The Sinclair QL Forum

I know I am probably opening a contentious topic here, but in considering writing a serial driver for the QL, I need to use one or two variables in the system variables area.

There seems to be 2 purpose built variables for serial 1 and serial 2 read queues, but for a ring buffer I need one read and ...

If you can take control of the bus, then you can use DMA.

As far as I know, all the Motorola 68K processors have the ability to share bus with some other processor or device.

...

Non-Sinclair for me was the hardware design. Especially that costs, board space, complexity, and development time were wasted by the introduction of the coprocessor. With a benefit over the ZX Spectrum that was close to zero. Another example is the crippled dual SER design instead of leaving ...

Plus points for me:

It was Black
It was a Sinclair
It had well presented manuals
Once TK2 arrived, you could so some wacky stuff over that network!
It came with some half descent packages to work straight away
It was built with expansion in mind

The original coprocessor architecture of the 68K was supposed to be extensible, but I only recollect FPU and MMU being made availabe, were there any others??

There were at least the 68440/450 DMA controllers, 68681 DUART, 68901 MPU and 68230 PIT

Tobias

The last 3 on your list are purely ...

What about potential instruction time improvements that could be had with FPGA design, and in addition to that, the possibility of building in some primatives that could provide functions to accelerate parts of the code that are involved in repetative data movements ?

The original coprocessor ...

...

Many thanks Pr0f, very useful to know! Is there example of a boot file available which loads in the standard sort of things that people are interested in these days? TKII, QubATA, etc? I guess this is how SMSQ/E would be fired up too?

I can probably find the one I used to use when I get back ...

There is that question - what part of the QL is it that you want to improve or keep going forward?

Apple have gone through several processors, and a couple of OS's under the hood in their progression.

Is it the QDOS / SMSQ look and feel that's important, or the allegiance to the Motorolla ...

warm up issues can also be related to power supply. Capacitors deteriorate over time. If voltages are a little low until the components are warmed up, it may be that the supply is insufficient to guarantee proper operation when cold. Checks with a multimeter can help.

So, the trumpcard rom chip is a 32K device, with approximately one half being the disk driver and other driver support software, and the other half being the toolkit II.

I say approximately half, because some of the TK II images are actually larger than 16Kb.

From my understanding of the ROM scan ...