On 9 May 2021, I tagged release 0.1.0 of OqtaDrive, simply titled “first alpha release”. It was a hobby project that had sat on the shelf for a while, until discussions over at World of Spectrum revived it: an Arduino Nano pretending to be a bank of eight Sinclair Microdrives, for the ZX Spectrum with Interface 1 as well as the QL. Five years and 34 releases later, time for a look back.
Microdrives First
The core idea hasn’t changed since day one. The Nano is just a protocol converter. With only 2KB of RAM, it can’t hold a 144KB cartridge, so it continuously streams the data over a 1Mb/s serial link to a daemon written in Go, running on your PC or a RaspberryPi Zero. The daemon does the heavy lifting, and that’s where most new features landed (more about the beginnings).
2021 was about getting the basics solid: auto detection of Spectrum and QL, co-existing with real Microdrives, an installer, and a first web UI. Thanks to Tom Dalby open-sourcing Z80onMDR, snapshot files (and later TAP files) can be loaded directly into a virtual drive. Tom also designed several PCBs and 3D printed cases, from a tiny micro version to a standalone unit with a Pi on board. In October 2021, OqtaDrive went on display at the Vintage Computing Festival Berlin.
The following years brought the move to Codeberg, ready-made setup images, upgrades from the browser, controlling OqtaDrive from the Spectrum or QL itself, searching and loading software straight from ZXDB, a file system implementation for editing cartridges, and even CP/M support.
Then Came the Network
The Interface 1 and the QL don’t only talk to Microdrives. They also come with the Sinclair Network, a simple LAN from the early 80s. With release 0.7.0 in April 2024, OqtaDrive became an Internet gateway for it. Add one transistor and four resistors to the adapter, connect to a hub server, and a friend on the other side of the world can LOAD *"n";18 what you just sent with SAVE *"n";24. No modifications, no extra software on the vintage machine.
Since then, private on-demand networks were added, also a flat addressing scheme for network games, chat and echo services on the hub, and with 0.8.4, a major round of stability fixes under heavy load. Big thanks to Hans Kramp for finding that issue and relentlessly stress testing the fix!
Join In
If you have a Spectrum or QL, build an OqtaDrive, connect to the hub, and say hello in the chat.
Happy Micro driving!