A new user on the QL
Posted: Fri May 27, 2016 1:11 pm
So recently I got my hands on a reasonable amount of QL gear and started on my journey of discovery. Facing the ups and downs of using a QL.
Initially my experience with microdrive cassettes wasn't that bad, most of mine worked. Then after a week I noticed not all of them were working properly and then some later out right failed. Even a quick clean of the heads did nothing to fix the ailing tapes. Pretty sure the drives work fine, just the cassettes that are old and buggered.
Where microdrives this hit and miss when they came out? As a kid, I started out on the Spectrum+2 and C64 and missed this technology completely.
A couple of people have told me to give up on using the medium completely in favor of floppy disks. Is that how most people use their QL's these days? It just seems a little sad that one part of the machine is effectively left unused.
I was wondering what people use their QL's for, I gather programming is still popular by one or two. I've never really been able to break any ground with programming, but Quill has peaked my interest as a useful wordprocessor. Could see myself using that for a distraction free typing environment.
Will the software that allows you to read DOS floppies, run on a 512kb expanded, JM Rom QL?
And finally, did Psion ever release Chess for download?
Thanks to everyone who has helped me out this past week or two, its been really interesting, learning about this ill fated machine
Initially my experience with microdrive cassettes wasn't that bad, most of mine worked. Then after a week I noticed not all of them were working properly and then some later out right failed. Even a quick clean of the heads did nothing to fix the ailing tapes. Pretty sure the drives work fine, just the cassettes that are old and buggered.
Where microdrives this hit and miss when they came out? As a kid, I started out on the Spectrum+2 and C64 and missed this technology completely.
A couple of people have told me to give up on using the medium completely in favor of floppy disks. Is that how most people use their QL's these days? It just seems a little sad that one part of the machine is effectively left unused.
I was wondering what people use their QL's for, I gather programming is still popular by one or two. I've never really been able to break any ground with programming, but Quill has peaked my interest as a useful wordprocessor. Could see myself using that for a distraction free typing environment.
Will the software that allows you to read DOS floppies, run on a 512kb expanded, JM Rom QL?
And finally, did Psion ever release Chess for download?
Thanks to everyone who has helped me out this past week or two, its been really interesting, learning about this ill fated machine