> A three expansion backplane with ROM port included for RomDisq etc. > Aurora can be fitted in notebook case and powered off single 5V > rail - > contact QBranch for details. Two boards (eg Aurora and Gold > Card/Super > Gold Card/Goldfire fixed to base. Suitable for Aurora (ROM > accessible > from outside) & QL Motherboard in tower case. Specify ROM facing IN > towards boards, or OUT towards back of case. > > Taken from QL Today Vol 10 Issue 4 --- Jan-Mar 2006 > > > Bit of a quiet day in work today...... Backplanes are basically a board with two or more QL expansion connectors on them.
Some of the older ones were little more than two or three QL expansion connectors soldered to each other in parallel - companies like Miracle, Simplex and Adman did simple ones like this in the early days. They usually worked (not always!) when all you wanted to do was plug a RAM card and disk interface together into a QL. Most backplanes have been devices with 3 or more card connectors, a power supply connection and some degree of buffering on the lines from the QL. CST made one called a Q+4 which was a huge great metal cased unit which sat under a QL with a ribbon lead connecting it to the QL expansion connector. You could plug up to 4 circuit boards into it, but if more than one of the cards had a ROM on board, it ran into problems with version AH or JM ROM QLs which could only link one expansion card rom into the system. JS and MG and Minerva should all be fine. The MPlane and Qubbesoft's QPlane were both designed to help with putting QL and Aurora circuit boards into PC style cases - they helped you with getting the QL or Aurora and the expansion cards to work from the PC case power supplies, and of course helped shorten the system because you didn't necessarily need to have a Super Gold Card plugged into a Qubide plugged into a QL board for example, because the backplanes can be mounted in such a way that the boards mount alongside or above each other to avoid the length problem. If I may cite a simple example, I have a Minis-QL. This is essentially an Aurora with super gold card, qubide and mplane. The case is an old Epson one, only 12 inch wide, 9 inch deep and 2 inches high. Yet this case, thanks to Mplane, contains a floppy disk drive, hard disk and romdisq in addition to the other cards, the only thing which didn't fit in the case is a power supply, which is almost half the size of the case! MPlane was well thought out and designed to enable all these cards to be plugged together in quite a compact footprint. -- Dilwyn Jones _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
