Much like the ZX Spectrum the Sinclair QL was a machine largely unknown to me growing up in Canada, then moving to the Miami area as a teenager. While the ZX 80/81 were pioneers in low end home computers barely able to do anything the ZX Spectrum with it’s 80kb of RAM (48k usable, as half the 64kb was defective), the QL announced in the start of 1984 was announced to the world as a very serious business machine. No gaming around to be found here!

While the IBM PC had been released in 1981 with it’s 16bit Intel 8088 processor utilizing a much slower & cheaper 8bit bus, the QL went one step further utilizing the Motorola 68008, a hybrid 16bit processor with 32bit registers, also using an external 8bit bus. However, being always on the cheap sifde, the QL only offered a single expansion slot, unlike the IBM PC. Also it eschewed floppy disks in favour of it’s endless loop ‘micro drive’ cassettes. Every corner that could be cut was, and sadly the resulted in a machine that just wasn’t ready as one has to wonder if the word of the Macintosh launch the following week was out, and Clive knew that it was either announce it now, or be a meetoo going forward. For better or worse he launched.

On paper it sounds fantastic, 128kb of ram, 32bit capable processor, and 2 drives all for £399! The IBM PC was an eye watering £3,325 by comparison, while the similarly spec’d Macintosh was £2,698! Indeed the QL stood for Quantum Leap, as the jump from 8bit to 32bit home computing was going to be phenomenal.

But how could it all go so wrong? Within a year the price had been slashed to £199, and stores were said to be further marking them down to a mere £99 the year afterwards. How could a seemingly on par machine fail so badly? The 128k Macintosh also was limited to a paultry 128kb on it’s motherboard, while the more expensive, and expandable IBM PC/XT maxed out at infamous 640kb, and it supported up to two floppy drives, and 2 hard disks although the IBM AT would be announced later that year, and it could go well beyond 640Kb, but the lack of protected mode operating systems & software would hinder the platform for quite some time.

If the trades are to be believed it was a combination of announcing too early, and failing to deliver burnt people on the QL. Additionally the ZX Spectrum had been busy wining apps at the time (games), but Sinclair wanted so much to be a serious company, not the man who brought you jet-set “fucking” willy. Sound and video capabilities of the QL were no match for the Spectrum, just weren’t there, and also missing was the incredibly cheap European storage of choice the audio casette. Many people were also dismayed that the operating system was much larger than expected and it needed to occupy both internal ROM sockets, and the cartridge port. And of course, the microdrives themselves were seen as easy to corrupt, stretch and tear. Not the kind of thing someone in business wants to hear. The ironic thing about the QL was that in my opinion it was too cheap. The PC/XT offered plenty of expansion at the base price (albeit a high one), and Apple also quickly added a much more realistic 512kb model Macintosh. The QL never got a ‘big brother’, basically condemning it at launch as nothing more but a toy. Which is a shame.

The operating system, burnt into ROM feels kind of 8bit as it has a basic interpreter built in, and it’ll open several hard coded windows in which you are expected to interact with. However, it feels more like a minicomputer with input on the bottom, running lists on the left, and output on the right. Indeed, it can feel outright baffling. And certainly nothing like an 8bit machine, or like the later home 32bit machines like the Amiga, or Mac. Even the TOS based Atari ST felt more ready for the world with its GEM burned into ROM.

Building my dream system

Despite all of these downsides, I was still intrigued by the machine, and I have to admit I really love the look of it. When I’d first read Neuromancer around the time of the video game, and this is what I’d imagined a cyberdeck to look like. While I was wasting my youth with an 8bit machine I wanted to experience this seemingly parallel universe where affordable 32bit micros were a thing.

Since I’ve heard of the machine, I’ve been trying to get one. Surprisingly for such an unloved machine they are incredibly hard to find, and they do go for quite a bit of money. However, thanks to making contacts on the QL User’s forum, I had managed to get my hands on one, so I could start my journey. I sent it off to RudeDog Retros, luckily located across the bridge from where I’m staying and within a week. I was able to get back a working system. I also had managed to get a tetroid ram expansion/CF card addon as well for my QL bringing it up to 880kb of RAM, and an 8MB CF card, making the machine a top of the line experience. Although the card was given to me with known issues, for the most part it worked, except when it didn’t, and it was always the same, bad ram at the 128kb boundary. Which is a shame, having mass storage certainly gets around the microdrives, but 128kb of ram just isn’t enough when factoring in mass storage.

