The Sinclair QL Forum

Merry Christmas to everyone!

I was playing around with an old version of Desktop Publisher which I had on disc for more than 20 years. It seem to be slightly older than the version on Dilwyn homepage. It runs perfect from Floppy, so I tried to get it running from Win1_xyz_, where I only had partly success and I ask for some advice here.

The boot program loads 3 (4 with Lng_rext which is not necessary to run the program) extension and then executes a file called "publish_task". The executable itself loads some other stuff, which I am not sure about in detail. I used a hex-editor to investigate the executable and found an entry "flp1_". I suppose this is used to load further files. I changes it to ram1_ copied all files to ram1_ and have been successful in get it working from ram1_ (win1_ as well). Now the funny thing: If I change the entry to ram2_ (or win2_) it will not run. The executable file will not find the other files to load. I have totally no idea how this can be and how to solve this issue. I also tried win1_subdir_ but it will not work as well.
I already considered to de-compile the file with Martin Heads Turbo de-compiler, but probably there is an easier solution. Any idea is highly appreciated.

As DTP is published on Dilwyns hompage I attach it here as well.

Cheers,

Stephan

Thanks to the awesome help of Martin Head in decompiling the code, the issue is solved.

Stephan

Hi Stephen - I think you meant to credit our legendary Martin Head, rather than myself

Hi Martyn,

totally right! Martin Head helped me in decompiling the programm. Sorry for this mistake. I corrected my post above!

Stephan

Read this:

https://qlwiki.theqlforum.com/doku.php?i ... =publisher

"Professional Publisher unfortunately does not support directories during configuration and still only supports a single page design. The file "variable_default" must always be present in the root directory of the medium, where the program sits. So, if one wants to put all the files of Professional Publisher in a directory, say "win1_ProPub_", the file "publish_task" must be searched for a string "variable_default", then the string changed to "ProPub_e_default". Of course, the file "variable_default" has then to be put in the directory "win1_ProPub_" and the filename changed to "e_default". Length of the directoryname plus filename has to be identical to "Variable_default". "

This has to be changed with an editor, which is able to load binary files.