The Sinclair QL Forum

Hi,

Has anyone else experienced a crash on the Q68.

Twice now during longish programming sessions with QD, SBasic and the SBASIC thing my Q68 has crashed.

Screen resolution down from 512x384 to 512x256 and vertical flashing multi coloured lines. No options for recovery. Does the Q68 overheat?. Unlikely as it does not feel hot.
Is it a problem with QD or the SBASIC thing? I don't know. It is only irritating as from long experience with Microsoft I save frequently.

Cheers

Can you clarify two things: a) how long is longish and b) what were you specifically running (i.e. which interface and were you running something you created or did it just freeze up on its own)?

I've had mine up for hours with no issues (bought it a few months ago) but only poking around the various directories to see what is there and getting various apps to run like the Speccy emulator. I haven't been running either graphical configuration (QL/E or Black Phoenix) for very long (really only gave them a try) and mostly have been in the default QL window in the lowest resolution (I run it more like a unix/linux system and less like a Windows/Mac system -- err, well when I run unix/linux I don't use a front-end).

To be fair, I haven't done too much with it as I'm still working on getting my old QL software off of microdrives onto SD card and that requires some physical intervention of re-felting. I have a bunch of software I wrote in Digital C back in the 90's when the QL was my primary machine (Ql terminal program and a command shell with my own BASIC interpreter) that I'm trying to reclaim the source for. Still trying to find the terminal program source -- hate losing code and for some reason I kept the microdrives but not the floppy disks.

I can confirm that QD tends to crash every now and then. Rarely, but, if it does, in a spectacular way. And it does that on any hardware platform.

Q68 hasn't given me any problems (other that it tends to forget the clock every now and then when switched off for more than 4 weeks) since I have it and I use it heavily.

Tobias

Hi,

I have been using QD and QD/SBAS Thing.

Are you using the SBASIC compiler Thing?

It maybe that QD, SBASIC thing or SMSQ/E has bugs that can crash the system.

Personally, I do not use QL/E or Black Pheonix as I can write boot files ...

I have supplied the above distributions with the Q68, as I thought they were good examples of QL software. So that the problems with each distribution can be corrected by each user.

I think I am regretting this and should only supplied basic operating system.

Artificer wrote:Twice now during longish programming sessions with QD, SBasic and the SBASIC thing my Q68 has crashed.

The only chance seems to invoke QMON first, then "g" and use your programs, so perhaps QMON pops up with an error.

Artificer wrote:No options for recovery.

Which "option for recovery" would you expect on an OS without memory protection, after a piece of software crashed?

Artificer wrote:Does the Q68 overheat?

No. The Q68 doesn't even heat up at all.

tofro wrote:Q68 hasn't given me any problems (other that it tends to forget the clock every now and then when switched off for more than 4 weeks) since I have it and I use it heavily

The Q68 uses a SuperCap with a capacity of 100000 µF for clock backup. At design time, larger SuperCaps were still expensive.
I can confirm that a higher capacity would be beneficial for long off-times. Still I find the SuperCap solution better than a non-rechargeable battery.

For tinkerers, it is easy to replace it with 220000 µF or even more. They are cheap by now.

Peter wrote:

tofro wrote:Q68 hasn't given me any problems (other that it tends to forget the clock every now and then when switched off for more than 4 weeks) since I have it and I use it heavily

For tinkerers, it is easy to replace it with 220000 µF or even more. They are cheap by now.

The pain is by far not large enough for that

Tobias

Hi,
Thanks for the interest and responses.

bwinkel67 wrote
Can you clarify two things: a) how long is longish and b) what were you specifically running (i.e. which interface and were you running something you created or did it just freeze up on its own)?

Longish = 3
close to 4 hours.
Jobs that were active were : Superbasic, SBasic asleep, qascade, qdock, serialnet 3.01, hotkey, QD with the QD/SBAS thing and the Sbasic code in QD.
I am not sure what you mean by interface but I don't use QL/E or Black Phoenix.
What was I doing at the time the Q68 went belly up - actually I was just sitting thinking about the next line of code.

Tofro wrote
I can confirm that QD tends to crash every now and then

Thanks for that confirmation. I suspect it was QD as I have noticed QD can have minor glitches with very long SBASIC code lines.

Ralf R wrote
The only chance seems to invoke QMON first, then "g" and use your programs, so perhaps QMON pops up with an error.

Thanks for the suggestion, will give it a go.

Cheers

Artificer wrote:Hi,

Has anyone else experienced a crash on the Q68.

Twice now during longish programming sessions with QD, SBasic and the SBASIC thing my Q68 has crashed.

Screen resolution down from 512x384 to 512x256 and vertical flashing multi coloured lines. No options for recovery. Does the Q68 overheat?. Unlikely as it does not feel hot.
Is it a problem with QD or the SBASIC thing? I don't know. It is only irritating as from long experience with Microsoft I save frequently.

Cheers

Since I reverted to QD V B.01 I havent had any problems (other than the "creeping last line" problem, which never seems to go away). Certainly no crashes.