It is small hardware piece, with Coldfire 266 MHz processor, and many modern peripherals (see LINK).
Small and absolutely silent (with CF card and no fan).
Even it can run for two hours on small battery power!
I think, in case that Q60 will not be produced again, this is good, existing, already available, modern hardware ready to be transformed from Atari into a new QL.
No need to develop new hardware, just to use this one.
Of course it needs to re-program the Altera Cyclone III FPGA. To replace the Atari video with ZX801 graphical modes and possibly Aurora 256 color mode (maybe Q60 graphic modes).
It has CF card, SD card reader, IDE, SCSI, USB, floppy, serial, VGA output via DVI-I, ethernet, 48 kHz sound input and output, PS/2 keyboardand mouse, 512 MB RAM, 128 MB VRAM, ...
Too much, I think, not all of them will be used for a QL.
I thought deeply about possible problems:
1) can the work of 8049/Hermes be archieved on this hardware?
2) will there be any software compatibility issue, as Coldfire does not support all instructions in the 68k instruction set?
3) Anyone, who can create the hardware (ZX801 etc) for the FPGA?
4) the price is high.
What do You think about this?
):
