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.



Posted by at

2 comments:

  1. Marcel Kilgus13 April 2018 at 02:10

    Hmm, April fool's day is over, so I guess this must be real ;) I don't have much time right now, but can you send me the file to have a look at some time?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Artificer13 April 2018 at 06:54

      I can certainly send it to you, but I imagine that if someone had created early versions of colour drivers for the Aurora this would be common knowledge. The file is around 46k long contains a config block, key words for display modes. It locks up SBASIC on the Aurora when LRESPRed. The patch program likewise. Its puzzling.

      Delete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)