Hello from Ellesmere Port.

Introduce yourself here!
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dinox
ROM Dongle
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Joined: Tue Dec 20, 2016 4:59 pm

Hello from Ellesmere Port.

Post by dinox »

I’ve been meaning to join for ages!

I got my first QL in the late 80s. I’d been hankering after one since they first came out but it was too expensive for me until they dropped in price. I soon upgraded the memory from 128k to 500k with a trump card within a few years.

The programming language was the real interest for me. Superbasic still seems very powerful even today. The mathematical and graphic functions were particularly good for the time. I wrote various programs but the largest was a palaeographic program to reposition the Earth’s ancient plates. This produced a good animation of plate movements over the last 200 million years. It enabled the production of videos and a “flip animation” for my 1994 book. But time moves on and in the late 90s and early 21st century the old QL started to gather dust.

More recently I wanted to use these palaeographic animations on my web site and the 3rd edition of my book in 2011. I found the easiest way was to use an emulator. I now have Q-emulator running an upgraded version of my main program connected to a “cloud” storage device. It has generated about 500 GBytes of diagrams so far and I have upgraded the program so these are viewable on Google Earth. This is obviously a vast improvement on the old 1990s version. I’m still upgrading it as I think of new functions to add.

I still think Superbasic is a great programming language and the ability to store the information to hard disk directly through the emulator makes it even more powerful. I still get stuck on a few programming problems so hopefully other members will be able to help me out as they occur. Also I think it would be interesting to write a program to connect directly to the internet. Q-emulator can obviously do that since it runs email/web programs but how do you connect directly though Superbasic? It should be possible to generate web pages within a program and upload them directly to the internet. There are still a lot of reasons to be interested in the old QL!

Stephen


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vanpeebles
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Re: Hello from Ellesmere Port.

Post by vanpeebles »

Welcome to the forum! :D That all sounds very clever! :)


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dinox
ROM Dongle
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Re: Hello from Ellesmere Port.

Post by dinox »

Cheers! :D


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NormanDunbar
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Re: Hello from Ellesmere Port.

Post by NormanDunbar »

Welcome!

Your book and website sound interesting, to me anyway! Do you have links?


Cheers,
Norm.


Why do they put lightning conductors on churches?
Author of Arduino Software Internals
Author of Arduino Interrupts

No longer on Twitter, find me on https://mastodon.scot/@NormanDunbar.
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robheaton
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Location: Ormskirk, UK

Re: Hello from Ellesmere Port.

Post by robheaton »

Welcome to the Forum!

Ellesmere Port...
Always good to find another QL user in the North West!


--
If vanpeebles parps in the woods and there is nobody around, does it make a sound?
Derek_Stewart
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Joined: Mon Dec 20, 2010 11:40 am
Location: Sunny Runcorn, Cheshire, UK

Re: Hello from Ellesmere Port.

Post by Derek_Stewart »

Hi,

I live in Runcorn, not far from Ellesmere Port.

Maybe have to arrange a get together, at a place with enough facilities for using QLs


Regards,

Derek
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XorA
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Location: Shotts, North Lanarkshire, Scotland, UK

Re: Hello from Ellesmere Port.

Post by XorA »

Derek_Stewart wrote:Hi,

I live in Runcorn, not far from Ellesmere Port.

Maybe have to arrange a get together, at a place with enough facilities for using QLs
QLForum 2017 NW meetup coming soon?


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Cristian
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Re: Hello from Ellesmere Port.

Post by Cristian »

dinox wrote:the largest was a palaeographic program to reposition the Earth’s ancient plates. This produced a good animation of plate movements over the last 200 million years.
:o


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dinox
ROM Dongle
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Joined: Tue Dec 20, 2016 4:59 pm

Re: Hello from Ellesmere Port.

Post by dinox »

NormanDunbar wrote:Welcome!

Your book and website sound interesting, to me anyway! Do you have links?


Cheers,
Norm.
Sure. I describe an old version of my QL program here: http://www.dinox.org/eeprog.html

And there is a link to my book at the bottom.


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dinox
ROM Dongle
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Joined: Tue Dec 20, 2016 4:59 pm

Re: Hello from Ellesmere Port.

Post by dinox »

Derek_Stewart wrote:Hi,

I live in Runcorn, not far from Ellesmere Port.

Maybe have to arrange a get together, at a place with enough facilities for using QLs
Sounds good. My "QL" now runs on a small notebook pc so I can take it anywhere. Probably be the new year now though after we get all the xmas visiting out of the way.


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