Saturday 17 December 2011

Debugging Listings and the Future is Black

Two ideas in  one post. QL Heaven has been unable to post for a while thanks to BT (British Telecom for non UK readers). QL Heaven recently moved to BT's Infinity Broadband service. Up to 41 MB downloads and an uncapped connection. Cable connection not required. It was great until the outage, only a few weeks after the connection had been set up. 5 days no service despite 4 conversations with the "help line service" which is based outside the UK. Eventually an engineer was promised and arrived. It took the engineer half a day to fix the problem which was something to do with the frequencies in the fiber optic cables, ie nothing to do with QL Heaven at all.

Debugging

Problems aside QL Heaven has been trying to debug the 3D noughts and crosses listing on the basis of run the program and see where it fails and try to pick out the bug from the code running. This is proving somewhat inconclusive. QL Heaven has identified a number of typos that have made problems but many remain. Is there a structure or scientific way to debug programs. QL Heaven has decided the logical way to proceed now is to print out the typed in listing and compare it line by line with the QL World listing. Is there any6 simpler way to sort this out?

The Future is Black

On the QL user listing Peter Graf has been describing his progress with installing a SD card reader in one of the MDV slots of a basic QL. This has generated much interest. Memory Lane computing is also progressing with a ROM slot SD card reader project for black box QLs. The future is black.

A SuperGold card replacement is now definitely needed.

Additionally the Aurora replacement motherboard has a ROM slot. This slot was backwards compatible when the Aurora was launched baut could need an adapter for ROM modules that was available from QUBBESoft PD at the time Aurora was launched. QUBBESoft has stopped trading some time ago. Non the less the details should be obtainable. Imagine an Aurora board with SD card hard drive in the ROM slot installed in an original QL case and able to display on modern TFT monitors as the Aurora display sizes are compatible with these unlike most bits of QL hardware.

A SuperGold card replacement is now definitely definitely needed.

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