Rich Mellor wrote:
I would also like a java based Sinclair QL emulator and perhaps
that
would be a project which Quanta could help fund the development
of - it
would attract a much wider audience and enable demos of programs to
be
played online to show what the QL is capable of.
There are already Java based emulators for the Amiga - perhaps
someone
could use this core, or even see if they can get the QL emulator to
run
on the Java based Amiga emulator.
I think the idea of using a platform independent system to run an
emulator to be a good idea, though it does add another layer of
indirection and a performance penalty. After all, it's a virtual
processor/machine running within another virtual processor/machine.
My original suggestion for the "QL In A Browser" was intended more as
a portable option - where I could use my "QL" from abrowser wherever I
happened to be at the time (no comments please!). I accept what you
say about the speed overheads, but it was really only intended as a
facility to use a QL in a browser, nothing more than that.
For those who like hardware, maybe building upon the work done in
the
Linux world would be an interesting way forward, e.g. writing a
bare-metal M68K virtual machine on top of an ARM (I know, it's an
Acorn
derivative ;-)) machine which is already available.
I seem to remember that Urs mentioned something on 11th June discussed
at the Austrian QL meeting called a QCF card (QLCompact Flash), a
bare bones Linux computer on a flash card for the ROM port. I'm not
sure if this was meant to be running a QL emulator and so become a
super-QL-on-a-QL (he mentioned the QXL.WIN etc) or simply a plug-in
Linux computer for the QL. Either way, it sounded interesting and
certainly one way to go forward.
Dilwyn Jones
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