Rom Diagram

[Ruptor]

Is there any kind of process chart or diagram of the layout of QL rom OS? I am old school from the days when software use to be described with pictures so you knew what was going on at a glance.

[Ruptor]

I take that as a no then.

[NormanDunbar]

You could take a look in the technical manual or the QDOS Companion that Derek scanned recently. See separate thread.

However, if you are looking for organised sections of the ROM then, basically, it isn't organised! Apart from the vectored routines perhaps.

Cheers,
Norm.

[martyn_hill]

Hi Ruptor

Just to piggy-back on Norman's reply, QDOS was never designed to be called from discrete code-entry points, except for the Vectored utilities which are well documented and, unlike, say the Spectrum ROM, which only ever had 1 production variant, and which came to be well-known by the budding developers of the time by its routine entry points.

Sinclair did move in the direction of the QDOS approach with the Interface-1 ROM which had a number of similarly vectored routines (so-called 'Hook-codes'.)

Otherwise, a documented 'map'' of the QDOS ROM is tedious given the x number of versions that made it in to user's machines, and was never part of its - arguably - more modern approach to making routines available via well-documented TRAPs and Vectored Utilities.

Or did I misunderstand your aim in asking the question?

Certainly I don't mean to undermine your question at all, just that it doesn't quite align with how QDOS was designed (to my mind, at least)...

[Derek_Stewart]

Hi,

If you look at the Minerva and SMSQ/E source code, they are both assembled by using a link file which describes the order the individual files are assembled and linked (combined) into final operating system code.

While this does not give a specific map to the operating system, you can use QDOS Technical and SMSQ/E Reference Guides to read about the operating system.

[Ruptor]

You could take a look in the technical manual or the QDOS Companion that Derek scanned recently. See separate thread. However, if you are looking for organised sections of the ROM then, basically, it isn't organised! Apart from the vectored routines perhaps.

I kept reading QDOS as QL that gives QL Companion the book I have and isn't much use. Thanks I will take a look.

Certainly I don't mean to undermine your question at all, just that it doesn't quite align with how QDOS was designed (to my mind, at least)...

More like I expect too much coming from the medical equipment design side of the industry where everything is documented. Thanks I will take a look at your suggested documentation.
It just seems alien to me especially after all these years that a process chart hasn't been created by someone.

[martyn_hill]

Hi Ruptor!

More like I expect too much coming from the medical equipment design side of the industry where everything is documented. Thanks I will take a look at your suggested documentation.
It just seems alien to me especially after all these years that a process chart hasn't been created by someone.

Fair comment. I think again, the design principal behind QDOS (as I have come to understand) is that rather than being a monolithic, sequential task that might lend itself to a system-flow description, it is more a large collection of simple but useful routines, exposed through a fairly regular API-like interface. 'Fairly' being the operative word

That said, understanding of such entities as the 'Scheduler' and especially the IOSS and its all-important 'Retry' mechanism might benefit from a flow-type diagram to augment the written descriptions you can find in Pennel, Dickens, et-al. Food for thought...