The Sinclair QL Forum

It could work in theory with Aurora, a feature for that sort of thing was built-in from the start.
In any case it requires a Gold or Supergoldcard, to run SMSQ/E in the first case. The reason is that GC and SGC replace the actual ROM with a ROM image in RAM at the same addresses, and SMSQ/E actually ...

Thanks Your so much Nasta (and other) for the aditional information, now I understand clearly how the memory is accesses in Aurora (and GC/SGC).

Only one doubth:


When Aurora is used with SGC, the whole 256k of it's video RAM can be accessed (on SGC this is $4C0000 to $4FFFFF) but the video ...

SGC does reads and writes on J1 to the motherboard IO area at addresses $18000..$1BFFF, only reads to the ROM slot addresses at $C000..$FFFF, and the entire ROM area at $0000..$FFFF (as appears on J1) appears once more as $400000..$40FFFF to the SGC but read-only. That last one is a damn shame ...

OK, let's see if I can clear this up a bit...

First, the Aurora was made for two reasons:
1) Make it possible to run a QL on a VGA monitor (since at that time monitors based on the TV standard were already getting scarce and expensive)
2) Add more resolutions and colors to the QL

The first part is ...

Yes, one on should be able to implement DTACK.
Also there are two 74HC04 in there, one of which has 2 unused inverters, and the other has 3.
The one with 3, uses 2 for the floppy WD1772 clock and one to invert the RDWL signal for the ROM. If an integrated 8MHz oscillator is used, two of those ...

Using an 8 MHz clock oscillator saves one IC, two resistors and some space on the board...
It should be possible to also remove 4 diodes and make the whole thing faster with a few changes to the GAL programming, will look at the source...

BTW, is there a schematic diagram? Didn't see one in the github project...

Since static RAM is used, no need for address multiplexing or refresh. That being said, I have looked at the GAL sources and there still is a MUX input which really should not be there. And yes, it does use the ROM relocation trick like the original. There is also a bit of missed opportunity as ...

I used the public source smsq/e version and emulated the aurora registers and set the same vram addresses, I managed to make the smsq/e recognize my card as a gold card with aurora, machine=11. The standard modes worked using the aurora vram space. The higher resolution 512x384 didn't seem to ...

I used the public source smsq/e version and emulated the aurora registers and set the same vram addresses, I managed to make the smsq/e recognize my card as a gold card with aurora, machine=11. The standard modes worked using the aurora vram space. The higher resolution 512x384 didn't seem to work ...