> Hey all. Is there a master list somewhere of commercial QL games > released? > Someone mentioned that the Magnetic Scrolls stuff was available for > the QL, > which I never realized. I have only a few entertainment > applications and > they're not necessarily of the highest quality. I think there was a program called The Pawn from them, which was released way back in the early days of the QL (1985???).
It's not commercially available, but some of the traders (e.g. Rich Mellor at RWAP Services) may be able to source a second user copy for you. Rich does have a few commercial games for the QL, and there are plenty in PD too. Trouble is, many are fairly old, and either need a little bit of hacking to work on modern systems, or the other option is often to use an unexpanded QL or QL with early ROM if you wan to play games. Try to find out the game's requirements, try it on your current QL hardware, if it fails to run, try an old QL ROM such as JM or JS and if necessary, run without RAM expansion. Some of the very early games were written in position dependent code. If they were designed ot load intot he 128K RAM, they may well fail to run on higher memory. Some of the early games had a rudimentary copy-protection which relied on a 'fingerprint' number recorded onto the mdv cartridge - these games usually asked you to make a working copy of the master, then it was run with the working copy in mdv1_ and the master copy in mdv2_. Failure to detect the master caused the game to stop. The reaosn for doing it this way was that you could make reasonable backup copies, and it didn't matter if the master got slightly damaged, the fingerprint (which I think was a "random" number applied during formatting of the cartridge) was detectable as long as the master wasn't completely destroyed. Might be worth visiting Rich Mellor's website at www.rwapsoftware.co.ik to see what he has to offer. -- Dilwyn Jones _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
