QL USER type-in programs

[dilwyn]

Well, from what you describe, it's excactly behaving as it should.

98403 (or $18063) is the QL's display control register. Bit 1 (the value 2) blanks the display, bit 3 (value 8) switches between a MODE 4 and MODE 8 screen, while value 0 switches back to MODE 4 and an enabled display. It's very unlikely these POKEs would work on anything but a real QL or a true QL emulator. It's also very likely that what you describe as a crash is actually simply a disabled display.

Poke 98403,2 disables the screen ... but it never gets enabled again
I thought it should work on QEmulator
Well, back to digging - it might be a problem in other part of the code ...

I have QemuLator 3.3 installed, with JS ROM. On that system, POKE 98403,2 disables the screen. POKE 98403,0 re-enables the screen (OK, you have to type it blind but it works)

Where I do run into a problem is POKE 98403,8 when the emulator is in mode 4, followed by a MODE 8 command, at that point keyboard response stops (although a ctrl-space will still print Not Complete' to screen).

The POKE command only seems to change the hardware mode - QDOS doesn't realise the screen mode has changed and continues to write to it as though it's still in the other mode.

Probably easier to just do away with that poke, Andrei, and let the screen flash etc as the program changes modes with regular MODE commands. At least until debugging is finished.

[Pr0f]

The poke of the screen register will not change the screen mode in qdos - only for the hardware

[Derek_Stewart]

Hi,

Is it worth starting a project to type in all the QL World Microdrive Exchange programmes?

I have been typing in some assembler programmes, but maybe I should start at the first issue and type the programmes in.

I do not think the listings can be OCRed, due to the way the magazines have been scanned.

Is Got Hub a good idea to centralise this?

[Andrew]

Hi,
I do not think the listings can be OCRed, due to the way the magazines have been scanned.

I OCRed them with ABBY FineReader - and corrected the result also in ABBY. It seems to be the easiest way to do it, as ABBY will present you each scanned row and the ocr-ed row, so it is easy to keep track and correct it.
But nevertheless it is a bit of work - Stellaris took me 6 hours to complete - the font used was horrible - variable width font size 8 with several letters looking the same ( i 1 l - : ; . etc.) made it impossible to understand how many spaces were inserted in a PRINT statement.
I also have a fairly complete collection of QL World and tried to re-scan - but some magazines have very thin translucent pages and when scanned the writing on the opposite page gets visible and this messes up the OCR process.

[dilwyn]

Hi,

Is it worth starting a project to type in all the QL World Microdrive Exchange programmes?
I have been typing in some assembler programmes, but maybe I should start at the first issue and type the programmes in.
I do not think the listings can be OCRed, due to the way the magazines have been scanned.
Is Got Hub a good idea to centralise this?

As Rich mentioned, and Andrew found to his cost, half the fun of the QL User listings are typing them in and hunting down those typos and bugs!

I'd be happy to try adding a page for the type in listings if nobody's willing to co-ordinate them on Github. I suppose we have to be wary of copyright issues, I know one or two slipped through onto my website which later turned out to be QL magazine listings and MDV exchange stuff.

[Derek_Stewart]

Hi,
I do not think the listings can be OCRed, due to the way the magazines have been scanned.

I OCRed them with ABBY FineReader - and corrected the result also in ABBY. It seems to be the easiest way to do it, as ABBY will present you each scanned row and the ocr-ed row, so it is easy to keep track and correct it.
But nevertheless it is a bit of work - Stellaris took me 6 hours to complete - the font used was horrible - variable width font size 8 with several letters looking the same ( i 1 l - : ; . etc.) made it impossible to understand how many spaces were inserted in a PRINT statement.
I also have a fairly complete collection of QL World and tried to re-scan - but some magazines have very thin translucent pages and when scanned the writing on the opposite page gets visible and this messes up the OCR process.

I used to use ABBY FineReader 11 PRO, but since I hardy use Windows, the Linux equivalent software does the same job.

I use SCAN2PDF for scanning, image manipulation, OCR with Tesseract OCR engine. All this is open source and work really well.

But any major cleaning of scanning noise, can be removed with GIMP.

I only use Windows for some CAD programmes, bit there are Linux alternatives that are licence free.

With regards to the copyright of the QL World Microdrive Exchange, David Batty seems to be involved with the ownership, but always says he is too busy to look into the issue.

I wrongly assumed, if the QL World magazines can be scanned and made publically available, then the listing are freely available.

On between soldering PCBs, adapters, I might type all the QLW MDV XChange. If there is copyright issues, I keep them private.

[tofro]

[
I also have a fairly complete collection of QL World and tried to re-scan - but some magazines have very thin translucent pages and when scanned the writing on the opposite page gets visible and this messes up the OCR process.

It often helps to back the page you want scanned with a sheet of black card, at least it does with my scanner. The scanner adapts the exposure to the darker page and all looks good.

[Andrew]

It often helps to back the page you want scanned with a sheet of black card, at least it does with my scanner. The scanner adapts the exposure to the darker page and all looks good.

I tried with a white carboard, but the results were not satisfactory. I will try with a black one! Thank you for the tip!

[Andrew]

If there is copyright issues, I keep them private.

I am sure that there will be no copyright issues. There is no money to me made with those programs. Well, will any QL software...

[Derek_Stewart]

Hi,

I will start typying the programmes from the start of QL World.

Maybe this spark my interest in programming again.