Tag Archives: ql software

Farmer by Talent, Re-released by RWAP

We have now managed to resurrect yet another former Talent title – FARMER written by J.K. of Finland (would love to know who that was!)

Farmer is a platform game where you play the role of a Farmer who needs to harvest the tomatoes, bananas and pears from your fields.

Whoever said that farming was easy – as well as the usual fear over crop yields and pricing, this year has been unusual.

Not only did your somewhat eccentric uncle leave you a farm where the fields are not joined together, where you have to jump between them or risk the danger of falling down holes between the fields, but the farm appears to have come with its own infestation of monsters whose only pleasure is killing farmhands.

Even the weather has been against you – with all the recent high rain fall, some of the fields have developed soft earth which has turned into sink holes, where the land may give way underneath you.

You can jump over areas, but if you happen to fall too far, you may have to use up one of your three umbrellas as a parachute to slow your fall, instead of losing a life. Luckily there is a lift to get back up to the higher fields.

Once all of the crops have been gathered in, you can move to the next level by jumping into the coloured flashing square.

Order it from http://www.sellmyretro.com/offer/details/Sinclair-QL-Platform-Arcade-Game%3A-Farmer-3626

Concept 3D

Concept 3D is now available as freeware.

It’s a 3D graphics package, written by the late Robert Fingerle and published by US software house Tesseract Software.

Prior to his death, the author gave permission for the software to be freely released for the QL.

The software is configured for microdrive, so you may need to use a FLP_USE “MDV” command to run it from floppy disk, for example. Unfortunately, I have no manual for the software, so I have included a magazine review from 1986 with the software in the form of a Quill _doc file called concpt3d_doc which you may wish to read before trying the software. Alternatively, read the article as a (256K) PDF file on the same page. Although I haven’t had time yet to try running the software myself, the review seems to imply it’s a great 3D graphics program.

The software is available to download from my website at http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/graphics/index.html

I am grateful to Timothy Swenson for obtaining the permission to release the software, and to Rich Mellor for preserving a copy of the software before it was allowed to vanish forever.

Update: Shortly after I wrote this, I was given a copy of Concept 3D patched to run from disk, now available on the same page. Hopefully if we can find a manual and scan it, we can also make that available.

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

PROGS QL Software

Rich Mellor has managed to get confirmation from Joachim van der Auwera of PROGS in Belgium that the PROGS range of QL software (all of it!) is now open source and freely available.

Most of it is available to download from  the PROGS website at http://www.progs.be/ – to get to the QL software, just scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the link where it says “PROGS used to be known for Sinclair QL work. This information is now (very) outdated, it is still available here.”

The programs are mostly also available from the Prowess section of the Dilwyn Jones QL website at

http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/prowess/index.html

We are still missing the following ProWeSs bits:

Fsearch
PWFile
PWList
PWSBasic

Although there are more programs to download on the PROGS website – these seem to be the sources, so need re-compiling.

ProWesS is the PROGS Windowing System, which in its time was a new window manager, which used a system called PROforma for all its drawing, resulting in a resolution and colour independent windowing system. One of the major applications for PROforma at the time was Line Design, a vector drawing and DTP system for the QL.