Abandonware Revisited

Back in 2009 this blog posted a rant about abandonware for the QL. This is one of the most frequently viewed posts indicating a general interest in the subject. The good news about abandonware is that the situation has improved dramatically since 2009. This last year saw the release of even more formerly commercial programs as freeware including Qmenu, QLiberator, QDock, QTImage, QPTR, QBase, SuQcess, QLAWK, DISA as far as QLHeaven is aware. There are probably more including 292 games.

The QL scene has been particularly buoyant with the release of a new hardware QL, the Q68, and updates to SMSQ/E, SMSQumlator, and uQLx. The release of a new Qubide driver with also runs on the Q60, and a revamp of the ubiquitous Toolkit2. New software has also been forthcoming including QLWarz, QXLwinreader, sbtohtml, Hexa-puzzle, plus updates to other programmes including Photon, MediaManager, Quill, PCB Design, QcdEze and more.

All the above information has been gleaned from a quick run through of Dilwyn Jones site updates for 2017 of which there have been 72 update entries often with multiple updates.

It is amazing that a 1980s computer and it's OS that had a commercial life of 3-4 years is still evolving.

Felice Anno Nuove

Bonne annee

Happy New Year
 

Great QDOS/SMSQ/E Download Sites

In the QL Forum there has been talk of new black box noobs to the QL world. So if any read this blog,  here are the best, in the opinion of QL Heaven, download sites for free QL software, listed with the name of the site owner. Click on the link.

1. Dilwyn Jones

2. Thiery Godefroy

3. Wolfgang Lenerz
     smsq/e
     personal software
     smsqmulator

4. Bob Spelten

5. George Gwilt

6. London QL + Quanta Group

7. Daniel Terina

8. Marcel Kilgus


And then there are some that are group efforts : Black Phoenix
                                                                             The Repository

Finally the on line SBASIC/SuperBasic manual

SMSQ/E 3.32 AND FAT32 QXL.win DEVICE

This new facility is an excellent addition for Qx0 users. Back up of Qx0 hard disks and transfer of their contents to other QL systems has been problematic up to now. QPC2 uses the QXL.win file as hard disk, Supergold card QLs  would use the QUBide hard disk interface, while the disk structure of the Qx0 hard disk was based on the Atari hard disk conventions. Three incompatible systems. Here at QL Heaven the Q60 hard disk was originally backed up to compact flash cards via a CF reader, and then in addition it was copied to external hard disks via a caddy system. Both of the hard disk IDE slots on the primary ISA card are attached to caddies to allow swapping of IDE disks, not hot swapping however. Latterly the contents of the Q60 hard disk were exported to a QPC2 QXLwin file via the serial port to a USBwiz device. This was a magical system but never entirely stable or compatible with all file handling programs so the transfer was somewhat hard work.

Now there is the FAT32 QXL.win device. This is at an early stage of development but works just fine. QLHeaven can report the trouble free transfer of the entire contents of the Q60 hard disk to a QXL.win file masquerading as Win5_. A FAT 32 CFcard was used simply because one and a CF card reader were to hand. Below is the card reader sitting inside the caddy.

Below is a view of the caddies on the Q60. Find SMSQ/E 3.32 here

Digital C

Digital C is a version of small C that was sold by Digital Precision up to and including the closing sale of the QL Collection back in the early to mid 1990s if memory serves QL Heaven correctly.
The collection comprised 10 disks containing zipped copies of a digital precision programs and their manuals. Digital C is now freeware and can be downloaded from Dilwyn Jones site. The sources are also available.

Digital C was QLHeaven's easy introduction to C programming. Digital C although complex was easier for the tyro to get in to that the more powerful C68 package. QL Heaven is a 14 day C programmer. A book was bought titled teach yourself C programming in 21 days. QLHeaven got to day 14, skipped the rest and got down to programming.

Some screen savers and a program to display some graphic file formats were the results. Yesterday checking through the QL sites bookmarked in QLHeaven's browser to remove those that had been taken down, a post on Tim Swenson's site caught the eye. A smsqe-zine  from earlier this year where Tim Swenson had been playing around with Digital C and found that Digital C could only use the standard QL colours. This is not actually the case as Digital C contains functions to access QL Traps including trap#3. So here is a Digital C program running on a Q60 with grey and brown for its paper, ink and border colours. Why these colours were chosen is now beyond the ken of QLHeaven. Anyway here are some pics.