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Greetings! newcomer to the QL here!

Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2019 12:58 pm
by keith56
Hello! let me introduce myself!

I'm Keith, Author of the Z80 based 'ChibiAkumas' Game... I started learning Z80 Assembly a couple of years ago, and found it more interesting than I expected! I've since expanded, and learned 6502 and 68000...

I came across the Sinclair QL a couple of months back, and I find it a strange 'middle ground' between an 8 bit like the Camputers Lynx, and a 16 bit like the Amiga...

I like to go to 'bare metal' in my programming, and skip pesky things like Bios and operating systems, so the QL seems quite interesting to me!

I'm currently having to make do with emulators, but I'm planning to get 'real hardware'... and hopefully I'll be able to make a little game or two in the future for the QL!

I may ask a silly question or two in the early days, so please bear with me!

Re: Greetings! newcomer to the QL here!

Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2019 1:11 pm
by tofro
Welcome, Keith!

When looking for hardware, you might want to have a look at the Q68 (use the forum search), an FPGA re-implementation of the QL that comes with a lot of improvements, but can also behave pretty close to the original (just what the Spectrum Next is doing, but with a way better availability...). Derek here in the forum is busy building batches of it.

Tobias

Re: Greetings! newcomer to the QL here!

Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2019 4:51 pm
by vanpeebles
A big warm welcome to the forum! :) Are you hoping to do some QL games? :)

Re: Greetings! newcomer to the QL here!

Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2019 8:14 pm
by Cristian
Welcome!

Re: Greetings! newcomer to the QL here!

Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2019 9:23 pm
by keith56
vanpeebles wrote:A big warm welcome to the forum! :) Are you hoping to do some QL games? :)
Yes, I'm looking to do some multiplatform 68000 games, and where possible, I'll be releasing them on the QL as well.

Re: Greetings! newcomer to the QL here!

Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2019 9:37 pm
by Derek_Stewart
Hi,

Welcome, Keith56, I have been reading your Z80 tutorial, which I find very interesting and well written.

I must admit to only using WINAPE to play CPC games. I run it on a Linux computer, under Wine. I have never used the bulitin assembler and debugger, I will have a look at this.

I used to programme in Z80 assembler on ZX Spectrum, Memotech MTX512. I was looking at the Skoolkit disassembler, with a view to convert the Z80 to 68000.

I thought about writing a 68000 library for an assembler to emulate a Z80 instruction set, but alas the Q68 construction gets in the way of the software development.

Re: Greetings! newcomer to the QL here!

Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2019 11:31 pm
by keith56
Thanks for your comments on my Z80 tutorials!....
The Winape Assembler was great to get me started on ASM - I don't think I could have managed it without it, though now I'm more familiar, I just use Notepad++ and VASM most of the time...

I recently wrote a little game called 'Grime Z80' (a remake of an old dos game) and later ported it to the 6502 and 68000 (YES - Sinclair QL version in the works!)... I 'hand converted' the code from Z80, so the resulting code is the 6502/68k equivalents of the z80 code, but it wasn't any kind of 'Automatic job'...

Code conversion is something that is interesting to me, I want any future projects to be available on 6502 and 68K systems as well as Z80 - and I've started writing a simple 'converter' to help me port my code (it's just a script that swaps comamnds for the 68k alternative) - I'm never imagining it doing all the work for me - and a lot of tweaking and optimization will be needed, but my goal is to produce multiplatform games with as little extra 'overhead' as possible, so it's something I am looking at to assist me in this...

Thanks for your comments! I'm hoping to learn more about the QL!

Re: Greetings! newcomer to the QL here!

Posted: Mon May 06, 2019 9:47 pm
by Outsoft
keith56 wrote:Hello! let me introduce myself!

I'm Keith, Author of the Z80 based 'ChibiAkumas' Game... I started learning Z80 Assembly a couple of years ago, and found it more interesting than I expected! I've since expanded, and learned 6502 and 68000...

I came across the Sinclair QL a couple of months back, and I find it a strange 'middle ground' between an 8 bit like the Camputers Lynx, and a 16 bit like the Amiga...

I like to go to 'bare metal' in my programming, and skip pesky things like Bios and operating systems, so the QL seems quite interesting to me!

I'm currently having to make do with emulators, but I'm planning to get 'real hardware'... and hopefully I'll be able to make a little game or two in the future for the QL!

I may ask a silly question or two in the early days, so please bear with me!
Wow!!!

What a great surprise!!!

We absolutely need new games for the QL :)

I loved you Chibi's game and I've bought it fot Speccy in the +3 disk format.

It will be very very nice to see some new work on the QL published on floppy or MD ;)

I hope you can do it using the base QL SET (128k and MD drive) but also a Floppy version with an upgrade of 768k ram can be used mostly to all QL users.

We hope to find more details from you.

In LOW res will be very colourful but in HI RES will be divine too ;)

Best regards from Italy ;)