UQLX with BDI / QL-SD support

Discussion and advice about emulating the QL on other machines.
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Peter
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UQLX with BDI / QL-SD support

Post by Peter »

I should have eliminated the last remaining bugs today, so UQLX is now
the second QL emulator, after Qemulator, which can handle QL-SD
filesystem images.

I have no idea when Richard will release it. If someone already needs
the feature, please feel free to contact me by personal email.

The trick is that the emulator just implements simple "Block Device
Image" (BDI) support. Which are a few registers, allowing the QL side to
access the image file on the PC. The real driver is then running native.
It is essentially the same driver as the one on the real QL, minus the
FAT32, SDHC and hardware specific portions.

Peter


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Marq
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Re: UQLX with BDI / QL-SD support

Post by Marq »

Where exactly are the latest versions of UQLX located...? A Google search leads to a messy pile of various old versions that can't even be compiled anymore.


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Peter
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Re: UQLX with BDI / QL-SD support

Post by Peter »

I have no idea where or when Richard will release it. The best is, you contact him directly.
Or if you are okay with my inofficial snapshot, please feel free to contact me by personal message. It only works on 32-bit Linux though.


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QLvsJAGUAR
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Re: UQLX with BDI / QL-SD support

Post by QLvsJAGUAR »

Hi QLers,

the only three Linux machines I own are my NAS, a SubNotebook and my Raspberry Pi. While the NAS has its job to do, the SubNotebook gets dust on a shelf, the Raspi gets at least fired up whenever I want to test a new version of QL/E.

At work the situation is completely different, at least at the moment. We are ramping up some new point-of-sales computers (3 series with the following platforms: BayTrail, Haswell, Skylake) and are making sure the retail applications work smoothly under both Windows and Linux. While the Windows world is easy for me, Linux is still a bit of a mystery. Don’t get me wrong, installing a Linux distribution is most of the time trouble-free, installing professional packages such as Java or device drivers for receipt printers, barcode scanners, etc. is also easy and works most of the time. My personal Unix/Linux know-how is somehow limited, but I’m save on the desktops and with graphical dialogs plus I know some basic shell commands and the purpose of some folders.

Installing and running SMSQmulator under Linux is trouble-free, I just unzip the QL/E distribution and start it using the shell command “java -jar entire_path_to_jar_file”.

But even I wrote the step-by-step installation guide for uQLx ARM for the Raspberry Pi, I constantly fail to install and run uQLx on Intel based Linux systems. IIRC the last time I succeeded was about 12 years ago at a Swiss QL workshop where Jon Dent and Markus Dettwiler were giving me a helping hand.

End of 2013 Peter sent me a work-in-progress version of uQLx with QL_BDI support (uqlx-src-peter-17-11-2013.zip). He stated that this works on his (then) recent Debian 32-bit.

A year ago John was wrote to me:
> Have you seen https://github.com/slimlogic/uqlx-fork
> This has a version of uQLx that now works on native 64bit Linux boxes
> without seg faulting when trying to modify files.
> You could previously run uQLx on a 64bit Linux only if you had the
> 32bit i386 architecture packages.

Is it only me or is it true that all the old uQLx distributions plus the two above are not able to be installed and run on recent Linux systems (modern HW platforms, recent 32-bit or 64-bit Linux distributions). I one says one or the other uQLx distribution works could he or she provide an understandable and working step-by-step guide.

QL forever!

Urs


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janbredenbeek
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Re: UQLX with BDI / QL-SD support

Post by janbredenbeek »

QLvsJAGUAR wrote:Hi QLers,

Is it only me or is it true that all the old uQLx distributions plus the two above are not able to be installed and run on recent Linux systems (modern HW platforms, recent 32-bit or 64-bit Linux distributions). I one says one or the other uQLx distribution works could he or she provide an understandable and working step-by-step guide.
Hi Urs,

I've been fighting with different versions of uQLx too, and my experience is that the slimlogic fork (dated 2014) runs fine on my 64-bit Linux Mint installation. However compared to other emulators it has still a lot of issues, like not being able to scale the 512x256 display to modern resolutions and when I run Multimon (my own monitor/disassembler which I wrote in 1986/87) I only get one window instead of the 5 expected. Unfortunately I haven't got the time to delve deeper into the source code :(

regards, Jan.


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Re: UQLX with BDI / QL-SD support

Post by XorA »

janbredenbeek wrote:
QLvsJAGUAR wrote:Hi QLers,

Is it only me or is it true that all the old uQLx distributions plus the two above are not able to be installed and run on recent Linux systems (modern HW platforms, recent 32-bit or 64-bit Linux distributions). I one says one or the other uQLx distribution works could he or she provide an understandable and working step-by-step guide.
Hi Urs,

I've been fighting with different versions of uQLx too, and my experience is that the slimlogic fork (dated 2014) runs fine on my 64-bit Linux Mint installation. However compared to other emulators it has still a lot of issues, like not being able to scale the 512x256 display to modern resolutions and when I run Multimon (my own monitor/disassembler which I wrote in 1986/87) I only get one window instead of the 5 expected. Unfortunately I haven't got the time to delve deeper into the source code :(

regards, Jan.
I have plans to move it to use SDL2 so it gains scaleable GFX. If anyone has a spare TARDIS so I can get some extra time that would be great (slimlogic is me).

G


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Re: UQLX with BDI / QL-SD support

Post by QLvsJAGUAR »

QLvsJAGUAR wrote: Is it only me or is it true that all the old uQLx distributions plus the two above are not able to be installed and run on recent Linux systems (modern HW platforms, recent 32-bit or 64-bit Linux distributions). I one says one or the other uQLx distribution works could he or she provide an understandable and working step-by-step guide.
Thanks to the great work of Graeme and Timothy and the recent release of uQLx 2017, I - for the first time since a QL workshop on February 28 2004, hey that is 13 years since! - I have been able to start uQLx under Linux on an Intel x86 based system! So, the mentioned problem has been solved! :D

QL forever!


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XorA
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Re: UQLX with BDI / QL-SD support

Post by XorA »

Peter wrote:I should have eliminated the last remaining bugs today, so UQLX is now
the second QL emulator, after Qemulator, which can handle QL-SD
filesystem images.

I have no idea when Richard will release it. If someone already needs
the feature, please feel free to contact me by personal email.

The trick is that the emulator just implements simple "Block Device
Image" (BDI) support. Which are a few registers, allowing the QL side to
access the image file on the PC. The real driver is then running native.
It is essentially the same driver as the one on the real QL, minus the
FAT32, SDHC and hardware specific portions.

Peter
Thread resurrection, but I guess there will not be an official release of uQLx with this in before my beard reaches my knees.

Any chance you could donate the code to sQLux? Id love to get it in there (Ill handle any merge needed).


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XorA
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Re: UQLX with BDI / QL-SD support

Post by XorA »

Actually dont worry about it, it turned out incredibly simple to implement.
Screenshot 2021-01-16 at 13.32.15.png
I just need to tidy up the final few bits and add config file options.


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Re: UQLX with BDI / QL-SD support

Post by mk79 »

XorA wrote:Thread resurrection, but I guess there will not be an official release of uQLx with this in before my beard reaches my knees.
One caveat: the new QL-SD drivers don't support the BDI format anymore, it is all QLWA now.

Cheers, Marcel


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