The Sinclair QL Forum

Just testing opinion.

How unlikely is it for old peripheral cards to come up for sale?
Such as the cased double expander boards, eprom boards, disk interfaces, Ramplus, cased memory boards (am not interested in Trump or GC's).

I expect collectors will have them, along with several QL's. Seems the best chances were years past.

If I could get them the set up I want is a 640k set up, so no Trump or GC, with a double expander with memory and the other port to interchange various cards.

Are the old modems still usable today?

Wicksy wrote: Sat Dec 28, 2024 3:26 pm Are the old modems still usable today?

Probably only if you have a PABX to connect it to your other modem.
Online services offering dial-in have almost vanished (except maybe some die-hard BBs), and analogue phone lines are rapidly replaced by DSL and fiber connections. The voice service runs over this IP connection (VoIP) and is unsuitable for carrying modem signals.

janbredenbeek wrote: Sat Dec 28, 2024 10:56 pm

Wicksy wrote: Sat Dec 28, 2024 3:26 pm Are the old modems still usable today?

Probably only if you have a PABX to connect it to your other modem.
Online services offering dial-in have almost vanished (except maybe some die-hard BBs), and analogue phone lines are rapidly replaced by DSL and fiber connections. The voice service runs over this IP connection (VoIP) and is unsuitable for carrying modem signals.

I didn't consider the analogue aspect, and you do see QL modems just sitting on Ebay unsold.

You can easily create your own phone network at home. If your house is wired for phone you can use that as a simple network to go from floor to floor. Just need to put 9 volts on the line to get a carrier signal, and then you can use modems on multiple computers to communicate. There's even an open source project that creates boards that give dial tones, numbers, etc, to simulate this...though again, a simple 9 volt signal is enough for direct contact.

I did that and it worked as advertised.

Thanks, but I'm on one level :). Seriously though I'd just use QLnet. Am not electronically minded,and commercial hardware is more appealing than my clumsy soldering.

The Qconnect module seems a nice item to have for serial connection to a pc.

bwinkel67 wrote: Sun Dec 29, 2024 1:09 am You can easily create your own phone network at home. If your house is wired for phone you can use that as a simple network to go from floor to floor. Just need to put 9 volts on the line to get a carrier signal, and then you can use modems on multiple computers to communicate. There's even an open source project that creates boards that give dial tones, numbers, etc, to simulate this...though again, a simple 9 volt signal is enough for direct contact.

I did that and it worked as advertised.

Would that be this one?: https://github.com/GadgetReboot/Phone_SLIM

Pr0f wrote: Sun Dec 29, 2024 9:58 am Would that be this one?: https://github.com/GadgetReboot/Phone_SLIM

That looks like the one. I saw it through the creator's YouTube video.

That's where I found it too - the videos are really quite instructional.