thanks dilwyn no zx80, but i did have a zx81, i remember my and my sisters had competitions as to whom could keep their hands on it the longest.
i had the microdrive problem, not consitently, but enough to break the flow. it was great when i finally saved enough to plug in some disks, i was totally in the future then :-) i didn't know about the chaisy dain issues. my goodness, how did we put up with it? if anything stops working at the office i start cursing at it within a few seconds. he he he. fern --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: "Dilwyn Jones" <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [Ql-Users] the heat! If you ever had a ZX80, that thing got even hotter than a QL. It was rumoured back then you could fry an egg on it, although I'm not sure anyone ever dared to try! Amazingly despite getting so hot it would usually keep working reasonably well. An annoying feature of my first QL was that microdrive cartridges which were recorded on MDV2_ would usually not work in MDV1_ (or vice versa). And if you plug a ZX Spectrum microdrive drive unit into the QL expansion port there were several problems: 1. It faced away from you with a standard microdrive ribbon cable. You had to fold and crease the short cable to make it face the right way. 2. Spectrum microdrives would not format cartridges on a QL, though you could usually read and write OK. I think there was a bit of a speed difference IIRC, that Sinclair made changes to make QL drives work at higher capacity. 3. I never got to try this, but apparently if you strung six of those to the QL expansion port, the whole microdrive system would fail if you accessed MDV8_ - this is a "feature" of QDOS which Simon Goodwin documented in his rom bugs articles. There we are Fern, some more nostalgia for you! Dilwyn Jones _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
