The Sinclair QL Forum

About Alain Haoui Starter kit.

Alain Haoui made the Starter Kit, image on Floppy disk to make new partitoin on Compact Flash.
After installing this kit your QL system will boot from Compact flash card.]

Starter kit package in attachment.
To use this kit, just unzip the attached file on a pre-formatted QDOS DD diskette and boot QL with the diskette in flp1 and a CF Card in socket. (keep unzipped starter1_zip file on the diskette).
The setup program will run in unattended mode and take approx 10 min to achieve task. When finished, remove diskette and reboot QL. It will start from CF Card.
This program is simply written in basic so it is easy to amend it as needed (number of partitions, sizes, hard format, …).
The kit is enough small to fit in one 720KB diskette.

If you cannot decompress starterkit.zip under qdos system to create diskette, you have to use following trick to restore header for this tool on diskette :


TK2_EXT

A=ALCHP(111158)

LBYTES flp1_unzip_exe,a

DELETE flp1_unzip_exe

SEXEC flp1_unzip_exe,a,111158,51810 : REMark create executable with dataspace

RECHP a

And then restart (LRUN flp1_setup_bas).

Nice.

Note the BOOT included in the starter1_zip zip file (that seems to be intended to go to WIN1_BOOT) will not work on ROM versions before JS. It loads SuperBASIC extensions and tries to use them in the very same Basic program - This will not work on JM and earlier.

Tobias

Hi guys, is there any documentation available on what exactly the Alain Haoui Starter kit contains and how to get the most out of it?

Is it specifically for this implementation of QubIDE where the storage medium is CF, or would it be likely to work ok on my Zaxon QubIDE card with standard IDE connection? Has anyone tried it on hardware besides the TDI?

(Like others I am using a IDE to SD adaptor with mine, so the hard disk is really an SD card)

Thanks!

Alain Haoui's code will work with any QubIDE that has the version 2 GALs. The Zaxon QubIDE does.

I've now been able to successfully install the starter kit on my non-TDI setup, after a couple of attempts. (Running Minerva on ROM switcher, Hermes, the Tetroid backplane, Zaxon QubIDE, and V3 Gold Card)

With unreliable floppies and drives at the time, I had to do it all through the Q-emulator, QubIDE and Habi image editor.

Getting two drives setup on the QubIDE as master and slave was essential for me, so that I could trade files between cards in the absence of a floppy disk. The master was a memory card in an adaptor but I actually used a real IDE drive as the slave, so I could set it to slave on the jumper pins on the back (not sure if this helped, but it worked!). Initialising it with WIN_DRIVE 2,2,1 was fine, and now with the appropriate DIR commands I could see the contents of both win1_ (master) and win2_ (slave) drives.

I was worried about doing something wrong and wrecking one of the cards. Using a PC program, I think it was called HD Raw Copy or something like that, I could mirror one card to another of the same size, just in case. The QL was quite happy with the mirrored card.

I had troubles where the install process relies on QubATA which I didn't have. Adding QubATA_REXT to win2_ and LRESPR-ing that before attempting the install did the trick. I was amazed at how much easier and quicker the partitioning process is with QubATA and knowing the right commands to do a quick format!

There was a further issue with the installation code for my scenario, where by one line unloads all the drives with WIN_DRIVE -1. I changed this to WIN_DRIVE 1, so it just unloaded win1_, leaving win2_ in place, in case more files were needed from win2_. Finally, for some reason, the last bit where the starter1_zip file is actually unzipped to the relevant folders, just didn't work for me. The install process came back with bad parameter. Probably another problem with headers. I ended up just doing this unzipping manually with another version of starter1_zip which I copied to the win2_ slave, along with an install of UNZIP using the binary file on Dilywn's website, which has been invaluable throughout!

After all that, everything fired up and I could see the GUI and have a little play around. Very nice! I may not keep this setup, but it was a good exercise as part of the getting reacquainted with the QL and learning about the various issues and how to deal with them. I look forward to exploring further!

Oh, in the menu there is a load of games, but they aren't part of the install and the games folder that is created is empty... Did my install go wrong there or do these need to be sourced separately?

Another note - the boot file is very nice, easy to comment out or remove comments for things you want - I removed the comments for Hermes, so that it would be recognised and I could turn the keyclicks off!

Hi Derek,

Derek_Stewart wrote:Hi,

I have trying Habi image editor to read a CF Card formatted under Qubide v1.56 and QubATA (Qubide v2.xx).

I inserted a CF Card in to my Windows 10 PC via USB card reader. Windows said the CF Card needed formatting. But ignored and cancelled the request.

The image editor run as Administrator and opened the disk. All Qubide partitions were recognised.

I used the insert file function and copied C68, DP Collection zip files.

Executable files will lose the File Header. But there is a Header function to possibly preserve file header.

I put the CF Card back in the Trump Card Card slot and all the files I copied from the PC, were present and correct.

Nice piece of software.

The link is :
http://hardware.speccy.org/temp/qubide/ ... ftware.zip

I wanted to do everything like you tell, on my PC with windows 7 where I am the only user, declared as administrator **, but :

after opening the Habi Image Editor (Img1.2-eng), when selecting "disc" "Open disc" I got the message (apparently from the Image Editor itself * ) :

"There is no administrative privileges"

and I do not know how to do to correct this ? **

* I suppose that the error message is generated by the program, because I tried also other versions and got a similar message in spanish.
** somewhere on the internet, I read that when you are the only user (thus administrator), you don't initially have the "rights" but you may acquire them with the command : " net user administrator /active:yes" but it doesn't work.

Thank you for your help.

Polka

Have you tried to right click the program and then select "run as administrator" from the menu ?

Thank's a lot ! indeed, it was so simple (when you know... )

Polka