And during the pause, I need to get a passable facsimily of me made to handle day to day affairs, while I concentrate on things I really like doing, like designing hardware for the QL ;-)
Life would be so much better with a new Nasta h/w creation:-)
CardsWell I would love to know as well - all I do know is that Super Goldare soon snapped up as soon as people know that they are available.....
Even at 80 plus pounds a piece (which shows how badly a new "standard" expansion card is needed (Nasta?)
Or at least more SGCs...
Well SGCs will never be produced again and that's that... they are way too expensive anyway to make any sense for a *brilliant admittedly* piece of hardware of the 90s
Why do you think I posted the lengthy messages about ColdFire vs 68k?
I wish I knew :-)
I just saw all your messages... It turns out that I have set up a filter for your messages as I always keep them for reference (One Nasta email worth is two manuals of any subject to say the least -plus three or four essays on a subject to boot-) Trouble was that my filter removed your messages from ql-users (which is set up differently) and didn't display them anywhere! SO I missed all of them... well not really I just spent the last two hours reading them all :-)
Dave told me about the PortAsm/68K software (which was originally said here and I never knew it) which was promptly downloaded :-)
At this point designing a new standard card requires a rather major
decision involving a problem quite similar to what was being discussed in
the original thread, namely, leaving some of the past IN the past. Even the
GoldFire design (even though, in it's last iteration, it did not have much
to do with ColdFire CPUs) was intended to run QMSQ/E exclusively, or at
least as the first option. Of course, no one would be stopped from porting
QDOS classic on it or indeed anything they saw fit - which is why the
documentation was freely available. It can still be made with the original
pair of 68060s (one required, one optional). The performance would be
slightly faster than Q60 as it utilizes faster RAM, and this is certainly
quite powerful in QL terms. Redesigning for CF V4e would push the
performance up by a factor of 4, ASSUMING the differences in architecture
are suitably handled - and note that at this point, 'suitably' is
signifficantly complicated by the nead to provide near 100% compatibility.
One of the reasons the freeQDOS idea was born was this one specifically... keep the idea (and what code can be kept) and leave the rest behind... to tie this with the other thread about SMSQ/e, QWord etc this is a strategic decision that hasn't been taken lightly. While still in QDOS-like world you HAVE to support as many as you can with system and application software. That was the shortcoming of SMSQ/e because it was so much QDOS-like that failed to move forward to the extent TT would have wanted(If I have understood TT's intentions clearly from articles available in iQLR was to move the QDOS idea forward without too much "baggage" but was forced by demand to reintroduce bugs and make it as compatible as possible).
My intentions re: freeQDOS (as I said currently *vapourware* :-) ) are such and even more grandiose than that and probably tie to the Stella idea if anything else (It also incroporates almost to the "T" your own ideas of Metadrivers... which is in a sense a slightly modified POSIX way of doing things).
All of this means that the OS developers Marcel mentioned in his astute
email (in fact, I don't remember Marcel ever NOT being astute and to the
point in any email), would certainly get space to develop. But even if they
do and all the extra nice hardware features are supported, nothing will
happen if applications actually don't use them.
Unless they are forced to... A "concept" OS would do just that by introducing so many incompatibilities with its predecessors that if anyone gets it it would be only to really try it and not to replace what he currently has. That approach of course has the drawback of the new OS itself being completely ignored in which case you didn't lose anything but a few hundred hours of sleep but at least you gained valuable experience :-)
Now, there are two ways about this:
Either I design what i think I should, even breaking compatibility in
places where it's the sensible thing to do, and ignore the rants of the
sticklers-to-the-old, inviting the formation of yet another rift in the
shrinking community. A sort of "this is the medicine, take it or leave it"
approach. Lots of time and money involved, and most certainly not only for
me.
If any design could have OTHER applications than just running SMSQ/e or any QDOS compatible/like etc. OS then you should go ahead and do that... the future of QL is not in its weaning numbers but in the continuation of the ideas brought forward which in themselves were radical at the time and still are to a great extent... Radical it is :-) *please?* :-P
I could get back into 68k programming with months needed to tackle
So, what should I do?
N.
PS - in a recent mail someone said that most users that do not want to
upgrade to SMSQ/E don't want it because theyt would have to use the PE. To
my knowledge SMSQ/E does not come with a built in bomb that explodes if one
does not use thge PE part of SMSQ/E, I just don't see what part of it would
MAKE them use it? Oh, and I have no doubt that quite a lot of the same lot
use Windows on a daily basis.... am I the only one who sees this as ironic?
I said that and I was refering to specific reasonings which are all valid...
Some people (among which extremely talented programmers - which excludes myself immediately ;-) ) *REALLY* hate the concept of the PE and dismiss it completely as to say the least a crude hack.
Others do not like its look and feel (among them myself) - For example I can never get used in pulldown menus that aren't really pull down but context menus (can't get around that concept still but that's my quirk)
There are people that do not like the idea of SMSQ/e as Open Source but non Free Software... perfectly valid reason as well... you cannot develop -or use- an operating system whose principles violate yours (in the sense that software is the development of an idea similar to literature and such an idea if it violates your principles you don't aspouse*
There are also people afraid of change... that I am *absolutely certain* they would love SMSQ/e if they'd given it a chance but are too afraid? conformists? (who knows really) so they do not try it... That's the most misguided reasoning of all IMHO but heck who am I to judge.
And of course there are people whose computing needs are in an extremely tight budget and they are even lucky to just have a black box QL... to that I cannot say anything...
It's each to their own I guess...
Phoebus
P.S. Now I can see your emails again so keep them a-comin'!!! _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
