The Sinclair QL Forum

Hi all,

What are the main differences between QUBIDE 1.56 and 2.x ? Is there any advantage in upgrading?

The reason that I ask is that I have produced a card that has a (logical) clone of the floppy part of the Sandy Super[Disk,QBoard] plus a copy of the QUBIDE circuit, though I have simplified the address decoding & DSMCL / DACK generation by using a CPLD.

I can get this board to work with the 1.56 QUBIDE roms, but not the 2.x I have used PALs that are a cut down version of the released QUBIDE ones, they don't contain the address decode as this is done by the CPLD.

What was the difference in the ROMS / PALs ?

Cheers.

Phill.

Having seen the pictures on Facebook - it looks like good work. The re-use of old drivers also help ensure that the project will work.

Does the interface have any extra memory?

From memory the v2.xx required new PALs as well as the code - the v2.xx supported more disk drives, a quicker start up and had a (fragile) recycle bin.

I always found that the recycle bin was best left switched off as I kept getting corruption otherwise!

RWAP wrote:Having seen the pictures on Facebook - it looks like good work. The re-use of old drivers also help ensure that the project will work.

Does the interface have any extra memory?

Not at the moment, though it might be easy to implement, if I can cram it onto the board, I know how the Trumpcard works, so I should be able to replicate that logic in the CPLD, to get maximum RAM.

From memory the v2.xx required new PALs as well as the code - the v2.xx supported more disk drives, a quicker start up and had a (fragile) recycle bin.

I always found that the recycle bin was best left switched off as I kept getting corruption otherwise!

Ahh ok then, so may not actually have that much of an advantage then

Cheers.

Phill.

prime wrote:Hi all,

What are the main differences between QUBIDE 1.56 and 2.x ? Is there any advantage in upgrading?

The reason that I ask is that I have produced a card that has a (logical) clone of the floppy part of the Sandy Super[Disk,QBoard] plus a copy of the QUBIDE circuit, though I have simplified the address decoding & DSMCL / DACK generation by using a CPLD.

I can get this board to work with the 1.56 QUBIDE roms, but not the 2.x I have used PALs that are a cut down version of the released QUBIDE ones, they don't contain the address decode as this is done by the CPLD.

What was the difference in the ROMS / PALs ?

Cheers.

Phill.

Here's the v2.00 to v2.02 upgrade sheet that came with the new chips:

http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/docs/manuals/index.html

Scroll down to Qubbesoft section and find the two 'Qubide manuals'. Both are not the same - the second was updated by Q-Branch.

The Qubide in my Minis-QL is modified to use the v2 chipset - would you like to borrow it for a while if you think you can reverse engineer the chips or make new copies? Perhaps Rich or Dave might be interested in (legally) supplying upgrades liek Roy Wood used to do? Alternatively, if you are able to establish contact with Roy Wood (Q-Branch), or Nasta, they may be able to supply you with the information you need. The v2 ROM was was written by Phil Borman.

We will - eventually - be providing upgrades to 3.0. that will include a new ROM and two new PALs.

I can't give a timeline - we're still trying to dig ourselves out of the rut we got into by doing many projects at once instead of just focusing on one QL project at a time.

Dave wrote:We will - eventually - be providing upgrades to 3.0.

Please note that 3.0 existed long before this. Major rewrite from Richard with a better partition scheme for co-existence with SMSQ/E partitions on the same harddisk.

If possible, please choose a different version number. Thanks.

I understand the work was never commercially released. It's hardly going to cause confusion. It won't be sold as a QubIDE ROM, but instead as an UltimIDE ROM upgrade. The differences will be clear.