> This means that Quanta would have a sum of about £1,000 each year to spend > on QL development. How should they spend this money? > > In fact Quanta would have two possible ways of financially stimulating QL > development. Major projects (SGC successor?) could be financed out of the > capital. These would have to be backed with good business plans and legal > safeguards to ensure that there was a return on the capital and that Quanta > does not lose its favourable tax status. Minor projects (mainly software?) > could be financed out of subscription income. No financial return would be > expected from these and thus there would be fewer legal difficulties over > tax etc. > > Remember your subscription is your money, not Quanta's. How would you like > them to spend it on your behalf? After a brief exchange of correspondence with Per Witte about programs we've both been writing recently, I came to the conclusion that one possible expenditure might be to bring SDUMP up to date, to provide us with screen dumps for more printers (i.e. HP printers and possibly Canon control code sets) and also to cope with GD2 modes. If this was done, it would provide a rudimentary basis for writing graphical applications without having to write printer dumps from scratch or learning to program for Proforma/Prowess.
I have a (roughly) one third written graphics program I'd meant originally to include as a basic paint program with Launchpad but it was too much work and would have delayed Launchpad quite a bit, so it's sat on my hard disk waiting for me to pluck up the courage to tackle adding GD2 screen dumps! (fat chance at the moment) Sdump is available as an Sdump_rext file which can be loaded resident on emulators etc and provides the necessary basic and assembler interfaces, so people like myself who write mostly in compiled basic could easily use it, and the assembler entries could probably be easily made available to C programmers too. Does this fall into the parameters of what you were looking for Geoff - the possibility of paying someone to extend the SDUMP system. -- Dilwyn Jones
