Aurora/Pandora

 The Aurora card

Qubbesoft produced a QL-compatible Aurora motherboard (right), which involved using some standard QL parts to complete the board, but allowed you to more easily mount the 'QL' into a standard AT style PC case. The Aurora card was designed by Zeljko Nastasic of Croatia. Either a Gold Card or Super Gold Card could be attached to the Aurora, with the Super Gold Card being the expansion of choice because it allowed all of the extended facilities to be used.

The Aurora was more compact than the QL motherboard and did not make use of the microdrives at all. Unlike the old QL motherboard, an Aurora could use either an SVGA or an old-style TTL monitor.

The video display was enhanced to give resolutions up to 1024x768 in up to 256 colours. It was possible to use the existing colour modes at this resolution though sadly operating system support for this level of colour depth did not arrive until after its production was discontinued!

There is now a version of the Gold Card SMSQ/E which supports the 8-bit 256 colour mode on an Aurora system, and a compatible mode has also been added to the QPC2 emulator for PCs.

The Aurora was designed to be used with a 5V backplane (a backplane is an expansion connector which allows further cards to be added to the system and provides a means of powering the whole system). Qubbesoft produced one called the QPlane, and TF Services produced one called the MPlane.

The Aurora was largely designed with PC case compatibility in mind, regarding connectors and devices found in the PC case, such as reset button, LED indicators and speaker switches.

A keyboard interface was also required to a allow a PC keyboard to be used with the Aurora. Most QL keyboard interfaces were suitable, probably the most commonly used ones being the DiRen, Keyboard-90, or one of the SuperHermes interfaces.

A mouse could be attached and the Aurora supported both the traditional QIMI or Serial Mouse types.

Some chips from the original QL motherboard had to be used. These included:

• The ZX8302 i.c. (trivia: "ZX83" was the original Sinclair codename for the machine which eventually became the QL!)
• The second processor chip, which could be the original 8049, Hermes, or other replacement for the QL second processor.
• QL ROM chips, which could be a standard Sinclair ROM chip pair (which had to be soldered "piggy-back" onto each other as there was only one ROM socket) or a replacement such as Minerva

Although designed to be built into a PC-style system case with 5V power, it was also possible to mount the Aurora card into an original QL case, but it wasn't a straightforward job - an idea of the complexities could be gleaned from reading Appendix D of the Aurora manual. For example, the system had to be modified to work from the 9V power source, and the Aurora board was narrower than the QL board, although this allowed simpler cable routing and the possibility of using the original microdrive space in the case to include a slim floppy disk drive in the case!

The combination of Aurora, Qubide and Super Gold Card had similar dimensions to the original QL motherboard, so it could have been practical to build a system complete with floppy disk drive and 2.5 inch IDE hard disk into a standard QL case, although it was no mean task to put it all together!

MinisQL

Pronounced 'Miniscule', this was an Aurora-based computer from QBranch. Using an old Epson computer case of around 21cm deep x 30 cm wide and 4.5cm high. The case was the traditional PC "putty" colour, so although not black like most QL systems, matched many of the PC bits and pieces (such as the front panels of floppy drives) used with re-cased QLs at the time.

Quite how they managed to fit the combination of Aurora card, MPlane, Super Gold Card, Qubide keyboard interface, floppy disk drive and hard disk into such a tiny case is hard to imagine, but do that they did! The only negative part was the power supply brick, which was a quarter to a third the size of the case itself!

The case could hold connectors for mouse, 2 serial ports, parallel printer port, external speaker, reset switch, monitor and network in what was an attractive system which was even strong enough to have an SVGA monitor standing on top. Which made for a very attractive system which looked like a PC system, but was a QL inside!

Indeed, many such QL systems built into a PC-style tower or desktop case were visually indistinguishable from PCs of the time.