QL-VGA update

The remaining stock of QL-VGA was sold in under 24 hours on SellMyRetro (wow) and I’m asked quite often for more. The thing is, all cables for QL-VGA were hand-made and making cables isn’t exactly my favorite way to spend my day. I inquired some cable companies for professionally made cables and the prices are fairly reasonable. But they have quite high minimum order quantities and shipping costs have gone through the roof because of Corona (no flights to and from China means less plane capacity for cargo. And the order is too small to ship via sea).

So I was looking around and thinking some more and decided that using a big DIN connector for QL-VGA is the way to go (the same as used in the QL) as I can get these cables at lower quantities and with much reduced shipping prices. But the big DIN connector doesn’t fit on my QL-VGA sandwich design and in any case soldering the remaining 221 joints on each board wasn’t that much fun either, so in the end I did a complete redesign as a single board:

This is the most complex board I’ve ever done: my first 4-layer board, my first FPGA board and my first Spartan 6 design. That’s a lot of firsts, so it’s entirely possible that it will not work. I ordered the boards and components yesterday, so in 2 to 3 weeks I will hopefully know more. But if it works then manufacturing it will become much easier. Finger’s crossed! In terms of functionality it will be pretty much the same as v1 for now.