Somewhat rare US QL on eBay...

[bwinkel67]

This just popped up on my US eBay...like the German version this has DB-9 connections. Also it's NTSC:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/194165185329

Looks like it has one of those short RAM expansion cards too.

[bwinkel67]

Shipping from the seller seems to be about $30 within the US and it looks like $100 to the UK and $130 to Germany...I wonder if standard shipping from US to UK/Germany via postal service would be significantly lower than $30 less...let me know if any collectors out there want to see if the difference would be significant enough (I can get a shipping quote if I have an address).

[Dave]

I'm going for this, as I do not currently have a good US dev machine.

[bwinkel67]

I'm going for this, as I do not currently have a good US dev machine.

Good luck...it is up to $100 now, hopefully it won't get too outrageous. I'm curious what that little extension board is...256K memory?

[Dave]

I guess I’ll find out in a couple of weeks.

[Dave]

Got it for $323.55 shipped, would have paid MUCH more. That's only £228 though so a bit of a bargain by UK standards.

This leaves me free to disassemble and reverse engineer my current dead (beyond repair, corrosion) US QL to turn it into a schematic.

[Chr$]

Got it for $323.55 shipped, would have paid MUCH more.

So would I!

I was going to bid Dave, but the huge ebay global shipping and customs charges ($200+) put me off. When you said you wanted it I didn't even bother to bid (probably a good job, or one of us would have ended up paying a lot more). That looks great value to me.

[Dave]

I have two US QLs. One has weird corrosion issues and I think it's just a poor candidate for repair. The other I disassembled to reverse engineer the microdrives and see if Samsung made any substantial or meaningful changes to them. I did a replacement microdrive board with better noise floor, but it wasn't enough of an improvement to make it worth going through the process of disassembling and reassembling the microdrive unit entirely. Of course, I disassembled most of my microdrives in this exploration, so I have a single microdrive unit that works properly now.

I do appreciate you stepping aside once I declared my interest. I am working on a budget. I did think this would go for around $400-500.

I'll look at the odd little card that's in it and report back when it arrives. I have no idea what it is at all. I don't know any cards that have a through connector and are not a QubIDE.

[tofro]

I'll look at the odd little card that's in it and report back when it arrives. I have no idea what it is at all. I don't know any cards that have a through connector and are not a QubIDE.

If anyone, you should in fact know The Sandy ThroughCon memory expansion looks suspiciously similar. Maybe that's an early one without the second floor.

[Dave]

Nope, not a match:

I have no idea what it is.

Interestingly, that thru-con card got adapted into the first 512K RAM expansion with battery backed clock for the Amiga, which is what ultimately pushed Sandy in that whole new direction to become Power Computing.