The vDriveQL …
Delivers hardware emulation for up to eight Microdrives and includes a comprehensive toolkit for managing Microdrive cartridge images which are stored on SD Card. The vDriveQL simply connects to your QL’s external Microdrive bus and is accessed with the usual Microdrive commands. An existing Microdrive case is used to house the vDriveQL (check out the installation manual here).
The SD Card file system implementation is DOS based and is compatible with systems which can read or write to FAT16 or FAT32 media. The vDriveQL has been tested with SD Cards having a capacity of up to 32GB.
The vDriveQL adopts the MDV image format. This format is supported by emulators such as Q-emulator and QLAY. In general, images created with these emulators will be compatible with the vDriveQL and vice versa. MDV images can be formatted, saved to, read from and erased by standard QL commands on real QL hardware.
Other formats, such as the mDump archive format, and MDI, are also supported. They are automatically converted to MDV format prior to assigning to a vDrive.
As well as the standard 128K QL hardware with either the JM, JS or Minerva 1.97/1.98 ROM, the vDrive QL has also been tested on the following:
Miracle Systems Gold Card (including Tetroid’s clone)
Miracle Systems Super Gold Card
512K memory expansion cards
QL Trump Card (including clones)
vMapQL Microdrive Address Translator
Any combination of system firmware and peripheral listed above are supported. It is likely that many other peripheral cards will also be compatible but these haven’t been tested. The toolkit is compatible with Toolkit II and both extensions can be resident at the same time.
The User Manual is available for download here.
For greatest flexibility, the vDriveQL is best paired with the vMapQL Microdrive Address Translator. For more information on this versatile interface go the vMapQL product page.
vRetro Design 