The Sinclair QL Forum

Hi,

years ago I bought a SuperHermes from Ebay and promptly forgot about it. Today I tested it in the black box and it does not work. With Minerva, I see the logo but nothing else. I have checked for broken/bent pins but don't see any. The caps on the board look ok on visual inspection.

Can't find a schematic for the board, only a chip layout diagram. I have an oscilloscope / logic analyzer available.

Would greatly appreciate any hints or tips on what to check / where to start looking?

Cheers,
Petri

The circuit diagram for Superhermes was included in the User Manual, some scans of the manual exclude the circuit diagram.

Look on Dilwyn's site or this link to the Superhermes manual:
http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/docs/manuals/shmanual.zip

The circuit diagram is in the manual: "sh print manual.pdf"

Thank you Derek, I don't know why I didn't realize the print and non-print version have different contents! Feeling very stupid at the moment!

You wouldn't happen to have any "usual suspects" candidates to inspect?

Cheers,
Petri

It doesn't announce itself with any ROM banner - so you won't see it like you do other add in cards.

Also - if the keyboard driver isn't loaded at startup, you probably won't see any action pressing keyboard keys - so you may have to hunt around looking for a boot disk or similar to get you started. Once you are into the machine you can load the extensions and print the ipcver$ - which will tell you if it's alive or not.

Pr0f wrote:It doesn't announce itself with any ROM banner - so you won't see it like you do other add in cards.

Problem is, I only see Minerva logo, not the "Press F1/F2", etc. messages. And with regular ROM I just see an empty screen. My hypothesis is that initialization hangs because communication with 8049 (SuperHermes) fails.

do you have a standard ipc or hermes just to confirm the issue is not elsewhere?

I had a SuperHermes fail the same way. In the end I determined the 8049 had lost part of its programming over time. It couldn't start up properly, so the boot sequence couldn't finish.

Dave wrote:I had a SuperHermes fail the same way. In the end I determined the 8049 had lost part of its programming over time. It couldn't start up properly, so the boot sequence couldn't finish.

Interesting. There's no 8049 in a SuperHermes

I'll pull it out of the drawer tomorrow and identify the part that does the job of the 8049. That part. It was programmable, and lost its program.

Pr0f wrote:do you have a standard ipc or hermes just to confirm the issue is not elsewhere?

Yeah, QL works fine with the standard IPC