Tag Archives: QL

QL-SD driver 1.10

The QL-SD driver ROM is so full that every byte counts and during my search for superfluous bytes for v1.09 I removed one instruction too much. This results in a wrong value returned from the iof.rhdr call which is often not used anyway but can lead to subtle bugs in applications. Today I’ve uploaded a… Read More »

A short history of QDOS file headers

Background In Germany there was a famous commercial that starts with the sentence “The history of menstruation is a history full of misunderstandings” and the same can be said about QDOS file headers. So what’s it all about? On today’s PC file systems every file has some meta data associated with it. The main one… Read More »

QL-SD ROM news

A while ago I’ve sent pre-production QL-SD ROM samples to a few testers and now Dilwyn Jones has written a review of his, read it here. Thanks Dilwyn! Unfortunately I don’t currently have much time for QL stuff and what little time I recently had I’ve invested into making a NTSC compatible QL-VGA. But before… Read More »

QL-VGA and the mysterious NTSC QL

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 »

QL-SD ROM (tiny!)

Hardware revisions I get asked a lot about the state of my new QL-SD, so here’s an update. The new external QL-SD variant (henceforth called “QL-SD ROM”) went through a lot of revisions: This series also exemplifies my progress as a PCB-designer. I’ve never formally learned to create PCBs, so it’s all learning by doing.… Read More »

QL-VGA v2 production

Merry Christmas everyone! The first batch of QL-VGA v2 has been produced and sent out today! Here’s the picture the factory has sent me for validation: The connectors are missing as I’ll just solder them in myself, this shouldn’t take too long. Then only the FPGA must be programmed before a final test can happen,… Read More »

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 »