Hi All (but especially Wolfgang, Tony, Marcel or anybody else involved in
SMSQ/E development and/or source maintainance),
In the last months on the Italian Sinclair QL mailing list we had quite a
number of discussions on some bugs (?) that appeared in SMSQ/E and were
probably not promptly spotted because of the impossibility of testing
everything and lack of feedback from users (who maybe were not upgrading
regularly).
I will try to recup the main ones and I would appreciate if anybody could
help fixing them or at least providing ideas on how other QL users could
help.
1) SMSQ/E for Aurora does not read anymore DD floppy disks. Everything was
working till 2.91. From the tests did on some SMSQ/E version we found 2.95
has the bug, 2.98 crashes, 3.03 has the bug
2) SMSQ/E for QXL
in DISP_COLOUR 3:
- DISP_SIZE 512,256 - works OK
- DISP_SIZE 640,480 - works OK
- DISP_SIZE 800,600 - no error but the resolution is 640x480
- DISP_SIZE 1024,768 - no error but the resolution is 640x480
in DISP_COLOUR 0:
- DISP_SIZE 512,256 - works OK
- DISP_SIZE 640,480 - works OK
- DISP_SIZE 800,600 - no error but the screen is corrupted and unreadable
- DISP_SIZE 1024,768 - no error but the screen is corrupted and unreadable
So the maximum possible resolution is 640x480
BAUD returns an error
3) SMSQ/E for Gold Card does not initialise external interface.
Here we found different versions of SMSQ/E for standard expanded QL (i.e.
GC, SGC with or withour Aurora) for which it was almost impossible to
understand their real usage. These versions were named GOLD, GOLD256 and
Aurora. Thanks to Per Witte we received a list of the modules linked in the
above three versions. To make a long story short the following differences
were detected:
GOLD GOLD256
Aurora
..... ....
....
SMSQ GOLD CON Driver SMSQ
GOLD CON Driver
SMSQ GOLD 8 bit CON Driver SMSQ
GOLD 8 bit CON Driver
Initialise QL ROM
GOLD only contains standard CON drivers
GOLD256 contains only 8bit CON drivers
Aurora contains both
.... Only Aurora contains "Initailise QL Roms"!!
This explains why the versions GOLD and GOLD256 do not initialise external
roms like Qubide Romdisk etcetera: the modules is just not linked! So what
were they meant for? For sure they were not intended for QemuLator as
Daniele Terdina explicitely excluded this. Anybody could explain why the
Initialise QL ROM has not been linked? Would it be possible to link it? Or
maybe the Aurora version would just suite all possible hw combinations?
I guess it does not make sense to spend effort for SMSQ/E for QXL, but the
issues on the GC/SGC/Aurora versions I think would deserve at least a try.
N.3 maybe is just a question of understanding whether it makes sense to keep
all these versions and in case link again the "Initalise QL ROM" where
missing. The DD floppy bug would deserve a fix hoping all source codes of
old versions are avaailble as I think there are still quite some users with
GC/SGC/Aurora with DD disks.
Any feedback and contributions to the above findings would be welcome.
Kind regards
Davide (as spokesman of Italian QL users)
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