Much like other 68000 based machines, the Sinclair QL is no stranger to hardware modifications. I ordered a 512kb memory expansion unit (Sinclair QL 512KB Internal Memory Expansion from *der_englaender*) to fill in the 128k gap from the Tetroid card (plugged into the left). The red 68008 socket is a real pain to deal with, and it took an unreasonable amount of force to get the RAM expansion into the QL. No doubt nearly 40 year old sockets are just not that flexible. I had thought the board was in, but I was getting a buzzing black screen, it only took a bit of reassuring and swapping in another 68008 to verify the machine was fine, and more pressing to get it to seat into the socket.

You can also spot the Hermes 2.20 co-processor upgrade to support 19,200 baud serial operations, along with the Minerva OS upgrade, and you can see the numerous RAM chips that had to get replaced to make the unit functional. With an appropriately upgraded system it can begin to feel like a real machine.

Thanks to the folks over at The Sinclair QL Forum, I was able to complete the upgrade!

With enough luck my machine now has reliable memory, mass storage, and faster communications with the outside world. Everything you’d want in a modern computer! I now have a capable machine to do the one thing I always worry about when doing cross compiling, actual hardware verification.

SIxteen/Thirtytwo into EIght dreams…

The 68000 was used by Stanford University in it’s project based motherboards, that gave way to the 68010 based SUN-1/SUN-2 based machines, where other companys also used the 68000 line of processors in their Unix based machines. While the QL with it’s cost conscious 68008 was not going to run a ‘real unix’, it was however capable of running real programs. The big AT&T compilers (PCC!) can target the processor, just as other new and upcoming compilers, even GCC, although even 880kb of ram is probably not enough for running GCC natively. But going back to 1985 this leaves room for something more restricted to mini-computers, Hack.

While Hack had been ported to 16bit machines like the IBM-PC, or sixteen/32bit machines like the Amiga, I was surprised to find that it had not appeared on the QL. For someone like me that first meant getting a cross compiler in place to target the QL. Thankfully xXorAa had done a lot of the hard work in xtc68, qdos-libc, and Dilwyn Jones had saved the GCC patches by Richard Zidlicky, Jonathan Hudson, Thierry Godefroy and Dave Walker. With a working cross compiler, time to get hacking!

From the mini-computer to the 32bit home micro-computer

Doing my thing I put together a simple cross compiler so that I could begin work. With enough RAM, the QL is in the surprising league of many a minicomputer of the early 1980’s. It’s incredible to think of what a missed opportunity this is. When I had decided to try to get Hack-1.03 up and running, I went for the Unix version, bypassing the probably more apt PC port, as despite Hack-1.03 being free enough to be still part of OpenBSD, PC Hack however has a more restrictive license. I know it’s weird.

Using a VT library that gives the QL, something akin to ANSI.SYS functionality and another library to set environment variables (yes QDOS doesn’t have either…) a simple basic program to setup the screen type and point Hack where to find it’s files, and we are suddenly off to the races. I didn’t have to restrict or cut anything down, it’s running the same code that effectively would run on a VAX-11/780 mini-computer, or a SUN-2 workstation. It’s crazy how this machine didn’t fill the home 32bit gap that took Microsoft/Intel quite a few years to fill.

For those into the javascript, you can download a disk image: hack.win here, and test drive it on ppe/xXorAa‘s emulator here sQLux – MIN198.rom, 4096K (qlforum.co.uk)

Another great program, COM, the 8080 CP/M emulator can also happily run on the QL, again with libvt, emulating a vt52 it opens up an entire ecosystem of software, much like it did on the Commodore-128. If it had been available perhaps it would have greatly helped out things for the platform as it languished.

While the QL was marred with it’s too early announcement/pre-orders, and terrible primary storage medium, and far too restrictive motherboard design, there was great potential in that tiny little machine. I’d like to have thought if I’d known about the QL, I’d have bought one, even though the 128kb is super restrictive, thanks to it’s processor it really was an incredible machine for 1984.

In the days of cheap arm machines, and who knows what the downstream effects of those will be, it feels like there was a much earlier missed window with the Sinclair QL.

I’ve been messing with Hack, along with some progress on some ports that’d never been mainstreamed..

I’ll have some more added to that, along with a port of COM, the CP/M emulator to the QL, bridging that fatal application launch gap. Some nearly 40 years too late, but as they say, better late than never.

I’ve also been digging up some older projects and throwing them up on github, along with looking at the SLiRP updates from Debian, and 86Box, and thinking of doing an update for stuff like Cockatrice III. I’ve also started uploading more to archive.org preserving stuff like MacMiNT, that was nearly lost from my primary machine being offline. Of course, check out my favourites, maybe some of what I enjoy will be interesting for you.

So since i’ve been messing with 68k ql lately:

Maybe ill do a stream. Maybe I won’t I don’t know. Its been a rough year for me and my muse but we’ve made it this far.

