Roy wood wrote: > There are a lot of books on programming the QL in Assembler, BASIC and C > (although not the modern version) and many of these are available, 2nd > hand, from QUANTA, TF Services, Rich Mellor etc. These all stop short of > the modern system but would provide a grounding in the system. > > Yes, there are a lot of old books that cover programming the basic QL - I have a lot of them already. The problem is that these cover only the basic QL and the original QDOS system, most don't even cover Minerva. I actually did a lot of assembly coding back in the days when the QL was my main system and I've still got most of my source code - I can probably tinker with that and get back to that level of coding fairly quickly.
The problems start though when you try and integrate things like SMSQ or the pointer system, yes documentation is available on the net - and to be honest it's a lot more readily available than it was when I bought the Aurora system from you. Most of it isn't in a coherent state though - by that I mean that it's very bitty and it's difficult to know where one set of instructions might supersede another. > True, many articles in QL Today which demonstrate programming techniques > etc. are scattered throughout it's 11 volumes. I believe that all of > these still exist in electronic form so maybe there is some possible > mileage in gathering all of the articles of each series together and > either printing them off as a single volume or putting them on a CD as > PDF files. I have no idea how much work this would be but it would be > work so there would have to be a charge. Nevertheless it would be > worthwhile if it got some people writing software again. > This is something that I think should be considered, but I think that with the permission of the authors the information should be freely available - yes there's work involved in getting it out there but as a group I'm sure there'd be a few people who'd volunteer to do a few articles and before you know it it's out there and there isn't one single person who's had to put in an inordinate amount of work. To take a leaf from the ZX81/Spectrum community - there was a recent 'project' to scan and OCR the ZX81 rom disassembly, several people chose a range of pages to do - sorted them out and sent them to a central place - they were then collated into a single document - each person involved probably didn't have to spend more than a couple of hours on it but in the end the work was freely available for anyone to use. It also didn't take more than a couple of months to do! On another note - having mentioned that I'd be willing to try and port SMSQ to the Amiga I decided to download the source today and have a look at it. Thinking that it'd be a good idea to build it for the existing hardware first so that I can experiment. I then find that without yet again spending money I can't do this - I either need to buy QMAC or I need to use GWASS (not that there is any available information on how to do it with GWASS that was another QL Today article that I haven't got) - Unfortunately GWASS requires a 68020 or better which I don't have. Yet again - someone who's interested in doing some good for the QL hits a brick wall. Phil _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
