The Sinclair QL Forum

Having a great time at the QL workshop in Manchester this weekend. We're here today (Saturday) and tomorrow (Sunday).

Plenty of computers of all types, all with some QL connection or other. Quite a few black box QLs, Pandoras, PCs, Macs and even Raspberry Pis running both uQLx and SMSQmulator emulators (thanks to John Southern).

This time round, we've set up tables in a 'U' shape so that we are all facing each other and so can talk to anyone without getting up!

Keith has set up a mobile internet connection for us. All in all, although we are fairly small in number there is a high level of activity here. All QL users are welcome to join us, not just Quanta members. Details of where we are on the Quanta website http://www.quanta.org.uk.

Here's a couple of pictures so far:

Good report I was hoping to go on Saturday but had to cancel as car failed MOT. I'm currently knee deep in piles of rust on the drive

And reading QL Forum postings while knee deep in rust on your drive, that's dedication for you

Here are some more pictures from today's QL workshop. Although we aren't large in numbers here, it's been a bit of a job keeping up with everything that's been happening!

John Southern has been demonstrating QL emulators running on Raspberry Pi, and David Buckley has successfully got SMSQmulator running in Java 8 on his Raspberry Pi. The second board (on the right of the picture) is a Propellor board - you may recall some time ago that someone had implemented a QL system on a board using one of the Propellor microcontrollers - see https://dilwyn2.wordpress.com/2014/02/18/propeller-ql/ Here's a screen picture of SMSQmulator running on David's Raspberry Pi: John gave a very interesting demonstration of uQLx running a SuperBASIC program which used the ptyc device on that emulator accessing a website to check weather data - a few lines of SuperBASIC told us what the weather was like outside! Fortunately, we had a projector and screen on hand to see the display so that we didn't all have to crowd around to see the demo. Here we see Alex Wells (right) discussing the weather outside courtesy of a few lines of SuperBASIC

The Raspi is around 25€ - That's way cheaper than any glass window you can buy to check the weather outside

Some good pics there and info. Cheers for the updates

I had better explain for the Raspberry Pi B version 1 (256MB) SMSQMulator is too slow (mainly due to memory).
Pi B version 2 (512MB) or B+ (512MB) SMSQMulator runs on Java 6 but does sort of max out the CPU

Pi 2 B+ (1GB) SMSQmulator Java 8 is perfect.

All the Pi's run Tobias' uQLX for ARM nicely.

I'm sure there's a joke there about all the pi's.

Hi

Nice photos

It's good to see people in this kind of events

Bye

José Leandro

I really wanted to go to this but work required that I be in USA