The Sinclair QL Forum

Rereading the topic now and again. I wish to ask, what makes it different to hook 8302 on CPU data bus as with Iss#6 vs RAM bus in Iss#5, is there any performance gain? The RAM side of the bus is often occupied with RAM refresh, so communication to 8302 stalls every time the RAM is being refreshed....

You can also use RESPR if you want the memory to survive a NEW (it will try to use the resident procedure area but fall back to the common heap if that isn't possible).

Ralf R. wrote:POKE_F !196!330,1 (and also POKE_F !$c4!$14a,1) gives ERR.BP in QPC2.

Turbo extension comes with its own POKE_F that doesn't have quite as many features as the SMSQ version, so try not loading that.

By the way, disassembling this was a fun little exercise, but essentially they rewrote WMAN in basic. At the level they're doing this it's fairly easy, but still this is not how one should code these days. Using EasyPtr and the real WMAN is always less work and the result will always work better!

pjw wrote:BTW, do you have enough of a handle on this to fix the main Q-Liberator window so it can be moved beyond the confines of the 512x256a0x0 screen?

No, that limit is imposed in the compiled code, not in the basic extension.

That IS pretty cool :D I'm trying to unify the platforms by giving the base QL Q68-like graphics capabilities. Are you saying that PE doesn't care too much about bit order for colour information, or are you saying something different? Bit order flexibility would increase the accessible capabilities...

The root of my question is: if there were hardware support for funtionality that is currently implemented laboriously in software - that makes the implementation unconscionably difficult to work with - is there any will or desire to shift that load from software to hardware? Sorry, what difficulty ...

As usual this is a highly professional, downright over-engineered piece of software from you. I already played a preview and besides the fact that I'm too dumb for it it works and plays very well

Dave wrote:I've never used the PE for longer than it takes to disable it.

That makes it pretty pointless to talk about pointers with you, doesn't it?

Let me repeat myself: because under PE the cursor can be more than a 2-bit deep bitmap Even more than that, the PE can alpha-blend the mouse cursor unto the background. I know because I've written that feature. And as mentioned even the text cursor can be a sprite, meaning it can alpha blend with t...