Re: Faster/wider CPU...
Posted: Thu Feb 02, 2012 7:25 pm
Oh your that Peter, let me publicly thank you for all the work you have put in to the SD card interface
Your very welcome Let's hope that my SuperGoldCard related problems with QL-SD were not general, but just my second hand black box. I now bought a brandnew German QL, which I shall try after I found the time to modify the power supply. I would enjoy to own a SuperGoldCard QL where no floppy and harddisk is needed and no other stuff sticks out of the black case. Feels good to use the microdrives slots againMr_Navigator wrote:Oh your that Peter, let me publicly thank you for all the work you have put in to the SD card interface
The sources and Minerva 1.98 ROM images are freely downloadable from my website http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/qlrom/index.html to anyone who wants to have a look. I haven't checked the licence terms to see if it allows for modified derivatives to be used - I would presume that Peter has already looked at this. Alternatively, if it doesn't, it might be possible to supply a program which patches an existing Minerva ROM as required, perhaps. Also, I wonder if QDOS Classic author Mark Swift is still around to provide input to this?Dave wrote:Hi Peter,
I really appreciate your input into this thread.
I agree with you on the SMSQ/E license situation - I think it is a very unfortunate license that was designed not to encourage development (which it hasn't) but to protect incumbent interests (which it has.)
Is it possible to contact Lau and obtain the sources or rights to Minerva? I am convinced he knows it's economically worthless now, and if he decided to extract a price for it, it could be reasonably small. Is that an option? I know most of it is freely available, but the whole thing, not quite.
The history of the QL is peppered with hardware designs which nearly failed because insufficient consideration was given to software/OS (e.g. QXL, Aurora, to some extent Q40). Which is why I am glad that Peter has given this a lot of thought and time to try to implement two versions of QDOS and chosen not to announce this board too early. I knew of it a few years back when the hardware was being designed, but chose not to say anything.Peter wrote:
Good luck. Something finished is always better that a nice concept which becomes an endless story. I also plan for some "last resort" in case we fail to debug the FPGA CPU. There are provisions to add a hardware CPU on a daughterboard I was near to that decision already, but the partial success with QDOS Classic gave new hope. My biggest obstacle has become lack of time, and I'm therefore very glad that Adrian has taken over the QL-SD project from me. This is of great help.
Laurence Reeves has kindly released the sources for Minerva 1.98 under the GNU General Public License. He states that the license covers all supplied files, even if not individually mentioned in each file.dilwyn wrote:The sources and Minerva 1.98 ROM images are freely downloadable from my website http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/qlrom/index.html to anyone who wants to have a look. I haven't checked the licence terms to see if it allows for modified derivatives to be used - I would presume that Peter has already looked at this. Alternatively, if it doesn't, it might be possible to supply a program which patches an existing Minerva ROM as required, perhaps.
I tried to contact Mark years ago, but received no reply. QDOS Classic is offered as a free program, but a specific license is not mentioned. Both sources and binaries can be downloaded from http://www.mswift.unisonplus.net/ql/index.htmldilwyn wrote: Also, I wonder if QDOS Classic author Mark Swift is still around to provide input to this?
In addition to what Rich mentioned, visit the SQLUG site http://www.jms1.supanet.com/SQLUG/gwilt/gwilt.htm, where George Gwilt has a package explaining how to use his GWASS assembler program to compile SMSQE. On that page, scroll down to the Articles section where you'll find SMSQE Compilation with Gwass.Brane2 wrote:I've checked SMSQ/E main site.
And download the source. But it seems that beside pure asm sources there is no documentation.
How is one supposed to use these sources ?
EDIT: I have just found "QDOS SMS Reference Manual.pdf" and "QPTR update document for SMSQ/E" on Marcel Kilgus site...
OK I'm quoting this from page 1, so doing a 'where have you been' here but:Dave wrote:The EC and HC variants both do that. I can, however, obtain EC variants for less than half the cost of a similarly clocked HC.
I'm curious if there's a simple way to have a faster CPU than the 7.5MHz of the 68008, and/or if there's a simple way to have wider memory accesses, and still use the onboard facilities, like the gold cards do, but without lots of heavyweight custom logic.
I am looking at whatever comes out of this thread being an open-source design.