Dr. Jim's personal Sinclair showcase (includes some QL content!)

[TMD2003]

This might or might not be the right place for this, but here I go anyway..

There were some Spectrum-related webpages that I hosted some of my own stuff on, and it's about time it had an extensive rehash. So, over the last week or so, I've finally done it. Why it took me 12 years to start the project I will never know, but that's probably just explained by being me. I may not be fast, but I get there in the end.

I call it Spectribution, and it features:

- Every program I've written that has found its way onto the internet, whether it's given a full article on ZXDB, posted on the BASIC Dumping Ground, or just confined to this one page. It's anything from "quick and potentially useful bits and pieces", to the mighty Corona Capers.
- The "enhanced" type-ins that wormed their way onto WOS and ZXDB a while back (because I think WOS had an appeal to find some type-ins that had been done circa 2004 or so, and I offered my modified versions, seeing as that was what was available). These are being deleted here, and I'm hosting them on Spectribution instead, for those that are curious. I might package them all as a microdrive compilation at some stage.
- Some character sets and UDGs I've made over the past 20-odd years, some of which are from popular(ish) games, and which I didn't rip directly from the code, I made them all manually with screenshots and converting the pixels to binary. One of them (the Mighty Musical Character Set) can be found on the BASIC Dumping Ground.
- An archive of QL type-ins, divided into games and demos/utilities. I think this is useful seeing as we have no way of knowing if the Type Fantastic will ever be updated again, or if ZXDB (and maybe WOS) will start indexing QL software.
- Links to everything I've ever submitted to the RZX Archive.
- Everything you ever wanted to know (and a lot you didn't) about my history with Sinclair computers.

Things I plan to add when I get round to them:

- An archive of all my first forays into machine code;
- An archive of ZX80 type-ins - though this may end up becoming me sending all the ZX80 type-ins I have to Peter, Einar and the rest for proper preservation here - I get the impression that ZXDB hosting ZX80 titles is a relatively recent development. There are already quite a few at The Type Fantastic, and the archives for Sync have loads of them, only one of which has been typed in, and I'm going to take that on as a project at some stage.

Now, you see, I've even highlighted the QL bits and pieces in appropriate red and green!

[Derek_Stewart]

Hi,

The QL was not really designed to be a games machine, so that is probably why there is no support for User Defined Graphics (UDG). But Superbasic is extendable by writing new keywords in assembler or in compiled basic procedures or function with a compiler called Qliberator.

Another method is generate UDGs is to create the required graphics as part of a font.

The QL can use 2 Fonts, which can be switched in or out which needs some extensions called Toolkit 2 by Tony Tebby.

I was converting the Spectrum Football Manager by Kevin Toms for the Spectrum, using the BASINC BAS file export.

I was going to define the UDG and Spectrum block graphics has a user defined font. Switching the required graphics characters as required.

Doing the UDG graphics this way, may have a better chance of success, as later QL operating systems move the system variables to different locations than specified in examples quoted in ZX Computing and Sinclair User.