The Sinclair QL Forum

Silvester:
TK2 and battery backed clock on a ROM port cartridge.
SAA1099 sound card

Dave:
Microdrive extender: a microdrive bridge to plug onto the QL microdrive expansion socket and allow two more microdrives to be connected. With a nice 3D printed QL-matching case and reset button extender...
A replacement diode/cap board for PSUs that are all showing their age now.
A 1MB RAM card.
A USB 2.0 full speed card.

When we can...dump more easily the Md's? ^_^

I have already got a SAA1099 on Trump card QL (must get around to writing tracker!). But recently picked up some genuine Yamaha OPL3 FM chips, now very cheap:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/1pair-YMF262- ... xy0NtTCX5e

Make a nice QL Adlib type sound board (easy to interface).

Silvester wrote:I have already got a SAA1099 on Trump card QL (must get around to writing tracker!). But recently picked up some genuine Yamaha OPL3 FM chips, now very cheap:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/1pair-YMF262- ... xy0NtTCX5e

Make a nice QL Adlib type sound board (easy to interface).

Hi Silvester,

The addition of a SA0199 sounds interesting, do you have any details or photographs.

Silvester wrote: Make a nice QL Adlib type sound board (easy to interface).

Very nice idea!

A proper USB port.

Using the FTDI FT245R 2.0 IC: http://www.ftdichip.com/Support/Documen ... FT245R.pdf

It works well in Motorola systems, is 5V capable, provides USB 2.0 (480Mb/sec theoretical).

I'll provide hardware if someone wants to develop the code to run it. The same driver could be used with parallel and SPI versions of the IC.

Anyone interested in the driver side?

(Edited to change to newer device.)

Dave wrote: Anyone interested in the driver side?

I have programmed two (full) USB drivers in my life - The first and the last one (incidentally, the same one).

USB as such is not so hard - you just hand small blocks of memory to and from the hardware. The problem is: You need to put USB devices on top of you low-level driver. Lots of them. and all of them are a tiny bit different. And all af them need routing of packets to the proper device, and in the end everything is one single mess.

I wouldn't consider that hobby...

BTW: Supporting interrupt - is not the QL way of doing things. The QL wants to poll peripherals, ideally.

Tobias

I think the community has a nice way, when a new port becomes available and supported, is they look at what can be plugged into that port, find one thing that is good, cheap and fast *laughs* and standardize around that.

USB would open up a lot of options for people to.... tinker.

A new video system.

Two parts:

• A video card that contains RAM and a better way of reading it, resulting in a more modern signal like HDMI.
• A new 8301 replacement that doesn't do anything about video, removes that interrupt and just does its other tasks.

So, add a video capability left-of-CPU and remove it right-of-CPU.

This one's a bit out there.

Dave wrote:A proper USB port.
Using the FTDI FT245R 2.0 IC

That chip would make the QL a USB peripheral device for a PC.
What you probably want is a chip which makes the QL USB host, so it can use USB devices.

The hope that someone would write USB drivers for a QL, was already unrealistic 15 years ago.
Today with almost no developers left, chances have not increased.