A new item I learned this month is that the QDOS rights to North America is held by Mechanical Affinity. I wrote Frank Davis trying to learn more about this. I specifically asked him if the rights to QDOS include creating a new QL. He responded by saying that he was not too sure.
The uniqueness of the QL is not in its hardware but lies in its operating system, QDOS. If one could implement QDOS (Including SuperBasic with QDOS calls) on another hardware platform, most of us would gladly support the new machine ($costs excluded).
This has been done with QL emulators for the Atari ST and the Amiga. If one had the know-how and the ambition, QDOS could be implemented on a new 68000 platform in a language like C. It could be disk-based and not ROM based (I don’t know what this will do to QDOS calls. I guess QDOS could be loaded from disk into low memory where it resided now) making it easier for updates and cheaper to produce.
Changes could be done to QDOS to make it more “standard” with such things as command line arguements. As it stands, QDOS and SuperBasic are really one thing. QDOS could be separated from SuperBasic, yet still allow SuperBasic to use QDOS commands. This would be similar to MS-DOS Batch files and UNIX shell scripts.
The possiblity and opportunity is there, it’s just a matter of finding someone to do it. It would take a lot of effort to do this. The English QLAW group (working on a “SuperQL”) might have the know-how, but not the opportunity. As far as I understand it, Amstrad still has the rights to QDOS in the rest of the world.
Oh well, it’s nice to ponder on it. Sometimes I wish I had the know-how, time, and (yes) ambition to do it. I confess that I’m a bit lazy. The initial writing of code is the hardest part. Sometimes it takes me a while to work up the energy to do it.