SMSQE emulation on a Raspberry Pi

Not much is happening as the RPi has been converted to an XBMC box with iplayer, 4on demand, itv player and channel 5. Setting up internet TV with the RPi was a dream as was setting up the wireless connection and finding that the HDMI link to the TV could also transmit the TV control commands to the RPi. Need to get another RPi to try SMSQE and QDOS.

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.

Jan Jones Designer and Writer of Sinclair's QL SuperBASIC language

QL Heaven discovered yesterday that Jan Jones is still a writer, but not about the QL at all. To quote her


"I am, first and foremost, a writer of romance. I believe that everybody, no matter how stressful their life, is entitled to at least one happy ending."
 

 If it seems unbelievable here i sthe link to her web site Jan Jones Website

A Bit Of A Gap

QL heaven has been quite for most of last year. Lat month the latest QLToday and Quanta magazines were out.
Nothing terribly interesting in the content. QLToday featured some information about a floppy disk emulator sold by Rich Mellor. Interesting but does not address the age old problem of transfer of files between the QL and other systems. A bit of a lost opportunity there I think. In addition there was a further long article from Tony Tebby rubbishing every thing in computing that was not down to him. I am beginning to wonder if he is a bit more than  a bit eccentric. I hope QLToday does not feel the need to pad out the magazine with anymore of this angst derived stream of consciousness M$ directed diatribe. Its just not that interesting to us QL future enthusiast as QL Heaven. Pleased to see that Quanta are keeping up the work with colours and high resolution for the .pdf magazine.

Not that we at QL Heaven are fans of things M$, which gives me the opportunity to segue into a bit of advice for Civilisation IV fans who have "upgraded" their windows to Windows 7. I struggled to get this epic game to run under Civ IV. Consulting the web revealed many others with this problem. Windows 7 helpfully itself told me that this was a known problem, but it and the M$ site offered no advice. The Civ IV site was silent as well.
One bit of advice I found did strike me as reasonably helpful. It was to install direct X 9c and use the "compatibility mode" in Windows 7. OK downloaded and installed Direct X9c from Microsoft. Where was that dratted compatibility mode? Found on the properties menu for the game executable. Accessed via right click and down at the bottom of the list is properties item. Select this then choose the compatibility tab. OK I thought this is it. selected windows XP service pack 2 or 3 as it runs on that on my previous PC. As you no doubt have realised this did not work. The game could not find the DVD ROM in the DVD drive. After a bit of thinking I selected vista compatibility and behold it works fine. Interesting as vista did not exist when the game was written. Looks as if the vaunted compatibility mode is just a list of system tweaks dressed up previous versions of windows emulation. Its just a case of suck it and see with whichever so called previous version of windows you wish to try.

Still Off Topic

I will be back on QL topics soon. Had a spot of trouble getting the itouch toconnect to the home wireless network. Had a search on google and loads of cries for help there. Seems it is a common problem. Many solution suggested from resetting the entire itouch and starting from scratch, to resetting the itouch wifi settings to default settings, to WEP encrytion being a problem with itouches, to changing the network encryption algorithm, to DHS server setting incongruities, to updating the modem router software.

Well here is how I set it up after trying the simpler of the solutions from the apple site. No need to change encryption methods, or upgrade the modem router. What I did was switch off the network. All PCs , and the modem router. Next reset the itouch wifi settings to default : settings/general/reset/reset network settings. Then fire up the modem router but not any other part of the network. Once it has set itself up fir up safari which will ask to connect to the home network. Type in the WEP key in hexadecimal not ASCII. And that's it. You can now restart the rest of the network. itouch just likes to be first on the modem and home.

Enough off topic. Next time QLing in August 1989, 1999 and 2009.

Off Topic

Just got an itouch mp3 player. Is there a QL emulator app for this??