The Sinclair QL Forum

I would say 2-4Mb is a reasonable about of memory.
I find 2 MB insufficient. In many cases, I could probably live with 4 MB, given the upcoming new SMSQ/E background image handling.
But there are users who need more, e.g. many instances of editors, or displaying large images.
The Qzero has SDRAM ...

Thanks Peter - I'll look into it. Is it on github?

No, it's on the QL homepage: https://dilwyn.theqlforum.com/qlsd/index.html
Your PLD looks relatively large, maybe the logic fits. Driver and hardware allow hot-plugging, so you might find it more convenient than floppy. Several hundreds of QL ...

Any way you can set some sort of "afinity" flag so certain types of code will always go to the faster memory?

That sounds like a serious OS change, maybe not justified. If memory grows into the "slow" region, everything that has been allocated before, remains fast. Especially the extensions and ...

I know two people who own unwanted QLs they would be happy to give them to me for the purpose
mentioned above.

I've become quite sceptical about replacing the QL mainboard. Before I designed QLbase, I also thought there were a good number of dead QLs waiting for a new use of the case. Turned out ...

Yesterday I played around with my memory hungry QPC setup using 4MB of RAM. I found it perfectly usable, 8MB was ample for my needs.

Thanks for this feedback. This coincides with my own experience.

The zero has separate video memory so I assume this reduces the need for "main memory ...

Hi Derek,
Personally, I am not worried by the increased cost of SRAM, but but much more expensive would to have the Qzero use fast ram completely and not use slow ram?
About 150 € if purchased from authorized distributors. Potentially more than a 68EC060CPU.
Not knowing exactly what the use of ...

SRAM is expensive, so I came to consider a "mixed memory" approach with only 4 MB of SRAM. For example, only the lower 1 MB and the upper 3 MB of the main memory would be mapped to fast SRAM, while the rest of 28 MB stays SDRAM. (Video memory is separate on Qzero anyway). This would not require any ...

I was thinking it might be nice to have the QL PiStorm as an expansion card but with a floppy interface on the board too rather than trying to fit it internally into the 68008 socket.

If you get that far: SD card might be an alternative to floppy. I released QL-SD circuit and logic as open ...

The QLion Gold card is finished, [...]

Congratulations!

In my own TIndex tests (using CoWo's QTop), I get around the 21x mark for the Q68 and QZero (both in mode 4, SMSQe), so these are great results for the QLion card!

You should get 24.2. Unless you see something obvious (like loading ...

techfury wrote: Tue Mar 11, 2025 9:44 pmIf one were to develop a hypothetical expansion with a ROM replacer (using the good old trick of forcing DSMCL high through a diode when the address range matches) [...]

My memory has faded, but I have doubts this works for the ROM address range. Please double check or ask Nasta