The Sinclair QL Forum

Some recent QL archaeology has produced this. It's called 'Life' and is by CAT Systems Ltd. It's very much in the style of Psion with the red initial screen and menu within the program.

I think it's similar to QL Life, perhaps. No idea. You can change some parameters and apparently move the cursor around, but it seems slow and quite buggy. Anyone heard of CAT Systems Ltd? I can find absolutely nothing online.

It looks like this: (no idea why 2 of the images have gone massive)

Interesting find, Chr$. Not seen or heard of this before.

I'll share it here, just trying to find more info first and also working out the best configuration/screen mode as sometimes it goes funny like it's mixing up mode 8 and 4.

Here's a qzip of CAT Systems 'Life'.

For some reason I can't get it to work properly again (in Qemulator). No matter what combination of RAM/ROM, with/without tk2 etc it always seems not to display properly and often crashes.

Hi Chr$,

I can only gte it to run in 128K with JS Roms or less, on Q-emulator.

I get weirdness like this. Odd, as it obviously worked fine for the screen above.

Probably because of the "Assembler" things, which are CALLed several times in the program.

Chr$ wrote:I get weirdness like this. Odd, as it obviously worked fine for the screen above.

Yes, that's what I get too.
And it seems to work only with Minerva, but not with JS

I think there is more to it than meets the eye. As far as I can see it makes use of the second screen, meaning Minerva is needed. And it seems to switch mode mid-screen, meaning that the top part is displayed in mode 4 and the actual life part is displayed in mode 8. Quite tricky and will not work in QemuLator, only on original 50Hz QLs (have yet to try). For QemuLator the best bet is to boot it F4 mode, making everything mode 8. Text won't fit then but will work okay enough.

OK, I had a little go with it on a real QL. There's a bug in the startup code which might make it stop with an error, as a workaround one can change line 9310 to "CALL address,0,-1". It should also work with QDOS under some circumstances as it not only switches colour mode mid-screen, the menu is always in SCR0 and only afterwards the screen is toggled, so the system variables are not overwritten or displayed. There is a dummy memory allocation at the start to try to reserve the rest of the screen, I still think it's safer to boot Minerva using F3.

The timing loop is off, so it displays like this for me: https://youtu.be/mDlT4fK3bGI
I did a ballpark tweak to the value at offset $52 to $825 and then it looked better (that value might toggle too late, but I didn't wait long enough for something to move to directly below the menu): https://youtu.be/R_0P3TAW4aY