Breaking news: The QIMSI Interface

[Derek_Stewart]

Hi,

I have connected the QIMSI onto a Issue 5 QL, Trump Card 1, fitted with Leon's ZX8301 replacement board, and vDrive QL Microdrive Emulator all works very nicely, with Extended Environment.

I have just got to make a USB to PS/2 Cable for the Mouse and keyboard.

[Peter]

I have two QLs. One has a QIMI inside.

Obviously, I would not deliberately try a QIMSI on that QL. But if I accidentally plugged a QIMSI into that QL (which already has QIMI) by mistake, would it cause damage?

No damage at all. And if you don't load the QIMSI mouse driver, your QIMI will continue to work as expected.
Hard to predict what happens when both drivers are active simultaneously. My guess would be a jumping pointer.
But even that will do no harm.

[Peter]

I have just got to make a USB to PS/2 Cable for the Mouse and keyboard.

Why not simply use an USB OTG cable with passive PS/2 adaptor as depicted in the manual?

[Derek_Stewart]

I have just got to make a USB to PS/2 Cable for the Mouse and keyboard.

Why not simply use an USB OTG cable with passive PS/2 adaptor as depicted in the manual?

Hi

...because I would have to buy the parts, whereas, I have USB cables and PS/2 Sockets already, just solder 4 wires.

[Peter]

What a journey Peter, from the beginning with the first attempts to attach your Qzero to the QL Rom Port about one year ago and the uncountable ups and downs we have been faced?

Oh yeah, but just for historical completeness: This didn't start with the Qzero ROM port adaptor, but an actual QIMSI prototype PCB that I had manually soldered and which worked for an hour or so, until I made a short or something. The adaptor idea came into play because I was not in the mood to handsolder another QIMSI with its BGA chip.

b. When I got back the PCBs and open the box and recognized that they put QZERO FPGAs on the QIMSI PCB and vice versa. All our hopes turned into smoke.... And I still remember your words when I send you the Photos

I don't And I have a new phone so the evidence is lost.

I will open a thread supporting information how you get your hand on a QIMSI

Many thanks, Stephan! I'm so glad you take care of that.

[FrancoisLanciault]

I have 3 QLs and all of them are maxed out with either super gold card with mechanical hard drives, QL-SD on another and a V-Drive on the last one… but but I MUST have this new interface!!! 68040 like coprocessor that is difficult to use! What can be more appealing!

François

[Peter]

I have 3 QLs and all of them are maxed out with either super gold card with mechanical hard drives, QL-SD on another and a V-Drive on the last one…

When I read this, I wonder if there should be a QIMSI variant which can co-exist with QL-SD. It could indeed make some sense to keep an existing QL-SD in place, to be able to "front load" SD cards. But in order to read the non-SD-card registers of QIMSI, the QL-SD logic requires modification.

but I MUST have this new interface!!! 68040 like coprocessor that is difficult to use! What can be more appealing!

Haha, I thought almost nobody would actually be interested to work with such little ROM/RAM, and now this seems the most mentioned feature. Unfortunately I hate to write docs. Just "documented" a small portion in a voice message to Martyn, but can't do that for everyone. Maybe I can just help two persons to get started, and the others can then learn from their code or ask here in the forum.

Would you program it in C or assembler?

[SM7I]

First this that comes to mind is SSL handling and creation of an SSH client, SFTP client and such. I’d like to tinker with this if I can get the gcc chain. Prefereably a Docker container

There are a number of very interesting and useful uses to put to a co-processor and, with the QIMSI's direct FIFO link back to the QL itself, we now have a viable solution (the FIFO link was always a bottleneck in my own designs for adding a co-processor to the QL...)

Many thanks Martyn. If you like to use C language for QIMSI, maybe I could upload the compiled GCC toolchain somewhere (again) and help you to get it working in a telephone session. The toolchain is quite large with 33 MB packed size, I wonder if it could be permanently hosted on dilwyn.theqlforum.com, if more people start playing with the MiniQ68 inside QIMSI.

[Pr0f]

Some sort of Maths accelerator comes to mind...

[Peter]

First this that comes to mind is SSL handling and creation of an SSH client, SFTP client and such. I’d like to tinker with this if I can get the gcc chain. Prefereably a Docker container

My binaries are relatively old Windows version of m68k-coff-gcc that I compiled long ago. Of course one could compile a Linux one, but I have no time for that soon. There are usually some problems to solve until an older crosscompiler works with new distros. Please note there is no C library and no OS - would be too large. I just have a handful of routines that I wrote myself.

By the way, not sure a 68040-speed CPU is fast enough for SSL. From what I heard, it brings even a 68060 to its limits.