The Sinclair QL Forum

Hi

I have this up and running. I am using Q-emuLator registered version with Minerva under Windows. After downloading the zip file, this was moved into Q-emuLator’s win4_ directory. The file was then unzipped with ... EX UNZIP,#1; “-d ram6_ win4_libguide_zip”. After LOADing ram6_boot, line 1080 was amended to read device$ = ‘ram6_’. The program works perfectly, with no problems at all.

With QPC2, this only seems to work with DATA_BIN_original – it doesn’t work with DATA_BIN. So, change line 1100 to read LBYTES device$ & 'data_bin_original', addr. When I unzipped the file the resulting filenames contained dot extensions. These dots need to be changed back to underscores. It is necessary to do this because the exe files refer to the file libguide_dbs by name. The names can be converted with RENAME, like this ... RENAME “ram6_boot.dv4” TO “ram6_boot_dv4”. All the files with dots need to be converted.

Once up and running, the first record is shown, which is that of Lee Privett’s CAD program, described as “One of the best CAD’s we have, & just about the easiest to use.” In my experience of using this, it needs to be run at Original QL speed. With QPC2, I suppose the SLUG command will have to be used to slow the emulation down.

Michael

Please try this, also done on a MAC, you will need to scroll down on some of the images

http://www.qlforum.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=696

EmmBee wrote:Hi

I have this up and running. I am using Q-emuLator registered version with Minerva under Windows. After downloading the zip file, this was moved into Q-emuLator’s win4_ directory. The file was then unzipped with ... EX UNZIP,#1; “-d ram6_ win4_libguide_zip”. After LOADing ram6_boot, line 1080 was amended to read device$ = ‘ram6_’. The program works perfectly, with no problems at all.

With QPC2, this only seems to work with DATA_BIN_original – it doesn’t work with DATA_BIN. So, change line 1100 to read LBYTES device$ & 'data_bin_original', addr. When I unzipped the file the resulting filenames contained dot extensions. These dots need to be changed back to underscores. It is necessary to do this because the exe files refer to the file libguide_dbs by name. The names can be converted with RENAME, like this ... RENAME “ram6_boot.dv4” TO “ram6_boot_dv4”. All the files with dots need to be converted.

Once up and running, the first record is shown, which is that of Lee Privett’s CAD program, described as “One of the best CAD’s we have, & just about the easiest to use.” In my experience of using this, it needs to be run at Original QL speed. With QPC2, I suppose the SLUG command will have to be used to slow the emulation down.

Michael

I have spent all day on this today and apart from fixing one minor bug got nowhere.

The situation is that the Library Guide only works with QemuLator in the following scenarios:

Boot direct into the Library Guide on Minerva 1.97 (the only version of Minerva I can get it to run on)

JM, JS ROMs: Says it "Cannot open 'flp1_libguide_dbs' as a database (-15) Press Eenter"

QemuLator+SMSQE 3.13 (only tried QemuLator specific version from Daniele's website). SOMETIMES the Library Guide works, sometimes it gives the above error message. If it does, try again, sometimes it works second time around (??)

QPC2 4.02 : works fine

QL with JS ROM and Minerva ROM 1.97: works fine

The version with the minor change has been uploaded to the Quanta website. After spending a lot of time on this today I have now given up any hope of getting any further and will ask Norman, who wrote it originally, to have a look to see if he has any ideas.

It is probably also worth dropping an email to Daniele Terdina, as it suggests a potential issue with q-emulator if it works on an original QL with JS ROM...

Afternoon all,

I don't get here much, so please email me if you have something to add - norman (at) dunbar (hyphen) it (dot) co (dot) uk.

I wrote the DBAS based version of the library guide many many many years ago, using the DBAS database system and C68.

I've had a conversation with Dilwyn, by email, on this matter and the only way I can reproduce the problem on QPC 3.33 or QPC 4.00 running on Linux under Wine, is to forget to load the data_bin file.

The error you are seeing, "cannot open .... as a database (-15)" is exactly what you will see if data_bin has not been loaded, or has not loaded "properly". (Not sure that's possible though!)

The C code is pretty simple:

* Open the file first as a normal C FILE using fopen with the mode set to "rb" (Read only, binary).
* If this fails, display an error saying that "cannot open libguide_dbs" and the error code. This is NOT the error message you are seeing.
* Convert the C FILE* (FILE pointer) into a QDOS channel id.
* Pass that channel id to the DBAS routine fsd_open to do whatever DBAS does to make an already open file into a database.
* If fsd_open faild, display "cannot open libguide_dbs as a database (nnn)" - and this is exactly what you are seeing, with nnn replaced by the error returned from fsd_open.

So, it looks like either DBAS doesn't like running on Qemulator, or, Qemulator may have introduced a bug whereby some MC6800x instruction is failing to get emulated properly and is causing DBAS to barf; or DBAS is being run on a system with a much too modern operating system version and that is causing the problem.

I'll do my best to help, but if anyone has a more recent version of DBAs than the old old old version I'm using in the libguide, that might be useful. Assuming, of course, that there is actually one in existence and that the function calls, parameters and/or internals have not changed.


Cheers,
Norm.
norman (at) dunbar (hyphen) it (dot) co (dot) uk.

By the way, the source code should be available from Quanta, I know I sent it to Roy Brereton many years ago, there are two versions libguide and libadmin, generated from the same source files. Libguide is read only while libadmin is read write and has options for admins.

Cheers,
Norm.

Evening all,

I have set up a Windows XP Virtual Machine on my Linux laptop, running under VirtualBox, and installed the trial version of QemuLator 3.1.2 on it.

I downloaded the Libguide zip file from the Quanta web site.

With the zip file extracted and the folder it lives in attached as mdv1_ I loaded the libguide_exe file into RAM and SEXEC'd it back to mdv1_ with a data space of 8192 bytes - obvioulsy, windows files have no data space and this allows QemuLator to create whatever it does in the file "header" to make the file executable again.

Running QemuLator with the default JS Roms, results in never being able to open the database as a database. This is the case with RAM set to 128Kb or 384 Kb.

However, running with the Minerva ROM and either 128 Kb or 384 Kb RAM, results in the correct execution of the program, always.

I am unable to make it fail to run with Minerva and equally unable to make it open the database with the JS ROMs.

I have managed exactly this outcome with both versions of the data_bin file - the old original one, and the new (larger) one supplied in the zip file.

I'm not sure where we will go from here.

HTH

Cheers,
Norm.

Hi Norman,

I think the best solution would be to use Minerva, rather than JS-ROMS.

Thanks for all your efforts on this; I've not had chance to explore this yet (exam marking and Landrover rebuilding is my priority right now), but I hope to give it a try over the weekend.

Once again, thanks for all the hard work...