any one got any tales of annoying little things which in retrospect are
quite charming?
cheers
fern
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
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