Category Archives: News

Classic 70s and 80s Games Go Online

The Internet Archive has made available a number of classic 70s and 80s games online to play in a browser. OK, nostalgic and all that, but the real interest for us is that some of this is based on a Javascript implementation of the MESS emulator system, which included the Sinclair QL when I last reviewed it in this magazine, although the online version is so far based on only a handful of games machines from that era such as the Atari games consoles. The online version is called JSMESS.

There is a news feature about it on the BBC website at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25527786

The Internet Archive feature on this is at https://archive.org/details/consolelivingroom (it’s referred to as the Consolve Living Room online).

Where it gets even more interesting is if you search for ‘Sinclair QL’. Try:

https://archive.org/details/Sinclair_QL_TOSEC_2012_04_23

(note it has several underscores in the link above which may be hidden by the underlining).

Scroll down to the bottom of that page and check out the links to some of Timo Salmi’s old QL software, for example. The ones I have looked at are written in SuperBASIC.

For further information about the MESS system, visit http://www.mess.org/

QL Games Collection 1

To celebrate the 30th Anniversary of the Sinclair QL, we are now offering the QL Games Collection Pack 1 at 50% off until the end of March – just £5 with email delivery! The games included in this package are:

Jungle Eddi by Stefan Kuhne
Hoverzone by R G Riley
Deathstrike by Damon Chaplin and T. Bovingdon
Cuthbert in Space by Steve Bak and S J Proctor
QL Hopper by Steve Bak and S J Proctor
QL Pengi by Jochen Merz and R. Bieniek
QL Vroom by Daniel Macré
Stone Raider II by Alex J Herbert
The King by C H Robertson Consultants
The Lost Pharaoh by Stefan Kuhne

http://www.sellmyretro.com/offer/details/Sinclair-QL-Games-Collection-1-2152

BMP Program Update

Bob Spelten jr. has supplied an enhanced version of the Dilwyn Jones BMP program which runs on QL systems and converts between QL and Windows BMP graphics.

In addition to a few bug fixes and use of the latest DJToolkit to fix problems when run on SMSQmulator, Bob has improved the colour conversion routines to improve the colour tone scale and generally provide better results all round. While technically a beta-release (the older version will remain available for a while just in case), Bob and his beta-tester Francois van Emelen have been using it for a while now, so it may quickly become the official release. Download it from http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/graphics/index.html

RET_STK Extension

RET_STK  is a small sbasic extension by Wolfgang Lenerz to get the value on the SMSQ/E SBasic return stack. This was written in response to a help request from a user on the ql-users mailing list, who wanted help to find a method in SBASIC to find which line number called a procedure in his program, to aid debugging. The extension may be downloaded from Wolfgang’s Qlstuff website at http://www.wlenerz.com/qlstuff/

QL Forum Is 3 Years Old!

Mid-November saw the third birthday of QL Forum. Happy birthday to what is probably the most popular meeting place for QL enthusiasts, thanks to the efforts of Peter Scott and Rob Heaton. At the time of writing the Forum has 193 members worldwide and subjects discussed are as diverse as ever and sometimes controversial too! Even better news is that Peter Scott, responsible for so much of the success of QL Forum, has volunteered to assist Quanta with our own website, given that our own website has sometimes not been our best selling point at times in the past!

uQLx Update

On 17th November, Peter Graf wrote:

“Re: QL Emulation • UQLX with BDI / QL-SD support

I should have eliminated the last remaining bugs today, so UQLX is now the second QL emulator, after Qemulator, which can handle QL-SD filesystem images.

I have no idea when Richard [Zidlicky]  will release it. If someone already needs the feature, please feel free to contact me by personal email.

The trick is that the emulator just implements simple “Block Device Image” (BDI) support. Which are a few registers, allowing the QL side to access the image file on the PC. The real driver is then running native.

It is essentially the same driver as the one on the real QL, minus the FAT32, SDHC and hardware specific portions.”

Q-Dock

The latest on this long overdue software dock can be seen on my QL blog at http://dilwyn2.wordpress.com/ . The software will include Q-Dock itself, plus Q-Bar (an autohide taskbar and start menu for SMSQ systems) and SPRV, a sprite viewer program which can either view single sprites, or has a tiled view mode allowing you to view all sprites in a given directory.

Some 200 dock graphics have been created or converted, while some 5000 sprite graphics have been created or converted for use as icons. Most of these are freeware or PD graphics and will be available to download free of charge from my website, while the Q-Dock program itself will be available to buy from Bruce Nicholls’ Quo Vadis Design site.

Q-Dock makes extensive use of transparent windows and alpha-mask sprites, becoming one of the first QL programs to use ‘see-through’ window effects, making best use of the graphics features built into the GD2 ‘colour drivers’.

Once again I have to apologise for the delays in releasing this program, my personal circumstances have been less than kind over the last year or so due to my partner’s ill health (hi Ann!), although I’ve been slowly grafting away getting the software to the highest standard I can and making sure it has more than enough graphics at launch!