Hardware Renaissance?

There has been an upsurge in QL related hardware developments over the past 12-36 months (excellent) with several coming to market and several seeming to be still in development and one limited by the need to find legacy chips.

Supplied by Tetroid ( based in the Russian Fedeartion) there are new Goldcard clones, Trumpcard clones, Qubide interfaces and back planes and recently when he managed to track down some obsolete chips a handful of SuperGoldCard clones were poduced and sold. Tetroid seems to have produced so many new cloned expansion cards that the bottom has fallen out of the market in used Goldcards and other used memory expansion cards as shown by the multiple listings of a number of expansion cards including an original GoldCard, at a price reduced from that achieved previously, on ebay.

In terms of new original hardware there is the Q68. How many have been sold is not known here but as each batch seems to have been around 40 units and at least 3-4 batches have been mentioned on the QL Forum the figure could well be in 3 digits. So that is a success.

There also seems to be a direct QL clone/evolution in the discussions around an issue 8 motherboard on the QL forum. This seems to be driven by Dave and Nasta and might be on the market sometime this year. Again this seems to have generated a lot of interest.

For those still running QLs based on the original motherboard Marcel Kilgus reported in his blog that he is working on a solution to the problem of displaying the QL screen on a modern TFT monitor see.

There is also the Retro-Printer project from RWAP. This is not specific to the QL but will allow a range of retro computer systems including the QL to print to modern printers.

In addition from the author of QPC2 came QL-SD an adapter for SD cards fitted in to one of the original QL microdrive slots.

What next, will Tetroid produce some sort of an ultra gold card upgrade of his GoldCard clone, will the LAN drivers and TCP/IP stack be released for Q68 or  what? The impression here at QLheaven is that there does not seem to have been this level of new hardware activity since the Q40/Q60 of the late 1990.

Apologies to anyone whose hardware project has been inadvertently missed off this review.