The background to my presence here

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mk79
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Re: The background to my presence here

Post by mk79 »

TMD2003 wrote:
mk79 wrote:Interesting that quite often people insist on using the least well developed/hardest to use solutions. Perhaps retro computing needs to be painful :D
The only thing I've found "painful" so far is the sound that QLAY puts out.
No wonder. I spent whole days fine-tuning sound support in QPC.


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TMD2003
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Re: The background to my presence here

Post by TMD2003 »

mk79 wrote:The only thing I've found "painful" so far is the sound that QLAY puts out.
No wonder. I spent whole days fine-tuning sound support in QPC.[/quote]
And it sounds like it's something that's far harder than it should be - given that, by the looks of things, QL emulators with no sound are more common than those with it. It's probably a good job QLAY 0.90 does have sound, though, because I used that to tweak the config file so that I could get it running at the right speed. This involved grabbing the PLAYSCALE off Dilwyn's software archive, noting which pitch produced as close as possible to 440 Hz then BEEPing that constantly, routing the sound out of one PC and into another that was running an oscilloscope program. When the sound comes out at 440 Hz, the timing's right.

And then, of course, the slightest variation in DOSBox speed causes it to flounder all over the place... and if there's something I notice (as well as oddly-shaped pixels), it's notes out of tune.


Spectribution: Dr. Jim's Sinclair computing pages.
Features my own programs, modified type-ins, RZXs, character sets & UDGs, and QL type-ins... so far!
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TMD2003
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Re: The background to my presence here

Post by TMD2003 »

Seeing as this was my "achtung, I'm a QL noob" thread, I'll post it here and see if anyone notices, despite now achieving the level of "Brittle Membrane". Exciting times...

NOOB QUESTION:

What could cause LRUN to not execute the program that's just loaded? Something I'm writing at the moment (on a text editor) has stopped LRUNning and just acts as if I've used LOAD instead. (This is on QemuLator with the JS ROM.)

Seeing as I use LRUN every time I want to check the program is working as I add new lines, this is mildly irritating.


Spectribution: Dr. Jim's Sinclair computing pages.
Features my own programs, modified type-ins, RZXs, character sets & UDGs, and QL type-ins... so far!
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NormanDunbar
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Re: The background to my presence here

Post by NormanDunbar »

No errors? Strange.

Look in the loaded code gor lines beginning with "MISTAKE"'. But they should give an error message.

You are LRUNning the correct filename?

You did SAVE to the correct filename?

...

Cheers,
Norm.


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TMD2003
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Re: The background to my presence here

Post by TMD2003 »

NormanDunbar wrote:No errors? Strange.
Look in the loaded code gor lines beginning with "MISTAKE"'. But they should give an error message.
Originally, that's what I found; it's strange that QemuLator will interpret all the shorthands and add the extra lower case letters (i.e. I can write END DEF and it'll fill in into END DEFine) but writing SEL ON variable won't expand to SELect ON variable and that started with a MISTake. I corrected that... and LRUN continued to not work.
You are LRUNning the correct filename?
You did SAVE to the correct filename?
Certainly did. It was while I was editing file5_bas getting rid of the above MISTake, but even after the correction, even after saving to a new file6_bas, it's refusing to auto-run.

QmeuLator is set up to use TK2 so that I can LRUN file6_bas, but even with LRUN mdv1_file6_bas it isn't auto-running.

The further thought occurred that I should try QPC2 and see what SBASIC does... and it doesn't auto-run. When I ran it manually, I now find that SBASIC doesn't like what I've written... "At line 8201:1 DEFines may not be within other clauses". That one is well outside my realm... I think the best thing might be to finish what I'm doing with QemuLator and then bash it into SMSQ/E-compatible shape.


Spectribution: Dr. Jim's Sinclair computing pages.
Features my own programs, modified type-ins, RZXs, character sets & UDGs, and QL type-ins... so far!
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NormanDunbar
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Re: The background to my presence here

Post by NormanDunbar »

It's the SuperBASIC interpreter that expands Def fn etc to whatever. I can't remember if I ever typed the shorthand for select on though, so I'm not sure there.

What's the code around 8201? It sounds like you might have a define proc/fun line inside another structure, like a repeat, define proc/fun, select on, etc. That's what the error message is telling you.

Defines need to be at the top level, not embedded inside some other stuff.

HTH

Cheers,
Norm.


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janbredenbeek
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Re: The background to my presence here

Post by janbredenbeek »

TMD2003 wrote: The further thought occurred that I should try QPC2 and see what SBASIC does... and it doesn't auto-run. When I ran it manually, I now find that SBASIC doesn't like what I've written... "At line 8201:1 DEFines may not be within other clauses". That one is well outside my realm... I think the best thing might be to finish what I'm doing with QemuLator and then bash it into SMSQ/E-compatible shape.
Are all DEFines matched with an END DEFine?
On encountering a DEFine, S*BASIC jumps over all statements until it finds an END DEFine. That might explain why you won't see anything when run.


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Re: The background to my presence here

Post by Martin_Head »

TMD2003 wrote:Something I'm writing at the moment (on a text editor) has stopped LRUNning
Is this a QL text editor, or a Windows one. If it's a Windows one, it might not have the correct line termination of just a Line Feed.


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TMD2003
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Re: The background to my presence here

Post by TMD2003 »

Prepare to laugh...

I'd copied a procedure and forgotten to change the name in the END DEF. Nothing was nested, as such, but I had DEF PROC a... END DEF a, DEF PROC b... END DEF a.

Everything is now running as it should be so far in both QemuLator and QPC2, so I'll get back to this once I've finished the Harvest Festival, because I have perishables to deal with.


Spectribution: Dr. Jim's Sinclair computing pages.
Features my own programs, modified type-ins, RZXs, character sets & UDGs, and QL type-ins... so far!
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