Epson QX owners - please join

[DeltaDon]

I hope to see owners of the QX-10 & QX-16 join this group and share knowledge.

 

[vprada]

Hello Don...

I found your forum when looking for information about the QX-11. I actually owned a QX-11 when I was young (about 15).

The QX-11 was a MS-DOS machine, with two 3.5in floppy drives. It included MS-DOS 2.11 in ROM (so no need to boot from floppy), and it was "95%" compatible with the IBM-PC.

One of the incompatibilities with the IBM-PC was the video output. By default the QX-11 came with a 640x400 / 320x200 video resolution. The monitor was a green phosphor monitor that show really crisp video. As a matter of fact, the QX-11 was able to display 80 text columns, which was not the normal back in the day.

In order to run some MS-DOS programs, specially those programs that use IBM-PC native video modes (or graphics) you have to add a CRT card. The CRT card would emulate the IBM video (but still using a 640x400 video resolution). I saw with my own eyes a QX-11 connected to a color CGA monitor, so I know it was possible to create a video cable that will connect your video output to a regular CGA monitor.

I found the QX-16 technical documentation manual outside this forum, but probably you guys already got a hold of it. But by reading the manual I am convinced that the QX-16 was EPSON's attempt to create a hybrid machine, some kind of QX-10 + QX-11 in one body.

The QX-16 comes with a proprietary video card (based on the NEC 7220 video chip) and it also have a CRT card to display "IBM" video (just alike the QX11). The QX-10 comes with the Valdocs system, I remember my QX-11 didn't come with Valdocs but it actually came with an EPSON "Valdocs" keyboard.

I don't remember if I had to plug my monitor to power or if the power was provided by the PC. It is interesting though that your EPSON Monitor do not have the QX-11 (Q601A) as a compatible machine, so I wonder if the QX-11 and the QX-16 share the monitor.

Based on how close the QX-10, QX-11 and the QX-16 were released, I have no doubt in my mind that EPSON used the same design for all three. I think all three QX-1x will share the same power supply, same video circuit, same keyboard interface, etc

I'm attaching a picture I found in facebook of someone that had a QX-11. I actually did try to reach out to this user to see if he still have it but I haven't been able to get a hold of him...

I'm from Venezuela (a country in south america) but living here in the US. I actually contacted EPSON in my country to see if they have more documentation or an actual QX-11 in storage. If I heard anything from them I will share it here.

Please let me know if I can help with the restoration of this QX-16 .... BTW, if you can dump the ROM for QX-16 somewhere that will be great. If you don't have an EPROM programmer I can actually borrow you mine ....

Thanks
Victor Prada




The QX-11 ... can you tell if that's the same monitor you have for your QX-16 ?

 

[DeltaDon]

Thank you the information on the QX-11. It doesn't seem to be just an updated QX-10 with a 8088 card as I've seen reported elsewhere. The QX-11 sounds like a very different computer in many ways. The QX-16 (and 10) have simple ROM's and both DOS and CP/M are on 5.25" diskettes and boot each time you turn the computer on. Other wise all you get is a message telling you to load an OS. The monitors in your photos don't match the QX-10 monitor that I'm using on my QX-16. Even the keyboard appears to be different.

 

[vprada]

Yes... the QX-11 was a standalone system, not a card. But as I mentioned before the QX-11 seems to have the very same video system than the QX-10 and QX-16... the QX-11 also have a "CRT" card to emulate IBM Video. I'll bet you those two 3.5 disk drives use the same FDD controller as the QX-10 with different geometry compared to a IBM DOS formatted disk, as a matter of fact that was part of the problem to install software in those QX-11, it was really hard to format those diskettes...

I just found an article that says that the QX-11 and the QX-16 could use the same monitor. The monitor still uses the DIN cable connector but it have an independent power supply/power cord. My options are limited, but if I'm able to get a hold of a QX-11 It will be great if we can compare it with your QX-16 ...

