The Sinclair QL Forum

You could try warming or cooling the MDVs depending whether they were written to in hot or cold weather. I managed to read floppy discs for a game a friend bought when he was in California. Out of 20 disks about half gave errors but warming them up slightly they all worked and could be copied to new disks. I know tape bits are probably a lot longer relative to floppy data but maybe cooling would enhance the magnetic field since heat degrades them.

If nothing else, it may expand the cartridge ever so slightly allowing it to run more freely ?

Well, it's not so much the temperature what prohibits old tape material to be read properly.

Instead, the material seems to ingest humidity over time from the air which aparently causes it to detoriate and develop read faults.

It's been "magic wisdom" of system adminiatrators for quite some time (especially DEC tapes, but I'm pretty sure that also applies to Microdrives) that "baking" the tapes in an oven at moderate temperature can restore formerly unreadable tape material to a readable state. This is how just recently the original source code of Magnetic Scrolls adventure games was recovered (See here for a blog entry and recipe on it)

Be interesting to see what the cable was, the psion had a comms link adapter with rs232.

Thank you for making the Transform titles available.

To help with the list, here's a scan of the last full page advert I could find from QL World, listing their software titles. I'm afraid I don't know if they are all from Transform. Some may be third party.

dden wrote:Thank you for making the Transform titles available.

To help with the list, here's a scan of the last full page advert I could find from QL World, listing their software titles. I'm afraid I don't know if they are all from Transform. Some may be third party.
transform.jpg

What date was that issue (save me looking)? I'll add prices and anything else relevant to the qlwiki.

Chr$ wrote:

dden wrote:Thank you for making the Transform titles available.

To help with the list, here's a scan of the last full page advert I could find from QL World, listing their software titles. I'm afraid I don't know if they are all from Transform. Some may be third party.
transform.jpg

What date was that issue (save me looking)? I'll add prices and anything else relevant to the qlwiki.

May 1987, page 59.
They do have later adverts, but they are small quarter page ones with only a sub-set of their products.

dden wrote: May 1987, page 59.

Thanks. I recognise many of those as being from other publishers. I believe the only titles by Transform were:

QL Appointment
QL Mail List
QL Organiser
QL Switch
QL to PC
Stock Control

[quote="vanpeebles"]Be interesting to see what the cable was, the psion had a comms link adapter with rs232.[/quote]

Dear vanpeebles

We had 20 QL's in our 'first' College Construction Department I.T. suite. The Land Surveying students used PSION organisers for optical instrument field data logging. We adapted two Organiser Comms link cables (RS232 end) to fit the QL original 'BT style' serial port. If I remember correctly it was an Electrical Engineering student that wrote the SuperBASIC QL comms server programme.

When the students were on Land Surveying camp they would spend all week doing the field work and manually calculating and plotting all the data. We would turn up on the last evening with 4 QL's, 2 Hewlet Packard pen plotters (RS232) and 2 dot matrix printers. Once we were setup, it would take a matter of minutes to back-up and calculate all their data, plot and print the results - They would be exasperated after all the work they had done.

I wouldn't be surprised if I don't still have those RS232 leads in an attic somewhere.

Happy days
Sincerely
Martin Reid

MartinReid wrote:

vanpeebles wrote:Be interesting to see what the cable was, the psion had a comms link adapter with rs232.

Dear vanpeebles

We had 20 QL's in our 'first' College Construction Department I.T. suite. The Land Surveying students used PSION organisers for optical instrument field data logging. We adapted two Organiser Comms link cables (RS232 end) to fit the QL original 'BT style' serial port. If I remember correctly it was an Electrical Engineering student that wrote the SuperBASIC QL comms server programme.

When the students were on Land Surveying camp they would spend all week doing the field work and manually calculating and plotting all the data. We would turn up on the last evening with 4 QL's, 2 Hewlet Packard pen plotters (RS232) and 2 dot matrix printers. Once we were setup, it would take a matter of minutes to back-up and calculate all their data, plot and print the results - They would be exasperated after all the work they had done.

I wouldn't be surprised if I don't still have those RS232 leads in an attic somewhere.

Happy days
Sincerely
Martin Reid

Always great to hear of how they were used in the real world back in the day. I think the Organiser 2 is a very under appreciated and looked over machine. It's basically a full blown pocket computer, with it's own basic, machine code etc. And built like a tank.