Hey, y'all.

[DeathAdderSF]

Hello, everyone.

I am soon to be starting my QL experience via the QXL Card. So that should be fun.
Nice to know the community is here for me. Let's see what I can learn & discover...

[NormanDunbar]

Good luck. I used to have one of those.

Cheers,
Norm.

[vanpeebles]

Welcome to the forum!!

[DeathAdderSF]

Good luck. I used to have one of those.

How'd you like it? Did you find it to be fairly capable, or ???

[NormanDunbar]

It was a long long time ago, my PC at the time was a 486-DX, no floating point co-pro though, running 40 MHz on Turbo mode. 40 Mb (yes, Mb) HDD doubled with Stak.

Windows 3.1, updated to 3.1.1, and MS-DOS 5. The QXL worked great for me back then. I'm not sure they fit in modern PCs these days though. I could be wrong, it's been a while since I took the back off of one!

Have fun.


Cheers,
Norm.

[Chr$]

Hello, everyone.

I am soon to be starting my QL experience via the QXL Card. So that should be fun.
Nice to know the community is here for me. Let's see what I can learn & discover...

I have a QXL(II) card in a PC, was using it a month or so ago. Great to have plenty of space for HDD .win container files and very useful to have a floppy drive to hand that you can access from the QXL and the PC side (for transferring small files from the internet to the QXL for example). And you can easily add or remove files from the QXL.win container from the PC side (or copy the QXL.win file to a newer PC and do it from there). The QNET connection is also handy to transfer files to/from an original QL. They are not lightening fast, but with the right settings they can handle the complete SMSQ/E based systems that you can get online ready-to-go as QXL.win files, i.e. QLE and Black Phoenix. Performance-wise it was very close to the Q68, but the Q68 is more practical due to the SD cards, FAT device, the small size, the fact it makes absolutely no noise and some other improvements!

I like the QXL cards, they were quite powerful QL systems (for the time) and are also quite rare now. There can't have been many that have found their way to the USA either.

Have you had it long? How did you come by it?

Norm, they need an ISA slot to live in don't they, so they don't fit in any PC later than, oooh about 2004 at a guess, and I think most or at least many PCs had probably lost their ISA slots a few years prior to that.

[NormanDunbar]

Norm, they need an ISA slot to live in don't they, so they don't fit in any PC later than, oooh about 2004 at a guess, and I think most or at least many PCs had probably lost their ISA slots a few years prior to that.

Thanks! I knew there was a slot that isn't around anymore, but I couldn't remember which one - there have been a few!


Cheers,
Norm.

[Derek_Stewart]

Hi,

I have 3 QXL cards and 2 bare PCBs, which I was going to sell but got overtaken with work.

The bare PCBs are a little stuck for completion due to the identification of a custom chip on the QXL card.

I do not understand why people want to use a QXL with Windows, as most PC motherboards with an ISA bus will not run WIndows 98SE. The QXL was produced to run on a DOS environment, and this works OK, Network cards and even non-swop USB cards can be added quite easily.

I also had an idea for added a 68060 CPU, running at 50 Mhz, but never got around to making it. his would make the QXL 2 run at full speed, as the 68040 CPU reduces the CPU speed by half to 25Mhz.

This would have problems with the QL Network, as it needs accurate speed timings, but SerNET works about as fast as the QL Network, so n problems there.

[tofro]

Well, there's reasons why you would want to run QXL on a multi-tasking OS. (Like <ALT>-tabbing between SMSQ/E and the PC's native OS. It's just nice to be able to file-transfer over a working Ethernet in the background while working with SMSQ/E in the foreground).

It is, however, a bad idea to do this with Windows - my experience is that the QXL's network ports cease to work when operating under (any) Windows on the PC side (somehow the timing seems to be messed up). Thus I have been using my QXL under OS/2 Warp and, more recently, eComStation. This works flawlessly in my experience and leaves QXL networking intact. Also, support for more modern video and networking is much better there. OS/2 and eComStation's DOS seems to run much more undisturbed than a Windows 9x command shell.

[martyn_hill]

Hi everyone

With reference to Derek's comment re Network timing on QXL, should a faster CPU be installed...

This would have problems with the QL Network, as it needs accurate speed timings, ...

The NET driver included with SMSQE for QXL (so called 'Variable clock' version) is actually highly configurable with regards to bit-timing - for my QXL II from Derek, I needed to scale the default timings slightly (about 5%) to accomodate the modified CPU/clock speed he kindly fitted for me and thus expect it a fairly trivial job to update the timing constants for a potential faster clock.

I have previously explored scaling of NET bit-timings between the faster NET compatible machines such as sGC, QXL and Q68 and observed some very helpful throughput improvements as the configurable bit-timings are systematically scaled _down_ (sGC /4.5, Q68 down to /10) - the throughput increases are not entirely linear with each decrease of bit-time, but quite useful.

A bit off-topic, but thought to share...