On Mon, 31 Dec 2001, Wayne Weedon wrote:
> I got involved with the sam after MGT moved to Swansea. Did Bruce do
> any QL hardware design? I knew of the Spectrum Card Cage, DisCiple and
> +D interfaces, and then the sam.
Ahhh, MGT... One day, two guys came in and cleared a bench. They had a
cardboard box with 3 or 4 Spectrums in it. My first job for them was to
desolder all the components. They got a wire-wrap board and rebuilt the
Spectrum on that - then they started building... The first thing they did
was double the speed of it. It seemed lightning quick at the time.
Amusingly, they didn't have any Spectrum software - they were truly
hardware geeks and the idea of actually running software on it totally
passed them by. I brought in two games from home - one was a helicopter
simulator whose name has long been forgotten. The other was a cute lil'
game called Alien8, which involved trundling a robot around an isometric
maze.
At the time I was addicted to Hobnobs, and it was quite an effort to stop
Bruce pinching mine. I applied "plan b" and got him addicted - then he
became my supplier ;)
I knew that they were Alan Miles and Bruce Gordon, and that they designed
the Disciple interface, and that I was present at an Important Happening,
but I was a teenager at the time, and therefore easily impressed.
> Yes I have been playing with Qlay too. Seem to able to crash it a lot.
> Now I need to find all my old QL disks and really try it out.
Yup.
I've been looking at the current "batch" (that's really too big a word for
it) of QL-evolved boards and don't really see anything that I can say
"Hey, that's a modern day super-QL! I want one!" There are some pics of
some anonymous looking boards with a distinct lack of interfaces, and
ambiguous chips... :o)
This begs the question: What is the current best performer in 68XXX
processors, and does anyone know how to program FPGAs so we can circumvent
those two custom chips? :o)
Dave
