The Sinclair QL Forum

This seems a really odd problem.

QL Flightdeck works fine on QPC2 and Q-emulator.
See the demo version: http://www.rwapadventures.com/downloads/flight.zip

However, when I try running it on a real QL, it shows the instrumentation panel, beeps and then freezes the system !!

I just can't think of a reason why it might do this - I have tried both Minerva and JS ROMs on the QL and q-emulator, and also tried it with a 512K expanderam + disk interface, and a Trump Card on different QLs.

I wonder if I only tested this on a QL with Gold Card before - alas I don't have a Gold Card any longer to try.

Can someone else please try it on their real hardware and let me know if it works?

I think I had a similar with the Pawn. It ran fine on emulators but I could never get it run on a proper QL

Hi Rich,

Works great under Ubuntu/Wine QPC2 v3.33 on a Dell D610 Laptop.

Not got a real QL running at present.

Any chance of 3D graphics programming...

Derek

It seems as though the software works on emulators and on a Gold Card / Super Gold Card.

It doesn't run on a Trump Card for some reason.

Daniele Terdina has had a quick look and tried throwing all sorts of things at it in q-emulator - it still runs without issues.

He has however, noticed a couple of exception errors are thrown every now and then.

I wonder if it is writing to somewhere it shouldn't...

Luckily (for me) George Gwilt has offered to have a look at the source code for all of the extensions, so we shall see if he can spot anything!

Rich,
this sounds a bit like the code is hitting an exception (address error or other). Emulators typically ignore those and continue, the Gold card+ has specific exception handlers while the QL's original routine just enters an endless loop.

It might be worth a try to run alongside a QL monitor like QMon or C1Mon, or Minerva (also has a bit more sophisticated exception handling)

Did you check whether dataspace size of your copy (executable job) is even? Once had a program that lost its dataspace after copying along and somehow managed to get an odd length data space. Gives funny crashes as well....

Tobias

Thanks to George Gwilt, this has now been fixed - the issue was that the code had two lines in it: It should have read: Whilst the fact that it was returning the value did not matter too much - on the 68008, the TST.L 8(A%) was causing an error if A5 happened to be an odd number - the 68000, and 68020 do not worry about this - oddly neither do the emulators.

RWAP wrote:.....the 68000, and 68020 do not worry about this - oddly neither do the emulators.

Rich,

I'm quite sure the 68k would throw an exception on that as well (Because I remember having programmed a similar problem on the Atari ST) - The 020 definitely doesn't.

Regards,
Tobias

Sorry - you are right - the 68000 should also have the same problem - I need to try out the original Flightdeck on a Gold Card QL...