The Sinclair QL Forum

Thanks Paolo! you will find that all shugart's type of floppy drives are fine with QL interfaces; the only thing that you need to know is that you must use a straight flat cable with no twist if you use a single floppy drive. The drives I've got are Sony MPF920s (I've got 2), and I've got a standard...

I'd suggest waiting until you've got a lead (serial comms-pun not intended) on the comms issues before deciding, and for the Trump Card to arrive, by which time you might have developed a clearer chain of thought as to where your priorities are likely to take you. Thank you Dilwyn, that seems sensi...

Ah, another stab in the dark - the JM ROM. Again without knowledge of the way the transfer software works, the JM ROM does have a limited input buffer (128 bytes) whereas with other later ROMs it is dynamic. Ah, now that's interesting - I was trying to decide whether the next upgrade (once I've got...

The problem you have is the QL SER ports are not wired the same, from memory, SER2 is a DCE and SER1 is DTR, see QL Service manual page 10, Figure 1 for QL RS232 schematic Hi Derek, and thanks. I did appreciate the ports were wired differently; I've had success transferring -bas files on SER1, but ...

This is just a stab in the dark robsoft - since _bas files are essentially ASCII codes 32 to 127 most of the time, and _cde files could easily contain the entire ASCII range 0-255 is it possible that, say, a character with a code value of 0-31 somewhere in the file could be acting as a control code...

Sorry to resurrect an old thread: Step by step instructions, apologies if I'm being too verbose with the explanations: Nope, this is all perfect sir! Well - kinda. I can get as far as step 15. Try as I might, I cannot persuade the XModem transfer to work. Copying over the xmrecv_bas file was no prob...

Ah, I see from Dilwyn's brilliant website that almost any standard floppy drive should do the trick (presumably as long as it's IDE/IDC-type connectors, and not SATA or USB). Cool. I should have scoured a wee bit harder before asking.

Ok, having spent the weekend playing, the handful of MDVs I've got are mostly too unreliable for use. I've tried fixing a couple with cut-up cassette tape 'pads', with mixed results. So I've just bought a floppy/mem expansion card, brand new and 'Trump compatible'. Probably take a week or so to arri...

Hi, middle aged full-time software developer here, finally got round to picking up a real QL (never had one as a lad - I went from '81 to Spectrum, then Amiga, PC and finally Mac). I want to write a bit of C, Pascal or maybe asm or even SuperBASIC for fun, even better if I can do something that othe...

In the QL-SD.... heh heh