Clonetastic: QL-SD clone working with GoldCard clone

By | 2018-02-02

Every since I got my QL-SD interface I was annoyed with the driver support, especially on the PC side. I didn’t manage to fill the SD card without destroying the image one way or another. Then came Wolfgang Lenerz awesome QLWA compatible driver and now it works like a charm.

But only on my original QL, the QL-SD always had problems with the (Super)GoldCards of the world and especially with my Tetroid GoldCard clone, where it didn’t work at all. The general assumption was that the QL lines are too noisy and the chip employed on the QL-SD too fast so that all sort of trouble happens. To check for this I started building a QL-SD clone (thanks to Peter Graf for open-sourcing the hardware!) using a slightly older Xilinx XC9572XL architecture. But before I could finish that I finally did some measurements myself and found something interesting concerning my GoldCard:

When the ROM area is accessed the CPU puts the address on the bus and the motherboard generates the ROMOE (ROM Output Enable) signal. This is fed to the ROM chip, which in turn outputs the data for the address on the data bus. When the data read is finished, ROMOE is disabled again, the ROM stops driving the data bus and then the next address is put onto the address bus. Pretty simple. But now let’s look at this on the GoldCard, upper signal is ROMOE, lower signal is A0:

ROMOE/A0 signals

ROMOE/A0 signals

One can clearly see that the address line A0 begins to change even though ROMOE at this time is still high! This doesn’t harm much when accessing a ROM, it would just output some garbage which will be ignored anyway, but with QL-SD it’s a bit more complicated. This illegal state can trigger actions in the interface that were not requested by the software, especially when the driver code is executed from the ROM, too, as then obviously there are many more accesses to the ROM area. This also explains why some people apparently had more luck getting it to work when the driver was purely executed from RAM. Anyway, this can be fixed fairly easily. Problem is, I don’t have a Lattice programmer to change QL-SD, though one is on its way from China right now. But I did have my clone, so I worked with that:

Looks pretty wild, right? But what can I say, despite the long lines and everything, once my changes to the Verilog code were uploaded to the chip the interface began to work, without a single fault so far, even when the driver is executed from the ROM. With the original Verilog code my clone didn’t work at all, so it’s definitely not just the different chip.

Next step is waiting for my Lattice programmer to arrive (apparently today it was put onto an Airplane) and to reprogram the original hardware. I’m fairly confident that this will work, too, at least for the GoldCard. So far I still was not able to acquire a SuperGoldCard :-(, so I cannot tell in how far this would help there, too. Stay tuned!

5 thoughts on “Clonetastic: QL-SD clone working with GoldCard clone

    1. Marcel Post author

      Hi Arnould,

      I think the best use is to send it to Tetroid because potentially I could then buy me my own SGC in the future if he succeeds 😉

      Cheers, Marcel

      Reply
      1. Arnould

        OK, thank you for your answer. I thought maybe it would be important for you to own an original…

        Arnould

        Reply

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