Hi guys,

when we become older, sometime we want to refresh old passions but with a bit of modernity. People who have had a Sinclair Spectrum have seen into the QL a really “quantum leap” machine so….I bought it immediatly! The presence of Superbasic, the PSION suite and some other good software made us hope for a great future on that machine. We all know how the story ended and same as other people I selled my QL.

But, as a strange think, I have preserved some floppy disks with nice programs….because you never know what’s going to happen (I thought)….

Now, after at least 30 years, thanks to new friend and collegue Giorgio, I bought again a QL; I also attended the 2018’s Qlers Italian meeting in Modena. There I saw what kind of marvelous things we can do with a 30 years old PC and I have grab the moment to update the QL and use it more time.

To do that I bought from Tetroid the Disk Interface with a modern compact flash, 768k of RAM and Minerva ROM inside.

I wrote this article of the TDI unboxing to give to potential buyers some infos about that interface and also to demonstrate it to all humankind  😀

Here is the package arrived from Russia … .

Unboxing first step:

Pulled away the stuff, first thing that we can see is the 8Gb flash card and the interface into an antistatic bag…

The first look of interface is that it was made very nice and with some “industry” tips, without “last minute” remaking, it comes with a 4 pages manual and for those things I give to Tetroid max vote.

… also under …

The manual, simple but nice.

Now…Why I bought this kind of interface?

This is the minimum hardware needed to work with QL and give it a decent memory expansion, a modern mass memory instead of obsolete floppy disks but with the fdd interface to load and run old programs… for more speed and modern software we have PC emulators and the great “Black Phoenix” environment!

So let’s get started and…power on system and ….first screen is:

Into the flash card there are two partitions with some useful stuff but this isn’t the right place to analyze them, I need to work with that software to make a good “workplace”; I hope in some suggestion by QL’s friends and fans.

The access speed is good and it makes easy-to-work with the “oldest” QL!

Also the use of floppy drives is easy and they work fine with some old programs…do you remember some of these?….

..or this! 🙂



This is meant to be just a quick step in how to refresh an “old partner of night to use the superbasic …” and rejuvenate a bit !!Questo vuole essere solo un rapido passaggio di come rinfrescare nell’utilizzo un “vecchio compagno di nottate a usare il superbasic…”  e ringiovanire un po’ !!

This want to be a fast review about an update of our beloved “friend and roommate”.

Good QL to all!Good QL to all

Max!