The Sinclair QL Forum

*grins* Nice.

Hi Phill,
before you go ahead with your design for a professionell pcb, please take in account that there is still a space problem. Your board is blocking a trimmer on issue 5 boards. Then axle of the trimmer is high enought to cause short circuits. I showed the postion on the picture. That the reason why my board has the same shape like the orginal one. The PS/2 converter is under the Eprom and connected via a ribbon cable to the Qimi circuit. That also enables you to use the Atari and Amiga mouse instead of a PS/2 mouse.
The Eprom socket is not equiped with all pins, due to the fact that only A10 is used.

QLObi

QLObi wrote:Hi Phill,
before you go ahead with your design for a professionell pcb, please take in account that there is still a space problem. Your board is blocking a trimmer on issue 5 boards. Then axle of the trimmer is high enought to cause short circuits. I showed the postion on the picture.

I did check with a printed layout on an Issue 5 board, and it seemed to just fit, I will check the clearance tonight on one of my issue 5 machines. I have slightly moved the board edges in that area for the next version so hopefully that will solve the problem

looking at your picture the axle sticks up just slightly further down the board than pin 19 of the ZX8302, in which case there shouldn't be a problem as the edge of the board in the next version is about in the middle of pin 18, so about 1.5mm away, but will test tonight all the same

That the reason why my board has the same shape like the orginal one. The PS/2 converter is under the Eprom and connected via a ribbon cable to the Qimi circuit. That also enables you to use the Atari and Amiga mouse instead of a PS/2 mouse.
The Eprom socket is not equiped with all pins, due to the fact that only A10 is used.

I may do this also, have an option for an Atari / Amiga mouse, with the right AVR you may even be able to add a USB mouse

Cheers.

Phill.

Ok, I checked the current board in an issue 5 machine and it misses the axle of the capacitor....and it works too

I'll post a piccie later this evening.

Cheers.

Phill.

Great!

I will be interested on buy one

Phill - did you get any further with this project?

RWAP wrote:Phill - did you get any further with this project?

Yep See the last couple of photos in this Facebook album (you shouldn't need an FB account to view).

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set ... f5a72bc540

Basically current version does the following :

Emulates QIMI, but using a PS/2 mouse via the AVR.

Emulates the MICE interface, though via a different I/O location, obviously ICE has to be patched but since it does all it's I/O in one routine, it's just one longword that needs changing.

Has the capability of banking both the main OS ROM $00000-$0BFFF and the cartridge ROM $0C000-$0FFFF so that you can have a single flash rom with multiple versions of the OS and multiple cartridges. These are selected with a poke and then pressing reset. The cartridge rom is by default disabled, so that an external cartridge can be used.

Downside, it's fiddly to assemble with all the surface mount stuff I also made a slight error in the distance between the two sockets so the ROM socket pins are slightly out and had to be fitted to the board at an angel so that they went into the socket.

Cheers.

Phill.