If QPC2 were freely available at no cost the difficulties of the demo
version would, of
course, disappear. How could a free version of QPC2 be possible?
I would guess that not many copies, if any, of QPC2 will be sold in the
future. That being so,
it might be worth while offering Marcel a sum of money in place of these.
This could be
attractive to Marcel if he reckoned that it was worth more than he would
get from the future
sales. It would, I suggest, be of interest to the present body of QLers in
that it may well attract
new users and give the QL a new lease of life.
Where would the money come from?
Again I have a suggestion. It seems that QUANTA have some funds which they
have
considered using on projects. If that is still the case then "freeing"
QPC2 would be a project
to be considered.
George
Approaches to Quanta would depend on proper business case propositions being
written and a formal approach made to Quanta. I'm not sure it would involve
an amount Quanta could afford - obviously I don't know what QPC2 sales are
like at the moment.
Alternatives might be:
1. Getting a floppy disk driver written for QLay2 or QL2K, as that is
already a free QDOS emulator.
2. There is a chap in the Netherlands (can't remember his real name, he goes
under the moniker of Zeccie on QL Forum) who is developing a Java-based QL
emulator. I don't know what progress (if any) he's made on this, but it
would be a nice easy way of running QL software in a Java-capable browser.
3. When it comes to running older software, a QDOS QL emulator might be a
better choice, especially QemuLator as that can run with either QDOS ROMs or
SMSQ/E. I wonder if there's any mileage in persuading Daniele to do a
runtime only free or low cost QemuLator which ran programs without the
ability to save much? QemuLator can run at QL speed (for old games), has a
range of memory sizes and so on. And can even run software direct from a
QLPAK or Zipped file.
Just some ideas plucked out of thin air to extend this discussion...
Dilwyn Jones
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