The Sinclair QL Forum

I am very excited to receive this psu. It will allow me to actually boot up a ql for the first time ever. I’d never even seen one in real life til a few months ago despite being British, 50 and a total nerd. I can’t even explain how that happened. To never even see one in a high street electrical retailer!

I hope it still works

Yeah, disappointment incoming!
I have electronics 'mending' equipment here and after a couple of large whiskies I have a steady hand so if it doesn't work hopefully I can do whatever needs to be done.

It’s alive!!

New membrane working. Psu working. It boots and I can even die mdv2_

Mdv1 makes an awful noise and seems to make the machine hang

One weird thing, it only boots every other time. If it’s working and I press reset, or power off, then when it next boots it just says Minerva bottom right then sits there. Another press of reset and I’m back up and asked to press f1 or f2. Weird huh?

Also sometimes when I power on the drives just spin up and stay spinning up

I think the wires that connect the main board to the keyboard assembly might not be in
Properly. 3 black a grey a white and a red. They came out. I put them back in after looking at a photo of a QL motherboard. I assumed the 3 black wires were all the same. Please don’t tell me they aren’t! Anyway, they don’t really sit in there very tight.

Hi Brad,

The wires are connections to the power and microdrive leds.

Please this message for the connections order:

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2769&p=27046&hilit=wires#p27046

They should affect the powering if of the QL.

Ok a clean up of the
Micro drives and a reseating of the wires seems to now have both drives working. The only oddity is the every other boot thing that’s going on. This is completely reproducible; every other reset or boot shows the Minerva logo bottom right but no box on the left inviting f1 etc. Pressing any key does nothing. A reset makes it all work again! It’s too
Predictable to be random I feel but I’m a total QL noob. There are loads of other added bits in this machine. I wonder if it’s some sort of multi rom boot feature or something.

We might need a piccy!

Hi,

If the red Minerva logo is displayed only, usually the 8049 IPC chip next to the microdrives is not working.