On 11 Mar 2016 at 14:41, Thierry Godefroy wrote: > [...] > This problem was (apparently) due to the lack of poper system date setting > before starting the build process (my Q60 RTC's battery is alas dead, and > given it's a built-in battery inside the RTC package itself, it can't be > replaced);
The Q60 RTC with integrated battery should be available off-the-shelf for about 12 € from the usual electronic distributors like Mouser, Digikey, etc. To my surprise, the RTC in my own Q60 has been working for about 18 years. My much bigger concern is the flatscreen monitor issue. I have troubled my mind about that for years, and if it wasn't for the QL-SD project, I might have designed a solution. Now that my own CRT monitor faded, the pain level is growing. Basically, I see five options: 1) Create a 1024x768 signal with a modified CPLD, generating 1024x512 plus a black bar at the bottom of the screen. 800x600 does not fit the PLD. This solution seems to work with recent flatscreen monitors. For me on a 1920x1080 LG. But 1024x768 does not interpolate nicely, and the black area is annoying. 2) Design a Q60 graphics card. An ISA card would be slower than the onboard graphics, so the only socket where a graphics card could go (without modifying the mainboard) is the ROM sockets. This would have the nice side effect to replace the UV EPROMs by Flash. Unfortunately, a few additional address and byte select lines are required, which are not present on the ROM sockets. 3) Find a converter which can handle the Q60's 1024x512 resolution and does not misinterpret it as 800x600 like most VGA converters. 4) Find a flatscreen monitor with true multisync. A fellow QLer here in Germany owns such a rare monitor and the results are nice. It is sort of an industrial monitor. Unfortunately my attempts to get hands on a batch of similar devices failed yet. 5) Design a Q60 successor. I had seriously considered this, because debugging the FPGA-based CPU core inside the Q68 took so long. It would be a piggyback 68060 board on top of the Q68 hardware. The Q68 board providing video circuitry and peripherals, while the 68060 board holds the CPU, main RAM and glue logic. But this solution leads away from the original. Considering the Q60 is a vintage machine worth preserving, this has limited appeal. All the best Peter _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List
