Saturday, July 25, 2015

Vacation "Work"

It is vacation time this month and I have spent a lot of time with on of my passions, namely:
The Sinclair QL , or rather its operating system QDOS and its successor SMSQ/E.

The main quest has been to get a dedicated system. I don't have any original QL, they went away many years ago. SMSQ/E is available for many platforms, including Atari ST/TT. I have a Atari 1024STe so I picked that for my first test. Sadly the current builds of SMSQ/E didn't work on it. The testing resulted in more fun! I started to debug SMSQ/E using the sources and the Hatari emulator.

In the meantime I figured out a alternative. The most well known SMSQ/E capable emulators is  QPC . They recently became freeware and I encourage you to try them out. Since I wanted a machine that is dedicated to QL computing I opted for the older DOS QPC1. I found a Celeron 400Mz PC under my desk (!) that have a CF IDE adapter and runs DOS. I took the CF card and plugged it into my CF reader and extracted QPC1 to it from my Mac. It worked on first try in the DOS pc.

QPC1 doesn't multitask, it completely takes over the machine. That was exactly what I wanted.
I am currently busy with getting up a decent install of QL software, slow progress but I am getting there.



And on Atari (old smsq/e) :