The Sinclair QL Forum

Ok, where will I find details of the recommended mouse please?

Mark

viewtopic.php?p=59931#p59931
Found by one minute of forum search.

Thanks

Good news, the Cherry mouse has arrived and works great on the original, repaired USB micro connection. So my repair worked perfectly but none of my previous mice (about 10 various makes and connection types) work. The mouse works a treat without any drivers installed with the “lrun win8_boot” program from the default .WIN container. I can now on and learn more.

Thanks for all you help and patience.

Mark

Good to hear, that now everything is running as expected.

Have fun with it,

Stephan

Is the QIMSI fully relocatable?

Can it be plugged into any logical ROM slot?

Will it recognize other inserted ROMs in other slots?

I have an expansion card that has four ROM slots on it, mapped to three expansion slots and the original back slot location.

Dave wrote: Sun Jan 12, 2025 6:49 pm Is the QIMSI fully relocatable?

Can it be plugged into any logical ROM slot?

Will it recognize other inserted ROMs in other slots?

I have an expansion card that has four ROM slots on it, mapped to three expansion slots and the original back slot location.

Don't know if this is the case, but for the Gold version this wouldn't be very useful: Your additional ROMs would live in the 68008 address space and not (or at least not easily) be accessible from the Gold CPU which is running the show.

Dave wrote: Sun Jan 12, 2025 6:49 pm Is the QIMSI fully relocatable?

The short answer is no, but here is some technical background. QIMSI and QIMSI Gold have at least four different types of "ROM" involved:

1. The default ROM for the 68008 side, which contains the SD card driver
2. The optional QIMSI Gold support ROM on SD card, also for the 68008 side, which can override 1.
3. The internal bootloader ROM for the accelerated CPU
4. The operating system ROM for the accelerated CPU on SD card

Only 1 and 3 can be considered actual ROMs, 2 and 4 are emulated ROMs after loading from SD card.

ROM 1 and 2 could theoretically be written in relocatable fashion. Practically, they are not. I've compiled the QIMSI Gold support ROM with a GCC variant that can not generate relocatable ROM code at all. So my laziness is also involved here. I'm simply too slow at assembler coding, and C68 can not generate ROM code.

ROM 3 is initially located at $0 (4K) and $19000 (12K) of the accelerated CPU and does things like RAM check, initialization of mouse, RTC, SDHC card and loading the OS from serial port or card. It will usually overwrite itself at $0 by an OS ROM and replace $19000 with RAM when finished.

ROM 4 is located at $0 of the accelerated CPU and emulates an operating system ROM of up to 96K, typically Minerva or QDOS Classic. The respective ROM image will be started by an actual hardware reset of the accelerated CPU (not the 68008).

Even further ROMs could come into play, e.g. one could emulate a user specific ROM like TK2 for the 68008 side. This one might even be relocatable.

Dave wrote: Sun Jan 12, 2025 6:49 pm Can it be plugged into any logical ROM slot?

No, because the $C000 location needs to be decoded out of the $0 to $10000 range.

Dave wrote: Sun Jan 12, 2025 6:49 pm Will it recognize other inserted ROMs in other slots?

Not on the 68008 side. Minerva on the accelerated CPU will actually search the whole 0...16 MB.

Dave wrote: Sun Jan 12, 2025 6:49 pm I have an expansion card that has four ROM slots on it, mapped to three expansion slots and the original back slot location.

In principle, QIMSI could be relocated to a different area, but the driver would need to be adapted. Thanks to the ROM emulation from SD card, this does not require an FPGA chance. But I fear have not much time to help such an effort. If you only need the QIMSI Gold support ROM somewhere else, I could try a quick hack. That would be a different address, but not relocatable.

Thank you. This answered my question precisely and exquisitely.

I had in mind the possibility of moving the QIMSI Gold to the expansion bay and a different logical slot but this is irrelevant as you demonstrate. I was looking at the options to add hardware support for other Gold Card functions like floppy etc as I have bulk quantities of the chips and it suits my own needs. SMSQ/E has the drivers for this which is usually my downfall.

Unfortunately, QIMSI Gold is not an easily expandable system. A device on the ROM port can not be bus master - the downside of the very compact architecture. Everything new on the QL bus requires a modified QIMSI Gold support ROM which supports it. Unlike the Miracle Gold Card, the accelerated CPU can not take over the 68008 bus, but requires collaboration from the 68008.

A better way to attach a floppy controller would probably be standalone usage of QIMSI Gold, and a modified FPGA with a "floppy bus" instead of the former ROM port. I just doubt floppies will be missed when SD card is available. Except for copying to SD card once.

Ideally, a new Q60 would have floppy support, to be completely backwards compatible to the beloved original. I will probably not add a floppy controller on-mainboard, but such a machine would be expandable with some decent bus. I have not yet decided if that will be a 16 bit ISA-like bus (just smaller connector) or a full 32 bit 68060 bus, or both. And I don't know if I will actually go all the way to a public release, just "thinking loudly" and off-topic for a moment.