Good evening,
I've actually been thinking more about this over the day...
Malcolm Cadman wrote:
Hi Steve,
Nice link ... :-)
Chris Curry and Clive Sinclair originally worked together, and then
split with the Acorn/Sinclair rivalry ( friendly though ).
Coming back to together with a common hardware platform - the ARM chips
- would be interesting.
RISCOS Open is a nice idea, too, to take forward the development.
Interesting to hear that is now happening.
I still use my Archimedes ... :-)
Would that work for an QDOS/SMSQ/E "Open" ... ?
Anyway, something needs to get done.
Indeed....
Well, I see that there are two issues with the QL legacy, one which
gives a QL-like experience (i.e. SuperBASIC etc.) and emulation for
running old programs.
Now, for the former, I can see a niche market just waiting to be filled.
Firstly, read this link:
http://www.osnews.com/story/23464/Why_Johnny_Can_t_Code
Then, thing back to the BBC programme, Electric Dreams, the 1980s
episode (unfortunately not now available to view):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00n59t4
The boy was amazed by the BBC micro, as was his friend. They loved to be
able to make the machine do what THEY wanted it to do quickly and
easily. (As opposed to the current crop of OSs which ALLOW the user to
do what the application developers thought that the user SHOULD do and
no more.)
So, I envisage the following in this case, a re-implementation of
SuperBASIC, extendable but basically the same as the original, developed
using a cross-platform graphics toolkit, such as QT (which runs on
UNIX/Linux, MacOS and Windows and has a mobile version too, useful
later, see below). In its basic form, you could even have it use the
raw, whole display.
This could actually lead on to a second stage, the almost instant on
Linux/QL hybrid. Replace the Linux init process with this SuperBASIC
interpretor (plus display driver) and the system would boot within a
couple of seconds, be it ARM based or Intel it doesn't matter. Now for
the clever bit... when you called EXEC or EXEC_W the program being
referenced would be looked at and its type determined. If it is a QDOS
program then a virtual machine would be started with a QDOS compatible
OS inside and the program would be run in that. If it were a native
Linux binary then it would be able to be run as well, as would a
"SuperBASIC" program.
Writing the "SuperBASIC" application as a stand-alone application,
running within other windowing systems should be the priority but with a
thought to developing the "kiosk-mode" version for a later QL-like,
(pseudo-)instant-on system.
i.e. the best of all worlds and standing on the shoulders of the Linux
developers, who have done all the hard hardware work and using commodity
hardware.
Thoughts?
Steve
--
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Nostalgia isn't as good as it used to be.
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