Both my QL-VGA2 and QL-SD ROM hardware use Xilinx chips and to program these I have a Xilinx USB JTAG cable model DLC9LP. After months of inactivity I dusted it off to update a few remaining QL-VGA boards but found that the cable didn’t work anymore with my main laptop: Code 39!? Drat. Googling that… Read More »
After many happy customers Alex from the US was not impressed with the quality of QL-VGA’s picture quality and looking at what he sees this was completely understandable: It was soon clear that he owns one of the relatively rare original US NTSC QLs and QL-VGA was never tested with one of those. My working… Read More »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
When importing a project into Quartus 18.1 it helpfully suggests that it can rebuild the PLL IP blocks. Problem is, afterwards the MegaWizard doesn’t want to recognise the blocks anymore. It doesn’t even show an error, it just doesn’t do anything. As somebody who has never even used a MegaWizard before that was somewhat unfortunate.… Read More »