The Sinclair QL Forum

Help..... was doing a good deed and saving copies of my Thor System Roms and User Roms for Dilwyns website. But I seem to have got my system in a twist, when I boot now it posts my External Thor System Rom and Serial, but not the User Roms.
And if you press F1 or F2 you get a prompt without the full Thor System (disk access not working for example).

I only fear I'd not invoked some kind of copy protection ? or if its me playing around with old roms, as it seems not to run the System Rom at first start up any longer. I only hope this is a known QL issue......


If I put in an external QDisc interface it also posts this at startup. So it does find some external Roms (although in a different memory space).


But if I then do a system reset (either via QL reset button or Thor keyboard) the system now posts the system Roms and the User roms.


I assume the invoke of the External System Rom is from the QL motherboard still, so I've damaged/altered something ?.


To make matters worse, I was trying to test the system, so reverted to a 68008 and the Thor8 Roms, but I did the cardinal idiot move and put my 4.22 System Rom in the wrong way round..... so now have a dead Eprom and can't boot it as a Thor 8.

So is anyone able to make/sell me some new Eproms, luckily I have the images of the system Eproms which ironically got me into this trouble in the first place.

Checking more, on a cold restart (when its not been powered on for a while, few hours) it finds all the Roms. But if you power down, then on again straight away or even 5 minutes later it doesn't find the roms. But a warm reset does find the roms. So it seems like a capacitor is holding a level high and stopping a rom read or something similar....... I just need to remember to do a soft reset after a power restart. But its a niggling fault.

But would still like to get some roms made if anyone is able.

Fixed it, but just in case anyone else has the issue, it was a dodgy capacitor on the Reset circuit. Capacitor C4, a 4.7uf just below the serial ports on the QL motherboard.