The Sinclair QL Forum

mk79 wrote:

XorA wrote:Thread resurrection, but I guess there will not be an official release of uQLx with this in before my beard reaches my knees.

One caveat: the new QL-SD drivers don't support the BDI format anymore, it is all QLWA now.

Yes but sneakilly I can use the same support for qubide cards too

My QL-SD also doesnt have updated rom!

XorA wrote:My QL-SD also doesnt have updated rom!

Wow, okay. I tried to unzip the Minerva sources using this driver once. Gave up after many wasted hours.

mk79 wrote:

XorA wrote:Thread resurrection, but I guess there will not be an official release of uQLx with this in before my beard reaches my knees.

One caveat: the new QL-SD drivers don't support the BDI format anymore, it is all QLWA now.

The BDI interface has nothing to do with the filesystem used inside the image. It's just a simple, general interface for block devices under a QL emulator and could be used for QLWA as well as Qubide or anything else. Both Qemulator and UQLX support it. Sorry for reading this too late, is any sourcecode still needed?

By the way, no QL-SD hardware driver would run under UQLX anyway, be it QLWA (new) or Qubide (old) filesystem. The BDI interface does not emulate an SD card.

And it could be that the Qubide-derived BDI driver for UQLX/Qemulator is more reliable than the old QL-SD driver, as the low-level stuff is not in there.

Peter wrote:

mk79 wrote:

XorA wrote:Thread resurrection, but I guess there will not be an official release of uQLx with this in before my beard reaches my knees.

One caveat: the new QL-SD drivers don't support the BDI format anymore, it is all QLWA now.

The BDI interface has nothing to do with the filesystem used inside the image. It's just a simple, general interface for block devices under a QL emulator and could be used for QLWA as well as Qubide or anything else. Both Qemulator and UQLX support it. Sorry for reading this too late, is any sourcecode still needed?

By the way, no QL-SD hardware driver would run under UQLX anyway, be it QLWA (new) or Qubide (old) filesystem. The BDI interface does not emulate an SD card.

And it could be that the Qubide-derived BDI driver for UQLX/Qemulator is more reliable than the old QL-SD driver, as the low-level stuff is not in there.

I have just pushed my implementation to the sQLux github and it seems to be working. I havent given it heavy testing though. I put the BDI interface at the same address as used in Qemulator.

Where would I get this Qubide-derived BDI driver to test with? Ive been using the driver in the QLSD starter pack from dilwyn's site.

XorA wrote:Where would I get this Qubide-derived BDI driver to test with? Ive been using the driver in the QLSD starter pack from dilwyn's site.

That is the right place. You should also get the sources and the BDI specification there. For native driver development it was acctually quite helpful to have a defined interface on the native side of the emulation. The first target filesystem wasn't even Qubide, but the relatively little known QL-HD, which I used to develop QL-SD in the first place.

(QLWA has been tested for over 25 years and is now open source, so it makes little sense to still use QL-HD. But what I liked about that driver was that it's partially written in C. That allwowed me to pioneer and test the general SDHC and FAT32 support on which the later QL-SD and Q68 drivers were based.)