Announcing the new "Gold Card" - QIMSI Gold

[Livingstone]

GREAT NEWS.
Peter, you will tell us when you will release them for sale and prices.

[FrancoisLanciault]

Hi Peter,

Dumb question, but would the QIMSI Gold works if the two ROM sockets inside the QL are empty ? I guess yes, but you know bettter.

François (obviously asking to be on the list)

[ones' complement]

You may have noticed 2 x 2 extra pins in addition to the QL ROM port (the smaller ones near to the edge).
One of them is leading QLNET and one is a "detection" pin.
The other two could be used with such a connector board. Possibly one as R/W and one as a chip select.

Gets even better

[Peter]

Peter, you will tell us when you will release them for sale and prices.

The release will be at the international QL meeting on May 17/18/19 in Dormagen. The price for the initial batch will be 75 € per unit, and 90 € with buffered realtime clock. Component prices are volatile, so pricing could change later. I do not take any money for my development, not even to cover my prototyping expenses. This is just to cover the manufacturing for whoever does the job - at the moment Stephan is kindly helping us here. And he deserves a lot of credit for that!

[Peter]

Dumb question, but would the QIMSI Gold works if the two ROM sockets inside the QL are empty ? I guess yes, but you know bettter.

Good question. The idea behind QIMSI Gold is not to have to open the case. So I does not work without QL ROMs at the moment, for the following reasons:

a) QIMSI Gold can still work as a standard QIMSI if someone wants to, and that requires an OS in the QL.
b) The support ROM which handles QL matrix keyboard and joystick (maybe more in the future) comes as a normal QL ROM at $C000 and needs an OS to be found and initialized.
c) At power-up, the QIMSI Gold loader does some "housekeeping", e.g. it prepares ROM emulation from SD card at $C000 for the QL. This takes a little time and depends on the fact that the QL OS is booting slow enough. Which obviously requires a QL OS for the 68008 in ROM somewhere.

QIMSI and QIMSI Gold both do not aim to be a replacement for the various QL EPROM solutions.

[afx]

Peter, another question.

In a QL with (S)GC without the 68008, will QIMSI Gold work?

[Peter]

In a QL with (S)GC without the 68008, will QIMSI Gold work?

Yes it will - but from the accellerated QIMSI Gold CPU, you will not be able to access the (S)GC floppy. For that purpose, you can still use QIMSI Gold as standard QIMSI.

[Derek_Stewart]

In a QL with (S)GC without the 68008, will QIMSI Gold work?

Yes it will - but from the accellerated QIMSI Gold CPU, you will not be able to access the (S)GC floppy. For that purpose, you can still use QIMSI Gold as standard QIMSI.

Hi Peter,

I usually use a Tetroid TDI Trump Card with CF Intetface disabled for use with the QIMSI and use a Gotek drive attached to the Floppy Disk interface of the TDI Card.

For the QIMSI Gold with 68008 CPU in place, to work with the Tetroid TDI interface, the TDI onboard memory can be disabled leaving the Floppy Disk Intetface enabled.

Could be achieved?

Can other QL expansions be used with the QIMSI Gold?

[Peter]

Can other QL expansions be used with the QIMSI Gold?

If you use QIMSI Gold as standard QIMSI, yes of couse, if they do not access $C000...$CFFF.

If you mean from the accelerated CPU? Not directly of course, because
a) there can be no external bus master on the ROM port
b) they are at locations where the accelerated CPU has the main RAM
But they could be accessed from the 68008 and be communicated to the accelerated CPU, if they are worthwhile.
In practice I don't see a QL expansion that would make sense for the accelerated CPU.

[qbits]

Hi Peter,
Wow! Well done, the Spec looks great, what could be a better for the QL’s 40th Anniversary.
(Added this as top priority to my 2024 Birthday and Christmas wish list.)

Question: Be interesting to plug into one of my QL’s. Will you be able to include a case and when wired up for Sound can the Output be driven by both S/SuperBASIC BEEP and QSound commands. If latter maybe I’ll be able to experiment further with a code update to QBITS QLSounds Prog.

(What next: Will there be a QIMSI Super Gold for the QL’s 50th hopefully I’ll still be around then.)
QBITS