The Sinclair QL Forum

Based on la version A07 I have create this:
https://github.com/alvaroalea/QL_TheQuill_Tools

It's not finish yet, but allow to convert to and from a text file to the database of the quill. (It's for PC/Linux and under QL you need a specific header, this is not solved yet)

It's use a format similar to other tools (ngpaws mainly, and the unquill from John Elliot) so it's posible to convert adventures of other system to QL (and there about like 800).

As the manual for QL is not available, I'm also documenting all the things that I found different to other systems, perhaps this can help to found the differences between A07 and others.

aalea wrote: Sun Jun 30, 2024 6:21 pm Based on la version A07 I have create this:
https://github.com/alvaroalea/QL_TheQuill_Tools
...
As the manual for QL is not available, I'm also documenting all the things that I found different to other systems, perhaps this can help to found the differences between A07 and others.

This is great work and thank you for the effort on keeping the system alive.

The manual is on the MDV and FLP image as it was supplied as a File?

Tim

Timbucus wrote: Sun Jun 30, 2024 10:20 pm

aalea wrote: Sun Jun 30, 2024 6:21 pm As the manual for QL is not available....

The manual is on the MDV and FLP image as it was supplied as a File?

OMG! I was thinking that files were part of The Quill, they are simple .txt files, thank you so much for tell it me!.

Not everybody might be aware that there already are some third-party QUILL tools:

- unPAWS - UnPAWS v2.1 takes snapshot files (.SNA, .SP, .Z80) of Spectrum games written with PAWS or Quill system (version A or C), and produces text listings of the game database. (DOS and Win95 program with PASCAL source - i think it can easily be recompiled for QL) This program was developed first by Jose Luis Cebrian, and then ported to pascal and improved by Carlos Sanchez. Releases starting from version 1.0 are maintained by Alexander Katz.
- QUILL_TO_BASIC - Converts QUILL adventures into SuperBASIC - Written by Alan Pemberton, 1989
- QUILL_CHEAT_BAS - Allows you to read the text contained in QUILL adventures. - Written by Alan Pemberton, 1989
- QUILL_NEW_CODE - This replaces the machine code used by all Quill adventures to ensure that the display is not corrupted on SMSQ/E systems when the text in the adventure reaches the bottom of the screen. - Written by Rich Mellor 1998 (v1.00)
- QUILL_WINDS_BAS - This is a short program which allows you to change the colours used by the bottom window of the adventure. - Written by Alan Pemberton, 1989
- UnQUILL - UnQuill takes snapshot files (.SNA) of Spectrum QUILL games and produces textual listings of the data tables which control them. From this it is possible to reconstruct it on another gamewriting system. (C source)
- FixTheQuill.ssd - i have no idea what this is or does and I had no time to dig into it. It looks like some executable of some sort, but I have no idea about the platform

I guess that the source code might be useful for those who want to better understand the Quill data structures.

Timbucus wrote: Sun Jun 30, 2024 5:01 pm Popopo Did you ever mange to find the change log as that would be interesting! I wonder if it goes as high as the lost A08 and what that had extra or fixed. Unless someone has a copy of that as well

Now onto disassembly of the A07 and compare to the A03 original source I have, to reconstruct the A07 source...

Thanks to all on the forum and elsewhere who are helping with this.

Tim

Hello, everyone. Thanks to @aalea who shared it with me and helped me with it, I was able to try Quill A07 for Sinclair QL, and adapt my toolset to this platform, so now it can run QL databases, as well as produce databases that work on QL Quill. For those who don't know it yet, I refer to NAPS (https://github.com/daad-adventure-writer/NAPS), which is an interpreter and development environment with GUI; mainly for Quill, PAWS, SWAN and DAAD with support for many platforms.

