The Sinclair QL Forum

It has been a very busy month or so at work and home, so although I have periodically looked on the forum, I have not had much chance to even take the dust-cover off my QL. However, as the teaching term comes to a close at work, I can see a little light on the horizon which might even allow me to do a little bit of work on my QL.

Things haven't been completely static: I have been re-organising my man-cave/study to be more appropriate for a bit of retro computing, and now I have a permanent QL set-up with a nice little LCD TV (I'm hoping to buy one of those arcade machine cards to allow me to connect the QL to a VGA monitor soon) and a Spectrum gaming centre in another corner of the cave.

My plan over the Christmas break is to (re)start experimenting with QL SuperBASIC, although this will require trying to get my microdrive cartridges to work a little better... I'm going to see how I get on replacing the felt-pads on some, so watch this space.

Anyway, just thought I'd say hello!

What is your speccy gaming setup like? QL'ing for me happens in fits and starts, sometimes real life gets in the way

Yes, life has a habit of getting in the way of things... Ah well, another week of marking undergraduate coursework and then I might get an hour or two on my QL!

My default Spectrum games setup is my original 16k spectrum, which I upgraded using the Spectrum + upgrade kit in 1984 (adding the extra memory, of course!), connected to a SPECTRA interface to provide really clear, sharp image quality (and sound through the TV), with an IF1bis tacked onto the end of that, holding all my games handily on an SD card. Although I have kept (and continued to buy) the original games on tape, I have either downloaded or created my own .tap files so I don't risk wearing out the tapes, especially of all my precious Ultimate Play the Game, Automata and Hewson games! Having always had crappy Quickshot 2 joysticks because they were cheap and looked good, I now have a proper Competition Pro joystick, and a Cheetah Starprobe, both of which are awesome (if a little noisy due to the microswitches). I keep meaning to try to adapt or obtain some sort of nintendo or Atari keypad, which for many uses would probably be more useful. I also have a selection of other Speccys bought as duds on eBay that I have been repairing, but so far I have only found 1 or 2 128k only games that warrant getting these out for use.

I was planning a quiet hour or two playing Civilization on my mac this evening, but writing this has changed me to a nostalgic hour or two of Elite, or possibly AticAtac!