The machine I've just got seems to be a stock JM one (haven't opened it yet to determine issue number), no other hardware goodies just a few standard microdrives (some of which are more functional than others).
Not sure I'm likely to trust/persevere with the MDs for long, they're more diminutive and fragile than I expected, so I guess it's off to the internet to try and find some kind of filing system alternative - whether it be SD card, floppy disk or whatever else. I also imagine some kind of memory expansion will be in order.
The keyboard on this one is hit and miss - having just discovered that the CTRL key is dead following several minutes of trying to work out why I couldn't 'delete' mistyped characters. Got a replacement membrane ordered from Rich already, though.
I've had one crazy thought, I suspect I'm not the first to ask, but - has anyone tried to use something like a raspberry pi (or even an arduino) to provide SD card storage via the QL network interface? I wondered if you could write something to have the raspberry pi act as a file server to a QL, given how cheap and available the raspi is, how easy to get at the GPIO it is and how easy it is to develop software for it. I guess it depends how clunky the QL network system is, I haven't looked yet.
Anyway, here I am, very late to the party but keen. I write Windows, Mac and (a bit of) mobile software during the day, mostly Delphi/Pascal and C, and I'm looking forward to tinkering with the QL for a change. I recently got a Interface 1bis card for my Spectrum+, I'm about to try and get that 'networking' out into the greater world. We'll see. By the way - the Interface 1bis is an excellent bit of kit once you get the hang of it, but I guess that's off=topic here
