Tag Archives: QLTools Revision 2.15.5

QLTools Revision 2.15.5

Norman Dunbar has been busy revising the QLTools file transfer software, updating it to handle ED disk images, for example. He writes:

1) Now compiles under Windows with Gcc. I used CodeBlocks with the built in 32bit gcc to do the builds. There’s also a makefile for shell usage.

2) Fixed 32bit bug in formatting an ed image file. It would segfault on Windows 64bit when compiled as 32bit, but not as a 64 bit build. Turned out to be a bug in my ‘ed’ formatting code.

3) If the image file doesn’t exist, it will now be created when formatting an image.

4) Files were being corrupted when extracted from an image with the ‘-n’ option. This was because the ‘DOS_LIKE’ define was not being done on modern C compilers/operating systems. It is now! The corruption was to add a CR in front of every LF in the file.

5) When changing the dataspace of a file with ‘-x’ the dataspace size was allowed to be an odd size. I’m sure this causes trouble on a QL, so it now gets rounded up if it is odd.

6) The ‘-M’ option to create a level 2 directory wasn’t working. This was because it was opening the image file in read only mode. I may have been responsible for breaking this – but don’t quote me. It’s fixed now.

7) Dumping an ED cluster with the ‘-u’ option (ASCII dump) was only dumping 32 lines of 16 bytes – 512 bytes in total. The number of lines was hard coded. It has been changed to calculate the number of lines from the sector size. This option now works for ED drives as well.

8) Windows uses the ‘/’ character for command line options, unlike Linux which uses ‘-‘ and while there was some code that allowed the ‘/’ when ‘DOS_LIKE’ was defined, it wasn’t in all the places it needed to be. Now it is. Windows users have the choice of whichever flag symbol they like. (Well, ‘-‘ or ‘/’ is all the choice actually!)

9) Slightly weird. If the ‘-w’ option was used to write a file into an image, and that that file was already there, it didn’t prompt to overwrite. I spent ages tracking it down and it turned out that running in a Windows command session does prompt, only running in a bash shell, on Windows, does it not prompt. As most users won’t be in my development bash shell, I’m not fixing this.

10) Source Code is available from https://github.com/NormanDunbar/qltools

11) Compiled binaries for 32/64 bit Windows and Linux are also available from https://github.com/NormanDunbar/qltools/releases  – along with a new user guide.

If you enjoy using this half as much as I’ve enjoyed amending it, then I’ve had twice as much fun as you!