Tony Firshman wrote: > I didn't see his his hard disk interface. Phil Borman told me he had > used the Rebel code. Was that right? Qubide also used this under > license. Phii was not aware of any license for his build.
What I can say is, that Jürgen Falkenberg or Ulrich Rosowski must have modified a hardware circuit from Dirk Steinkopf, the person who also wrote QL-HD. I don't know wether they also used Dirk's driver or a different one. The interface from Dirk Steinkopf was public domain, and I had soldered it myself instead of buying the Falkenberg interface, which seemed somewhat big and expensive to me at the time. The disadvatage was, that an MFM/RLL-Controller was required in addition to the interface. >From my point of view, the structure of Dirk Steinkopf's driver (QL-HD) is cleaner and more modern than Rebel/Qubide. The lowlevel routines for init, read and write were nicely separated, and I've been able to complety bring them to the C language layer within a few days of work. This will allow me to adapt the driver to SD/MMC cards. In Qubide, low-level access is scattered all over the code and the same task would take me years. (I am not an assembler guru...) Also, QL-HD uses a C language layer, unlike all other QL disk drivers I know. I think the QL scene made a mistake to forget Dirk's driver for so long. It had nice features like true subdirectories, background operation, and job specific working directories. Other drivers implemented that much later or never. I am pretty sure Dirk has not used anyone elses's driver code, probably except looking into the QL ROM how things are done there. All the best, Peter _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
