Rhode Island Show

This past May I made the trek to Rhode Island. Paul Holmgren was good enough to give me a ride. We left Friday night and drove straight through to Rhode Island (NoDoz – don’t drive 12 hrs without it). Paul has this nice little black box that sets off radar detectors. I did a little behavior modification on some speeders on I-95.

The show in Rhode Island was pretty good. Saw a few faces that I have not seen for a while. I won’t go into much detail since other QL sources cover it better than I could. There was not much new on the programming front. C68 version 3.14c was released just before the show. Al Boehm had a nice cloud simulator running on the QXL. I’m looking forward to its public release.

| did pick up some copies of two older compilers: Computer One Pascal and ProFortran 77. ProFortran 77 had a bad microdrive, but I found someone that has a good copy. I should get it soon. Computer One Pascal reminds me of TurboPascal. It’s got everything in one package: editor, compiler, linker. I’ll have to give it a test drive soon.

While in Rhode Island, I decided to actually buy some new software for my QL. I’ve been interested in the Pointer Environment for a while, so I picked up QPAC II. Now I need a mouse, so I bought SERMouse. But, SERMouse has a problem with the standard QL serial port (as buggy as it is). So I bought the HERMES chip. Don Walterman had a $10 2400 baud modem, so I bought it and doubled my modem capability. I’ve moved my Hayes 1200 Personal modem (a modem that looks like a wall transformer) to Z88 duty. With a nice convertor cable, it works fine.

Now I have enough software to require a boot disk. I put all of the software listed above, plus a few other utilities on one disk and created a boot program. I saw one that John Impellizzeri had and copied it. When software is loaded on the QL, its done in silence. On an MS-DOS system, each package usually prints something to the screen letting the user know it’s loading. This is fairly handy when trying to debug stuff, so I did the same on the QL.

I open a little window and print a line stating what application is loading. This shows a progression of software being loaded. Then when it’s all done, I just do a new. Now the QL is loaded, SuperBasic is empty, and ready to go.

The only problem I have is QEM clashing with SERMouse. Both are trying to get the SER2 port. Since I have SERMouse running as a job, I just RJOB it before running QEM. The only hard part is getting behind the QL to switch the modem cable with the serial mouse.

As for QL Internet news, I recently FTPed a copy of ELVIS from maya.dei.unipd.it. ELVIS is a clone of the Unix editor, VI. I’ve seen it listed by some QL PD distributers, but it took a while for it to hit the net. I’ve unzipped the executable and it looks and feels like VI. Not that I’m a big fan of VI, it just nice to have another editor that is fairly portable.

| also downloaded MINEFIELD, a freeware Pointer Environment program, by Philipe Trion that is a clone of the MS-Windows game, Mine Sweeper. Besides QPAC II, MINEFIELD is the first PE program that I ran. It was a great demo of the PE. Maybe it should be distributed with other PE starter packages like QPAC II. My wife got hooked on it and stayed up to 1 AM playing it. Now if someone would do a PENTE program for the PE.

And the last thing. The last weekend in August is ComputerFest, here in Dayton. I plan on helping man the Computer Museum booth with Gary Ganger. But the important thing is that I’ll be hosting the 2nd Annual QHJ Bar-B-Q at my house. Like last year, I’ll provide burgers, hot dogs, plates, etc. People will probably need to bring drinks (unless someone brings a few 2 litre bottles). I’ll have directions at the Fest. Just drop by the Sinclair booths.