Recently I received a whole stack of disks from Ron Blizzard, and on one of the disks was a treatise on Xchange, the recently released Psion program. The article deals with how Xchange was released, and gives a lot of information on the use of this program.
This issue, I will give the history, as told by Gunther Strube & Erling Jacobsen, of the maneuvering to have it released. Next issue I will give the rest which is titled “XCHANGE Introduction and Reference Information”
Hugh Howie.
København, 7.7.93
Dear QL user,
At last we succeeded in getting the XCHANGE program released for you, the QL user. XCHANGE was programmed for the THOR based on the standard PSION QL software. Dansoft paid a considerable amount of money to have an improved version of the standard software but based around the concept of the IBM XCHANGE version. The software was then distributed on license from PSION as the standard software running on the CST THOR PC computer. Three versions were made: one english version, one danish version and a QUILL-only XCHANGE version in danish (sorry QL-users!). Around 1989 the production of the THOR computers were stopped due to cash flow problems. Dansoft and THOR International stopped the THOR business a year later. All excisting services were moved to other people. The Ritzau news system (NB: please refer to QL WORLD anno 1987-88) is still running in various information centres like the danish television and radio stations. Nobody had at the time any idea of releasing the XCHANGE software to the QL users. However, Dansoft knew that pirate copies were around running on QL’s and other compatibles! We had copies of it!
In early 1993 we contacted Hellmuth Stuven (former owner of Dansoft) to get an idea of the status of the THOR XCHANGE program. He informed us that he paid for the development costs and an exclusive agreement of the sole distribution of the THOR XCHANGE software. He agreed to release the software to the QL community. We now realise that PSION themselves have no objection of letting the software flow freely among QL users (the letter printed in the June issue of QL-world).
The THOR XCHANGE contained a minor degree of software protection against letting the program run other platforms than the THOR computer. It was a simple check whether a ‘THOR watermark’ was present or not (the THOR serial number display on initialisation of the computer). If no watermark was present the program simply displayed ‘This software is only running on a THOR’, and executed an infinite loop (the program had to be killed from another source, e.g. SuperBASIC). The software protection has now been removed.
In addition, we have improved the XCHANGE program in other areas:
1. XCHANGE used to call the MODE system call to redraw its windows. You already know the effect – all windows below XCHANGE are displayed momentarily. If you have a look of the old PSION boots you will notice that they close SuperBASIC windows #1 and #2 before execution the PSION program to prevent the ‘window demonstration’. This has now been fixed.
2. XCHANGE (and the previous PSION quartet) created a dummy job for its workspace. The drawback of this is that if you accidentally kill that job the mother job will crash (since its workspace has been corrupted due to QDOS using the memory for its own purposes). XCHANGE has now been modified to allocate its workspace in the Common Heap Area (dynamic allocation/ deallocation) as any job usually does.
3. The old PSION quartet had no active cursor which had the effect of not being able to activate the PSION console input by CTRL C, if the program had been executed by the SuperBASIC EXEC/EX commands. The problem of that were fixed if you installed the pointer environment with its protected windows. If you do not have any window system installed in your QL, you would have the same problem with XCHANGE. However we have modified XCHANGE with an active cursor (but not visible) to prevent that problem.
Unfortunately all THOR XCHANGE documentation (based around QUILL files) exists only in danish. There is still a chance to get information in english, since all english THOR users have the standard THOR manuals. You should be able to contact a THOR user through QUANTA. However, much incorrect information will be present, since it was written before the XCHANGE program was finished for the THOR (the XCHANGE information in the english THOR manuals were based around the IBM XCHANGE version which has more features than the present THOR version). Do not despair, dear QL user, since you still have the online help (with F1). Additional information of XCHANGE will be found in this document. We have only included the information that cannot be read from the XCHANGE help files. All other information should be comprehendable from the help files.
One last thing; both the old PSION programs and XCHANGE draw their lines around menus by POKE’ing directly to the screen memory! EASEL draws its graphs partially in the same way! If you use the ATARI QL-emulator with the EXTENDED MODE 4 emulator card (780×280 pixels in mode 4) a lot of mess is drawn onto the screen whenever an XCHANGE menu is drawn or XCHANGE EASEL is active. This is because the base address of the screen memory is lower than on the QL. If you have installed the QVME card in your ATARI, there is no problem since the video memory on the card is placed at a completely different address (in high memory). Since the menu lines is drawn in the old screen memory you will have XCHANGE running perfectly without the menu frames. However you will get only half of the graphics on the screen in XCHANGE EASEL – the rest is actually POKE’d in the old screen memory. With driver release E.30 you can use a command to activate the standard 512×256 resolution with all screen output directed to the old screen memory. This is then copied via the fast ATARI blitter chip to the QVME card. XCHANGE will display everything again as it used to.
Executing the XCHANGE on a QL (or compatible)
Since XCHANGE was designed to run on a THOR, certain things must be obeyed to be able to execute it on a QL:
1. You must have at least 256K expanded RAM in your QL. XCHANGE is a 183K program which needs minimum 64K workspace.
2. XCHANGE creates a workfile, ‘Psion_xch’ in ram1_ . It is therefore needed to have a ramdisc driver installed. If you have a Gold Card, an ATARI QL emulator, or a QL with expanded RAM and QRAM/QPAC2, there is no problem since they install a RAM disk on initialisation. If you do not own a RAM disc, but have a disk drive, you can execute the following:
FLP_USE RAM <ENTER>
EXEC RAM1_XCHANGE <ENTER>The June issue of QL-world indicates that other modified versions of XCHANGE V3.90 exists. If you should get any information, please let us know.
If you should have any queries, please contact us at the following address:
Gunther Strube
Gl. Kongevej 37, 2.th
DK-1610 København V
Denmark
We hope that you will enjoy XCHANGE, and, it is your responsibility to distribute XCHANGE to every QL user you know!
Best wishes from
Gunther Strube & Erling Jacobsen