Sinclair QL Floppy Disk Interfaces

[RWAP]

As for the Super Gold Cards - yes, as with anything, they can of course be made, well something similar, if it is a complete redesign from scratch - the logic code would need re-writing completely from scratch as the Altera chip used in the Gold Card and Super Gold Card is obsolete and although there are 100s on the second hand market - you need to know that they were made before a certain specific date if they are to work, and have not been programmed (as they cannot be re-programmed!)

You can always get a newer model and just port the logic code to the newer chip. On the VHDL level, it's a day's work tops and Altera will have guides (if not porting tools too) to tell you how.

Oh if only - the code will NOT work - it has been tried and tested by a few people - it relies on something that is slightly out of spec on the early Atera chips. Plus I understand that the sources to the code have been lost which does not help..

But then, if I were to design a Super Gold Card, I would do away with a floppy disk interface completely and move to an SD card reader complete with Toolkit II, switchable Minerva ROM (or SMSQ/e) and 4MB or more memory similar to 1024MAK above.

And I'm sure it'd cost an arm and a leg to buy one too...

Couldn't help but notice how you so expertly avoided the "we need new users" issue so expertly... doubly-quoted but never addressed.
Nicely done!

NO - I agree we need new users - why the hell do you think I do so much unpaid work and spend my time fixing the QLs etc I have here...

As for new hardware - why would it cost an arm and a leg?

I can provide figures but you will ignore them or brush them off as fanciful.
Take the Amiga Keyboard Membranes for example - £200 setup costs meant that I had to get 250 membranes made as a minimum to bring the initial price per membrane (to me) below £16 including VAT. Now the local corner shop would normally take the price and double it. What do I charge? £20 for a new membrane - 26% markup. Not 100% or more...

Why £20 ?

Well it means that if I sell 3/4 of the batch I will get my money back - lets face it how many Amiga users are out there?

Hardware is even worse - prototyping costs, layout costs and test runs of PCBs do not come cheap - let alone allowing the time for making prototypes and testing them, and writing new device drivers (particularly in the case of the QL). Ok, so I have around 1100 QL customers gained over 26 years of trading - although how many of them are collectors, or people who wanted a new membrane so that they could sell their QL, is unknown.

You would guess that maybe 10% would buy a new interface, so development and production costs would have to be split across 110 people / interfaces.

That is your starting point - I have no idea how much it would cost to reverse engineer and design / prototype such an interface for the QL - but say £2000. Parts for 110 interfaces around £100 each
So you are already talking of an investment of £12000 if someone is willing to do this. TIme to design and make them is unknown.

What do you sell the interfaces for ?

£120 and hope you will recover your costs - at least you might then sell 100 or so....
£200 and know that the original designer and developer is actually getting some recompense for what they have invested time and money wise?

Ah - but that is too expensive you cry!

You must live in cloud cuckoo land if you think that a retro trader is raking in £1000s of profit - that is why I spend 60% of my time programming websites - that is the only side of my business which is truly profitable - the rest, excluding stock in hand, runs at about 30% margin which I think is reasonable and covers the chances I take in investing money that may well never be recouped.

But you see, you just ignore the plain and simple fact - I buy and sell items to make profit, to invest in new projects and keep me alive. You buy things as a user.

[RWAP]

Oh, by the way, Rich... you never answered this: if your Gold Cards haven't sold at £165 for months now, how come and the price isn't coming down? Ever? Is there some secret "market force" there?

Simple answer - because I don't want to make a loss on them! I bought 3 QL systems complete with Gold Cards for around £100 each and made 2 working ones out of them!

The QL motherboards were scrapped.

I now have 3 Jurgen Falkenberg keyboard interfaces spare as a result - although these are very temperamental - are especially prone to legs bending or breaking off, or simply falling out of the chip sockets on the QL - so I am not sure whether I want to even offer these for sale or try plugging them into a QL to test them!

One had to be scrapped as it had a completely burnt out board (plugged into a QL when it had been set up to work in a backplane) - another had a bad Altera chip, and the third had memory problems (turned out to be one of the legs on the memory chip had broken off!)

[vanpeebles]

If I remember rightly wasn't there a recent sd system that was close to development but they passed it on as they felt the numbers just didn't work out?

[ppe]

I find this personal attack on Rich on a public forums strange to say the least. Resorting to name-calling is in very poor taste in my opinion.

