Sunday 20 March 2011

A New QL

QL users have again been discussing new hardware. The thread can be accessed through the mail archive site here ql-users where Dilwyn Jones explains the concept of a FPGA system. Various people have made suggestions as to what the "new" QL should be. Here is my suggestion as to how it should look to keep old and new QL users happy :-

The FGPA boards are apparently small enough to fit inside the original QL. The board could be programmed to emulate a 68000 or 68020 processor running at a GHz or 2 with 48MB of memory (the maximum smsq/e can address).The microdrives need to be consigned to history and the space used for a flash card reader, which could act as the heard drive as well. A couple of USB ports, legacy serial and parallel and more USB ports could be fixed at the back. The main issue is with regard to the video output. This is the killer for QLs at the moment. Only the Aurora motherboard replacement can drive flat screen monitors. But the colour resoloution is poor. Ideally only 16bit colour with a maximum resolution of 1024x768 will be required.
And thaks all for my wish list.

2 comments:

  1. http://propeller.wikispaces.com/pPropQL
    and
    http://propeller.wikispaces.com/pPropQL020
    are interesting QL boards with 68000 or 68020 processor and two Propeller chips.
    Pity, I didn't found any closer hardware information (board layout, firmware listing).

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for those links, anything that would run within a black box would be cool

    ReplyDelete