The Sinclair QL Forum

Hi,

Anyone know if the the Tetroid Disk Interface and QIMI are incompatible? I have a TDI, which is wonderful, but also managed to get a not-known-if-working QIMI. Putting the QIMI in the QL only and I can get to the cursor OK. Add the TDI and I get constant resets on the black screen with the Minerva logo before the info window bottom left appears.

It may be that the QIMI is broken, though but I'm not familiar with it.

Ta

If I remember right, the Trump Card (The TDI card should be somewhat similar) uses some of the QL's I/O space in the $18000-$1xxxx range (that is, it shares the space with the QL's internal I/O registers). If I also remember right, QIMI also uses that space for I/O ($1BF00-$1bFFF), so it could well be they overlap and are incompatible. I don't however, exactly know what addresses are used by the TDI card.

I'm pretty sure they can co-exist, but I can check next week if I find the time.

I've used Trump and QIMI together - fairly sure the Trump card has some logic in the GAL's to block out all but the Trump I/O addresses so the Trump card I/O Isn't active for other I/O areas.

Thanks for the replies on this.
Having done some more testing, I think the QIMI is broken - even on the machine with no TDI fitted, it's flaky.
For example, scrolling a window causes a reset
So something as simple as will trigger a reset when the window fills

Any ideas why this would be?

Wrangler wrote:Any ideas why this would be?

Battery flat or too low? That will cause spurious resets. need to either charge battery (ideally directly - resistor is too large) or remove battery and simply connect wires together.

See diagram: http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/docs/manuals/qimi.png

Aha! I daresay you could be right - the battery doesn't look in the best of shape.

Thank you!

Just to close this off, I got a replacement rechargeable battery and that allows the machine to boot fine with the TDI.

I then spent ages trying to work out why the mouse would only move upwards, eventually to discover that the Atari mouse I was using was broken <facepalm>.
Trying a different mouse and it works great, even if the way the mouse is used is a bit odd (eg double clicking doesn't seem to "do" an action). I guess you just get used to it.

It was mentioned in a QL thread many years ago that perhaps the QIMI way made more sense. You have two buttons so reduce the effort for the most common operations: Select/Action (QIMI=Hit/Do). The PC world went with LH button for both (IMHO it gets extremely tedious to double-click to open many files in succession), with RH button much less used for opening a menu. Do LH buttons wear out more often? AFAIK Mac just went for single button.