My Pandora Aurora Super QL Project

[vanpeebles]

I just thought I'd post some pics and thoughts on one of the more empty parts of the forum detailing my recent Pandora/Aurora acquisition. I already had the super gold card. The Pandora came with the Aurora plus a Q plane and a Super Hermes. It needed assembling and all the ports fitting etc.



The Q plane is not really suited for the Pandora case so I made a card support from some lego to take the weight of the super gold. I also made up a 5v lead for the super gold.



At the moment the only storage is two 2.88 floppy drives (which I didn't know about, so an added bonus). The second drive is very noisy though and doesn't work well, is it possible to add a third standard PC 1.44 drive to the second floppy drive on the SGC? So I'd have flp3_?

The next stage is to track down some proper storage, the qubide clone is not keen on working with it (and not designed too which is fair enough ) I also have a nice enermax ATX psu so maybe fit that with an AT to ATX adapter? Although it's not really needed at the moment.

[1024MAK]

The Q plane is not really suited for the Pandora case so I made a card support from some lego to take the weight of the super gold.

Nice, but I cannot see the Lego

Mark

[vanpeebles]

The black stuff with holes on the middle photo. Not the best picture/lighting sadly

[Derek_Stewart]

Hi,

Looks great, the Pandora case gives a great level of portability. Will you bring to a QL Show?

The Qplane does give alot of noise, I have one built into a Black PC Case, just need to get one of my Super Gold Cards or Gold working to make a nice system.

The Mplane is better, but it went to the USA for manufacture, pity, as I could built them as with the Romdisq.

[1024MAK]

Ahh, now I know where to look, I can now kinda see (still needs my imagination to help out though)

Have you ever thought about working in the military, if you can pull off the same trick by hiding a main battle tank, you would make millions

Mark

[vanpeebles]

It would be nice to take it to some shows I'll keep an eye out for a different backplane an d an original qubide too

Hehehe I'll see if I can take some better pics.

[vanpeebles]

Does anyone know if it's possible to set the screen resolution using qdos or do you need to be running smsq?

[dilwyn]

Does anyone know if it's possible to set the screen resolution using qdos or do you need to be running smsq?

You need to be running SMSQ/E.

QDOS does not support either the higher resolution or higher colour modes (unless you write your own code for QDOS!)

[tofro]

Peter,

I don't (unfortunately) have an Aurora, so don't know from own experience, but

with one of the later PEs you should be able to use GD2.

Tobias

[vanpeebles]

I've managed to get it working using smsq, although with a small window top left. Which from reading the manual, I need to adjust some window# values. The confusion was due to a misunderstanding in thinking that smsq wasn't keen on the hxc drive.

I'm currently locked in battle trying to get smsq working on a newly acquired hxc floppy drive emulator thingy. Lots of head scratching, much cursing but slow progress!

Will the Aurora only boot from flp1_ or should I be ok with the hxc as flp3_?