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#sinclairql

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lfa :emacs: :tux: :freebsd:

I'm talking about Europe here.
In the 80s there was a sucessful wave of 8bit computers: ZX Spectrum, Commodore C64, MSX, Amstrad CPC 664, some of them more succesfull than others, but the next 8bit wave IMHO was far from successful.: Spectrum 128/+2, Sinclair QL, Commodore C128, MSX2,... Any thoughts about this?

#retrocomputing#8bit#c64
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Quazatron

I'm proud to have been a supporter of the first Kickstarter campaign to make this wonderful machine a reality.

Now the guys are back at it, with the third campaign and lots of goodies, including #SinclairQL and #Commodore 64 cores.

Best of all, they keep supporting their users (from KS1 and KS2) by making sure we get the updates.

If you missed out on getting a #ZXSpectrum Next, this may be your final chance.

Email message from Henrique Olifiers announcing the date for the Kickstarter campaign #3 for the ZX Spectrum Next
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David Hembrow

I just found my Sinclair QL lurking at the back of the garage. It's going to take a bit of work to get it going again.

I built it into a metal toolbox to sit beside my desk and used a separate keyboard, which was borrowed from a VT100 and rewired to work with the QL.

My QL had not the usual 128 K of RAM, nor was it expanded to only 640 K, but I had 656 K, with an extra 16 K battery backed on a board which I could also use as an EPROM emulator when doing things with other micros. That board also contains a Dallas clock chip, so I didn't have to set the time everytime that I booted the machine up.

The extra 16 K of RAM was actually in the slot usually reserved for a ROM cartridge so it usually contained the dongle from Metacomco's port of the Lattice C compiler alongside a bit of extra code of my own.
#RetroComputing #SinclairQL #SinclairResearch #mc68008 #MC68000

First sight on opening the metal box. The black microdrive cartridge box was used as a case for a 28 pin ZIF socket and my battery backed RAM / clock / EPROM emulator is plugged into it. You can see the power supplies at the bottom, looking a bit rusty, and the back of two expansion cards.
Removing the expansion cards reveals that one of them is a disk interface (for two 720K floppies also in the box) and the other is a 256 Kb memory expansion on which extra 41256 chips have been piggybacked to provide 512 Kb in total, above the 128 Kb on the motherboard. The motherboard itself all looks fairly clean, except for a nasty brown stain on the heatsink at the bottom.
Some veroboard near the lovely ceramic 68008 contains a socket for the expansion boards. Next to the socket you'll see some germanium diodes (recycled from a 1960s Burroughs computer board!) and a resistor. These provide a write signal for the plug in ROM socket on the computer, which doesn't normally allow writing.
Close up of the eprom emulator. The lithium battery has leaked out some horrible brown stuff, which ended up on the heatsink inside the computer. Hopefully there isn't too much damage, but the DS1216 chip also looks to have corroded pins. The underside of this piece of veroboard has a lot of wires on it to connect everything up, and there are two switches at the back to switch from RW/RO mode and for two different EPROM pinouts. There's also a "dead cockroach" chip down there, which I don't remember the purpose of, but luckily no actual cockroaches were found...
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