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.