Q60

The Thor, Aurora, Q40, Q60 & Q68 etc. are discussed here.
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tofro
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Re: Q60

Post by tofro »

I would have interest in another board.


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Mr_Navigator
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Re: Q60

Post by Mr_Navigator »

ditto, but you haven't come back on a reply yet :(


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robheaton
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Re: Q60

Post by robheaton »

Any update on this?
Is a new run of Q60 boards on the horizon?


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Mr_Navigator
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Re: Q60

Post by Mr_Navigator »

Board for me too

"edit - I replied without looking at the last but on entry only to find I had already replied"

I think most people would like to have a final response positive or negative, with the advent of Raspberry Pi a distinct possibility of running an emulated QL quite cheaply inside a QL case of other such container, any older device such as a Q60 or SuperGold Card will attract interest although I am not so sure of some of the chips used availability though.

Having read a few posts both here on the forum and the QL Users List, there still seems to be a target audience for such exploration. I suppose it's just a case of how many, which makes it viable or not for someone to put the time and effort in.

Either way keeping people hanging is sometimes frustrating.

If your out there, let us know :)


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Mr_Navigator
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Re: Q60

Post by Mr_Navigator »

Just yestaerday I was searching around for magnetic tape head data. It would be ton of fun to reimplement microdrive board with decent FPGA so that it could achieve much more than 100 kbit/s adn 100kiB per unit. And be able to do data recovery and read/write Spectrum's data format...
Ah! but have you seen this little beauty :)
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dilwyn
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Re: Q60

Post by dilwyn »

Mr_Navigator wrote:
Just yestaerday I was searching around for magnetic tape head data. It would be ton of fun to reimplement microdrive board with decent FPGA so that it could achieve much more than 100 kbit/s adn 100kiB per unit. And be able to do data recovery and read/write Spectrum's data format...
Ah! but have you seen this little beauty :)
Replace MDV2 with a SD card, put a small fan onto MDV1 spindle, when you want a breath of air or QL gets too hot, type REPEAT loop:DIR MDV1_

:o)
(credit to whoever I stole that idea from, can't remember where I read it originally)

Dilwyn


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vanpeebles
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Re: Q60

Post by vanpeebles »

dilwyn wrote: Replace MDV2 with a SD card, put a small fan onto MDV1 spindle, when you want a breath of air or QL gets too hot, type REPEAT loop:DIR MDV1_

:o)
(credit to whoever I stole that idea from, can't remember where I read it originally)

Dilwyn
That was me, it made it to the Quanta mag as well! :oops:


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Peter
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Re: Q60

Post by Peter »

Hi all,

what do you all think about a specialized Q60 slot riser and Q60 case?

At the time of Q60 design, many QL users wanted PC cases to use equipment like harddisks, floppies, CDROM and strong PC power supply units. Consequently, I made the mainboard of the Q60 a sub-format of AT.

The Q60 itself was always much smaller than the PC cases and had a low power consumption. Both advantages were wasted this way.

Today, with SDHC cards being established as a QL storage medium, floppy and CDROM have little significance left. And harddisks can be relaced by small solid state disks. A Q60 with just SDHC and solid state disk could simply be powered by a 5V wall plug power supply, and fit a small case.

One difficulty is that the ISA I/O cards are quite high if mounted vertically. The other is that no PC case fits the Q60 shape well.

We are therefore considering to construct a special Q60 ISA slot riser, so the I/O card can be mounted horizontally. Also we are considering to design a fanless custom case with the openings exactly as needed for the Q60. Specialized for Q60 and of course not as cheap as PC stuff.

(Time allowing, the ISA slot riser would contain an SDHC card interface, which is faster than the current parallel port SDHC interface.)

Quite obviously, this is a lot of work, and I would like to get some feedback how much public interest still exists. After all the Q60 has become a historic computer.

Peter


Derek_Stewart
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Re: Q60

Post by Derek_Stewart »

Hi Peter,

I built a Q60 into a XPC Shuttle Case, which the mATX board was nearly the same dimensions as the Q60 board. This allowed a single floppy disk drive, CDROM Drive and maybe SD Card Readers at the front.

I did not really push this as a product, as it may of being said I was copying the MAC Cube thing produced by Apple.

But that was 6 years ago and the cube case lies empty, due the need for a Q60 board by other people.


Regards,

Derek
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Peter
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Re: Q60

Post by Peter »

HI Derek,

funny, I also have an unfinished a system with an XPC Shuttle case, mainboard at the bottom.

Nowadays I prefer a really small Q60 sepcific case though. My idea for optional CDROM connection was to use an IDE-SATA converter an external SATA drive. I would rarely use CDROM, if there is SDHC support.

Peter


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