Sunday, 26 April 2009

Spare GoldCard

No new hardware developments in QL Heaven since 2001/02. There is some quite good hardware out there - Goldcard, Supergoldcard, QXL ISA card, Qubide IDE interface, Aurora mother board, Hermes and Superhermes chips and the Q40 and Q60 successor QL motherboards. One weakness of the hardware scene is that there is no way to say upgrade memory or processor independently of changing a card. There have been various attempts to do so but have foundered due probably to the massive scale of the project attempted by a few individuals who also have families and day jobs.




Why I wonder is it not possible to upgrade say Goldcard's memory. Supergoldcard is after all Goldcard v3 with an upgraded processor and more memory. Is it possible to say replace the memory chips on a Goldcard or Supergoldcard? Has anyone tried?

Think of the QXL card, a 68040 processor and 8 MB memory designed to slot into an ISA slot on a PC. Yet at one point Miracle systems were marketing a slot converter to let a Supergoldcard plug into an ISA slot on a PC. Did anyone get one? Anyway what this observation suggests is that it is possible to convert an ISA slot to the QL expansion bus. If so could it be possible to use a QXL card with an Aurora motherboard or basic QL motherboard thereby expanding memory and processing power for these. Just a question.
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  1. Unknown26 December 2012 at 04:04

    The QXL board you talk about, was the QXL Gold, the only version I saw, was the circuit board held in Stuart Honeyball's hand and a Quanta North East Workshop, which I organsied in the 1990s. No QXL Gold boards were ever produced.

    The problem with adding more memory to Gold Cards, is that the Custom chips are written to address on the amount of ram on the board.

    Derek Stewart

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