On 22/01/2011 06:03, Plastic wrote:
Hi all.
So, I recently had a head injury that gave me some concentration and short
term memory problems. From my past experience with this type of injury in
1994, I know the best therapy is to work my brain, stretch it, make demands.
I have use of a QL software emulator. It can emulate the basic QL with many
memory configurations, QDOS, Minerva, etc, and save/load to disk.
So.
The exercise I have given myself is to write some SuperBASIC software that
benefits the community. On completion, the code would be released free for
all.
I was only an average programmer in my heyday and have an idea what my
limitations where then, and am sure they're less now. For this reason, I am
putting some artificial limits on what I do.
It could be anything - a game, utility, whatever. However, it can't rely on
special hardware. It should be able to run on a 640K QL. It would be in
SuperBASIC, not assembly, but as an option (if I can find the Lightning I
have in a box SOMEWHERE) it could be compiled. So TCP/IP based apps are
out... for now. No pointers (I don't have one.)
I'm open to games or simulations that don't require advanced math...
So far I have considered:
An Air Traffic Control game/simulator (depending on realism achieved.)
A graphical tower defense game - but not really a desire to develop some
game toolkit or learn a complicated one - something meeting 80s standards,
not today's!
Blocks games. Many ideas to choose from. Not so convinced on this.
Board games? Meh?
Trading game/stocks/... simulation?
An election/govt game? (Like the BBC "GB Ltd." game, but more playabe?)
A fantasy sport league game?
A catalog/library app? (for books, dvds, etc?)
I'm quite taken by doing a QL version of Plants vs Zombies.
I also have a to do list. I am rereading my original QL manual - don't have
the Care TK2 manual any more so need to go find a copy of that. Also, need
to check out this Minerva thing. I've always stuck to JS roms and tk2. I'm
not a big POKE/PEEKer so OS differences don't affect me so much.
What I'd like from the list is ideas within or outside this list to give me
something to work on. The brain took a good thump and it truly isn't working
so well - it feels like I have a permanent stinking head cold.
*So, ideas/suggestions/discussion would help me, and may act as a bunch of
ideas for others interested in doing something similar in the future...
*
Ok. I went and took a look, and my Lightning is on microdrive. Is there a pd
or shareware compiler anyone would recommend, depending on how the
conversation develops, that can work on an emulator?
Dave
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Good morning Dave,
It would also be a good idea for you to post this on the QL Forum (where
there are more new users than on this list) - see
www.qlforum.co.uk
Manuals - see the QL homepage for replacement manuals which can be
downloaded - http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/docs/manuals/index.html
As for a SuperBASIC compiler...
Lightning is a utility which increase the speed of graphics and text
routines in any program which uses the standard QDOS routines, it is not
a SuperBASIC compiler.
You can purchase Q-Liberator which is a good all round compiler, but not
highly optimised for speed.
Otherwise there is the public domain Turbo compiler which includes a
massive toolkit and can produce much faster code than Q-Liberator, so it
is better for games. The downside with Turbo is that it does not cope
well with sloppy programming, so you need to concentrate on structured
programming (procedures, functions, FOR... END FOR (not simply FOR..
NEXT) etc.
Turbo can be obtained from http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/turbo/index.html
--
Rich Mellor
RWAP Services
http://www.rwapsoftware.co.uk
http://www.rwapservices.co.uk
-- Try out our new site: http://sellmyretro.com
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