The Sinclair QL Forum

Hi all....

As can be seen from http://theqlforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=3& ... unzip#p529 I've got unzip onto my QL (well actually Mess emulated QL ). But I can't figure out how to tell it what to unzip !

Can someone please remind me of something I knew 20 odd years ago

Cheers.

Phill.

Got it,

Seems you have to use EX / EW from a toolkit as the normal QDOS EXEC / EXEC_W don't seem to like passing parameters.

So something like :

EX flp1_unzip;'-j flp1_editor_zip'

Did the trick.

Cheers.

Phill.

I have all these wrote down in a little book as I can never remember it

Hi,

Why not just type:

EX unzip

or

EX unzip;'-h'

will bring up the help screen.

If you want to redirect the ouput of the screen to a specific channel, say SCR_ (#1)

EX unzip,#1;'-h'

Will redirect the UNZIP dialog windows to channel #1 or you could open the channel to a file and capture the scree ouput.

Regards,

Derek

prime wrote:Got it,
Seems you have to use EX / EW from a toolkit as the normal QDOS EXEC / EXEC_W don't seem to like passing parameters.
So something like :
EX flp1_unzip;'-j flp1_editor_zip'
Did the trick.
Cheers.
Phill.

IIRC, the unzipped files get sent by default to the DATA_USE setting. Or can be sent to a specific path with the -d command:
EX flp1_unzip;'-dram1_ flp1_editor_zip'
would unzip the 'editor_zip' to ram1_, for example.

If you only want to unzip a few selected files, just add them in a list after the name of the zip file.

The -j option is very useful if you want to junk or forget the path names stored in the zip file, unzipping them to a location or directory of your choice instead of the one the person who zipped it up included.

Derek's tip about the use of the channel numbers in the parameter list of the EX or EW command is really handy for directing output streams - I used this facility when I wrote the Zip Manager program as a pointer driven front end for Zip and Unzip http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/arch/zipman.zip (plug, plug!)

Regarding MESS - are you using floppy disk images, or have you implemented a SuperQBoard style floppy driver for it? It's a long time since I used MESS/QL. The emulation seemed pretty god back then, but it was really hard to transfer QL software to it.

Maybe you could describe what it's like now Phill, and how people can get hold of it, after all, it's not exactly the most talked about QL emulator. I remember the website is at http://www.mess.org/, the name credited for the QL emulation is 'Kurt Coder' but that's about all I can remember!

For those who've never heard of MESS, it's a kind of multiple computer/arcade game emulation system which happens to have a QL emulator available in it. IIRC, you need to download a QL ROM image to make it work, but those are easy to get nowadays.

dilwyn wrote: Regarding MESS - are you using floppy disk images, or have you implemented a SuperQBoard style floppy driver for it? It's a long time since I used MESS/QL. The emulation seemed pretty god back then, but it was really hard to transfer QL software to it.

Ahh you probably used it before it had disk support, IIRC it only supported microdrive images back then which was pretty useless for anything more modern

Maybe you could describe what it's like now Phill, and how people can get hold of it, after all, it's not exactly the most talked about QL emulator. I remember the website is at http://www.mess.org/, the name credited for the QL emulation is 'Kurt Coder' but that's about all I can remember!

For those who've never heard of MESS, it's a kind of multiple computer/arcade game emulation system which happens to have a QL emulator available in it. IIRC, you need to download a QL ROM image to make it work, but those are easy to get nowadays.

I modified the driver a couple of years back and added support for both the Sandy Superdisk and the Trump Card (selectable from the dipswitch menu in Mess), obviously you need the correct romset but those should be easily findable on the net. If not, I could upload the relevant rom images as I took them from my own SSD and TC.

The only downside is that the way disks are emulated in MESS means that to create a blank disk image you would have to create it outside MESS and use something like qltools to format it.

The other problem with the MESS QL emulation seems to be that there is some sort of problem with the IPC communication emulation that seems to mean that if the QL makes a sound it kills communication and the keyboard stops responding Need to look into this at some point.

Cheers.

Phill.