The Sinclair QL Forum

Not sure if this is the right place to ask such a question, but is the I2C interface on the Q68 available through a trap call mechanism, like the one on Minerva ?

Or is it accessible only as a direct hardware port at the current time?

BTW - the manual looks excellent

Would it be worth having one sdcard set up for QDOS and another for SMSQ/E, then you could just keep swapping them round to use what you wanted. Or is that daft?

Pr0f wrote:Not sure if this is the right place to ask such a question, but is the I2C interface on the Q68 available through a trap call mechanism, like the one on Minerva ?

Not yet. I got in touch with Tony Firshman and Laurence Reeves about this.

However, I successfully tested the Q68 with the original I²C Analogue interface from TF Services: That was by a C program directly accessing the hardware registers.

vanpeebles wrote:Would it be worth having one sdcard set up for QDOS and another for SMSQ/E, then you could just keep swapping them round to use what you wanted. Or is that daft?

In principle that makes sense, and I actually have different cards for QDOS Classic, Minerva and SMSQ/E. However, an unchanged original QDOS oder Minerva would not work on the Q68 (obviously you'd need at least an SDHC driver - no microdrives anymore). But I do not plan to release my immature versions of QDOS Classic and Minerva anytime soon.

At the current stage of testing, it does not look like QDOS Classic or Minerva bring significant compatibility advantage over SMSQ/E on the Q68. Lots of old programs work under Q68 SMSQ/E, e.g. Psion Chess, Cuthbert in Space, Spook. And those already tested which don't work, also don't work under the older operating systems. Most issues with older software on the Q68 don't seem OS-related, but have to do with device names and paths (the "SUB" extension is very helpful in this regard), amount of memory, speed, copy protection.

I was assuming you mean QDOS for Q68... or do you mean a card that runs on both an original QL (with QDOS + QL-SD) and Q68 (with SMSQ/E)?

Ah, it sounds like it's time I got to grips with SMSQ/E! The first thing I will do, is see if ACT works, and that I can compile my game with it!

I guess "ACT" has to do with adventures, but it is one of those three letter acronyms which are not obvious to me. Is "ACT" an available piece of software?

It's the Adventure Creator Toolkit that I'm using to make my game

vanpeebles wrote:It's the Adventure Creator Toolkit that I'm using to make my game

Hi,

I looked at my copy of ACT from the DP Collection. After sorting out the badly compiled ZIP archive, which had the device names included in the ZIP file.

I ran the Captain_mate task. OK. BUt I have no experience in using ACT.

If Q68 DISP_MODE 1 (512x256) 4 Colours, is used then this is QL compatible mode, so I expect most well written QL software to run.

But as you remember with MInerva, not all DP software was well written.

I have not included ACT with the Q68, as I think it is still Copyright.