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Found this and trying to get it into the community.

Hey guys, I was out hunting and found this the other day and decided to fully restore and retrobright it. It comes with a bunch of software I know the community has a hard time tracking down.

Anyway, was a fun project, but not really in my lane. Figured someone in this group would be the best home for it.
 
Beautiful condition. That's the first QX-16 monitor that I've seen too. I had to modify a QX-10 CRT monitor for my QX-16. I'd be interested, but shipping cost is a killer if not near enough to pick up. However, if there's a set MS-DOS floppy disks are in the Epson boxes of software, I'd love to have copies of them. Ditto for GW-Basic. I can send NOS blank diskettes if necessary. I can make copies of Epson DBase II floppies in return too.
 
I can definitely help with that. Turns out unfortunately GW isn't in the box, but DOS is. I'm in Toledo btw
 
Happy to tie a bow on this thread by letting everyone know that the Epson QX-16 referenced in the OP has found a new home — mine. Thanks to Sunderian for a great restoration — it really is in beautiful condition. The monitor in particular is impressively bright. The keyboard needs a rebuild but I think I have good guidance on that front here:
Code: 
https://deskthority.net/viewtopic.php?t=12772

I previously owned a MultiFonts QX-10 that I purchased used in New Zealand some 35 years ago, which was my introduction to computing and helped me to learn basic principles of MFBasic programming. I look forward to exploring what else I can do now with the QX-16, particularly with the 512Kb memory in DOS 2. Soon as I get the a, i, r, s, and : working on the keyboard again 😚 I’ll share what I learn.

I’m also now putting together the pieces I think I need to manage some of the software archive files generously shared by folks here and elsewhere. Like GW Basic, for instance. But I’m brand new at much of the conversion and transfer process and so will probably be reaching out for help from time to time.

Anyway, glad to join this forum. What a great resource!
 
I’m looking for help now in getting a GW Basic disk written for the QX-16.

What I have so far is a Kryoflusk disk image contributed by brijohn that I downloaded here: https://archive.org/details/qx16_gwbasic. This image appears to have been created from an original QX-16 disk, or at least the format spec is consistent with the spec detailed in both the QX-16 DOS manual and the QX-16 technical manual. I converted that image to an hfe image using the HxC Floppy Emulator software with the idea that I would then write the hfe to a DSDD disk with my Greaseweazle 4.1 paired with an NEC FD1157C dual-mode 48 and 96TPI drive. And there the trouble begins, because while I can (inconsistently) read both 360K and 720K DSDD disks I’ve copied from the QX-16 with this setup, I haven’t been able to successfully write anything to those disks.

I mention all these details in hopes that someone will flag the obvious flaw (or two…) in my plan. I strongly suspect the dual-mode drive is either bad or badly configured for this purpose, and so I have a dedicated 360K Panasonic drive on order (good floppy drives seem very hard to come by nowadays, and I have no pc capable of independently testing them). But in any case I also strongly suspect that, despite my best efforts to get up to speed, I just don’t know what I’m doing when it comes to writing disk images properly.

All suggestions welcome and much appreciated.
 
I have the original DOS 2.1 disks for the QX-16. You can format both 360 and 720 DSDD disks from DOS, but the 8088 alone will handle those 720k disks. Microsoft calls its 720K disk format DS Quad, but the QX-16 drives will successfully format and run ordinary DSDD disks. Since the GW Basic disk image I have is spec’d for 360K disks, that’s what I’m trying to write to via my Greaseweazle setup.
 
Let me add that the “GW Basic for QX-16” user manual was included with the package I have, and specifies a few unique QX-16 keyboard functions, so if I can get the image written to disk it should work fine.
 
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Well, the QX-16 runs fine by itself but I’m having no luck at all with old 5.25 floppy drives (3 out of 3 fails so far) so my hope of getting GW Basic and possibly other software to run on this machine is stymied for now.
 
ChkDM said:
Well, the QX-16 runs fine by itself but I’m having no luck at all with old 5.25 floppy drives (3 out of 3 fails so far) so my hope of getting GW Basic and possibly other software to run on this machine is stymied for now.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure if you are just having bad luck with drives or not, but one thing to try is not converting them to hfe format first greaseweazel should be perfectly capable of writing back the flux streams as is. I have used the following to write back my flux streams
gw write --drive=A --format="ibm.360" qx16_msdos/track00.0.raw.

Also when I do write back a non flux image i usually use IMD as the format and do the conversion with greaseweazzle itself using
gw convert --format="ibm.360" qx16_msdos/track00.0.raw qx16_msdos.imd. This can also convert to other formats including hfe if needed by changing the extension of the output file.
 
So many variables at play — drives, disks, know-how. And yeah, my go-to excuse, luck ;) But thanks, good advice I can always use.
 
brijohn said:
I'm not sure if you are just having bad luck with drives or not, but one thing to try is not converting them to hfe format first greaseweazel should be perfectly capable of writing back the flux streams as is. I have used the following to write back my flux streams
gw write --drive=A --format="ibm.360" qx16_msdos/track00.0.raw.

Also when I do write back a non flux image i usually use IMD as the format and do the conversion with greaseweazzle itself using
gw convert --format="ibm.360" qx16_msdos/track00.0.raw qx16_msdos.imd. This can also convert to other formats including hfe if needed by changing the extension of the output file.
Click to expand...

Ok, so with a bit of nothing-to-lose brute force and a generous application of lubricant, I finallly managed to get my greaseweazle-driven 360Kb floppy to index correctly and then succesfully write an .hfe image to disk with all tracks verified, read back that disk to another .hfe image and convert that to .imd format, and then write the .imd image back again to disk with all tracks verified. So I'm going to call that drive reliably OK now.

For some reason, writing directly from the GW Basic .raw image consistently failed with "FATAL ERROR, missing sector, Track 39". But using gw as suggested to convert .raw to both .hfe and .imd worked perfectly and I could write and read successfully in both cases.

I have yet to try these new disks in the QX-16 because I have the keyboard apart for repair. Hopefully I can do that soon.
 
ChkDM said:
Ok, so with a bit of nothing-to-lose brute force and a generous application of lubricant, I finallly managed to get my greaseweazle-driven 360Kb floppy to index correctly and then succesfully write an .hfe image to disk with all tracks verified, read back that disk to another .hfe image and convert that to .imd format, and then write the .imd image back again to disk with all tracks verified. So I'm going to call that drive reliably OK now.

For some reason, writing directly from the GW Basic .raw image consistently failed with "FATAL ERROR, missing sector, Track 39". But using gw as suggested to convert .raw to both .hfe and .imd worked perfectly and I could write and read successfully in both cases.

I have yet to try these new disks in the QX-16 because I have the keyboard apart for repair. Hopefully I can do that soon.
Click to expand...
Glad you got it working. Also yeah the rubber dome foam and foil variant of the Epson keyboards kinda suck. I have like three of them and none of them worked reliably when i got them. I repaired one but the others are just sitting around waiting till i feel like bothering to repair them.
 
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