The Sinclair QL Forum

Hello,

I am just starting with the QL. Got one unexpanded off eBay, and added to it a vDrive. Seems to be working fine so far.
I went over to http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/psions/index.html and downloaded the "Quill V2.35 for microdrives".
Expanded the archive on to my hard drive, and mounted the directory on Qemulator.
when I do : 'lrun mdv1_boot' the red spash screen of Quill appears and over it an error saying : 'At line 8 bad parameter'

So I made an empty .MDV on the QL with the vDrive and copied all the files on the Quill directory to it using the emulator.
Did the setup of the vDrive to load that MDV on to vdrive 1 (I have vMap installed with the option for all drives being vDrives), and ran the same command.
Same error. How do I execute the program ? I tried giving a file name after like 'lrun mdv1_boot, "mdv1_test.doc", but same error.

Thanks,
Regards

You fell into a common pitfall and want to read this.

There's an even easier way in this instance. See further down on Dilwyn's page, there are versions for vDrive. Those are plain unzipped .mdv files that you can just put on your vDrive SD card, assign it to a vDrive in the usual way and away you go.

Thanks for your replies.

I read the PC-QL file transfer page, and got the impression that I wont be able to use unzip on the QL, because mine is 128K.
Also the PC program to transfer files only works on floppies, and I only have a vDrive.

I will be trying to use the vDrive specific images on the psion apps page, and see how it goes.
But when I want to put zipped software in the QL, I am not seeing any way other than UNZIP on the QL, but with 128k only I will not be able.
The only way I see , is to use a emulator with more memory and unzip the files there and copy them to a MDV that will then be used on the vDrive.
In the link, I see mentioned the dd command. But that is only to write the .img files on floppies right ?

As for an emulator with more memory, I think I are there any free alternatives to Qemulator ?

Thanks,
Regards

You can use mdvtool to go directly from a .zip to a .mdv file.

https://github.com/mist-devel/mist-bina ... ls/mdvtool

I downloaded and built the mdvtool, and converted the qull235.zip to a mdv.
Put it in a SD card prepared for the vDrive, and now I get past the splash screen. When it starts to render the editor screen, it draws the header, and after that errors out with the message 'Unable to start Quill'.
I then tried the vDrive version and it loaded fine.
I went back to trying to run the version created from the zip, and after adding a blank cartridge on vDrive #2, it loaded fine.

So, lesson learned. I will now try to explore more software for this neat machine.

Thanks for the help

QEmulator is able to be run with 384k of memory, even in its free version. That should be good to run unzip on most of the programs that would actually run on your unexpanded QL. Otherwise you might also use other emulators like QPC or SMSQmulator.

Hi,

Why not do ax Chr$ suggested, downliad the vDrive .mdv file for the Psion programs on the same web page.

Just put the mdv file on a SD Card and load up with vDrive.

No need to mess around with zip files.

Derek_Stewart wrote: ↑Mon Nov 14, 2022 10:35 pm Hi,

Why not do ax Chr$ suggested, downliad the vDrive .mdv file for the Psion programs on the same web page.

Just put the mdv file on a SD Card and load up with vDrive.

No need to mess around with zip files.

Quill 2.35 does actually require a blank cart in mdv2 to start I believe. I always forget that.

I have been insisting on the zip conversion process, because I may want to convert other software in that format, that does not have any vDrive versions.