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Dilwyn Jones wrote:
> 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.
>
Mplane was designed precisely for the minisQL and Aurora.
I even had an option for inward or outward facing ROM connector, and
there is on-board -ve voltage generation for SER.
The PC case use was incidental.
In designing the connector positions, I offset one of the connectors for
the never-to-be Goldfire. Nasta needed space for RAM chips. By an
amazing bit of luck, this allowed a SGC when used with the original QL
motherboard, to overlap. It does need the ROM port removing (it is on
Mplane in any case) and CTRL1. Even more of a coincidence is that a
hole on the QL pcb lines up perfectly with a hole on SGC, allowing the
two to be screwed together.
The older back planes, including Qplane, were not too effective when
used with the QL motherboard due to signal noise. Mplane does much
better in this respect. It has both power and ground planes in inner
layers. Qplane was though an awful lot better than any preceding
backplane mainly due to its ground plane and smoothing capacitors. It
was though only a two layer board.
None of the backplanes I know, including Qplane and Mplane, have any
buffering.
Tony
- --
QBBS (QL fido BBS 2:257/67) +44(0)1442-828255
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://firshman.co.uk
Voice: +44(0)1442-828254 Fax: +44(0)1442-828255 Skype: tonyfirshman
TF Services, 29 Longfield Road, TRING, Herts, HP23 4DG
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