A general level discussion of the problems of second hand HW market for a niche retro computer is quite welcome in my mind but I see no reason to single out someone. Based on the messages in the thread something has happened on *another* forum which has sparked this attack but description of the events is vague to say the least.

Nobody is forcing anyone to buy anything from RWAP. I have purchased several items from Rich and have found his service to be excellent. He is very quick to respond to any queries, ships items really, really fast and is always willing to help with any problems. I find it very comforting to be able to purchase from a businessman whom I can I trust to receive tested components from.

For a couple of years I have been longing for a Super Gold Card but cannot afford one. In my opinion it would be very strange to blame Rich for it.

Could we please revert back to discussion rather than personal attacks?

[skagon]

Again, selective answers, dear sir.

Point one: why would the parts for a Gold Card cost £100? If people can get Altera CPLDs (or whatever else) and make PlusDs and DivIDEs and IF1bis' and all sorts of devices and sell them for less than £50... The actual cost of parts for a Gold Card, in my estimate would be less than £30.
But that's not the point.

Point two: notice how I never mentioned membranes? I think that £20 is a tad expensive but not unreasonable. I also already said I support the development of new hardware and if it gets made, I'm all for it. But then again, most recent developers give their code for free, or for a few boards, if someone makes them. See DivIDE or IF1bis.
But that's not the point either.

Point three: you bought three full QLs complete with Gold Cards for £300. Unfortunately for you, most didn't work. That's a part of the risk. But now, you're trying to make £330 from... two Gold Cards! I'm sorry but you did NOT buy two Gold Cards for 300. You bought THREE COMPLETE QLs, with Gold Cards, processors, cases, even keyboard interfaces and Hermes chips, for 300. And you chose to 'transfer' the cost entirely on the Gold Cards.
It's like buying a used car for £1000 pounds and then trying to sell the... turbocharger for £1100, only because the rest of the car was scrapped, isn't it?
By the way, I'm sure you got more from these QLs than just the Gold Cards. Spare parts, chips, CPU, ROMs, ULAs... I am certain you got a lot more out of them and didn't just "scrap" them.
So... if you were lucky and all three QLs worked... again, I am certain that the price of the Gold Cards would have been exactly the same. And you'd have made even more from the rest of the parts, on top of that.
You got unlucky. Normal businesses that get unlucky just suck it up and move on. But not you. You still want to make profit, even when you get unlucky, don't you?
But that's still not the point.

The point is that you're cornering the market with your practices. Exactly as you did with the Trump Cards, going behind the scenes and against the rules of the forum you used. Exactly because you supposedly only needed one Trump Card for a little while, but you still got BOTH and are now selling them at 50% profit, or more. Original seller's price: £60, your price £95 for one, original price £90, your price £120 for the other. If you only needed one Trump Card for a little while, go ahead and sell them for £70 and £100 and notice that NORMAL people would sell at the same price they got it. If I needed one to compare against my own, I'd consider the postage as some kind of "rent", if you will. The price I'd pay for having it for that little while. And sell at the same price I bought it.
But much like the Gold Cards, you want to make a 50% profit, even from that. And keep your status as the only source in the process.

P.S. If you don't want those keyboard interfaces, I'd have one or two or all. I'm willing to test them, since you've got them just lying about. But I guess you'd want another £300 for them too, because that's how much you spent on the QLs you pried them from, wouldn't you?

[vanpeebles]

I think we will draw a line under this now as it's just going round in circles and getting no where. Please feel to talk about new hard developments in the hardware thread though

[Dave]

Indeed. Very undignified.

If you don't like what he's doing, compete with him. Become a QL trader. And remember, don't charge for your time.

Rich, how many QL floppy/512K/TK2 cards do you think the market could absorb?

[RWAP]

A floppy disk drive interface with TK2 and 512K - if it could be sold for £40-£50 then I reckon we could sell 25-40 - people will be waiting to see what happens with the QL-SD interfaces.

Peter Graf's needs more memory for the drivers and extra memory will always be useful for running programs whatever SD interface people use.

There is of course also the option of using a HxC floppy disk emulator where external cased disk drives are more difficult to get, or unreliable.

[Dave]

So, in the event there's a successful SDHC project, it will likely spur demand for simple 512K expansions?

[RWAP]

So, in the event there's a successful SDHC project, it will likely spur demand for simple 512K expansions?

Yes definitely - people will want TK2 and 512K memory if nothing else so that they can run the latest software

There are still other projects though Dave that we need - Minerva MKII, Super Hermes, batteries for the (S)GC .....