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) :



6 comments:

Matt said...

I was hoping to find SMSQ/E binary that worked. after a lot of trial and error, I chose mono high res and emutos and it displayed a garbled screen. I pushed a few keys and moved the mouse and it cleared. No idea what I changed to get that to work! Now to try and get a .win file to mount ??

Michael Grunditz said...

Matt, do you have your harddisk configure with qwa partitions? I think you need hd driver to set it up.

whynoFPU? said...

Hi, I know that this post is old, but I just found it because I'm trying to make SMSQ/E work on my ST. I only managed to get the Basic prompt but no desktop. I wondered if you had maybe a working disk image like you display here that you can give me, this would be wonderfull. Thanks :-)

whynoFPU? said...

or maybe you can explain me how to mount a .win container?

Michael Grunditz said...

whynoFPU:

You can't mount win container. You will need to create qwa partitions using HD driver, which I think still is commercial Atari software. After that you will need to format the partition from smsqe.

There is no desktop , unless you install desktop software.

I don't have a Atari right now, and no disc image. Sorry.

Good luck! There is a ql forum that is quite active. https://www.qlforum.co.uk/

whynoFPU? said...

ok, thanks for the hints!