PiStorm

[Peter]

I'm curious if it had that support and you kept it at 7.5Mhz if you could easily interface to the CPU socket and then just see what you'd get (i.e. so no speed up but wifi, memory, SD, etc...)

But where would you have the SD card? Inaccessible inside the QL case? And how to close the case if you fit the Raspberry?

[bwinkel67]

I'm curious if it had that support and you kept it at 7.5Mhz if you could easily interface to the CPU socket and then just see what you'd get (i.e. so no speed up but wifi, memory, SD, etc...)

But where would you have the SD card? Inaccessible inside the QL case? And how to close the case if you fit the Raspberry?

That's true...I suppose you could use one of those expansion cables and have a microSD card come out of the back like the internal SD interface does. But WiFi might be cool (like OqtaDrive but for Win images).

[Dave]

As a person who has put an ESP32 inside a QL case a few times, it can't go under the metal keyboard of the plate. The signal just reflects into the ground and is very weak in horizontal travel. So besides buffering, the Pi would have to be offset enough to have the antenna out from under the keyboard backing plate, or an external antenna (doable, but a PITA)....

[Peter]

The Raspberry would not fit over the 68008 inside QL case anyway...

[bwinkel67]

For any PIStorm variant on the QL, a PCB would have to be designed with those issues in mind, esp since there currently isn't any 68008 interface. One approach would be having the circuit board hook into the 68008 socket and it could extend over the expansion port with the Pi plugging in on the bottom (so the Pi is oriented just like the QL motherboard and the PIStorm board bridges the two). Or there could be an interface that just use the expansion port directly (ala GoldCard). Ideally having the expansion port open would be best (but you could have a pass through). Or a socketed board with a ribbon cable may also work. I also think there is a branch looking at the smaller PI Zero's so the size may also shrink. In any case, not much work going on for the 68008 PiStorm so it likely won't happen, but if it existed, I'm sure there would be a workable solution.

Unfortunately I don't have any verilog experience, otherwise I'd give it a crack. As Claude himself said last year:

Claude — 06/04/2021
but if anyone at the sinclair forum is a bit aware of verilog and c coding he gets all the help to make it work on QL

[Peter]

Ahm... who is "Claude himself"? Jean Claude van Damme?

[bwinkel67]

Ahm... who is "Claude himself"? Jean Claude van Damme?

Oh sorry, I thought you were on the PiStorm Discord server (there is a QL-Peter). Claude is the creator of PiStorm and he's always wanted a QL. His project has blown up with many variants now so it's not something he can focus on.

[Peter]

Claude is the creator of PiStorm and he's always wanted a QL.

Thanks for the info. Did he mainly design the hardware or software or both?

[Derek_Stewart]

Hi

I have a PiStorm PCB with the SMD chips soldered, just need to solder the GPIO pins and build the SD Card, which was for an Amiga A500 I have that once built an installed will be up for sale, but alas the Amiga power needs repairing, probably capacitord.

I have a PI Zero 2 ready to be fitted as Pi3A is very rare.

[bwinkel67]

Claude is the creator of PiStorm and he's always wanted a QL.

Thanks for the info. Did he mainly design the hardware or software or both?

He designed the hardware (interface between Amiga and Pi) and integrated an existing Pi Emulator (Mushashi) which itself required some coding...so both I would say...he just didn't write the 68K emulator from scratch.

This seems to be his initial twitter post (from Oct 2020, so not that long ago):

https://twitter.com/Claude1079/status/1 ... 58530?s=20