During a recent trip over to the home of Frank Davis, and during a recent four week vacation which took me to Oregon, Toronto, Montreal and New York, I got the chance to try out several new software and hardware items for the QL. Never be afraid to try new products; it can be fun. Or that can be put as “Never regret yesterday, life is in you today and you make your own tomorrow!” In short, you may find a few dogs when you go looking for new items for your computer, but if you never look you will also never find the gems that may be out there. In New York I ran into an old friend who pretty much still only used the four PSION programs that came with the QL when he first purchased it. He had bought only three programs in the last four years. Two he had never learned how to use, the third had a bug in it, and he had never subscribed to any Sinclair periodical (I sold him some back issues of UPDATE, of which all are now available for $16.00 for any one year or $4.50 each otherwise from the UPDATE office, so get your collection completed before some issues are sold out), nor had he ever joined a Sinclair user group, despite having the LIST group nearby! He was afraid that if he spent a lot on his computer, which he uses almost daily to do sales reports, that he might waste money on a program that he could not learn to use! Talk about allowing fear to paralyze one! As a psychologist this was to me a challenge. I spent about 2 hours getting him honed in on the two programs he never learned to use, then fixed the bug he had in the other (a patch to get it to work with the JSU ROM), sold him a subscription to UPDATE and got him to join QUANTA. He is still considering the LIST group. I also told him to contact EMSoft and Mechanical Affinity to get newer software. Not bad for an afternoon visit to an old friend; and after all, what are friends for, right?
While at Franks I got to try out a new item, which while minor, can still be of great help to those of us who do some networking. It is a small box, with LEDs for placement between two or more networked QLs that informs us of when the network is in use and working. It worked just as advertised. It had no software to load, or complicated procedure, just plug it in to one of the networks and the cable into it and otherwise proceed as usual. I could only have wished for an auditory signal to let me know when it started and stopped operation on a network line. But that is just an additional bell and whistle and not really necessary. He was evaluating as to whether to add these to the catalog of Mechanical Affinity. On my advice he ordered some more and now has them available for $12.00, which as with all items they handle does include postage. If you do even a modest amount of networking, this can be handy. While for those new to it, you will find it easier to keep track of just what is going on between the various machines.
While in Oregon I tried to see Dick Wagner, but found him not home, so I went over to Ed Rourkes. He had written me that he had just got the new ROMSWITCH from QLEA in the U.K. I could not pass up the chance to see this and try it out (Frank told me that Bob Dyl of IQLR had been giving it a modicum of praise). The version that Ed has fits inside of the QL, but I hear there is also an external version that is a small box. What it consisted of was a small printed circuit board that fitted inside the QL. It has a small toggle switch that you mount on the case, with which you choose one of two possible ROMs to work with when you power up. Ed had his JSU ROMs and the MINERVA Mark 1 on his board. With this he could avoid any program he found to be having trouble with Minerva, and switch back to his JSU. I tried putting a Bent ROM board from Mechanical Affinity on the board so I could use it’s switch to select or de-select the extra 16K area I keep Lightning in and it worked. On the QLEA board is a bi-colored LED so you can see which system you have selected. Red is for the Minerva and green is for your normal QDOS operating system. There is a new version that I have heard about, but not seen and it is external. With this you can easily change ROMS without opening up your QL, and it will work with either the Mark 1 or the Mark 2 Minerva. This board is available from QLEA, c/o Chris Howard, 13 Oak Grove, Horsford, Norwich, Norfolk, U.K. NR103DR. If you want they can also provide the Minerva ROM. I believe the price is £25 for the kit and £50 with the Minerva. Postage to the USA is £2 and £4 respectively. They will take major credit cards. I am not sure of the price on the external board so you may want to write about this. Ah, yes, one more little item on this is that it fits in the left hand ROM slot, so if you are using the QIMI mouse interface, the right hand socket is free to do so. Of course if you are using the new Serial Mouse available from Jochen Merz or Mechanical Affinity then you need not worry about this. One last note on this, QLEA stands for QL East Anglica, a QUANTA sub-group, and this system is fully compatible with the Miracle Systems Gold Card.
What else is new, or I have not mentioned, yet that I have tried? I get so use to these things I start to take them for granted and assume that all of you have all of the newest items, but this is not so. My old CST disk interface on my QL always had four drives hooked up to it, but when I went to a Trump Card I found myself limited to two drives. Even when I went to the Gold Card I could only use three drives. Miracle Systems solved this with their 4 drive adaptor. This allows you to use four drives on your Trump Card or Gold Card. If you have earlier than a 1.28 ROM on your Trump Card it will need to be updated or replaced with the FLP/RAM Level 2 Eprom from Jochen Merz or Mechanical Affinity to get this little board to work. The price is about $42 with the updated eprom, and a total of $80 if you want it with the Level 2 operating system. The Level 2 Eprom will allow you to have directories and read them off of disks done on a Gold Card, as well as give you increased disk access speed for all disk related activities. Last, but not least, you can use the new ATR DEV and read/write as well as format IBM/ ATARI disks. With the Miracle eprom upgrade 1.37 you will get the directories and sub directories as well as an updated ToolKit 2 (both have this). If you are not going for a Gold Card, then the four drive adaptor and new eprom is the best thing you can do for your QL to modernize it. Just what do you need four drives for? How about if you want to run a BBS and do not have a hard drive, or perhaps you are heavily into desktop publishing and want all of those fonts and clip art available . I am sure you can dream up your own reason. It may even be that you like knowing you have all that power available. This is the sort of area where we get into personal preferences.
I seem to be running out of the space allotted to me and I have so much more I wanted to tell you about, such as the HERMES replacement chip for the 8049. I wanted to tell you about the new Gold Card version of PERFECTION (new QL word processor), and the new Gold Card version of PC Conqueror (uses HD drives, Extended Memory, and lets you use ED drives as mini hard drives) just to name a few. These are all done by Digital Precision and are now once again available in North America from Mechanical Affinity. Peter Hale is also offering some of these DP products if you are a member of his club. The list goes on from here, folks!