On Fri, 11 Mar 2016 16:53:56 +0100, pg...@q40.de wrote: > 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.
See my last message: 20€ + VAT (+ postage) from Farnell... > To my surprise, the RTC in my own Q60 has been working for about 18 > years. Mine lasted 12 years or so (it's been dead for alreay a couple of years and started loosing *minutes* per day when the Q60 was not powered two years earlier). Not bad, but still economically silly when compared with a RTC+quartz chip and independent battery (or supercap: I love those and use them in all my RTC-fitted electronic projects). > 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. Agreed, this is *the* weak point of the Q40/Q60: without a monitor to connect it onto, the Qx0 is just a dead part... :-( > 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. Strange... I'd have expected that the problem was the video memory, but 800x600 pixels consume less memory than 1024x512 pixels... > 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. Would it be possible to have black areas (lines) both above and below the Q60 screen, instead ?... It would look nicer. As for scaling, some monitors can have it disabled; mine, a Hyundai W220D, can display any standard EGA/*VGA resolution below its own (1680x1050) without scaling and centered on the screen (of course, displaying a 320x200 screen without scaling on such a monitor gives a tiny picture, but 1024x768 would be quite OK). > 2) Design a Q60 graphics card. An ISA card would be slower than the > onboard graphics, And both slots are already taken: one for the I/O board, the other for the Ethernet card... > 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. That would be nice too: I'm worried that the EPROMs contents will end up ebbing away with time (I saw this happening many times, even on military grade systems), and these EPROMs are so large that they don't fit any of my EPROM programmers (which are limited to 27C512 for the largest EPROM). > Unfortunately, a few additional address and byte select lines are > required, which are not present on the ROM sockets. Well, depending on how many are "a few", this could be done with manual wiring... > 3) Find a converter which can handle the Q60's 1024x512 resolution > and does not misinterpret it as 800x600 like most VGA converters. Good luck with that !... Forget about the Ambery and Jamma Boards products: bought them and they don't work with the Q60... Neither with the Thor XVI in 512x256 resolution (or very badly). > 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. Same here. True multi-sync monitors are History (I'm still so sad and annoyed that my NEC-3D died, 8 or so years ago). > 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. It would be another machine... Not sure you'd find a "market" for it. I'd personally vote for solution 1 (preferred) or 2. :-) Thierry. _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List
