The background to my presence here
Posted: Sun Oct 11, 2020 4:32 pm
My QL story starts in April 2020. Actually, it doesn't - I'd had an old shareware copy of QemuLator kicking around on my hard drive since, probably, around 2003 when I first signed up at World of Spectrum (which explains some of the username). But I'd never used it, and I'd never had a reason to look into QL emulation until this year.
At the start of the dark days of Coronatarianism, one WOS user started a project to fill in as many of the blanks in The Type Fantastic as possible, given that the site owner, Jim Grimwood, is horribly ill and can't do it himself. After completing the issues of Sinclair Programs, Sinclair User and ZX Computing that I had when I was much younger, I took on the job of getting the Sinclair User listings completed - and found that there were QL SuperBASIC listings. Would this be a problem? I couldn't get that old QemuLator to run, and the only other options I knew of were ZEsarUX 8.0, which looks to have half the keyboard missing, and EightyOne 1.16, which only starts a QL screen with a mess of flashing lines, and I can't find any reason in the options why it would be doing so (even now). ZEsarUX has been updated to version 9.0 but is still a multi-multi-machine emulator with no focus on any one model (the author looks to be trying to cram in as many Sinclair and peripherally-related models as possible) and still isn't running, while EightyOne is now at version 1.18 and the QL option is still totally crippled. And as that's designed more as a ZX81 and ZX80 emulator, that's all I use it for.
In April, JimG was at least well enough to tell me how he'd tackled QL emulation - using QLAYW, and he showed some examples of five QL programs he'd already typed in from the later years of ZX Computing. I thought "how hard can it be?" - and soon found it wasn't as easy as I'd thought. QLAYW wouldn't work on the Windows 7 PC I'm on now, and as it said it was designed for Windows 2000 and XP, I tried it on a 21-year-old Compaq laptop running Windows 2000. To my surprise, it crashed with the same error report as it had on the Windows 7 PC.
The only option I've found that works has been to go back to the DOS-based QLAY 0.90 and run it through DOSBox. It works in that I can type in listings and save them to a virtual microdrive with an .MDV extension that's always the exact same number of bytes, or via QLAY's internal win2_ drive, which I can redirect to a specific folder that will contain the file I've just saved, with the filename truncated to eight characters, alongside QLAY.DIR. What I have no way of knowing at this point, is whether it's possible for any other QL emulator out there to load the files I've saved with QLAY - whether that means ZEsarUX or EightyOne, if I can ever get either of those to work properly, or (preferably) a standalone QL emulator that will work as easily as I've found Spectrum and ZX81 emulators to do (as well as, say, STeem, Vice, CaPriCe, and any others outside the Sinclair realm).
The main reason for all this is, I have compiled my work in April and JimG's into the start of an admittedly-small collection of QL type-in games, the further reasons for which will probably become clearer early next year. I would like to complete the type-ins this year, while I have the time to do so, but I would also like them to be easily accessible to everyone who's got about as much background in QL emulation as I have. This year, I've had to teach an American friend all about Spectrum emulation and my instructions could be as easy as "download and install Fuse from here, switch it to +3 mode, open this .dsk file, select Loader and you're done". If there's any way of doing the same for the QL, this would be great to know.
There is the further problem that, even for those who are fluent in the ways of DOSBox, running QLAY through it isn't ideal. In April I found a few sound test programs on Dilwyn Jones' site, including the one that plays a downwards "scale" - in the loosest possible sense of the term - so that I could get QLAY running at the correct speed. Essentially, this meant feeding the output from the sound card into another PC running an oscilloscope program and changing the values in QLAY.RC until BEEP 100000,15 produced a consistent 440 Hz... or as consistent as QLAY gets. Yesterday, while assessing what I'd typed in, and what JimG had sent me earlier (and while waiting for my registration to be accepted here), I had several other programs running - LibreOffice to enter the programs I'd assessed into a spreadsheet, GIMP to get screenshots of them all, Opera, Thunderbird (occasionally) and several other windows - and the pitch of the sound was not just noticeably lower, it was all over the place. Think of it as the equivalent of a bagpipe player (who we'll call Clive, and not after some bald ginger bloke from Cambridge who's just turned 80). When Clive changes his fingering on the pipes, because there's still air going through it, there's a scramble of extra rapid notes because Clive's fingers don't all change places instantaneously. QLAY was doing this, sometimes taking three or four dreadful attempts to get a note right without actually doing so. And if I changed focus to another window, the pitch dropped by a couple of octaves as the emulation suddenly ran a lot slower. Clearly, if I'm going to have to assess QL programs for their sound, QLAY - at least when running through DOSBox - is a blind alley. It's been useful so far, but I think I'm going to have to file for divorce and find an emulator that will provide a more realistic experience.
The first thing to find out will be how easy - or not - it is to transfer files between emulators. ZEsarUX and the so-far-unregistered QemuLator 3.3.1 I attempted yesterday spat the QLAY-derived .MDV file back at me without even attempting to recognise it. QemuLator also appears to lack an "Open file" option, quite bizarrely. ZEsarUX looks like it might only handle its own .ZSF memory-snapshot format, and that's not a viable option (and besides, it doesn't have a " key defined, so it'll be of very limited use anyway).
This is how it's going to be for a while - I am going to be asking a lot of noob-questions, though not right from the bottom of the pile because, as I say, I've had QLAY up and running and typing in 17 listings from Sinclair User has at least given me a start in both SuperBASIC and load/save operations. In the meantime, I am going to get the QL type-in games webpage up and running, and that'll take most of today, I suspect. I'll check back later to see what's going on.
