The Sinclair QL Forum

Keith, flashing pixels is actually a hardware function on the real QL - When the flash bits are set, the pixels will start to flash in 50Hz intervals driven by the hardware. The flash bits are, other than any other screen bits on the QL, a sort of serial attribute - You only set them at the beginnin...

The later ZX Microdrives worked pretty well on a QL, you could format, read and write without any problems.

The main reasons why you want to connect them today are:

• Because you can
• It just looks so odd you simply have to

Tobias

Martin, the STOP $2000 instruction simply waits for an (any, interrupt mask is 0) interrupt. The next one would most likely be the 50Hz VBL or polling interrupt. This technique can be used to synchronize the game flow with the external interrupt - And it is basically the only way to do that on a QL....

Even if it might sound a bit silly: A lab PSU is maybe not the most suitable thing to power a computer. Set to "Constant Voltage", these PSUs are built to maintain the output voltage regardless of what current you draw from them - they will just push in copious amounts of energy to maintai...

None. I have four QLs that have their ex-factory capacitors in place and have never changed any of them. The QL also has no such critical places like the Spectrum's DC/DC conversion circuit that tends to wreck all of the memory when caps go bust.

Tobias

Dave wrote:It seems they are the same, except Atari explicitly stated a +5V pin and Kempston didn't.

You don't need +5V for a digital joystick - The Atari has it because it can also connect analog paddles.

Tobias

With regards to the 9-pin joystick connectors on mainland Europe QLs, these are identical to what Atari, Commodore, Kempston (and even Sinclair, but not Amstrad) used. Thus I'd recommend to stay with these. Kempston and Sinclair (IF2) joystick ports have the same pinout as Commodore and Atari, just ...

Martyn,

Do you know that QPC2 has (or used to have? I never used it) a feature that allows it to execute headerless executables that have the amount of data space mangled into their filename extension?

This is a very pragmatic solution for people who think they need to have such files...

Tobias

Some versions of the dev device driver seem to understand the DEV_USEN command, some apparently don't. If your version does give you a "bad name" on DEV_USEN, then use the single-parameter version of DEV_USE, but make sure the argument is a string, not a name. So, your first version should...

http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/tk/sub.zip

Does more or less the same thing as the dev device driver, but doesn't need a loaded pointer environment. Read the included _txt file, commands are slightly different.

Tobias