The Sinclair QL Forum

Anyone know what it means when you copy a cart that all of a sudden it sounds like aliens are shooting me

Any ideas?

Thanks

Bill

I thought this was a QL game I'd not heard of!

retro_collector wrote:Anyone know what it means when you copy a cart that all of a sudden it sounds like aliens are shooting me

Any ideas?

Thanks

Bill

Assuming you mean zaps etc from the QL speaker (as opposed to weird mechanical noises from a jammed cartridge etc) it can mean a corrupt cartridge. Some systems choose to give asynchronous zaps from the speaker to indicate a write failure. My Super Gold Card sometimes does this when copying floppy disks and the copying fails. Although as I never use mdv's these days I don't know if the same applies.

Essentially an audible "bad or changed medium" error.

dilwyn wrote: Essentially an audible "bad or changed medium" error.

Not quite - after that audible warning, the system will retry - If it doesn't come back with a real "bad or changed medium" then, the retry succeeded and the audible warning can be understood as a thorough reminder to create a back-up.

And yes, I think I do remember this feature that came with newer Miracle cards and ROMs extends to microdrives.

Tobias

Thanks Tobias.

Bill

tofro wrote:

dilwyn wrote: Essentially an audible "bad or changed medium" error.

Not quite - after that audible warning, the system will retry - If it doesn't come back with a real "bad or changed medium" then, the retry succeeded and the audible warning can be understood as a thorough reminder to create a back-up.
Tobias

Backup - quite.
Don't think I''ve ever, ever had a disk survive the "Alien Laser".

This is a feature of the Level 2/3 disc drivers. Unlike earlier drivers these do writes asynchronously because that is much faster. But then this also means that the call that ordered the write has already returned, so the driver cannot return an error retroactively! On Windows you would get an error message box at this point, but the QDOS driver cannot easily do this so it just throws its hands in the air and emits this nasty sound.

Very often it just means that the medium was write protected by the way.

Thanks MK79

Bill

mk79 wrote:This is a feature of the Level 2/3 disc drivers. Unlike earlier drivers these do writes asynchronously because that is much faster. But then this also means that the call that ordered the write has already returned, so the driver cannot return an error retroactively! On Windows you would get an error message box at this point, but the QDOS driver cannot easily do this so it just throws its hands in the air and emits this nasty sound.

Very often it just means that the medium was write protected by the way.

Thanks Marcel. Hadn't thought of write protected media.

retro_collector wrote:Thanks MK79

Hey Bill, MK79 is Marcel Kilgus - our resident genius. And he's young too. God I hate him!

Cheers,
Norm.