Hi Petri, thanks for sharing your experience with the GBS-8220 video converter. I have ordered it myself now. The vertical jitter seems common to all external converter solutions I have seen or heard of. To overcome that problem we'd probably need a QL specific development.
A few remarks regarding ethernet: If you go for a solution without Microcontroller, I would not recommend the Microchip ENC28J60, but the Silabs CP2200, which has less power consumption, and seemed easier and more robust to implement from both driver and hardware side. I tested both, but this info is about three years old, so there might be even better chips by now. Before you put much work into the hardware, try to make sure what your goal is on the software side. Eight(?) years ago I implemented a full multitasking native TCP/IP stack for the QL and ran it on Q40/Q60 with NE2000-compatible chip. This software called QLwIP (derived from lwIP, other free software, plus self-written code) provided a full-featured sockets library which contained enough functionality to actually run native email, webbrowser, webserver etc. I proved that the above applications worked in real life, but I did not finish and release my work because of licensing issues that prevented me from adding that (open source) code to the (proprietary) operating system SMSQ/E. For a long time I waited for a Minerva port to the Q40/Q60 so I could complete the job, in vain. Adding support for the CP2200 IOT support the old QL would be small in comparison to the overall work already done. Nowadays I doubt how much of the knowledge I still have left. So many years - and I get older :-) Also I doubt wether I still have the time. So my work is not totally lost, I considered a QLwIP release with QDOS Classic, but that's a dead end and has severe disadvantages compared with Minerva. One of them is, that QDOS Classic doesn't run on the QL. I conclusion, your approach to run the TCP/IP stack on an external microcontroller which then allows a simple, stream-oriented approach on the QL side, seems much more realistic than the ones which involve a native TCP/IP stack. It might not be very "stylish" to run the stack outside the QL, but still better than having nothing. All the best Peter _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
