The Sinclair QL Forum

Just a bit of a fun thread this but when you get a new QL goodie please post up a pic here so we can see! This week amongst other things, I got this:

Picked this up on Ebay today!

robheaton wrote:Picked this up on Ebay today!

512102362_o.jpg

Hope you can save the files from this for preservation (although Tom Dolezal of Talent is sending me a master cartridge from this) - I could also do with scans of the inlay please for the QL Wiki.

I wonder if we should have some kind of scan preservation group? It's seem to be another thing lacking in the QL scene. It's worrying how little attention is paid to software preservation especially when you see how well worldofspectrum and other sites do it.

Well I would love to have more help in preserving the software and details on the Wiki - I have been asking for help for a couple of years, but with very limited success.

I did suggest to Quanta that they help fund the software preservation site (about 3 years ago now), but alas they turned me down. As it is, I have to concentrate on work which brings in revenue, as the retro business is now my only source of income - therefore I cannot justify the many hours (if not weeks) it will take me to copy QL software onto the PC, test it with emulators and remove copy protection where necessary.

I must have over 200 microdrive cartridges and another 100-200 disks here to be copied onto the PC and hopefully preserved!

Well I don't mind scanning all the covers and inlays I have It's something I feel quite strongly about as the most of QL community seem indifferent to it. The speccy is now preserved for future generations, can we say the same for the QL?

Could we adopt some kind of microdrive image standard and a disk one to start archiving software.

Sounds good to me -

As for disks etc, I have just basically copied them over so that disks and microdrives will work from within q-emulator, as that seems the best option for running and testing old software.

There is a tool I have for making microdrive images - however, the issue is that so many now have one or two bad sectors, you end up having to extract files from 3 or 4 different microdrives to get a full copy of the original program, so microdrive imaging software is not really the best solution.

It can be used for key cartridges - although even there, the original microdrive has to be fully working (or at least 70-75% readable), otherwise the imaging software fails.

RWAP wrote:Well I would love to have more help in preserving the software and details on the Wiki - I have been asking for help for a couple of years, but with very limited success.

I did suggest to Quanta that they help fund the software preservation site (about 3 years ago now), but alas they turned me down. As it is, I have to concentrate on work which brings in revenue, as the retro business is now my only source of income - therefore I cannot justify the many hours (if not weeks) it will take me to copy QL software onto the PC, test it with emulators and remove copy protection where necessary.

I must have over 200 microdrive cartridges and another 100-200 disks here to be copied onto the PC and hopefully preserved!

I'll scan all the paperwork and backup the carts as soon as it arrives!
I did offer to help you with software preservation back in August, but never got a reply.

The offer still stands!

Here are a couple of things I got this week, a booklet for ICE
and a Transform Microdrive box full of lovely little microdrives

Any thing take your fancy in that set of programs?