The long road to QL-VGA v2

As mentioned last time, I’ve designed a new QL-VGA version that is a lot more complex than the simple “hat” I designed for v1, but will hopefully be a lot easier to manufacture. I’ve ordered the board early September and they arrived a few days later. Unfortunately JLCPCB, my go-to prototype house, while having an… Read More »

Hardware from my past

After months of work I finally added a few new pages to my site. First, there is a small page describing my old QL, which was pretty unique:My QL of yore Related to that I updated and open sourced two extension cards I used to use, a Sandy SuperQBoard clone called the “Herbert”-card and finally… Read More »

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… Read More »

New QD version B.07

I introduced a bug in QD version B.05 that when the window was configured too high to fit on the screen (either by configuration or by command line parameter) QD will corrupt the memory. Curiously the feature of per-extension highlight handling was the culprit, a very unexpected side effect, so thanks a lot to Per… Read More »

QL-SD driver v1.09

A heap of dung I’ve been working hard behind the scenes to release a new version of the QL-SD ROM driver. The starting point was that Urs König asked me about a mysterious heap corruption with QL-SD when using his QL/E distribution under Minerva. And mysterious it was, after stripping down QL/E’s monster boot file… Read More »

QL-SD ROM – the early days

This weekend the German ZX meeting was supposed to happen, but for some pandemic reason it didn’t. Which is very unfortunate because not only did I produce a batch of QL-VGAs for it, I also had a secret product in development that I wanted to reveal there: QL-SD ROM. Please note that everything I write… Read More »

QL-VGA, the second

The last few weeks I continued working on the QL-VGA adapter, for once to have one myself and also because I was pretty strongly petitioned by some people. I’m not an electronics guy by trade, so this is some tough order for me. The first PCB I ordered looked gorgeous, but it was already obsolete… Read More »

ZX81 composite output

Recently I decided to dust off my old ZX81, the very machine that I learned programming on some 30+ years ago. It’s getting kind of difficult to find a TV that works with it, especially as I have the 1st ULA version that didn’t do the sync signals correctly. So I decided to “invest” (it’s… Read More »

QL-VGA (part 1?)

The QL and its non-standard video interface has always been a problem, even more so since the introduction of LCD monitors. Since I got my QL out of storage a few years ago I’ve been looking for a solution. I bought all kinds of Chinese video converters, the GBS8220 for example produced a very unstable… Read More »