WEB page IX Italian QL Meeting

QL Meeting Italy 2000 - Report

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On 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

 

Exhibitors

Italian guests (1)

Italian guests (2)

Hardware (Q40, SuperHermes, Minerva)

Report