Q40/Q60

Peter Graf in Germany produced what was the most advanced QL system of its time. They took a 68040 processor (Q40) or 68060 (Q60) and designed a motherboard which had a little in common with a PC board, but was designed to be a super-QL, running QL software a hundred times faster in some cases than an original QL. Up to 160 BogoMIPS performance for QDOS and SMSQ/E.

In addition to running QDOS or SMSQ/E, a Q40 or Q60 could also run its own version of Linux. As SMSQ/E was held in flash memory on board, the computer could boot up very quickly - as little as 5 seconds.

The idea was that you took this new motherboard and built it into a PC-style AT case, using standard PC parts such as floppy disk drives, hard disks, keyboards, PC power supply, monitors and so on. The computer could have from 16MB to 128MB of RAM and came with 256K of ROM. The board measured a little over 6 inches by 8 inches, making it easy to build into a PC tower or desktop case. No original QL parts were needed - you did not need to cannibalise parts from your QL!

Probably its main selling point apart from its sheer speed was its ability to offer 16-bit colour modes, offering up to 65536 colours at a screen resolution of 1024x512 pixels. It also had a built in QL screen-compatible 512x256 mode if you needed to run older software which only worked on a QL-style screen.

The Q60 could offer sampled sound playback, up to 20kHz using the Unsigned Byte (.ub) sound file format. Up to 2 floppy drives and 2 hard disks (or a hard disk and CD-ROM) could be attached. Up to 2 serial ports and a parallel printer port were available. It had a slot for PC-style ISA add-on cards, although most fo these would have required QL drivers of course.

Initially only available as a motherboard for building into a system of your choice, it was later made available as a complete ready built computer by Derek Stewart and Dennis Smith of D&D Systems in England. The Q40 and Q60 quickly became the "ultimate QL" and sold rather well considering how late in the life of the QL it became available.

Link to Claus Graf's Q40 Website