What to do with a QL?

[zerohour]

Tomorrow I should receive a QL (Thanks Rich)

I was asked to order it for my ex father in law as he has always been interested in one. So now that it's on its way. He asked me a series of questions some I could answer some I couldn't.

First Question he asked

Can you get the QL to display more than 8 colours?

Second Question he asked

The Minerva ROM can you still get one and what does it actually fix ?

Third Question

Qubide is it similar to the DivIDE (I have a DivIDE for my +2 so he knows about it)?

Then he asked the final question after all that and that was the opening question in the subject line.

What can I do with the QL?

Part of me was annoyed, After all he made me order it for him. Now he wants to know what he can use it for. I admit I am far from an expert on QL. I have ran Quill on the QLAY emulator as far as I got. So any ideas what he can do with it?

He also asked about Gold cards and the Q40/60 boards I informed him the rates I had seen and the average rarity of hens teeth that they truly are. He still hopes to upgrade it at some point.any recommended cheap upgrades.

[vanpeebles]

Hello there, the best upgrade to start with is some kind of floppy drive expansion and some floppy drives.

The QL wiki http://www.rwapadventures.com/ql_wiki/ is a great source of info, I think the Qubide is more of a traditional ide disc interface compared to the speccy divide. My main QL still has the standard ROM in although I do have one with Minerva fitted. A Minerva is a nice upgrade but it's not needed to start with

As for things to do, pretty much most things, you can code on it, play games, do bits of work on it. I'm hoping to make an adventure game with mine.

[Mr_Navigator]

I would agree a disk interface and mane with some memory expansion built in, like a TRUMP card, Toolkit II is a must and bit would come with disk interfaces.

What can he do with it? The limitation is the imagination.

Is he a user or a delver/programmer

A user then throw Dilwyns website at him and let him play with that.

Alternatively get one of the second hand books that has listings (like the games compendium) and say 'copy a listing in and get it to run'.

[polka]

Without anything else than a plain QL, apart SuperBasic and the Psion suite, he should try FORTH

The Digital Precision SuperForth is now public domain.

Paul

[RWAP]

Without anything else than a plain QL, apart SuperBasic and the Psion suite, he should try FORTH

The Digital Precision SuperForth is now public domain.

Paul

True, but there is always the problem of finding someone who is willing to make some microdrive cartridges up until he gets a disk interface and drives...

[zerohour]

Hmmm after a bit of discussion with him, he is now looking to expand a bit. Interested in connecting a disk drive.

Options he wants to find.

a Trump Card with Disk interface.

He is still enquiring about the Qubide. Such as where to get one. What is can really do. He would rather run from a hard drive then have tons of disks about.

So my question is what sort of ballpark figures can I expect to pay for above items. Also any idea of availability or are we talking the equivalent of finding unicorns blood here. Like the average Goldcards

[tofro]

Hi!
QubIDE is an IDE hard disk interface for the QL. But today, they are rarer than a hen's tooth. I haven't seen on for sale for years now. (The Gold and SuperGold cards are mass-market stuff in comparison).
There was a guy in the Czech Republic who tried to re-produce QubIDEs, progressed quite far and then dumped the project, I think: http://omega.webnode.com/products/product-1/.

QUbIDEs also add a bit of a problem when used with an original QL: They lack the through connector and are thus ideally used with an extension backplane.

Cheers,
Tofro

[polka]

As I said, with a "plain" QL, you can almost only develop and run SuperBasic programs and use the Psion suite, because of the limited 128k memory and the microdrives (and FORTH, because it's a powerful interactive programming tool resident in only a 64k memory segment). But if you want to use other tools, like C compilers or other langages, then either your microdrives are put at work too hard or you have not enough memory (or maybe both).

To begin to do interesting things, you have to expand the plain QL : the most complete standalone expansion board I know was the Sandy SuperQboard, grouping 512k memory, floppy disk and parallel printer interfaces, TK2, and even sometimes a mouse port, but alas, this piece of hardware was produced only for two years, and thus is very rare and nowadays very hard to find.

If you really want to do a lot more, you may try emulators ? either QPC2 or Qemulator or... then you have mass-stores as big as you want and modern connectivity without bothering.

Paul