>Thanks for your reply. It's given us a clear idea of your situation, >although I shall have to read it several times to get the complete picture. >(I have already made a hard copy.) >I think we can now all look at the whole business far more calmly. > >One final point. Do you think you will be able to make it to QL2004? I >would love to give you a slot to talk about your work.
Yes, I should be there - I am certainly planning to be. One thing I forgot to add: there is one small project going on at the moment. There is a number of half-built Auroras that I have here (about 25), which will be completed, and sold off (hopefully) at very reasonable prices, mainly as a fund-riser for new projects. These last Auroras will also be a sort of 'limited special editions', slightly upgraded with respect to the original Aurora. I should be finishing the experimental phase on this by the end of the month. These boards will come with the full shrouded IDC connectors (so no possibility of plugging stuff the wrong way), including the 'keyboard' connector, turned pin sockets for the ROM and IPC, and, a half megabyte Flash ROM in the ROM socket. The idea was to make it possible to boot directly into SMSQ/E but the way the Flash is interfaced is such that one could have any boot operating system in it, initially the boards will probably come with Minerva, now that it is PD. The Flash ROM is of course in-system programmable for software updates or upgrades, but it needs to be initially programmed on a programmer - eventually, it should be possible to make a 'boot loader' of sorts that would allow programming of the Flash with the OS(s) of choice, this is all down to software support (though not a lot of it). There will also be an option to activate 32 additional lines of pixels in the 16 and 256 color mode, if the last 16k of the IO area on SGC can be freed up (usually this is where you would put Qubide if the ROM slot is to be used, but since SuperIDE uses a mechanism where no IO addresses are used at all, it is likely to be free) - this requires a minor change in the color drivers. The maximum resolutions would therefore be 1024x512 in 16 colors, and a rather odd 512x512 in 256 colors. Not extremely usefull, since we do not have a 16 color driver (yet?) but the capability was actually there from the start. The boards also come already modified for GoldFire (regular Auroras need removal of one component, which is trivial, it's not fitted on these specials). _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List