Now onto the topic I came for, the reason why I quoted Tim:

Tim, on my tests of Quill A07 for Sinclair QL, I have noticed two bugs on this version. The fist one is important: ATLT's implementation is wrong, it evaluates to true current location values <= than the parameter of ATLT, for example at location 0, ATLT 0 is evaluated as a met condition. The reason seems to be because that condact does a conditional jump with instruction BCC (or you might have it on the source with its alias BHS). Changing that instruction to BHI does the trick of ATLT working properly. As far as I can tell, this is a bug on Quill and not on the emulator (sqlux).

This might be of interest to several people: the aforementioned ATLT bug can be fixed - at least on a generated adventure file - by patching the desired file that has the interpreter code with an hexadecimal editor, by looking for the following hex string: b03a 06a8 (it's the comparison of ATLT condact), and replacing the 6464 sequence right after the one searched for, with 6264 instead.

The second bug is minor in comparison, and probably not as simple to fix, but it would be ideal to have it fixed. It is that the interpreter when printing one of the system messages of "Give me your command" (SM2 to SM5), if the message is totally empty, it still prints a new line afterwards, leaving an extra new line before the ">" order prompt. That newline makes sense only when there's any text on the message, but not when it's empty. If I recall correctly, there was some other Quill interpreter for another platform that had this undesired behavior when the author would put a code to change the color or activate inverse on those system messages, so the prompt would have a different color. So even that was considered a bug, something more complex than just checking for the system message's emptiness.

Morgul wrote: Sun Jul 13, 2025 5:45 pm
Hello, everyone. Thanks to @aalea who shared it with me and helped me with it, I was able to try Quill A07 for Sinclair QL, and adapt my toolset to this platform, so now it can run QL databases, as well as produce databases that work on QL Quill. For those who don't know it yet, I refer to NAPS (https://github.com/daad-adventure-writer/NAPS), which is an interpreter and development environment with GUI; mainly for Quill, PAWS, SWAN and DAAD with support for many platforms.

Hi Morgul,

Sorry, I can't help with the Quill bugs, but I didn't know about the NAPS project, which looks very interesting.

I've been playing about with https://adventuron.io/ recently, which is a great easy way of creating adventures, and the "8-bit" DAAD ready export works to create the adventure in loads of different retro computer formats (apart from QL). So, sorry if I'm being dumb, but can I take that output from Adventuron (.DSF file) and create an executable file that works on the QL from it with NAPS? I guess it would be easier for me if I were a Spanish speaker. Are there English instructions?

Recently, I've been trying to piece together the workings of the .DSF files with the aim of recreating working games on the QL (not got very far yet). It sounds like you might potentially be saving me a lot of work!

Cheers,
Alan

Sebright wrote: Sun Jul 13, 2025 8:47 pm

Morgul wrote: Sun Jul 13, 2025 5:45 pm
Hello, everyone. Thanks to @aalea who shared it with me and helped me with it, I was able to try Quill A07 for Sinclair QL, and adapt my toolset to this platform, so now it can run QL databases, as well as produce databases that work on QL Quill. For those who don't know it yet, I refer to NAPS (https://github.com/daad-adventure-writer/NAPS), which is an interpreter and development environment with GUI; mainly for Quill, PAWS, SWAN and DAAD with support for many platforms.

Hi Morgul,

Sorry, I can't help with the Quill bugs, but I didn't know about the NAPS project, which looks very interesting.

I've been playing about with https://adventuron.io/ recently, which is a great easy way of creating adventures, and the "8-bit" DAAD ready export works to create the adventure in loads of different retro computer formats (apart from QL). So, sorry if I'm being dumb, but can I take that output from Adventuron (.DSF file) and create an executable file that works on the QL from it with NAPS? I guess it would be easier for me if I were a Spanish speaker. Are there English instructions?

Recently, I've been trying to piece together the workings of the .DSF files with the aim of recreating working games on the QL (not got very far yet). It sounds like you might potentially be saving me a lot of work!

Cheers,
Alan

Hello, Alan.