So now I have too many, which I’ll have to flip a few as I don’t need so many, but for me it’s been super interesting as the whole UK 80’s scene was an isolated parallel software society, that a few software publishers ‘broke out’ once there was common hardware platforms in the 16bit (ST/Amiga), and especially in the Play Station 1 era.

A seeming 100% catastrophic failure of these machines is the keyboard.

The plastics tend to dry up and disintegrate over the decades, leaving a dead keyboard. However since it’s such a common problem people do make modern replacements.

Here is a closeup of the damage, and you can see the clear breakage.

While the keyboard is disassembled it’s a good time to clean the domes, to make sure there is no debris inside, and give it a light wash.

Reassembly

One thing that caught me off guard is that the membrane is really made up of 3 layers, and that they need to be pressed together to make it fully work. So the cable that goes under the collar needs to be tight. Many videos recommend pushing the cable slightly towards the keyboard assembly to give it that extra bit of tension as you screw it down to give it that little extra push to press the layers together.

After all that fun, the keyboard is working and now I can continue onto the next part!

Software

As always one of the big challenges with old machines is getting software loaded. Media deteriorates, becomes scarce, and of course some titles become more expensive than the machines. So what’s a pirate to do?

Luckily a discount ‘toy’ computer from the 80’s also used ‘toy’ storage, in this case the humble audio Philips compact audio cassette. And many of these tapes have been ripped, and converted to a ‘tap’ format, for emulation.

So first you’d think that it’s a simple matter of converting the tap file to a sound file, and playing the resulting file to the computer, and bingo you are up and running! Except it’s not quite that simple.

Digital to analog

This is the easiest part, is the tap conversion, I’m using Igor Maznitsa’s zxtap-to-wav, which is pretty simple to go to a 44100khz

zxtap2wav-windows-386.exe -a -f 44100 -s -i IM2.TAP -o impossibleMissionII.wav

  TAP2WAV converter of .TAP files (a format for ZX-Spectrum emulators) into its .WAV image (PCM, mono).
  Project page : https://github.com/raydac/zxtap-to-wav
        Author : Igor Maznitsa (http://www.igormaznitsa.com)
       Version : 1.0.1

Detected data blocks : .P.D.C.D.D.D.D.D.D
The Result WAV file size is 11043 Kb

Now you’d think we are good to go, however there is one more problem, and that is the mono plug in the Spectrum. As answered on stackexchange, by mcleod_ideafix, the fundamental problem is that odds are your sound card is stereo, your ‘headphone cable’ is also stereo. So instead of one nice big happy waveform, you’ll actually end up sending 2 waveforms down the stereo plug to the mono jack, that will introduce so much crosstalk that it’d be amazing that anything loads.

Inside the thread is a good explanation of how to fix the waveform to appear over both sides of the pin, but also this nice script to use sox to split for you:

#!/bin/bash
# wav2differential.sh - convert mono game tape audio to 2× stereo
# usage:   wav2differential.sh infile.wav
#          (creates  infile-differential.wav)
# scruss - 2016-06-07
# method by ‘mcleod_ideafix’; many thanks / greetz
#   — https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/774/439

base="${1%.wav}"
sox -q --norm=-3 "$1" -b 16 "${base}-n.wav"
sox -q  "${base}-n.wav" "${base}-ni.wav" vol -1.0
sox -q  --norm=-0.1 -M -c 1 "${base}-n.wav" -c 1 "${base}-ni.wav" "${base}-differential.wav"
rm -f  "${base}-n.wav" "${base}-ni.wav"

With the wav file in place, the next thing to do is to play it back to the spectrum. On the PC however in the age of multitasking you probably have a LOT of things going beep, and that’ll mess up the entire load process. Bring up the Volume Mixer, and mute everything that isn’t what you are using to play the wav file.

The first few mistakes I made was thinking that I didn’t want to send too loud of a signal to the Spectrum, as it is voltage, and it probably doesn’t need that much. However the DAC is very hard of hearing, even by 80’s standards so that means you need to crank the volume to 100%

As a matter of fact, go all the way to 125% if you are using VLC. Tapes load slow, expect anywhere for a minute for a 10kb program, and 5+ minutes for a 40kb program. Times vary depending on how the packed the waveform, fast loaders and other fun things.

And yeah there we go, loading Impossible Mission II, converted from a .tap to wav, then split and combined waveform to load from a stereo plug.

Going overboard!

