WEB page IX Italian QL Meeting
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meeting Italy 2000 main pageOn Sunday 8th of October has been held the 9th
Italian Sinclair QL meeting in Reggio Emilia (Italy). After four
years it has been the occasion in order to meet old and new
friends, Italians and not. The foreign exhibitors who have
participated were Jochen Merz (JMS Software), Tony Firshman (TF
Services) and Roy Wood (Q-Branch).
Nineteen Italian QL users attended the meeting. This is not a
good figure especially because some "historic" QL
Italian friends did not joined us. We really put a great effort
trying to contact and invite as much users as possible but the
feedback was not too satisfying.
After our foreign friends left Reggio Emilia around 4 p.m, we had
an interesting discussion about the actions to take in order to
invert this trend. One of the main reasons we found is the lack
of communication and co-ordination between all the Italian users.
For this reason one of the priorities that we have given
ourselves for the future, is to create an
"infrastructure" in order to maintain connected and
informed Italian users. For this task "the net" can
help us a lot: in 1996 the email was still limited to an
"elite" of persons, while right not now it is an
instrument of widespread use. It is necessary therefore to take
advantage of this technology in order to organise and maintain
informed the QL Italian community.
This is the reason why I have created an Email Italian bulletin
(sinclair-info on http://www.onelist.com),
which will periodically inform Italian users of news in the QL
scene. So far this mailing list counts 65 users. Of course we
will try to ship the newsletter via standard mail for people who
do not have internet access.
On another side we will try to put on the web all the files
collected on Italian Fidonet BBS: Ergon BBS (which has been
recently closed down) and Qitaly BBS (which closed down more or
less two years ago).
Finally Giorgio Garabello prepared the resurrection of the former
Italian QL disk magazine Qitaly. This completely new disk
magazine is called QL Magazine and is worth having if you are
able to read Italian language. It can be downloaded from http://utenti.tripod.it/Sinclair/qlm.htm
and can be read even from a 128Kb QL (640 Kb needed to view
pictures). It can also be seen from PC by means of any html
viewer (so it can be virtually view on almost every computer
platform) and ZX Spectrum thanks to a separate utility that can
be found on Giorgio's web site.
I started from the end, but now I'll return back to the meeting.
As in the past the day before the meeting we had dinner together
and this was really amusing. Unfortunately, unlike previous
times, the only Italian participant has been the undersigned. The
only difficulty was to find in the fattening "emiliana
cousine" some vegetarians dishes for our guests. Tony
Firhsman delighted us talking about his experience with insurance
companies after his crash during the trip to Croatia in 1998 (see
previous QL Today for full report). We talked about former QL
developers like Stuart Honeyball alias Miracle Systems, Freddy
Vaccha and many others. It was really great fun.
On Sunday morning I had just time to watch on TV the victorious
arrival of Micheal Schumacher in the Japan F1 grand prix.
(Ferrari won the F1 championship after 21 years!). At 9:15 I
opened the room. Jochen and the others guys arrived nearly at 10,
with a slight delay because of a "misunderstanding"
with the manager of the hotel that tried to apply higher rates
than the ones reported in the rooms and inside the lounge. The
first QL users who arrived there were my friends Adelchi
Moscardini and Roberto Baciglieri (Adelchi had a heart-operation
in hospital the week before!). Unfortunately the room sadly
remained empty till 11 a.m. when the other Italian friends not
coming from the Reggio Emilia area finally started to join us. At
noon we started the usual interviews.
We started talking with Tony Firshman (http://www.firshman.demon.co.uk/)
who introduced all his hardware products. Minerva MKII allows
interfacing with the external world through some I/O lines. I2C
are interface cards that allow to control electrical equipment
(Tony did the demonstration with a Lego helicopter). SuperHermes
allows to connect to the standard QL a PC keyboard and a PC
mouse. It has a fast serial port (up to 57600 baud), and it fixes
the bugs of QL serial ports. A light version is available only
with PC keyboard interface (plus standard serial port fixing).
M-Plane is a backplane for the QL that allows connecting all the
QL peripherals, from the standard QL to Aurora, Qubide, Gold
Card, Super Gold Card etcetera. Romdisq is a small card that
connects in the ROM port of the QL or in a special M-Plane slot.
Romdisq has a static ram static (from 2Mb to 8Mb) that is seen
from the QL like a standard ramdisk. Being a static ram it
maintains the data even when you switch off your equipment, hence
Romdisq becomes a small hard disk (seen the dimensions of QL
files). Tony came from England by plane with a Romdisq, Minerva,
SuperGoldCard and SuperHermes. I lent him for the meeting a QL
and monitor and all was ready for his demonstrations without he
had to carry an hard disk: all software was on Romdisq!
