Not a graveyard for old QXL cards (I’m sure we’d all be off to salvage QXLs and parts if it was!), but rather something Norman Dunbar has been up to, but don’t worry, it’s relatively benign. He writes:
I’m playing with QXL.WIN files, again! As part of something I’m working on, I needed a simple way to examine the internals of a qxl.win file in an easy manner. To this end, QXLDump was born.
At the moment I have a download for 64 bit Linux and 32/64 bit Windows only.
You can see a sample of my current win3 drive – which is a full set of the Sqlite 3 sources from some time back, at
http://qdosmsq.dunbar-it.co.uk/downloads/QXLDump/win3.html
The file was created with a random selection of options!
There is a verbose mode, not demonstrated, which hexdumps each and every block making up the directories, files etc – best avoided unless you are debugging a foible, or something similar!
The Read-me file is at:
http://qdosmsq.dunbar-it.co.uk/downloads/QXLDump/README.html
The Linux 64 bit download is at:
http://qdosmsq.dunbar-it.co.uk/downloads/QXLDump/QXLDump
The Windows download is at:
http://qdosmsq.dunbar-it.co.uk/downloads/QXLDump/QXLDump.exe
No additional libraries etc are required, everything is in plain vanilla C++ with the odd bit of the STL thrown in for good measure – thats the Standard Template Library.
As ever, source code is available at my GitHub location, and will be cloned into the SinclairQL repository as soon as I’m happy with it. I have a couple of minor changes to make, but nothing spectacular. The source is at:
https://github.com/NormanDunbar/QXLDump
which you can freely clone if you already use git, or, download as a zip file from this location:
https://github.com/NormanDunbar/QXLDump/archive/master.zip
The utility allows you to dump out the following:
The header
The map
The root directory
The free space list
Any datafile
Any directory
Any single block
And most of the above can be accompanied by a hexdump – if you are brave.
Output is only to HTML at the moment and I have no plans to make it text only, at the moment – but if you have that particular itch, feel free to scratch it and add the required code to do exactly that.