Hello Rich, I would be grateful if you could send me the ZM/hT and also the ZM/128 doc files (if you revised also that one). Unfortunately I left most of the files on ED disks which I am not able to read anymore. With those manuals I could perhaps find the will to prepare a more decent version for download both of ZM/hT and ZM/128 (though the latter is almost useless with ZeXcel).
Thank you Best regards Davide -----Messaggio originale----- Da: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Per conto di Rich Mellor Inviato: mercoledì 14 febbraio 2007 23.18 A: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Oggetto: Re: [ql-users] ZM/hT full manual ( was: The power of the Internet.) I have the full manual in Quill _doc format should anyone want me to email a copy. Davide - do you not have a full copy to upload to the website? I agree with some of the comments below. Low cost hardware has indeed been developed for the Spectrum, but it is hard to justify spending £30 on parts and then selling fully made up and tested boards for £30-£35. It takes time to solder, test and design the hardware. Plus firmware has to be written - the DivIDE designer was lucky that someone designed FATware for it before launch and did not want payment. However, now we come to design an improved version (DivIDE Plus), this is where we hit the stumbling block - some of the original firmware designers are not interested in going back to a 2-3 year old project and re-writing it to cope with improved hardware and all the new facilities made available - they do not hav ethe time or cannot give it freely, but yet are unwilling to charge for an upgraded version ! Designing hardware for the QL does not seem as easy as for the Spectrum for some reason - possibly due to the difference in the bus and expansion port. There are also a lot less people who can write firmware. I also think that the Spectrum users have much lower expectations than QL users, especially due to the memory paging system on the Spectrum - after all, we could sell a 4MB memory expansion card for the Spectrum, but programs have to page in 16K (?) at a time and therefore you do not get bigger programs being written !! There never were many programs written which utilised the full 128K available on later models, so memory is not an issue. However on the QL, programs are written which can fill all the available memory, as they do not have to worry about how it pages in. The QL has always had a wealth of public domain programs, but unfortunately the user base (and thus the programmer base) has always been a lot smaller than for the Speccy, so there is little incentive to write programs or design new hardware. Rich On Wed, 14 Feb 2007 21:11:06 -0000, omega <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> From: "Neil Riley" >> A comment Davide made to me has suddenly hit home. Basically he was >> pleased that someone was still having fun with his product after some >> 10 years or more.... >> but wait a minute, the spectrum >> scene is still strong so why on earth isn't ZM/ht etc still >> commercially available and being advertised on Auction sites like >> Ebay. > With full respect to Davide - he did truly good job with his emulator, > I do love it - I wouldn't probably buy it today. This time has gone. I > like his approach to provide it for free, which promotes himself > better than low selling product. > > I am from spectrum scene and I cannot believe what some people are > writing here. Have you ever think why on earth is the spectrum still > so strong? There are knowledged people willing to share for NO PROFIT. > This makes the spectrum scene stable, strong and up to date with HW and SW. > IDE HDD interface called divIDE (similar to Qubide) is great example > of such activity : http://baze.au.com/divide/ Anyone can build it from > schematics, buy a DIY kit for 20EURO(!) or buy a complete interface > for 30EURO. For 30 EUROs (+/- price of the components) your ZX > Spectrum has much higher value and more features. Reward for these > authors is only success and feedback from users. > > Similar trends to have open projects can be seen in Atari scene, > Commodore (look at Commodore One), MSX, CPC (look at try out SymbOS) etc. > > In contrary what I see here on QL scene is still push to commerciality. > This doesn't attract newcomers, because unexpanded QL which you buy on > ebay with four Psion microdrives is nothing more than poor computer > with "cool design and potential". Expanding QL is hard and expensive > or not possible due to lack of expension cards. At the top of it there > are no open source projects to change this status. Software on QL is > special category... So, where is the QL heading? > > I don't want to be missinterpretted - it is nothing against you Neil, > but certainly I see here big difference in ZX Scene and QL Scene. >> btw, as a side question. I have plenty of _Z80 images that ZM/hT >> expects but i have even more .SNA's. >> Is anyone aware of a .SNA to _Z80 convertors. Just for fun i renamed >> .sna to Z80_rom and whilst ZM/ht saw the Z80 and even showed initial >> splash screens, it crashes. >> > Z80 is compressed, SNA is not. Decompressing not compressed data must > certainly crash. > > Jan > _______________________________________________ > QL-Users Mailing List > http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm > > -- Rich Mellor RWAP Services URL:http://www.rwapsoftware.co.uk URL:http://www.rwapservices.co.uk _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
