The Sinclair QL Forum

Hi,

this is a small goodbye to you guys here. As a last resort to get anything interesting into the QL FPGA core i wrote two tools. Both available at

https://github.com/mist-devel/mist-bina ... s/ql/tools

qlem2qlay converts qlem MDV images into QLAY format for usage with e.g. my MIST QL core.

mdvtool is amanipulation tool for qlay MDV images. It can do various checks like e.g. verifying the block table against the information stored in each sectors block header. It can erase images, rename them, export and import files. But most importantly it can import the contents of a zip file while keeping the exe header intact. I only used it one time to erase the contents from an existing MDV file and instead import the contents from gunner.zip. During import it automatically replaces all occurances of flp1_ by mdv1_. The resulting mdv image boots directly into the gunner game.

Maybe it's of use for you. Maybe one you will even find a way to make some extra money with it. Have fun!

That is a neat little tool - but why are you leaving us so soon?

It would be really neat if someone could track down whatever happened to Di-Ren and Robin Barker, and then get Fleet Tactical Command to run on the MIST - it would be a great example of what the QL can do (especially if we could find a way of connecting the MIST to the original QL or PC running a QL emulator)

Unfortunately Fleet Tactical Command is not freeware, and due to the way in which it is copy protected, it can only currently be used on an emulator with a floppy disk image (if you can find an original of course).

There are a couple of programs which can only work from floppy disk (due to copy protection), so I was wondering if you could implement some form of floppy disk image on MIST. Many programs also do not fit on a microdrive cartridge so the use of a microdrive image is not always the answer!

That's sure all possible without too much effort. But I don't see a benefit justifying this.

Is there not a demo version of FTC...

What is the license of mdvtool?

I would like to incorporate the unzipping into qubide-tools/qltools which are GPL.

As far as I have understand, Martin's FDI handler should work on MIST and images are easily created on PC with EMT4WIN. His handler is compatible with this PC software images. Or on a pure QL. Or on QPC. Whatever you want.

Ok, I would have preferred a native USB disk drive on MIST, but this was not the authors intention (see elsewhere here). We should accept this.

RWAP wrote:There are a couple of programs which can only work from floppy disk (due to copy protection), so I was wondering if you could implement some form of floppy disk image on MIST. Many programs also do not fit on a microdrive cartridge so the use of a microdrive image is not always the answer!

MIST wrote:That's sure all possible without too much effort. But I don't see a benefit justifying this.

The benefit of implementing floppy disk images is mostly to do with whether MIST can handle programs stored in more than 255 sectors (I am not sure if QLAY's .mdv format can handle that) - it has been quite a while since I used QLAY mainly because of getting files into the right format for use with the emulator....