I'm afraid not for QL. The reason is that the DSF output of Adventuron is for DAAD system (not Quill), DSF source code is for DCC compiler, which is for DAAD only, and DAAD never had any Sinclair QL interpreters. DAAD is a system from Gilsoft's Quill family, but it's two or three generations ahead of Quill, so it cannot be back-ported to Quill without hard manual labor.

So far we only have Quill for Sinclair QL. I think Tim mentioned having a The PAWS (a system only one generation ahead of Quill) version for Sinclair QL, which is yet to be rescued.

Once we have PAWS for QL, based on what it says on Adventuron's 8-bit compatibility mode (https://adventuron.io/documentation/8bit.html), you have an option to export to PAWS instead of DAAD, so then adapting it for the PAWS for QL can be quite straightforward. And once I implement support to PAWS for QL on NAPS, you'll be able to export a PAWS database that you can use on QL. Of course that can only be after Tim Gilberts releases it.

Before that happens, you'll have it way easier and will save a ton of effort if you use Adventuron's PAWS output rather than DSF, as PAWS code and inner workings are much closer to Quill than those from DAAD. I'll eventually implement support on NAPS to import Quill source code in SCE/QSE format, so adapting the SCE that Adventuron generates to Quill you'll then be able to generate the database from NAPS. And don't overlook @aalea's tools to compile QL databases from QSE source code, you can use this too for what you want to do and save a lot of time than the DSF export way you were trying: https://github.com/alvaroalea/QL_TheQuill_Tools

By the way, NAPS IDE is translated into English, so you don't need to know Spanish to use it, its documentation is right there on the project page, that you can have translated into English by your web browser or with an online tool. Just take into account that the latest portable release of NAPS doesn't have support for Quill Sinclair QL platform. I'm yet to publish an up-to-date release of NAPS this 2025 with all the improvements I made since the previous one on April 2024, which include QL support. But it's possible and easy to update the current 24.04 portable release with the latest changes, by downloading as zip from NAPS' project page (that option appears when you click on the green button above) and carefully extracting all files and folders from the NAPS-main folder in the zip file, into the naps folder you had from the portable version.

Hi Morgul,

Thanks for your detailed reply. So as I understand it, the NAPS system allows you to create adventures as databases that work on other platforms, as well as exporting to the QL as a Quill-compatible database. That sounds great, and hopefully will allow more adventures to appear on the QL. QL Quill doesn't support graphics, which is why I wrote a utility (see: https://dilwyn.theqlforum.com/games/adv ... vutils.zip) to convert QL Quill databases to SuperBASIC, after which you can add graphics as you please by altering the SuperBASIC code to suit. I prefer to write adventures that include graphics.

(That reminds me, I revisited that utility recently and found a couple of bugs, so I need to package up the revised version and send it to Dilwyn to update the one on his website.)

As for exporting from Adventuron in PAWS format, the current version of the website only seems to allow DAAD ready download. Maybe this is just me, or just a temporary problem.
In the meantime, I'll persevere with trying to interpret the DAAD Ready output. It's keeping me amused / out of trouble, so it's no bother. Trying to recreate the DAAD "processes" as SuperBASIC procedures will be the real tricky part. If I don't crack it within a month, I'll probably lose interest and give up, but if I succeed, I'll let you know!

Cheers,
Alan

Morgul wrote: Sun Jul 13, 2025 5:45 pm

Hello, everyone. Thanks to @aalea who shared it with me and helped me with it, I was able to try Quill A07 for Sinclair QL, and adapt my toolset to this platform, so now it can run QL databases, as well as produce databases that work on QL Quill. For those who don't know it yet, I refer to NAPS (https://github.com/daad-adventure-writer/NAPS), which is an interpreter and development environment with GUI; mainly for Quill, PAWS, SWAN and DAAD with support for many platforms.

Is there an english page for NAPS? Sounds very interesting

the is an English version of NAPS, that's most important. Having a look at it, and it seems very useful so far.