Recent content by Chr$

I see. Yes, there are some characters there who can seem curt and sometimes rub people up the wrong way. I don't think they mean it and I have grown to like all of the regulars very much. Apart from the Facebook group though, I think it's one of the only places with any QL related activity. But...

You should probably post this on the QL forum, it's a lot more active for QL related things (and Peter, plus a lot of other QL hardware gurus are there and often comment).

Thank you for your response, it was pin 16 - PADS#. I've been lucky with fixes lately and I think my slightly-better than noob skills may have played a part in that recent run of luck. Although it was certainly pure luck that there was visible corrosion in the area and that I remembered it! I...

Yes, if there is a jumper on modern drives it's often a couple of solder pads to bridge. 1.44mb drives are normally fine on QL interfaces, but they can only be used as a 720k drive, just like the original 3.5" drive that it would have come with. Oh well, you got it working in the end and looks...

All modern PC 3.5" floppy drives are normally factory set to DS1 and the twist in the cable differentiates when 2 drives are connected. With QL disk interfaces (all the ones I have seen) there is a straight cable with no twist before either drive and the floppy ID is set on the drive itself by a...

Have you got a known-working more modern 3.5" drive you can try with it, e.g. one from a PC? It will work fine but by default a PC drive will be jumpered as DS1 (not DS0) which will mean that the QL will see it as FLP2_, so dir FLP2_ to access etc. Also remember that the original 3.5" drive(s)...

Fixed it! That was a very rewarding repair. I remembered there had been some minor corrosion signs around some of the pins of one of the main chipset chips and as the whole thing is completely dead, i.e. no activity at all, I wondered if perhaps whatever caused that minor corrosion had got...

Today I checked to see if I could find any activity anywhere, e.g. on either side of the LS245 buffer chips, around the chipset chips, on the BIOS ROM etc and apart from the crystal oscillators oscillating there is no activity whatsoever, everything is stuck at 3.6 - 4v, 5v or 0v! I'll probably...

1. Correct, the levels go up and stay there. No activity. Actually, looking at my notes, A19 goes to 4v, not 3.6v. And the 3 that are stuck at 0v obviously don't move at all. 2. Yes, makes sense to add it if/when I get this working. 3. Yes. Only the BIOS ROM and the cache chips are socketed and...

Hello. I have a Gigabyte GA486-US motherboard, which looks exactly like this: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/gigabyte-ga-486us Cosmetically it's very nice, there has been no battery leakage, so that's always a good start. With CPU, 4 sticks of RAM and post card plugged in I just get...

I also have a 286 or 2 but they aren't setup at the moment.

Tried on my original XT just now. It didn't work. I copied it from floppy to HDD (XT-IDE CF card) and when run it makes a slight quiet speaker click sound (I think, or I imagined it!) and then locks up. Ctl-Alt-Del didn't work, I had to power cycle.

XT Clone System - 300 Euros. Unusual and very large "Megaboard" motherboard from 1985 made by Display Telecomminications Company (or a clone of their board). Electrically virtually identical to the IBM XT. It works fine and has been one of my main 2 XT's, but I've decided to make space by...

I have a stash of about 10 ED disks. Interesting how these ED setups were always rare and never widely adopted but certainly more common in Sinclair QL's (Sinclair QL with Gold or Super Gold Cards and 68000/68020 CPUs and with a useable capacity of 3.2mb) than anywhere else, which is where these...

Nobody? Are they too expensive? I've sold them for around the same price on eBay previously.