On Thursday 13 April 2006 23:42, John Gilpin wrote: > Pity you didn't get over to the Manchester AGM. Nemqlug (the host sub > group) had a real WORKING party at the workshop, repairing old QLs and > other associated equipment. We also had a number of working QL Monitors for > sale from as little as £1 - YES one GBPound. Would you be interested if I > could still lay my hands on a couple?
Out of the twenty dead original black box QLs that we took along to the AGM, the sub group managed to get twelve working perfectly and another two just need membranes and microdrives fitting. To be honest we ran out of time for the microdrives, but the limiting factor in the future seems to be keyboard membranes. I know a few membranes are still available, but the price of original QLs have fallen through the floor on eBay to the extent that it is not worth the price. I will try to do something about this and hopefully reduce the cost in the future for anyone trying to keep old machines in operation. Boxed QLs still seem to find buyers, but I suspect these are collectors and not anyone who is actually using them. Without the ability to buy SGC and Aurora boards, I guess the market is limited to an ever falling number of machines and the Emulator route. The community has always split from time to time - Floppy/microdrive, TKII/no TKII, even colour graphics on emulators vs none on Aurora. How this is solved, if possible I leave to others. While it was fun setting up QLs for my children and watching them play games, the limiting factor was finding working cartridges. (We only repaired one floppy disk unit at the end and had a ready supply of legal cartridges to try). We had success with Deathstrike, Chess, Zkul, West (We used this one to test all the other machines) but the others all failed. Admittedly, this will now mean I will have to send some of the originals away to Rich Mellor to get working copies on disk for them but at least they will get some fun out of them. (What ever happened to Jochen's BrainSmasher, Diamonds and QShang? I could not see them for sale anywhere) OK so now to my questions. Has anyone ever had any success with getting SMSQ/E working under uQLx? Is ZMht available anywhere? I can find the demo but no mention of the full version. John S _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
