The Sinclair QL Forum

I checked that GCC out last year, but it's so old that it can't even be compiled anymore GCC is a complex beast anyway, so in that sense VBCC would be the easier route. I got it working with a static address, but as far as I've understood, well-behaving QL binaries should be position independent?

Purism aside, from a practical point of view it'd be great to have some modern C cross compiler for creating QL software. I did a bit of hacking with vbcc and got it to work (at least a proof of concept), but making QL a real supported platform would require a lot more work.

That's what I started realizing when trying to find a suitable opening there. Going for the expansion connector seems a bit overwhelming for a long-time software guy. Those DTACKs and timings and all, geez...

I tried to build a rather standard ROM port dongle for my QL (and knowing so little about hw design, it's been quite an adventure), but then I came to realize that the 16k slot is taken by the QL-SD. Does it eat all of it or is there some small address range that could still be used separately?

When I get chance I should try this - Minerva probably struggles due to the way it handles the second screen - might need to try it on a JS ROM on q-emulator, or Minerva in dual screen mode for example...

It should work pretty much the same with the standard ROM – haven't tried yet, tho. It will ...

I think that the emulator doesn't deal with page flipping in the middle of the screen, but a real QL can do that. Another similar effect didn't work with it either.

vanpeebles wrote:Coo! when is the demo coming?

Something small possibly this year, I suppose. The biggest trouble now is sound, which seems to eat up too much time from the effects plus I haven't found any tools for composing for the weird sound API of the 8049.

thorsinclair wrote:Cool stuff!
Is this a self written or ported? Need to test it

I just started writing it from scratch this morning

Today's experiment: big sprites running at 50 Hz with full masking and background.

http://www.kameli.net/~marq/bigsprites

lbytes to 196608 and then call. Disable toolkits and other extras, as this one hits the hardware pretty directly. Tested on a vanilla QL with QL-SD/Minerva.

http://www.kameli ...

A two-page image flipping experiment using the packer:

http://www.kameli.net/~marq/once_upon

(lbytes sdc1_once_upon,196608:call 196608)

Original size 32k, 15k compressed - this sort of raster images don't compress that well.