Author Archives: Dilwyn

Adventure Shell

David Denham’s port of the late Tim Hartnell’s Adventure Shell is now available to download from the Adventure Games section of my website.

Written in BASIC, this is a simple package to help create new adventure games, simply by altering names and descriptions in an easy to edit and well documented BASIC program. Adventure itself consist of one BASIC program and a Quill _doc file, that’s all. Free to use and without restriction other than naming the author, this package provides a simple way to author new adventure games without having to learn any new game creation software.

As supplied, it’s already a very simple playable no-frills game.

The finished game is a SuperBASIC program – compile it with Turbo or Q-Liberator if you wish.

Hopefully, users of this package will send in example games created to make available on the page.

Download Adventure Shell from http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/games/adventures/index.html

QL Adventure Shell

QXLdump

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.

QMake Released For Free

Marcel Kilgus secured agreement to release the QMake tool from Bernd Reinhardt for free.

QMake is a “make” tool which basically takes a linker file as input, collects all files that make up the executable and assembles any where the source is newer than the relocatable file. You can also add dependencies like “reassemble win1_fu_asm if win1_keys_bar changes”

QMake

Download QMake and PDF manual free of charge from https://www.kilgus.net/smsqe/qmake/

DISA3 Manual

In a previous issue we reported on the fact that DISA3 disassembler had now been freely released, but bemoaned the fact that no manual was available. Now I am happy to be able to report that thanks to Dave Westbury (who provided a scanned copy) and Marcel Kilgus, one is finally available.

Download the PDF file from Marcel’s blog at https://www.kilgus.net/smsqe/disa/

DISA 3 disassembler manual

Connect

Frank Dibowski has released a Hexa-Puzzle game called Connect. Pointer driven and running in 16-bit colour modes (so only runs on QPC2 and possibly SMSQmulator), the aim is to move hexagonal cells across the board to combine 4 or more cells with the same faces to get one cell with a new face. The game finishes if the hexagonal cell map is full. You take and set a face with ‘hit’, ‘do’ takes the face back!

Connect Game

Download Connect free of charge from http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/games/index.html

Frank has also released updates to three of his existing pointer driven QL games – Puzzel, Same and Sudoku. All three may also be downloaded free of charge from the same page.

TCP/IP Documentation And Examples

I’ve created a new page in the Documents part of my website, dedicated to information about the TCP/IP stack included with emulators such as QPC2, uQLx, SMSQmulator and QemuLator.

Personally, I found it hard to come across the information and examples of how to use the facilities from QL BASIC, so after a frustrating few days when I just couldn’t find the information to get even the most basic example working, I decided to do something about it myself.

The documents include Richard Zidlicky and Jonathan Hudson’s original pages about uQLx (now that Graeme Gregory is pushing ahead with the 2017 update of uQLx for Linux/ARM systems I realised the documentation might be welcome) and the TCP/IP stack originally implemented on uQLx.

I’ve included a document of mine showing how to use the TCP/IP stack from BASIC to download html pages and read email headers, for example. The document includes example BASIC listings.

There are also links to documents and software from Martin Head, including to his IPbasic software package designed to simplify and enhance the use of the networking facilities, plus a glossary of networking terminology.

I hope this helps generate some interest in the use of the facilities the emulator authors worked so hard to bring us, yet so few people seem to have used.

http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/docs/uqlx_tcp/index.html

German Version of Minerva ROM

Marcel Kilgus has put together a custom German keyboard version of the Minerva ROM. In the past he has used a patched German version, but since fitting a QL-SD into his QL he’s had to revert to using a “vanilla” version of Minerva where the German keyboard support had to be loaded every time. So in true Marcel style, out comes the source codes, a bit of reassembling and enter the new ROM. Printer translation tables pushed the ROM beyond the possible 48K, so those were dropped, but otherwise a perfectly usable German keyboard Minerva plus a version with QL-SD driver. An alternative to the traditional MGG ROMs for German QL users.

Further information and downloads here: https://www.kilgus.net/2017/03/05/german-minerva-rom/

PHGTK Updated

David Westbury has issued another update to PHGTK, the Photon General Toolkit. He has combined separate parts into one whole.

This version also includes a modest revision to the Photon viewer program, finally allowing conversion and output to PIC files as well as just use as a graphics viewer. V0.20 of Photon now includes an option in the command line to output as a QL PIC file using the Toolkit 2 EX command:

EX Photon,infile$,outfile$;command$

There are various command line options available for viewing JPEGs and QL PIC files and making wallpaper – see the supplied manual.

Photon now supports improved dithering in the colour output for 256 colour files.

Download PHGTK from http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/graphics/index.html

QL/E v3.16

Codenamed “White Swan”, version 3.16 of QL/E is now available to download from Urs König’s site at http://sinclairql.net/repository.html#QLE

For those who just need a modern and compact ready to run QL environment (applications, demos, desktops, games, tools, utilities), go ahead and download QL/E. QL/E comes loaded and pre-configured with a good selection of programs including a nicely setup desktop built using QPAC, QTop, Qascade and QDT. QL/E includes the the latest versions of the virtual QL machines (aka emulators) QPC2 and SMSQmulator and the operating system SMSQ/E.

The latest version also supports other SMSQ/E platforms such the MC68040 powered QXL PC ISA card (DOS) and QPC1 (DOS) plus QDOS/Minerva platforms such as the original Sinclair QL with QL-SD, the MIST FPGA based multi platform computer, Q-emuLator (Windows, Mac OS) and uQLx (Linux including the Raspberry Pi).

Screenshot of QL/E v3.16