When the QXL Gold card was advertised, I placed an order that never materialized because the project was dropped for the QXL 2, which I felt was too pricey for what I wanted to spend to stay in the game. However, when Jochen Merz, et al, came up with the QPC software emulator for the QL, I ordered one from him. By the way, the DM/dollar exchange rate of $1.725 premium per DM as I write this, makes the cost quite reasonable, at less than $140 including delivery.
When it arrived, after carefully reading the rather sparse manual (38 pages on the included SMSQ/E operating system and 16 pages of QPC-specific info) I felt confident enough to install the program on the hard drive. Since I had already made up a boot floppy disk for some programs that I was running on my PC under IBM DOS 7.0, I needed only to add another MENUITEM to the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files to boot DOS from this disk and then load QPC from the hard drive. (MS DOS supplied with Windows 95 has an almost identical MENUITEM capability.) Once QPC is loaded, the DOS boot floppy can be exchanged for a QL or QPC one, as the DOS file is not called for again until an exit is made from QPC by keying CTRL SHIFT SCROLL-LOCK.
As noted above, my next challenge was to try to get my old QL Trump Card system running long enough to transfer my 5 1/4″ data disks to 3 1/2″ ones that would work with the single floppy drive now standard on all PCs. I could not even get to the F1/F2 option-screen display.
Since I had noticed at times before that a sharp rap on the QL case near the RESET button sometimes would get it to boot up, I thought it might be that some fretting (oxidation) had occurred on the contacts of this momentary switch. I depressed the button and, using the thin extension tube on a spray can of TV tuner/contact cleaner, I soaked everything with the cleaner. While it was still wet, I snapped the button about 20 times. When I tried booting up again — voila! Everything was working and, knock on wood, has continued to work ever since. Unless it was an absolute coincidence that the spray hit something else, like a cracked trace, faulty solder connection or IC socket, what a cheap fix for the frustration I had put up with for years!
Feeling I was on a roll, I attacked the next challenge of replacing one of my two 5 1/4″ quad drives with a 3 1/2″ TEAC FD235HF that I had bought a couple of years ago. This is a jumper-configured type that is no longer made but may still be found in some surplus outlets — all the new floppy drives depend on the computer drive-controller to sort out the configuration. I had bought a 5 1/4″ to 3 1/2″ cable adapter kit (available from Frank Davis) about the time I bought the drive, and after some trial-and-error experimentation with the jumper settings, I successfully FORMATted my first 3 1/2″ disk on the QL. NB: From all documentation I have read, while wrong jumper settings or even reversing the data cable adapter seems not to harm anything, if anyone tries this at home make absolutely sure the power cable connections are correct. Otherwise, it may fry the drive circuitry and/or the power supply.
Four boxes of floppy disks later, and after encountering several files that had been corrupted by my QL crashing from time to time over the years, I had made WCOPYs of all my programs and everything I had ever done that I wanted to try using with QPC. using with QPC. Overall, I am very pleased with the enhanced capability of QPC that includes all the commands of SuperBASIC, Super Gold Card, SBASIC, SMSQ/E, and Toolkit 2 which installs automatically. It runs at an excellent speed with my IBM/Cyrix 5X86 CPU.
I should note, however, that QPC manual to the contrary, while my new QL drive happily did 1440-sector formats/reads/writes on a couple DSHD disks I tried on it, QPC would not recognize them as QL disks, but QL or QPC-formatted DSDD disks work fine on both. QPC will format DSHD disks to 2880 sectors on my HD PC drive, which my QL Trump Card of course will not recognize but a Gold Card system would.
Another anomaly I encountered with QPC and my 104-key Windows 95 keyboard appears similar to what 131 REN keyboard IF users have reported with sons: keyboards, and that is that some keys do not produce their respective characters. On mine, SHIFT 2 produces “, gives #, ” gives @, SHIFT gives (tilde), CTRL SHIFT gives 1, and SHIFT 3 gives the pound symbol. So far, I have not discovered any keystroke or combination that produces the back-slash V
When writing a program that requires using to produce a line-feed in a display or print-out, the ALTKEY function can be used. First, HOT – GO must be entered to activate ALTKEY. (HOT – GO also enables returning the last keystroke sequence used by keying ALT ENTER together as on the QL). Then entering ALTKEY “#”, CHR$(92) will produce whenever ALT and the PC key are pressed. This and other ALTKEY definitions may be SAVEd as a DO file if desired. With a disk in FLP 1, for my keyboard definitions I entered the following as a direct command: OPEN NEW #7, KEYS:PRINT #7,”HOT GO “:PRINT #7, “ALTKEY ‘#’, CHR$(92)”:PRINT 47, “ALTKEY CHR$(39), CHR$(34)”:PRINT #7,”ALTKEY ‘3’,’#'”:CLOSE. After ENTER creates the file KEYS on the disk, VIEW KEYS will display the routine and DO KEYS will activate it. Now ALT produces , ALT produces ” and ALT 3 produces #. Note that CHR$(92) is used to define the character, and using CHR$(39) and CHR$(34) allows both ‘ and ” to be properly nested in the same PRINT “string”.
Speaking of printing, in order to use a parallel printer with the parallel IF driver provided with QPC, the command in the DOS AUTOEXEC.BAT file that calls for QPC to load should read: QPC-P:1 . This causes QPC to look for parallel port LPT1, which is the default PC printer port. QL programs such as the PSION suite require some slight changes. With QPC loaded and running, and the program disk in FLP1, enter LRUN INSTALL_BAS and key the space-bar to select PARALLEL. Highlight the driver file to be edited. Key F2/EDIT to change the PRINTER_DAT file so the line for printer PORT shows PAR as the one that is being selected. Key F5 to install and save this edited driver back to the disk. This PRINTER_DAT file may then be used with XCHANGE by doing a WCOPY of it to RAM1_ and then, with the XCHANGE disk inserted, enter the command line:
WCOPY RAM1_PRINTER_DAT TO FLP1_XCHANGE_DAT.
An alternative for programs that were written for the old serial-to-parallel printer IF adapter is to simply place a PAR_USE SER command at the start of their respective boot routines.
Although I have a 1.3Gb hard drive on my PC, I added a ZIP drive so I do not have to take up hard drive space for storing data files. Other removable-disk drives are available that are faster and have larger capacity, but I bought the ZIP drive for less than $100. My ZIP disks cost me about 12¢ per megabyte, or about 4.8¢ per megabyte if used with Stacker 4.0, which gives a nominal capacity of over 248 Mb per disk. Those accustomed to the space-conserving programming used with Sinclair-based computers are likely to be amazed at the sheer size of Windows 95 programs that can quickly fill a hard drive. One that came pre-installed on my PC hard drive takes up 150 Mb by itself.
The hard drive format provided by QPC requires that a WINchester partition be reserved for WIN files so, rather than using my hard drive for WIN partition(s), I am installing them on ZIP disks also. My four hard drive partitions are C, D, E, and F, so each 100 Mb disk in the ZIP drive is seen by the PC as drive G, and by QPC as WIN5_. The “formatting” of a WIN partition actually creates a huge DOS file with a driver called QXL.WIN, which can coexist on the same disk with other DOS files. Allowing for the overhead required for this file and driver, about 95 Mb is the maximum available for a WIN partition on a 100 Mb ZIP disk. Be prepared to wait over an hour for a partition this size to be done. If Stacker 4.0 is used to create a compressed ZIP disk before doing a FORMAT WINn, the WIN partition on it may be up to about 240 Mb in size, or proportionately less if room is also being reserved for DOS files.