DeltaDon
Veteran Member
I hope to see owners of the QX-10 & QX-16 join this group and share knowledge.
I wonder if something as simple as cleaning the drive heads would get the drives going again? It's unusual for floppy mechanisms to fail outright, so I'd suspect fouled heads and failing media before suspecting the drives themselves.Unfortunately over the years the left drive began to fail, I swapped the cables and continued to use the other, but could no longer copy system disks, and over time, they all became unusable.
Welcome,Hi All,
While my QX-10 and QX-16 (both Euro versions) are still in the basement since years, I prepared myself to get them 'reanimated' soon... so for starters I got myself some CF-IDE PCBs (designed by @smbaker) and populated them.
And you know how it goes... you start Googling your way at 10AM and all the sudden it's 4PM and you wonder "will the just discovered smbaker CF card work in my '16 with @brijohn 's MSDOS drivers made for his card? So let's head over to VCFed and have a look... uhhhh, they have a QX Group now!"
So here I am - happy to meet you and looking forward to get my two QX's flying soon - if there wasn't this severe case of Project-ADHD
The QX-10 hat a Multifont card, of which I can certainly dump its ROMs for you - as soon I pulled it out of the frightening stack'o'things ;-)Since you have Euro versions of the QX10/16 do they have the Multifont card with them? If so, I would be interested in seeing if we can get dumps of the ROMs containing the font data.
...I already have your nice Titan-Clone card in my JLC cart (even I don't know exactly why I should need it )... and -as usual- thought "mhh, would a 8087 fit in there somehow?" but IIRC that would require a PIC like the 8259 making the whole idea a bit over-engineered.how I recently finished making a clone of the QX-PC card.
Nice, If i remember right the font roms are HN43128 which are mask ROMs made by Hitachi. Since they don't quite match up with a standard 27C128 ROM you will probably need to wire up an adapter to read them using a standard ROM programmer.Hey Brian,
The QX-10 hat a Multifont card, of which I can certainly dump its ROMs for you - as soon I pulled it out of the frightening stack'o'things ;-)
Hopefully I'll manage to dig though my cave this weekend.
Well obviously because its cool and interesting. Though for actually running MSDOS Programs I think ith QX-16 is better option. For one thing you can actually use the CF card currently with that, my driver won't work with Titan QX-PC since it requires direct port access to the IDE controller. I'm pretty sure i can eventually get the CF card to work since as far as i can tell the card supported the original comrex cr-1510 hard drive, but I haven't figured out what needs to change to get it working yet unfortunately....I already have your nice Titan-Clone card in my JLC cart (even I don't know exactly why I should need it )... and -as usual- thought "mhh, would a 8087 fit in there somehow?" but IIRC that would require a PIC like the 8259 making the whole idea a bit over-engineered.
Ettore ? do you still have that qx-11 machine with you ?Hi Victor, I got also an Abacus computer, It has two drives, (upgraded to 512K) and a Hard Disk with controller (HDD 10MB), have original software, only miss the organizador (database program). Regards
The driver is specific to MS-DOS, the for CP/M both Scott and me have created modified disk images that have been updated to support CF cards instead of MFM drives. One differences in my CP/M images though is that they have been modified to use LBA addressing instead of CHS which better supports CompactFlash devices, especially larger ones, that don't match the CHS values of the original MFM drives used.brijohn,
I'm interested in your QX-16 CF card driver. I have Scott's board and would like to try adding a CF card to my QX-16. Does your driver work with both DOS and CP/M? What maximum size CF cards are supported? I have CF's from 10MB to 256MB plus quite a few of 2GB and larger.
Also, while I have several complete versions of CP/M for the QX machines, I only have a single bootable DOS floppy diskette and that one doesn't have any DOS utilities and so I can't format or do much with DOS. If I sent you some blank diskettes would you load up everything DOS related I'm missing plus a copy of your CF driver onto them?
fdisk -c=dos -H<heads> -S<sectors> -C<cylinders> <path/to/device>
to partition your CF card on linux. heads,sectors, and cylinders are the correct CHS values for your CF card. The correct partition types are 01 for an MS-DOS partition and F0 for a CP/M partition. Note the previously mentioned sizes an MS-DOS partition should not be more then 32MB and a CP/M partition should not be more then 10MB.