass storage used, this may shrink u...

I want to do some experiments with graphics, and for that, the OS is not a concern. Naive question, but if it is just experimental, why not use Minerva? As far as I know, Minerva ROM adaptors are still available for the QL. And on the newer machines like Q68, which also support the second screen, M...

There is a QDOS Management Trap: MT.INF that returns the location of of the System Variables. Maybe just calling this Trap will solve the problem. Unfortunately not. It is perfectly allowed for the OS to place the system variables at a different location, and Minerva does that in order to allow the...

So, a hat's off Peter, this is the best QL hardware idea I have seen in a really long time! Many thanks Nasta. It is debatable whether a card for the expansion slot would have been a better idea. Doing it in an unorthodox way was more fun though. I never thought of doing it the 'other way' but did ...