The Sinclair QL Forum

Hi,

I have just aquired an Atari TT030, which had problems with RTC clock battery leakge.

The TT030 runs all Atari software okay, SMSQ/E in mono mode, all hardware is accessible form SMSQ/E.

I plugged the QVME card into the VME interface and started up the TT030. Loading SMS/E loads up and monitor goes out range.

Does anyone know if there is anything special to do on the TT030 to run SMSQ/E.

The QVME board runs okay on a Mega STE, SMSQ/E loads up correctly with the same monitor.

I have a feeling that the VME circuitry maybe damaged due to the battery leakage.

Did you load a driver? I dont remember details anymore, but there are a number of different drivers for different monitors and resolutions IIRC. Dont remember if that was for the original ST QL "emulator" or the QVME.

Hi Per,
I loaded the Atari SMSQ/E which has the Atari Screen driver included in it, I tried the Level E drivers and the Mono screen driver. All resulting in an out of range error message on the monitor.

The QVME card works on the Mega STE, I thought maybe there was something special to do on the TT030. But it looks like the VME interface is not working correctly. I have to do some more investigation.

But on saying all that, the Q68 can reproduce the TT030 screen resolution and in my opinion is faster.

The TT's video sub-system is very different from the MSTE's.

Could the system be trying to switch to TT-High resolution, which is not VGA compatible?

Have you tried starting SMSQ/E when running in ST-High resolution?

I must admit that I tried running the latest SMSQ/E on my TT and the display didn't work at all well.

Hi,

I forgot about the SMSQE.PRG config blocks, looking the configuration with Menuconfig, there is default setting of 15Khz in the Horizontal Frequency.

The monitor I used on the QVME is a HP LE1901w which gives frequencies of:

Horizontal: 24 - 83 kHz
Vertical: 50 - 76 Hz

So will replace the Horizontal Frequency default of the SMSQE.PRG to something in the middle of the frequency range like 50 kHz, just to get SMSQ/E up and running. Then change the display rates with the DISP_RATE command in the boot file.

I suppose, I could write a boot file on floppy disk to set the monitor display rate.

Running SMSQ/E without QVME, gives a reasonable monochrome display on the HP LE1901w monitor.

I remember now that the video drivers I was thinking about were for Atari TOS to use the QVME. The "QL" ones were built in to SMSQ/E and could be tweaked at boot time.

Hi, Per,

I read the Atari SMSQ/E manual and used the command:

DISP_SIZE 800,600,70,,128,60

Which gave a nice 800x600 display on the VGA monitor.

When I more time, I will play around with the DISP_SIZE command to get the maximum display size.

Just goes show if the information is in the manual, I just had to read it.

pjw wrote:I remember now that the video drivers I was thinking about were for Atari TOS to use the QVME. The "QL" ones were built in to SMSQ/E and could be tweaked at boot time.

Yes, Jochen supplied a disk to use the QVME with high resolution (b/w) under TOS, this also set a "Cookie" so Atari programs know about that. Was very nice with NVDI, Gemini and Calamus.

Ralf R. wrote:

pjw wrote:I remember now that the video drivers I was thinking about were for Atari TOS to use the QVME. The "QL" ones were built in to SMSQ/E and could be tweaked at boot time.

Yes, Jochen supplied a disk to use the QVME with high resolution (b/w) under TOS, this also set a "Cookie" so Atari programs know about that. Was very nice with NVDI, Gemini and Calamus.

Hi Ralf,

I have the High Resolution Atari driver disk for QVME.

The main problem was I did not read the manual correctly, now I have, it all works.

Still the Q68 seems slicker in 1024x768 Mode 4.