In a message dated 15/02/2007 09:40:16 GMT Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
Seeing all this discussion about possible new hardware etc. and the risks etc. is why I've come to the conclusion that there's never going to be any new hardware. It's just not economically viable: (a) The cost in time and money to design and build would be high. (b) The size of the market is too small so the price would be prohibitively high. It would be really nice if magically a new, hyper-fast, QL compatible replacement motherboard for the QL which fitted into the case would appear, but it's not going to. Those who want to continue to play can't find the old upgrade cards anymore (though I have seen on eBay UK at the moment someone selling two QLs with one Gold Card) so there's a problem. Porting something like SMS/Q or whatever to a new platform is still expensive in time but no-where near as much as new hardware, so surely, the best way forward would be to find some easily obtainable alternative hardware which can be easily adapted to our cause. (Sorry, for me emulation doesn't cut it, it's too clunky. I want to be able to plug a machine in, switch on and hit F2.) This is why I suggested 2nd hand Amiga 1200s (I know that one of our french friends said that french keyboard layout Amigas are hard to come by) as by default they're faster than the QL with useful on-board hardware and can be easily upgraded using reasonably available 3rd party 68030/040/060 and memory upgrade boards which can often be found on eBay. The only other possible alternatives would be Ataris, which aren't expanable and you pay through the nose for a Falcon040 (if you can find one), or old Apples, which don't have a great deal of hardware documentation. The alternative to replacing the Amiga Kickstart ROM in the machine would be to have the OS on disk as software and get Kickstart to load that instead. Probably easier than burning ROMs I would imagine. At least the Amiga platform is well documented and close enough to the QL to make it feasible. (You could probably even write a Copper list to make the Amiga video hardware read the QL screen format directly.) There are very few options available. All of them would require a huge amount of work. Steve What about a hardware connector that allows an existing amiga accellerator board to connect to a QL empansion slot or a backplane, would that not be simpler and give the advantages with less effort? Duncan _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
