The Sinclair QL Forum

Hi Tetroid!
Good you are still here and best wishes.

tetroid wrote: Sat Apr 01, 2023 11:17 am

Does that mean you've been able to reverse engineer the SuperGoldCard's EPM1810 and move the logic into a EPM7128?
Congratulations then! Sorry if you wrote about that previously and I missed it.

Peter

Peter wrote: Sat Apr 01, 2023 10:28 pm Hi Tetroid!
Good you are still here and best wishes.

tetroid wrote: Sat Apr 01, 2023 11:17 am

Does that mean you've been able to reverse engineer the SuperGoldCard's EPM1810 and move the logic into a EPM7128?
Congratulations then! Sorry if you wrote about that previously and I missed it.

Peter

Yes, recently I was able to solve the INGOT20/21 problem.
I plan to create documentation on the topic of SGC and various clones, but it will take some time.

tetroid wrote: Sun Apr 02, 2023 2:37 pm Yes, recently I was able to solve the INGOT20/21 problem.

Amazing. To reverse engineer the SGC logic without sourcecode is a fantastic achievement. Congratulations and applause to you!
It is also a very beautiful board. I like that you are using through-hole components whereever possible.
Keeps the spirit of the time when the original was designed. Reminds me of Q40/Q60 where I did the same.

tetroid wrote: Sun Apr 02, 2023 2:37 pm I plan to create documentation on the topic of SGC and various clones, but it will take some time.

That would be great. By the way, are you already selling those boards or are they still under development?

Peter wrote: Sun Apr 02, 2023 6:46 pm

tetroid wrote: Sun Apr 02, 2023 2:37 pm Yes, recently I was able to solve the INGOT20/21 problem.

Amazing. To reverse engineer the SGC logic without sourcecode is a fantastic achievement. Congratulations and applause to you!
It is also a very beautiful board. I like that you are using through-hole components whereever possible.
Keeps the spirit of the time when the original was designed. Reminds me of Q40/Q60 where I did the same.

tetroid wrote: Sun Apr 02, 2023 2:37 pm I plan to create documentation on the topic of SGC and various clones, but it will take some time.

That would be great. By the way, are you already selling those boards or are they still under development?

I had the original INGOT file ( A-PLUS ) from Derek, but with a lot of errors that I had to fix while parsing the INGOT firmware file in manual mode.

After replacing the EP1810, another problem remains the memory ZIP chips, which is now not easy to find in Russia.
I have already checked the replacement for DRAM 1Mx16 chips, as well as for the SIMM 72 module, they work fine.









I want to try adding support for QL-SD.
Although it looks a little strange to use the old driver for the ROM port, I think that modifying the QL-SD driver should increase the speed of communication with the card?
But I myself am not a programmer and can hardly modify the driver.

tetroid wrote: Sun Apr 02, 2023 7:53 pm I have already checked the replacement for DRAM 1Mx16 chips, as well as for the SIMM 72 module, they work fine.

That is good.

tetroid wrote: Sun Apr 02, 2023 7:53 pm I want to try adding support for QL-SD.

Sounds like a good idea.

tetroid wrote: Sun Apr 02, 2023 7:53 pm Although it looks a little strange to use the old driver for the ROM port, I think that modifying the QL-SD driver should increase the speed of communication with the card?

Since you are on a writable data bus, the QL-SD magic for writing by reading (with data in the lower 8 adress bits) could be removed, gaining some speed. But write speed is much less important than read speed, so the overall gain may not be worth the effort.

I would start with full QL-SD compatibility, but make sure the relevant PLD can see RWL and is able decode the ROM port address range without ROMOE. So you could later modify your logic for direct write, if someone takes care of the driver.

tetroid wrote: Sat Apr 01, 2023 11:17 am

Derek_Stewart wrote: Sat Apr 01, 2023 9:05 am Hi,

Maybe an existing disk interfaces could be reverse engineered, what would be the interface required, bearing in mid the Super/Gold Card suffer from custom chips that maybe unavailable.

Very happy to hear that you are fine and back with us !
Fabrizio