The Sinclair QL Forum

(Mislaid Daniele's email address, hope he's reading this).

Using QemuLator 3.1.3 on Windows 7 Home Premium, and the Q60 display version of SMSQ/E from Daniele's website, I am having the following difficulties:

1. Using QDOS Unzip and Zip, operation is extremely slow with ramdisk, up to 3 minutes just to get a list of files. Unzip 5.32 and Zip 2.2. Have also tried with Archivers Control Panel and Zip Manager, with same results. At first I thought it was a crash, as the emulator froze for up to 3 minutes, but eventually realised it eventually recovers.

2. Hotkeys - hotkeys defined on non-alphanumeric keys simply don't work (they do on all other systems), just giving the low pitched error beep. e.g. ERT HOT_LOAD('_','win1_exec_qtrans_obj') or ERT HOT_PICK('-','qtrans')
Although pressing ALT and '_' or ALT and '-' fail, interestingly HOT_DO '_' and HOT_DO('-') both work!

3. (This might be down to menu_rext, I don't know). RAM device name doesn't appear in the device names list in menu_rext v8.02

I have also come across some oddities where a DIR flp1_ does not list a specific file (say a basic file called TEST), WCOPY will then not copy the file

However, COPY flp1_test TO flp2_test works fine...

This looks to be something in the windows file settings - as copying the contents of the folder to another folder and then using DIR on that new folder still does not reveal the filename.

However, if I use the COPY command above to add the missing file (after using WCOPY flp1_ TO flp2_ ), I can then delete all of the files from the old folder in Windows, and then use WCOPY flp2_ TO flp1_ to copy them back without any problems.

The odd thing is that the original missing files came from a QL zip file which was attached as flp2_ and I used WCOPY flp2_ TO flp1_ to copy them over originally....

Are you using 64 bit?

With a 32 Bit version of Windoze 7 I did not come across file operation problems.
At the moment, the BDI extension works under 32 bit only. No idea if that is related.

Yes I am using Windows 7 64 bit

It is hard to know what causes the 'missing file' syndrome - as it is quite rare!

RWAP wrote:Yes I am using Windows 7 64 bit

It is hard to know what causes the 'missing file' syndrome - as it is quite rare!

Earlier this year I bought a floppy disk drive from Rich, which gets used with a Gold Card QL mainly for transferring software for the website or software preservation work, which gets done with QemuLator as that's what Rich also uses.

Now I use Windows 64-bit too, plus a USB floppy disk drive, which is absolutely useless at reading floppy disks which are less than 100% perfect. This is why the original QL and floppy disks are used - the Gold Card QL has a HD and ED floppy drive combo because the ED disk drive is fantastic at reading disks which fail to work on DD and HD drives.

Rich will remember me asking if he'd had any issues with the disk drive, as I found that not all of the content of the disk would always show up. As an example, I tried to copy a disk with 48 files on this morning. The PC and QemuLator would read about 3 of the files, but worse QemuLator would not, once it saw a bad file or bad medium, leave the disk alone and would keep retrying dozens and dozens of times, effectively locking me out so I had to kill the QemuLator session. Even ejecting the disk didn't fix this, the disk drive just went into hammer drill sound effects mode.

So I copy the disk the QL, do a DIR to check the disk, seemed ok, over to the PC and what happens is that QemuLator shows a mix of files from its first disk and the new one. Take the disk back to the QL, sure enough the directory is corrupted.

Try again, this time with QPC2. No problem at all.

Conclusion: QemuLator has problems on Windows 7 64 bit IF THE DISK IS LESS THAN 100% PERFECT. Any bad sectors or files, the problem above occurs. The problem even seems to occur with disks which are formatted to less than full capacity (as traders used to do to save time formatting disks), in which case QemuLator (or Windows? not sure, it's a Windows style error box) pops up an error message saying it's not a QDOS format disk

This is why I have put the note on my site asking people not to send me website contributions in QemuLator native hard disk format as QemuLator gives me a hard time between the disk problems and the zip/ramdisc issues I mentioned in another posting. The smallest job involving QemuLator on this PC can take hours. Sometime, I'll have to fetch the old 32-bit XP PC out of the attic to see if the same problems happen with Qemu on that.