| Exploring FLP_ | A guide to the lesser-documented commands of the Tony Tebby floppy-disk toolkit found on most QL disk interfaces (a limited version on the Cumana, full Toolkit II on the Sandy Super-Q-Board): FLP_OPT for safety level, start-up delay and track count, single-sided formatting with an asterisk in the medium name, and direct sector access by opening "flpx_*dyz" with GET, BGET, PUT and BPUT. Three SuperBASIC listings follow: msdisk2_bas, which dumps an MS-DOS disk sector by sector in hex and ASCII, and DISKCOPY_BAS, a fast whole-disk copier, with a slower "elegant" DISKCOPY2 variant. | Sinclair QL, Type-in program |
| French-Speaking QL: French Characters with Quill | How to print French accented characters from Quill. The article lists the ten TRANSLATEs for an Epson-compatible printer (switching to the French character set with ESC "R" SOH, or building accents with backspace), explains the simpler codes for IBM-graphics printers, and then the TRA command of the JS and JSU ROMs, which can translate any of 255 characters to up to three codes. A SuperBASIC program, TRA2, builds a TRA table file (tra_list) to load from Quill's BOOT; a © character can be mapped to ESC for embedding printer control codes. | Sinclair QL, Type-in program |
| Letters (INPUT<->OUTPUT) | Jean-Claude Touzin of La Sarre asks for a list of QL publications, and the editor surveys them: Sinclair QL World, Quanta, Curry Computer's QL Report, Time Designs, Quantum Levels, QLusa, Computer Shopper's Sinclair columns, Belgium's QL Clef and QL Contact France's Informa. Jerzy W. Jarmasz of Ottawa asks about printing French characters on his SP-1200AS with Quill, the Nucleon manual, and why his serial printer only works on SER2; the editor explains the QL's DCE/DTE serial wiring and gives cable pin-outs for SER1. A short tip from J.C.T. shows SAVE SER1 for listing a program to the printer. | Sinclair QL |
| Offset_bas | OFFSET_BAS, a SuperBASIC formatted-number procedure in the spirit of PRINT USING, by J.C. Touzin. Called with a channel, the number, the integer and decimal widths and a leading sign character, it lines up decimal points and removes the E of scientific notation for numbers of a million or more and for some numbers between -1 and +1, using helper procedures not_scient and million. A demonstration loop prints the QL's own output in window 0 beside the procedure's in window 1, and the author invites readers to improve it. | Sinclair QL, Type-in program |
| QL Books | Short reviews of five books about the QL: Laurent Besle's Au coeur du QL (Eyrolles), an excellent French guide to QDOS from assembler; L. de Bursac's Le désassemblage de la ROM du QL (Logisoft), a heavily commented listing of the JM ROM; R.A. and J.W. Penfold's An Introduction to QL Machine Code (Bernard Babani), mostly a 68008 primer; Vincent Lyon's Archive Master, on Psion Archive with business applications, sold by RMG Enterprise; and the QL Technical Guide by Tony Tebby and David Karlin, the reference for QDOS. | Sinclair QL |
| REMark: A Full Issue | The editor introduces an issue covering the disk interface's lesser-known commands, French characters with Quill, and books about the QL. He mentions recent problems with his QL and his search for a spare machine, his use of Quill with Speedscreen and Taskmaster, and asks readers how to run Quill and Front Page together under Taskmaster. | Sinclair QL |
| Sinclair News | News items: the May/June 1988 Time Designs, devoted to Sinclair user groups and dealers in the USA and Canada, mentions and recommends QL_DOC; Meta Media Productions' Q_Link 1.555 communications program adds UNARC, UNCRUNCH and a text editor ($29.95); three Ontario Sinclair clubs (Toronto, Waterloo/Wellington, Ottawa/Hull) with their contacts; and a "Sinclair" PC compatible sold in the USA, really a relabelled Amstrad PC-512, at $789 US. | Sinclair QL |