In the last auction I inadvertly won, it included a joystick interface (that hangs OVER the keyboard, WTF?!), and a legit 1980’s Tape deck, the Ingersoll XK696. Shockingly it actually works! It did have it’s fair share of dust bunnies inside which needed promptly cleaning out, I tested with a ‘legit’ tape, a copy of startrike, and yeah, it loaded up fine! I do like how it’s got it’s own ‘monitor’ volume and speaker, along with nice big chunky buttons, and tactile feedback. Got to say I do like it, although yeah loading from tape is slow. But since I never did back in the day, there is something oddly weird about having to pace oneself because of the insanely slow peripherals. I wonder how slot in bps the 1541 was.

I also ordered a retro.care “MaxDuino TZXduino CASduino” loader which can read the tap files directly, and included a stereo to monaural RCA 3.5 cable in the bundle. Pitty it didn’t include a SD card, and I ended up buying some 4GB card for £5. Such is the price of wanting it immediately. It does let you set the baud rate from 1200/2400/3600 and a blistering overdrive of 3668? Short of an eye watering £90+ for a DivIDE/DivMMC board it does seem to be the budget way to go for someone who doesn’t want to waste all that time converting tap images to wav, then inverse wav to load from PC. But then again if you have 5+ minutes to load a program, you have time to convert files.

There does seem to be something oddly zen about loading from tape, and it makes one all the more hesitant to reboot as loading up something else is such a long process, and that is of course assuming that it even loads in the first place.

Also the other odd thing is that some programs/games want you to load tapes as if they are semi-random access needing you to stop and go on demand (maybe rewind too!). Granted other computers (MSX?) did include a control cable allowing rewind giving a more randomish access out of tape. It’s a limitation of the time, sadly and microdrives and floppies arrived too late, and failed to have any significant adoption to matter, sadly.

I don’t know if this will reach any audience, although there is some ‘retro wave’ going on since the unmentionable event of CNY 2019, and shut ins are getting retro. Although for me, it’s very interesting exploring this parallel and yet foreign experience of a retro past I never knew existed. Although I guess thanks to US Gold, many in the UK were well aware of American software from the likes of EA/Activision et al.

I forget where I heard the term “Métal Hurlant” although it does seem appropriate having a younger machine scream the programs of tape drive past to it’s earphone jack. But it’s most likely the French magazine, and my imagination of something cross between Jarre/Ulrich.

But thanks to Simon Owen, there is this great emulator to an old physical dongal that’ll let you unlock the magical codes! LensKey doesn’t seem to scale to DPI that well, but it does work. And I was able to unlock Elite!

As you can see the weird pattern is reveled to be ‘j4’, you only get 3 chances, otherwise it’ll reset the Spectrum, and you HAVE TO LOAD FROM TAPE AGAIN. I can barely take it today, even with a dedicated MAX duino, tape emulator running at 3,850 baud, it’s just absolutely insane!

I need to write something sensible about tap files, and loading them to a physical machine, as it’s a bit more involved than I had first imagined. But it does work!!.. kinda.

No not this Will Smith Chris Rock thing, I’m talking of course about Clive Sinclair slapping Chris Curry at the Baron of Beef pub in Cambridge.

Where’s the beef?

As the legend goes, Curry worked under Clive, but he ran into Herman Hauser who had encouraged Curry to go his own way and make that computer of his dreams. Incised about this Clive was able to put together and rush out the Z80 before Acorn had anything ready to ship

And more importantly it was CHEAP. You’d have thought that the zx80 would have found a larger world wide market but Commodore and Apple reigned supreme in North America.

Later that year Acorn would ship the Acorn Atom priced around £129 in kit, and £179 assembled it was a lot more expensive but granted it did have a lot more ‘computer’ in there.

In the following year Sinclair had released the ZX81, which although a larger price point also included a lot more, larger ram/rom better display and of course this was ready to ignite the coming war.

As the legend goes a TV show of all things, ‘The Might Micro, (2/3/4/5/6)’ had ignited such a storm in parliament that the Department of Industry & the BBC decided that they were going to produce programming to go along with a selected microcomputer. And that machine was the Newbury NewBrain… until it was obvious that this wasn’t going to be the machine of choice, and the selection was pushed back from the fall of 81 to the spring of 82. With the BBC being forced to open up selection to other UK computer manufacturers, both worked hard for a machine, however Curry swooped in with his new ‘BBC Micro’ (that had started working the day of the inspection) and won the contract.

1982 of course would give us the ZX Spectrum as Sinclair’s answer to what the people needed.

Oddly enough things in the long term didn’t work out for ether of them, as they both made so many missteps that they ended up ultimately shelving both of the units, with Acorn barely surviving, although their ARM processor does live on, mostly because it ended up free of any hardware platform to go along with it.

