<snip>
There's probably more to say, but I've already lost enough time typing this up. Perhaps another time or in a follow up. But hopefully it helped clearing up some confusion.
It definitely did for me at least :-)
We need open discussion on ways to bring all these people back together, and find ways of programming for all of them, not just one or two select groups.
If your point is "some people do still use QDOS and we just have to cope with it and care for them", then I should probably resign as a SMSQ/E developer, because what's the point? We cannot do any enhancements because that would make it incompatible with QDOS! So we might as well freeze all developments, except bug fixes maybe, and call it a day.
-OR- decide to go the other way and indeed make it incompatible... I've always thought (and we have discussed this in the past) that the only way forward is.... forward :-) Which means yes, we should go ahead and make SMSQ/e incompatible with QDOS if a certain feature will bring a nice, yet missing functionality... in my mind however this is completely different from catering to the users of the older platform. It is the developer's own decision to cater -or not- for these. I, personally, do not have ANY problems with programs that won't work with QDOS... heck we even have programs that do not work between versions of QDOS proper... that's the way it was always and there's no difference here...
In reality the main problems (esp. with Q-Word) arose because there's no *clear* source of documentation of what the system's features are, what the changes have been and what is the planning for new ones... Don't get me wrong I realise that most of that information exists *out there* somewhere and most of it has been made public either here, or QLT or in some apospasmatic form within a discussion about a different item. For you (Marcel), that may or may not be clear, after all you have been involved so closely with the development of SMSQ/e you know the code as well as TT did and even more completely now; so this lack of supporting documentation may elude you as it is all very clear to you and in your head but it is very real to a great deal of people. I remember when the new PE was introduced before and after you did some changes to the way it handled sprites, the alpha channels etc you released information here which some people may have kept and others didn't (me for example)... Each for their own reasons. This documentation never made it to an "official" manual of sorts, the QDOS/SMS reference manual (by Jochen) never got updated and in the end although this information exists there's no definitive source to get it all in ONE place. In my mind this is more rediscovering the wheel than anything else :-)
Suggestions??
Develop software for SMSQ/E to perhaps nudge the users that don't have it yet to switch. In MY opinion we don't have the man power to care for all platforms in all cases. I have actually invested more time into debugging your QWord with its custom graphics than it probably would have taken me to completely write this thing myself using the PE functionality available! And that would have been truly independent of the colour mode it runs on. And believe it or not, smaller.
All QWord graphics can be compressed to a few hundred KB with the RLE algorithm
integrated into SMSQ/E.
Yes they would (Not all of them but the big screens definitely)... and I have tried it but it is way too slow on decompression for the amount of things to move around (Having said that I must admit that I did not use the RLE decompression of SMSQ/e when I tried it - independently from Rich I have to say- for two reasons: 1. I always believed that dealt with sprites only and 2. there's no documentation easily accessible for it... or should I just start bugging you again ? :-DDD)
Oh great, having spent all this time writing this, now my DSL line is down. Why can't they do any works on it when I don't need it, like 9 in the morning? So let's see when this mail finally leaves my machine.
Marcel
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