Quanta Magazine for October and November

Quanta are properly in colour now. A great dollop of colour has markedly enhance Quanta magazine. And its 60 pages long with excellent content. Programming the use of Ver$ by Dilwyn Jones. How to start chess games from Launchpad, Chaos Theory and Duck Shooting. An excellent issue. Well done John Gilpin and Dilwyn Jones. I am looking forward to the updates Quanta web site with content management, hopefully soon.

Hot Swappable IDE CF card devices for the Qx0

It is said that hot swapping compact flash cards using IDE to CF adapters is not possible on the Q60. Most IDE CF adapters are not hot swappable anyway. Some are and tend to be more expensive and may not be suitable for the PATA type IDE drivers in smsq/e.

None the less, I believe there is a simple way to adapt these cheap non hot swappable CF adapters to hot swap by mounting the CF IDE device in a removable 3.5 inch hard disk caddy!

Ok the caddy needs to be opened to access the CF card unless you have a caddy with an easily removable face plate.

Obviously do not remove the caddy and CF card while accessing files on the disk inside. When the device is reinserted either with a new CF card or the same you must remount the IDE device with a Win_Drive command to tell the system that there is a fresh IDE device to be used, otherwise it will not be recognised. And thats all there is to it. I have been trying this on my Q60 for some weeks now and not noticed any corruption of the CF cards data.

USB WIZ

This has appeared as a topic of discussion on the ql-users list again. The last time was in 2007. The device looks as if it is useful. All that is really needed intially is an application to communicate with the device using its inbuilt protocols. Future development might include SMSQ/E drivers for the device to integrate access to the file systems. There are 2 aspects to this project that I wonder about. Firstly since 2007 I have had some time to think about what I might do with a USB device and it seems there is little use for it at the moment given the limitation of writing drivers for all possible bits of hardware that may be connected. Secondly - memory sticks. There the problem is that they will be of little use unless a FAT32 device driver is written for SMSQ/E. Having spent some time looking at applications to read and write from FAT formatted disks I am not at all hopeful that this can be done due to the complexity of the data structures on PC disks and that the data is reversed compared with data organisation under QDOS.

36 or 40?

What is the maximum length of a file name under QDOS or smsq/e? The official answer is 36 characters. I discovered that QLiberator had this embedded in it this afternoon when I tried to link into a compiled program a file with a filename of more than 36 character. When I reduced the length of the file name to 36 character it compiled file. Wait a minute I had a legal file on disk with a name length of more than 36 characters!!  This file could be viewed, edited, copied and moved etc with the QPAC2 files thing! Earlier I was trying to get the length of a few files using the TK2 FLEN function, and guess what, it balked at file names of more than 36 characters although these were seen as legitimate file names by the file thing of QPAC2. Confusing it is but it seems in some circumstances that 40 characters is OK. This gives a file name of 36 characters plus 4 for the primary device : Win1_ or flp1_. But these device names are 5 characters not 4 due to the underscore. That makes the maximum file name length leaving aside the primary device 35 characters not 36. Tell me if this is so. If it is yet another QDOS secret uncovered.

Hard Disks, QLToday and Tony Tebbie

Some more on hard disks. I came across an article in an old copy of QL Today that I had forgotten about. Volume 10 Issue 2 August/September/October 2005, page 34. The author, Derek Stewart recommends partitioning QWA partitions to 512MB size. This is in contradiction to the standard advice of using no more than 256MB sized partitions. I think he may eventually have to revise his advice as while SMSQ/E will seem to read larger partition sizes the problem lies in the 16 bit limit of the number of files. I have used 512MB hard disk once. It was fine until the space occupied came to more than 256MB then files did not get written to the disk.
Sadly this article from one of the experts perpetuates the myth that you can only get 3 usable QWA partitions from a disk, in fact 4 is possible, just not with makepart_exe.


The latest QL Today is out - hurrah. Its a bit thinner now having shed its English distribution end as it needs to be postable from Austria without being too expensive. There is an extensive and interesting article from Tony Tebbie about the creation of the QL which make you wonder how it was ever functional and why some of us are still fans. Besides this there were 2 interesting listings. Not yet on the QL Toady web site. I am off to find some OCR software as life is too short to type all these things in.

Finally QL Heaven is still hearing about the financial angst between traders. Have the traders helped keep the interest in the QL alive for the rest of us or have they hindered the development of QL Nirvana. Its an interesting question. Some undoubted have been both a help and a major hinderance. For example in the opinion of some, the builders of the Q40, who launched this successor hardware but made continued development  dependent on open source for smsq/e. Yet the originators of the current crazy licence smsq/e licence did the scene no favours either. Almost despite the licence there has been substantial development of smsq/e and in fact it is possible to download the sources, modify if you wish and compile the latest version of smsq/e for any configuration of the QL except for QPC2 (commercial secrets there) for free! Madness!

Tony Tebbie's article has given me the idea of looking back at a few more what ifs. Another promise, if I get the OCR I will post more listings here to sane typing fingers.

QWA Hard Disk Secrets

One thing that has irritated me is that the MKpart_exe supplied with the Q60 is unable to make more than 4 partitions on a hard disk. As each partition can be a maximum of 256MB this makes for colossal wastage of available hard disk space. The final irritation is that the 4th partition has to be set to the remainder of the disk regardless of the size of the remaining space. If there is more than 256MB left this makes for a dangerous partition for smsq/e which due to the 16bit addressing scheme and 65535 file number limit seriously runs the risk of bad things happening on this partition.

There has been little or no information regarding the format of the QWA partition structure up to now. And there is absolutely no information in the public domain regarding the partition table structure apart from what I am about to tell. Firstly lately this site

http://www.qdosmsq.dunbar-it.co.uk/doku.php?id=qdosmsq:fs:qlwa

has publish detailed information regarding the QWA disk structure of the QXL.win file.
According to the information I have from reading raw QXL.win files it is accurate.
Secondly a little rummaging around on the first sector of my Q60 hard disk has revealed this : the partition table of the Q60 is on the first 512 byte sector of the hard disk. No real suprise there. It contains an identifier in the first 4 bytes which is $6002. The remainder of the sector is 0 except for 4 partition table entries. The entries start at position $01C6. Each entry is only 12 bytes long. The type of partition is identified by the first 4 bytes which are 1QWA. The next 4 bytes are the start sector of the partition and the last 4 bytes are the length of the partition in sectors and thats it.

The postion of the partition table is not movable within the sector. The first entry has to commence at $01C6. Table entries are editable with a program such as WinEd and so the last partition with its daft size set by MKpart_exe  can be edited to a maximum of 256MB.

Thats all for now but there is more to come on hard disk partitions.

QL Quill Adventure Creation System

A copy of this on microdrive cartridge just went for £38.00 on ebay. That is more I think than new. Who would buy this. I remember the version for the Sinclair Spectrum from many years ago. While it was OK it was limited to text only. What do collectors do. Do they have black box QLs as these are the only systems that can read the microdrive cartridges. The tape in the cartridges must be 20+ years old, so it won't last forever. Buying microdrive software cannot be thought of as a longterm investment.

If anyone knows what collectors do with this sort of stuff let me know. Are there standalone microdrives that plug into USB ports on PCs for transfer of the data. Should I expect a swathe of new text adventures released into QL Heaven