I would donate - Porting SymbOS

[aalea]

Oh you made me like ICE1 even more.
If it supports mouse, which mouse should I buy, where, how much?

ICE comes in a mouse version called MICE where the mouse is directly attached to the board. That said, there is a German forum post I once saw where they have created a new ICE board that allowed for other mice to attach but I can't find it presently.

Check this, it work with most USB mices
https://github.com/alvaroalea/QL_mIce_Starmouse

As a bonus It also can be used as starmouse, that is a mouse that uses the joy conector.

[bwinkel67]

Not so sophisticated as Giga-Basic, I think. And who has written programs with it?

I get it...Giga in place of Super :-/ Yes, that seems like a very extended from of SuperBASIC. The mouse/menu stuff, was that tied into PE, or was that completely separate and just expected a serial mouse interface?

[RalfR]

No, Giga-Basic was intended to work with the Giga-Mouse from the same supplier in these days. I do not know, how this mouse works but neither the mouse, nor Giga-Basic are PE compatible, i.e. cannot use that mouse. Perhaps it will work with the Sermouse system.

[Popopo]

Check this, it work with most USB mices
https://github.com/alvaroalea/QL_mIce_Starmouse

As a bonus It also can be used as starmouse, that is a mouse that uses the joy conector.

Thank you for your amazing cloning work Alvaro.
Never stop surprising

[Popopo]

...
Below was my mock-up Amiga Workbench 2.1 demo that uses the QDOS window system. The appearance of the windows and icons is just a single image, but then again, in a real window manager, the appearance of those items would be created from separate image elements, so not too far off. Yes, it's an awful color palette, but when you run it on a monochrome monitor, it looks pretty close to Workbench 2.1.

Ho ho ho!!! I WANNA IT!

[bwinkel67]

No, Giga-Basic was intended to work with the Giga-Mouse from the same supplier in these days. I do not know, how this mouse works but neither the mouse, nor Giga-Basic are PE compatible, i.e. cannot use that mouse. Perhaps it will work with the Sermouse system.

That sounds pretty cool. Btw, googling about the Giga-Mouse got me to a forum post here with this old link:

http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/frontend/index.html

Did someone grab Dilwyn's old domain?

[bwinkel67]

I wonder if GEOS can be ported, if not I opt SymbOS

I bet someone can do Z80 to m68k conversion

I am no coder, but willing to donate

I just took a perusal of this page:

https://dilwyn.theqlforum.com/frontend/index.html

This has a bunch of GEM-like front ends for the QL. I didn't realize how many. This goes back to your original question so you may want to check this out.

I think all require extra memory, even when they claim they don't, since taking 60K+ wouldn't leave much of anything free to run. I think the thing that made ICE special is that on an unexpanded QL it hardly took any memory since it was in ROM. For me, I can run most things from it at 128K with no problem (i.e. running Quill from ICE works as expected).

[bwinkel67]

I'm going to be looking at the various alternatives to ICE. I was surprised to see so many, but I guess it makes sense since Sinclair didn't provide one. It looks like it became the wild wild west in the early 80s and then eventually settled on a more X-like Pointer Environment that we have today which gives the QL much more modern abilities. But still, the early interfaces were interesting.

I saw this article and these seem to be the first entries into the QL GUI battle:

https://dilwyn.theqlforum.com/frontend/e ... ec1986.pdf

But I decided to start with J.A.M, which also seemed interesting. It doesn't work as a traditional GUI where it treats each file fully as an object (i.e. no double clicking to open things), focusing more on selecting icons and performing menu options on them. Though it's a bit more limited as it only supports 4 hard-coded drives (MDV1, MDV2, FLP1, FLP2) it has some cool features, like the job control providing TK2-like capabilities, and the memory dump, giving you quite a bit of detail. Would have been nice for ICE to add those, but then again, J.A.M. seems to take up twice as much memory at almost 30K. Maybe ICE could have added some auxiliary functionality on MDV, like it did with CHOICE.

So comparing ICE and J.A.M showing system and memory status, it seems that with a 128K QL, they both claim the system takes up about 51K. That would be 32K for screen memory....so where's the other 19K going to?

[vox]

[quote=bwinkel67 post_id=60227 time=1732743041 user_id=2217

So comparing ICE and J.A.M showing system and memory status, it seems that with a 128K QL, they both claim the system takes up about 51K. That would be 32K for screen memory....so where's the other 19K going to?

JAM.png
[/quote]

Thanks, never heard of J.A.M

Yes, 128K Minus video buffer leaves little to work with, in general.
QL should start with 256 to 512K, but as usual Clive wanted it to be as cheap as possible,
no matter the end user experience. Actually having 32K VRAM for separate video buffer could also help.

[vox]

Please read carefully: The original mICE mouse is directly attached to the the EPROM, NOT in the QL! And there are very few programs using it. Do you really want a mouse just for copying files and using a calculator? Rubbish.

While answer is yes, I found solution of mouse going to EMPROM crazy, when there were classic ports. Is there other GUI and way to use "normal" Amiga/Atari mice?