The Sinclair QL Forum

Hi all,

With the ongoing qubide clone thread I'm wondering which would be the best way to expand my existing set up.

What I have:
BBQL + Gold Card + Floppy Drive + Qimi (needs new keyboard membrane, connection to modern monitor)

What I want:
Modern storage medium to copy all my MDVs and Floppies on and also free software available of the internet

Problems I have recognised so far:
QL SD: My Gold Card would not work anymore (no floppy, no memory expansion), would need to buy a memory expansion but No access to floppies anymore
Qubide clone: Does it work with Gold Card? Can the storage medium be accessed on a Mac?

Possible solutions / Questions:
Floppy drive simulator connected to Gold Card containing a SD Card. Question: can files copied from a Mac onto the SD Card be read with the QL?
Is there a solution with the Qubide?
Is there a future version of the QL SD which will work with Gold Card?
Is there any other SD solution out in the wild? There was one from Spain I think and another one discussed here on the forum ...

Any advise is very much appreciated

Thor

Exciting times!

thorsinclair wrote:Hi all,
Problems I have recognised so far:
QL SD: My Gold Card would not work anymore (no floppy, no memory expansion), would need to buy a memory expansion but No access to floppies anymore
Qubide clone: Does it work with Gold Card? Can the storage medium be accessed on a Mac?

Unfortunately, yes it is true that at the moment, the QL-SD Interface does not work with the Gold Card

The QubIDE Clone does not have a through connector (but does have built in extra memory), so you would need to find an expansion bus or similar if you wanted to use it at the same time as the Gold Card.

I don't know if there are any MAC tools to read/write the qubIDE CF format - in fact what tools are there on the PC to be able to do this?

thorsinclair wrote: Possible solutions / Questions:
Floppy drive simulator connected to Gold Card containing a SD Card. Question: can files copied from a Mac onto the SD Card be read with the QL?

You mean the HxC floppy disk emulator?

http://www.sellmyretro.com/offer/detail ... es%29-2227

The software for converting disk images to the HFE files used by the HxC is apparently available for Windows, Mac OS and Linux - the downloads appear at:
http://hxc2001.free.fr/floppy_drive_emu ... l#download

You can use q-emulator on the MAC to copy files to / from a QL .dsk image, which is what I use (although under Windows).

thorsinclair wrote: Is there a solution with the Qubide?
Is there a future version of the QL SD which will work with Gold Card?

Ermm.... don't know

thorsinclair wrote: Is there any other SD solution out in the wild? There was one from Spain I think and another one discussed here on the forum ...
Thor

There are two more possible ones - the Spanish one which plugs into the QL ROM port (but does not have any drivers) and a microdrive emulator which would plug into the QL's microdrive port (but at the moment, does not support anything other than a microdrive image - ie 255 sectors and at the same speed as a microdrive I believe).

Unfortunately, there have been no updates on either project for 12 months...

A QubIDE clone with passthrough connector (no memory expansion) would be perfect, but that does not exist right now. In my opinion, that would be the most viable option in the near future for BBQL + (Super)GoldCard.

The windows software to transfer files to CF / SD cards with QubIDE format already exists (http://hardware.speccy.org/temp/qubide5.html).

afx wrote: The windows software to transfer files to CF / SD cards with QubIDE format already exists (http://hardware.speccy.org/temp/qubide5.html).

That looks good - are the source codes (or maybe a translate lookup file) available, so we could translate it to other languages?

@RWAP @afx

thank your for the info and advises. If there is no other solutions than I think for the moment I stay with what I have and try first to get it running again. The Floppy emulator is a bit expensive and I'd also like much more to support Hardware projects which has been built by community members like the QL SD, the Qubide or others when there will be a version which works with my set up. Thanks.

Cheers,

Thor

RWAP wrote: I don't know if there are any MAC tools to read/write the qubIDE CF format - in fact what tools are there on the PC to be able to do this?

https://github.com/slimlogic/qubide-tools

If someone wants to take it a bit further, I never seem to have time. QL disk formats are really simple and the qubide is just a variation on the floppy format! I think when I left it you can list the contents of an image file (real device on linux).