Monthly Archives: December 2013

How To Repair Microdrive Cartridges

A user on QL Forum (Saltor66 – Salvatore Lasorella) has produced a video showing how to use liquid glue to consolidate the little felt pad on detriorating microdrive cartridges, to help stop it falling off its mounting and contaminating the insides of the cartridge with little bits of debris. This helps to extend the life of a cartridge long enough for you to have a chance to recover the contents. The method applies equally to Spectrum and QL microdrive cartridges. The page is in Italian and English:

http://apuliaretrocomputing.wordpress.com/2013/10/20/come-ripararare-le-cartucce-per-zx-microdrive/

SMSQmulator Latest

SMSQmulator 1.22 is out – it contains several bugfixes (and comes with smsqe 3.17). There’s a list of changes and bug fixes on the download site. SMSQmulator is, of course, the QL emulator for Java systems. You need Java version 6 or 7 on your system to run SMSQmulator, although this can be on various operating system platforms such as Windows or Linux.

Download SMSQmulator from:

www.wlenerz.com/SMSQmulator

SMSQ/E v3.17

Wolgang Lenerz writes:

“SMSQE 3.17 is out – it only corrects the bug when moving a pulled down window with transparency.”

To update your SMSQ/E just visit Wolfgang’s SMSQ/E page at:

www.wlenerz.com/smsqe

From this page, you can download a 1.2MB zipped file containing binaries of the various versons of SMSQ/E for Atari, Aurora, Gold Card, Q40, QXLand SMSQmulator. The zip file also contains various text files describing changes in the various versions of SMSQ/E, and some help regarding recompiling SMSQ/E if you wish to tinker with the sources.