At the start of the dark days of Coronatarianism, one WOS user started a project to fill in as many of the blanks in The Type Fantastic as possible, given that the site owner, Jim Grimwood, is horribly ill and can't do it himself. After completing the issues of Sinclair Programs, Sinclair User and ZX Computing that I had when I was much younger, I took on the job of getting the Sinclair User listings completed - and found that there were QL SuperBASIC listings. Would this be a problem? I couldn't get that old QemuLator to run, and the only other options I knew of were ZEsarUX 8.0, which looks to have half the keyboard missing, and EightyOne 1.16, which only starts a QL screen with a mess of flashing lines, and I can't find any reason in the options why it would be doing so (even now). ZEsarUX has been updated to version 9.0 but is still a multi-multi-machine emulator with no focus on any one model (the author looks to be trying to cram in as many Sinclair and peripherally-related models as possible) and still isn't running, while EightyOne is now at version 1.18 and the QL option is still totally crippled. And as that's designed more as a ZX81 and ZX80 emulator, that's all I use it for.
In April, JimG was at least well enough to tell me how he'd tackled QL emulation - using QLAYW, and he showed some examples of five QL programs he'd already typed in from the later years of ZX Computing. I thought "how hard can it be?" - and soon found it wasn't as easy as I'd thought. QLAYW wouldn't work on the Windows 7 PC I'm on now, and as it said it was designed for Windows 2000 and XP, I tried it on a 21-year-old Compaq laptop running Windows 2000. To my surprise, it crashed with the same error report as it had on the Windows 7 PC.
The only option I've found that works has been to go back to the DOS-based QLAY 0.90 and run it through DOSBox. It works in that I can type in listings and save them to a virtual microdrive with an .MDV extension that's always the exact same number of bytes, or via QLAY's internal win2_ drive, which I can redirect to a specific folder that will contain the file I've just saved, with the filename truncated to eight characters, alongside QLAY.DIR. What I have no way of knowing at this point, is whether it's possible for any other QL emulator out there to load the files I've saved with QLAY - whether that means ZEsarUX or EightyOne, if I can ever get either of those to work properly, or (preferably) a standalone QL emulator that will work as easily as I've found Spectrum and ZX81 emulators to do (as well as, say, STeem, Vice, CaPriCe, and any others outside the Sinclair realm).
The main reason for all this is, I have compiled my work in April and JimG's into the start of an admittedly-small collection of QL type-in games, the further reasons for which will probably become clearer early next year. I would like to complete the type-ins this year, while I have the time to do so, but I would also like them to be easily accessible to everyone who's got about as much background in QL emulation as I have. This year, I've had to teach an American friend all about Spectrum emulation and my instructions could be as easy as "download and install Fuse from here, switch it to +3 mode, open this .dsk file, select Loader and you're done". If there's any way of doing the same for the QL, this would be great to know.
There is the further problem that, even for those who are fluent in the ways of DOSBox, running QLAY through it isn't ideal. In April I found a few sound test programs on Dilwyn Jones' site, including the one that plays a downwards "scale" - in the loosest possible sense of the term - so that I could get QLAY running at the correct speed. Essentially, this meant feeding the output from the sound card into another PC running an oscilloscope program and changing the values in QLAY.RC until BEEP 100000,15 produced a consistent 440 Hz... or as consistent as QLAY gets. Yesterday, while assessing what I'd typed in, and what JimG had sent me earlier (and while waiting for my registration to be accepted here), I had several other programs running - LibreOffice to enter the programs I'd assessed into a spreadsheet, GIMP to get screenshots of them all, Opera, Thunderbird (occasionally) and several other windows - and the pitch of the sound was not just noticeably lower, it was all over the place. Think of it as the equivalent of a bagpipe player (who we'll call Clive, and not after some bald ginger bloke from Cambridge who's just turned 80). When Clive changes his fingering on the pipes, because there's still air going through it, there's a scramble of extra rapid notes because Clive's fingers don't all change places instantaneously. QLAY was doing this, sometimes taking three or four dreadful attempts to get a note right without actually doing so. And if I changed focus to another window, the pitch dropped by a couple of octaves as the emulation suddenly ran a lot slower. Clearly, if I'm going to have to assess QL programs for their sound, QLAY - at least when running through DOSBox - is a blind alley. It's been useful so far, but I think I'm going to have to file for divorce and find an emulator that will provide a more realistic experience.
The first thing to find out will be how easy - or not - it is to transfer files between emulators. ZEsarUX and the so-far-unregistered QemuLator 3.3.1 I attempted yesterday spat the QLAY-derived .MDV file back at me without even attempting to recognise it. QemuLator also appears to lack an "Open file" option, quite bizarrely. ZEsarUX looks like it might only handle its own .ZSF memory-snapshot format, and that's not a viable option (and besides, it doesn't have a " key defined, so it'll be of very limited use anyway).
This is how it's going to be for a while - I am going to be asking a lot of noob-questions, though not right from the bottom of the pile because, as I say, I've had QLAY up and running and typing in 17 listings from Sinclair User has at least given me a start in both SuperBASIC and load/save operations. In the meantime, I am going to get the QL type-in games webpage up and running, and that'll take most of today, I suspect. I'll check back later to see what's going on.