The Sinclair QL Forum

Just one more point I realised while I've been thinking this over. One of the characters that appears rather than 'a' is '@', which isn't an unshifted key - in my mind this points closer to the 8302 as I can't imagine a contact issue at the keyboard end causing that.

Thanks @Martin_Head - I haven't yet tried replacing ICs, I am sleeping on it before I look at all of the above. The membrane is recent so I'd be surprised, especially given the behaviour, but otherwise it could be anything. (The F1/F2 thing is so odd, given neither 8302 nor 8049 are deeply involved ...

I am keeping an open mind here, as it gets slightly weirder. When I boot into F1, the problem is much reduced - I get the occasional wrong keystroke but it's good enough to both (a) type and run a Basic program and (b) go to MODE 8 and observe that the problem doesn't get worse.

Whereas from F2 it ...

Hi @jobdone, I just mean that I have to press F2 more than once sometimes to get to Basic. This is probably just because of the keyboard reading fault. Minerva is booting 128K ok, I mentioned the 64K thing to illustrate that while I was working through the bad upper ram I didn't have this issue with ...

Well after over two years and much butchering of traces, I have finally replaced enough RAM to make Minerva happy and get back to 128K. Thanks all who advised.

I now seem to have run up against an issue which I'm sure wasn't occurring even recently when Minerva would boot with 64K and I could type ...

It might well be a bug, but not in sQLux it seems - I was of course too quick to post here, and was able to reproduce the issue using only socat and cat pty (where pty is the symlink) - whether I've got the wrong options in the socat command line, or it's just buggy, who knows?

Anyway, I'm able to ...

My AH QL is still out of action so I'm looking at emulators and trying the following to see if sQLux can use a pty as a serial port. I wondered whether anyone looking at the below knows right off if something I am doing is wrong or why.

I start sQLux on Ubuntu with (say):

sqlux --SER1 pty ...

Someone correct me if they actually know whereof they speak unlike me - but I am assuming that a Spectrum emulator running on a QL would not be able to reproduce the timings in software to bit-bang the network protocol accurately - so any IF1 emulation would be bound to the QL's implementation and ...

This looks great, I was hoping someone might have a go at doing this at some point.

I am guessing that the Rs on the QL side might also provide some meaningful protection for the ZX8301 (given what I've read elsewhere?)

Many thanks everyone.

When I unsolder the repair on /WE between IC14 and IC15, the Minerva RAM fault screen returns:

70827600
F082F680
00020000

I just did this again for my own confirmation. So if this signal can still come out, and comes from the ZX8301, then that chip is at least working, am I ...