Thursday 12 April 2018

Looking through old floppy disks

Here in QL Heaven there is a store of old commercial and PD floppy disks for the QL, both DD and HD along with a few ED. What is on them is mainly unknown. The floppy disk labels tend to indicate only the main content so there can be surprises sometimes. Looking through the disks for something else this intriguing disk was discovered:


It had not been well looked after. Initially it would not read on the ED drive on the Aurora but the HD floppy drives on the Q60 were up to the job.


 The file that was interesting was the smsq_con. What was this? Menuconfig showed that it was an original replacement screen driver for smsq/e for the Aurora and interestingly is seemed to suggest that some work had been done on the colour screen drivers even at that stage. How it should be used is unknown as there is no documentation. Could there be rudimentary 8 and 16 colour drivers in the file? Who knows.