omega wrote: > Have you ever think why on earth is the spectrum still so strong?
Is it? I have actually no idea. > There are knowledged people willing to share for NO PROFIT. Oh well, then we only have to find some of those and we're all good. That should be easy ;-) > This makes the spectrum scene stable, strong and up to date with HW > and SW. Up to date? With all due respect, but regarding your example, the QL has had hard drive support for at least 15 years. I'm also sure it's possible to get the schematics and layout of the QuibIDE board for free if anybody wants to build one for themselves and the firmware is free anyway. So hardware of that complexity is a pretty old hat. Building hardware that actually advances the QL on the other hand is probably a dozen times more difficult. IIRC even the old SGC card is some very complex 4 layer board that you can't just cook up in your kitchen. And regarding the software side, how big is the spectrum firmware? 8kb of assembler code? Current SMSQ/E releases are 312kb of pure assembler code. That's well over 200,000 lines of code. So excuse me if I think that the two systems cannot be compared in any way. Development for the QL is, in my eyes, much more complex and in a completely different league. Don't get me wrong, I see your point to a certain degree. The hurdles for newcomers are much too high and expensive. You are completely right in that respect. But on one hand the QL scene was always driven and held together by the various commercial traders. On the other hand now is a time that not many new products happen, but that is in part because developing something truly new for the QL can be prohibitly expensive, in both time any money. Marcel _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
