At 07:58 PM 1/7/2002 +0000, you wrote: >In light of the above, there's a couple of practical things I can do to >help the situation. I would like to start a QDOS/SMSQ documentation >project.
Dilwyn Jones has a whole bunch of documentation on his web site. Plus, a while back I started the QL PD Documentation Project, where I collected as many files as I could find that talk about QDOS. Some discuss user level stuff, some discuss programming, some discuss system level stuff. It sounds like your aim is mostly at the OS itself. We already have a freeware version of QDOS, called ...... QDOS. It's my under understanding that Amstrad (and/or Sinclair) has allowed the distribution of the QL ROM's for things like emulators. This is how QDOS Classic came about. Mark Swift ported QDOS to the Amiga and to the Q40. Some have suggested that this be a starting point for extending the QL OS. A bunch of QDOS extensions (that have pretty much become part of QDOS) are still copyright (like the Pointer Environment, new color drivers, ToolKit II, newer file system drivers). These parts are what makes SMSQ/E different that QDOS. I have not looked at the QDOS Classic code, so I don't know if it is very documented. There was a nice article in Quanta that explains the QDOS Scheduler (in very gross detail). There is also the QDOS book by Pennel that goes into great detail about QDOS (although a little dated). Maybe someone could contact the author and get the book released as freeware. Tim Swenson