 

[ettore]

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

 

[Structured_Spirits]

Hello, I'm a new user here. One of the reasons I decided to join was because of this post. I'm hoping that at some point in the future, I'll be able to restore my QX-16 to full functionality. I actually got this machine as a child and used Valdocs as my primary OS for years. It was slow, but very intuitive and really prepared me for GUI Oses in a weird way. 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. I've had some success with making bootable DOS and CPM disks with a double density drive on a dos machine. But I've never been able to get Valdocs back. I can't find the proper images, and even then suspect the Quad Density drive format will require some hacking that is beyond me currently. I'm attaching a pic of my QX-16 in it's current state having booted with a QX-10 program disk.

 

[david__schmidt]

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.

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.

I didn't find any disk images where I expected on bitsavers (i.e. http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/bits/), and other archives (https://fjkraan.home.xs4all.nl/comp/qx10/disklibrary.html, http://dunfield.classiccmp.org/img/index.htm, http://www.retroarchive.org/maslin/disks/epson/index.html) seem to be geared towards QX-10. The fjkraan site does claim that the CP/M 2.2 is compatible with the QX-16: https://fjkraan.home.xs4all.nl/comp/qx10/diskimages/QX10CPM_MB.zip

 

[geekdot]

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

 

[brijohn]

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

Welcome,

My QX-16 MS-DOS CF Card Driver should work with Scott's card, I haven't personally tried it, but as long as you have the base IO address of the card configured to use address 0xD0 it should work fine. Let me know if it doesn't work for some reason, but I would be a bit surprised if it didn't work with Scott's card.

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. There already exists a dump of the program ROM, but there are a far as i am aware no know dumps of the actual font data. With dumped font data I could create a clone of the multifont card similar to how I recently finished making a clone of the QX-PC card. In addition some time ago I implemented support for the multifont card in MAME emulator, but it needs the font roms to be able to work correctly.

 

[geekdot]

Hey Brian,

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.

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.

how I recently finished making a clone of the QX-PC card.

...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.

 

[brijohn]

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.

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.

Here is a quick schematic that shows how I think the wiring for such an adapter should look, based on the datasheets for both chips.

...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.

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.

 

[vprada]

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

Ettore ? do you still have that qx-11 machine with you ?

 

[fjkraan]

There is some QX-10 info, including ROM dumps at: https://electrickery.nl/comp/qx10/index.html

 

[DeltaDon]

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?

 

[brijohn]

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?

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.

As far as size goes, in theory there is no maximum size supported, however the MS-DOS partition have a maximum of 32 megs and a CP/M partition has a max of 10 Megs. So using a large CF is somewhat wasteful if you have smaller ones available.

For the MS-DOS disk, while I can create a disk for you if you have the ability to image your own disks I also have provided in my github account a MS-DOS 2.11 disk image with the driver already installed on it. This image is based on Epson's original QX-16 2.11 MS-DOS disk so it should have all the utilities on it as well, including a cfformat utility for formatting your CF card partitions.

Partitioning the CF card is a little more tricky. I haven't written an MS-DOS program to handle the partitioning, and the hdpart.com utility on the CP/M disks assumes a drive of 10 megs in total. As such I personally find the easiest way to partition a CF card is to use fdisk on linux. If you have CF adapter you can run 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.

Link to diskimages in my github repo:

qx10/diskimages at master · brijohn/qx10

Epson QX-10 Files. Contribute to brijohn/qx10 development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

 

[ettore]

Ettore ? do you still have that qx-11 machine with you ?

Yes

 

[ettore]

More pictures of qx11 *abacus*

 

[ettore]

complete & video

 

[NerdPlex]

I recently acquired an Epson QX-10, which is the computer I grew up on in the early 80’s. Sadly, I don’t have a keyboard for it. Would anyone have any ideas on replacements?

 

[fjkraan]

The QX-10 keyboard interface is well described in the Technical Manual, chapter 7. It is possible to interface a PS/2-keyboard via an Arduino to the QX-10 keyboard scan codes. It wouldn't be perfect, but usable. It uses 1200 Baud, but the clock is provided by the QX-10 main board. I don't expect it to be hard, but AFAIK it isn't done yet.

Greetings,

Fred Jan