There was no ZX 83 model, instead there was of course the QL for 1984. And taking on the design of the QL the Sinclair + was launched. And despite the name, it was just a 48k with a reset button and nicer keyboard. Very NON plussed. The only upgrade to the ZX would have to come from spain in the form of the 128.

The QL was 100% incompatible with the ZX. Apparently doing something like the SEGA Megadrive, by including both a 68000 and z80 was just too out of the question. Instead it was so focused on price it made the machine not serious enough for the serious business market Clive had craved so much. No socket for a 68881, and the drives being so incredibly tiny, IBM had quickly followed up the PC with the XT which allowed for a hard disk, while the QL with a single slot in no way could fit a then 5 1/4″ full heigh disk.

Although many fault the QL for having relied on the 68008 processor remember even IBM was using the 8088, with the same 8bit constraints, it’s not that it was impossible, it’s that the sleek stylized deck of the QL was just far too ahead of itself, it’d be fine for today, just look at the Pi400! I’d prefer to have one with SD cards up front but I guess I need to learn how to 3d print and make my own.

Another fault of the QL was not having the space on the motherboard to go to the full 1MB of addressable RAM like the PC, and loading the OS from disk. Having the OS in ROM was such an 8bit holdover when loading it from tape would have been useless but the PC way of loading the OS from disk was the way to go, also it far easier facilitated updating. I know the ST & Amiga also went with OS in ROM thinking it saved money but in the long term all the wedge’s of the era just limited themselves.

The real slap: in the market

The real slap that was heard was the stagnation of both machines, and the decline of the UK computer makers. Acorn had apparently manufactured a tonne of Electron’s for Christmas but the order wasn’t actually put through because of some ‘pull back of a video game crash’ in Europe. I guess it’s the continuation of the video game crash in the USA, but as you can see the stockpile of machines to be blown out was just incredible.

And it was in 1984 that apparently Acorn had run an ad showing that Sinclair computers had a high defect rate, something that has always plagued Sinclair’s quest for low cost machines, Something that had been hand waved as a 1 year replacement policy with many teenagers abusing the machines, that led to the confrontation in the Baron of Beef along with the whooping Sinclair had unleashed on Curry. Although much of this has passed into more legend than fact, even Ruth Bramley didn’t recall anything about the event.

It’s an amazing flash in the pan, that has so many games, and so much early computer culture that was partitioned to a tiny island and for the most part in the rest of the world totally unknown. I hope to get a real Spectrum 128 one day, it sounds like a fascinating machine. Although they made a million? of them, they are quite expensive in any market place. I wonder sometimes if there is demand for a super cheap almost ‘disposable’ 8bit computer. Obviously it’d have be under £20.

Since all this UK micro computer stuff never really left the island it’s all new to me. And maybe many people outside of the UK, or surprisingly the iron curtain where zx spectrums were abundant.

footnote: I know people will say that there was some attempt at selling Sinclair Micros out of Texas with one OEM, but honestly I’ve never hear or seen of any such thing, it’s only recently as a curiosity on youtube. And they were incompatible anyways so whatever.

Also holy crap so an actor slapped another actor in a show where they backslap each other. Who cares?! Bring back Beavis and Butthead, and prime time boxing! People obviously have a thirst for this, why did the WWF’s kayfabe fade? the paywalls?

I’m not sure why but I seem to be getting pulled into the ZX spectrum. Maybe it’s because I’ve yet to have seen one, and find it interesting about this massive parallel space I knew nothing of.

I’d found this review of the game, by sinc LAIR, which goes over a bit of history behind this port of the game. Very cool stuff, but for non русский speakers like me, be sure to turn on the auto translated subtitles!

The game is for sale for a mere €3 zxonline.net. One thing I had issues with, is because it’s Russian, normal Pay Pal blocks the transaction of account to account, so you have to use incognito mode, and tell Pay Pal to process it as credit card and it’ll work fine. Keeping in mind since Pay Pal does the CC charge, your # never goes to Russia. And it’s a damned shame, it’s not like ever Russian hacker is all about online crimes, some just want to make cool games.

Game play is challenging as hell! It’s very much a ‘one touch and you are dead’ game. I cheated and uses save states from the EmuZWin emulator.

ABSOLUTELY GET A JOYSTICK!

I don’t know why I was playing with the keyboard, holy crap don’t do that, don’t waste your time!

Would I recommend nothing for the ZX Spectrum 128k? Absolutely. It’s totally worth the €3, you can feel the love in this game!

sinc LAIR is going to have a live stream of it in a few hours, so I can see how to get past the spinning monster thing on level 2. Maybe I’ll post some video of me constantly dying.