Jochen Merz (http://www.j-m-s.com/smsq)
presented all his vast software production. The most noticeable
news was the release of QPC2 version 2. This version (at the
moment still in beta version but the final release will be
available soon), supports 65536 colours (also through SuperBasic
commands) and allows to use QPC2 in a Windows' window (version 1
takes all the screen). I really hope that it will be possible to
read DOS files via a dosx _ device like (though in a different
way) Daniele Terdina's QemuLator does. The emulation kernel has
been further streamlined and is approximately 20% faster than
version 1.
The update from version 1 costs around 40 euros. I strongly
believe that QPC2 is the future of the QL: it is supported in an
excellent way by Marcel Kilgus (http://www.deuschle.de/qpc),
it has the advantage to benefit from the great steps done in the
PC world in terms of performances. You upgrade your system from a
Pentium 200 to a Pentium III 800? QPC will go at least 6 times
faster and you won't spend anything on the QL side. You can have
a portable QL or a workstation QL: just install it on your
notebook or your workstation PC. It is easy to network the QL in
an extremely efficient way taking advantage of the Windows
network (e.g. selecting the local QXL.WIN like win1 _ and the
QXL.WIN on another computer like WIN2). I think QPC2 is one of
the most important software ever produced for the QL.
Jochen also introduced version 2.98 of SMSQ/E for QXL. This
provides 65536 colours like QPC2 v2. With the respect to the
previous version the I/O speed has been improved. I've got and
tried it but I must say that on my 4 Mb QXL the 65536 colours
configuration is almost of no use because of lack of memory. Less
than 1.5 Mb are available without loading extensions. After
opening two or three windows the memory has gone. I wasn't even
able to view at 65k colours a jpeg image with Photon because of
insufficient memory. So if you are interested in the colours I
would suggest the upgrade only to people who have an 8 Mb QXL.
Said this please note that due to the large memory use for screen
updating, even with the improved I/O speed the screen update
redrawing appears sluggish. Instead it is now very good with the
original 4 colours.
Roy Wood (Qbranch - http://www.qbranch.demon.co.uk
/) presented many software and hardware pieces that he
distributes. After the withdraw of Qubbesoft, DJC, Miracle
Systems etc. Qbranch is now the reference for software and
hardware in the UK. You can find reconditioned / 2nd hand pieces
(Gold Card, Aurora, Super Gold Card, QXL...) and new ones like
Q40. Q40 (http://www.q40.de/) was probably the most waited
hardware at the Italian meeting: it is the real successor of the
QL. It is based on a Motorola 68040 40 MHz CPU. It has slots for
SIMM (until upto 16 Mb), two ISA slot - on of it is used for the
i/o card in order to connect the hard disk, serial portts, mouse
and keyboard. The graphic card (1Mb memory) allows to get
1024x512 pixels resolution with 65536 colors. On Q40 you can run
3 different operating systems: QDOS classic (free, derived from
Amiga QDOS - it has not all the SMSQ/E new features but it allows
to get the extended resolutions with 4 colors), SMSQ/E (available
for an extra price of 50 euro - it has all SMSQ/E features plus
65536 colours support) and LINUX. During the meeting we had a
demonstration of SMSQ/E and LINUX with X-WINDOWS. One of the most
interesting things about Q40 is the capability to connect
virtually every PC card with ISA interface (CD ROM, CD ROM
burners, network cards...). Unfortunately while under LINUX the
drivers already exist (in fact such cards work on Q40 with
Linux), on the QL the drivers do not exist. That is way we need
volunteers to write them in order to support new cards on Q40.
I mentioned before QemuLator. This is a shareware QL emulator for
Windows written by an Italian guy: Daniele Terdina. Daniele was
not able to attend the meeting because is now working in the U.S
at Microsoft. So I did myself some demonstration of QemuLator at
the meeting. I really like it because it can emulate the original
JM, JS, MGx and Minerva QL systems allowing very old games or
badly written software to run as it supports various ram
configuration (128Kb to 16 Mb). It runs in a Windows (9x, ME, NT,
2000) window but it can use the full screen thanks to a new
feature implemented in version 2 - extended resolutions are not
supported though. I think that QemuLator is completely
complementary to QPC2 and is worth having. The latter is a real
professional product with all the Great features of SMSQ/E.
QemuLator in this respect is a step behind QPC2 but it has other
peculiarities such as the capability of emulating original QL
systems (it has even a feature of simulating the original QL
speed to slow down games on fast PCs). If you have QPC2 I would
suggest to give a try to QemuLator. Give a look at Daniele's web
site: http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Heights/1296/index.html
Last but not least Beginner's club from Vercelly (Andrea and
Paolo Carpi - http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/lab/5011)
came with their QLs with screen background of Japanese
"Anime" and showed their good freeware software
produced so far.
CONCLUSIONS: It was really great fun to meet
again QL friends after so much time. Let's hope the next meeting
to have a better attendance..
D.Santachiara
Hardware (Q40, SuperHermes, Minerva)
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