The Sinclair QL Forum

dilwyn wrote:I often wonder what is the fascination and obsession with MDV's in this day and age?

I can sort of see the attraction of copying an original commercial game off MDV into an image, but beyond that, at a time when 99% of cartridges need refelting because they are well past their use by date?

Well, I can very well understand that people new to the QL (who never had to rely on mdvs for "real" storage and never really worked with them) want to explore this quirky technology. I reckon the fascination dries off after some hours

Yeah, I understand what you mean. I suppose it's a common denominator for pretty much all systems, given that these days just about every QL system and emulator has its own storage formats, despite the laudable best efforts of Marcel and Wolfgang to standardise. The sheer range of hard disk, floppy disk types, SD-cards etc etc must put off some people, making MDV storage systems seem like the "easy" option? Or is it just nostalgia for what the real original QLs could do?

I think it's not nostalgia so much as their uniqueness and compact design

I'm glad I have other media to work with and for the most part I haven't used microdrives other than to get old software off of them. I do recall, before my QL arrived in late '89, reading about them and being really excited. I don't recall initially having too many problems, or maybe I just got used to the normal behavior. Over the summer I will re-felt a few of them to give the old-school feel a try again. I need to have a good one handy so when I switch banks in my vDrive I can copy between them a file if I need to...better than sticking the SD card in my PC and fiddling with emulators to move stuff around. Is there a QxlwinReader equivalent for MDV files...that you can just pick images and drag and drop files between?

I like the MDV design, they are cute. I get that. I don't see why one would want to fiddle with virtual MDVs however. Those are not cute, they are just extremely limited in every way. But in any case, the subject of the thread is QPC2 v5, please open another one about any general MDV topics.

Hi,

The original QL was a good computer, which I struggled with the Mircodrive system. But adding a Disk System and more memory, made it even better.

I have never used Microdrives consistently since 1990, so it is not a miss. All my microdrives are in long term storage and never used, all the software have been copied and changed torun on Disk, Hard Disk systems.

So if Microdrives were unavailable, I would not miss them.

Oh Hum!

I finally got QPC version 5.0 downloaded and installed. While saving a file from QPC to dos1_ for editing, I couldn't find it! I no longer need to look for my_file_asm, in Linux, as the file now have the last underscore replaced by a dot automatically! I like it!

Thanks Marcel.


Cheers,
Norm.

Glad you like it. I'm a huge fan of version controlling my source code and this feature makes that sooo much easier.

The first time anyone has to recover a lost file from version control is when they realise exactly how useful it is!

I have my stuff in various git repositories all over the place. Most are online which is effectively an off-site backup. For free! Who mentioned Scotsmen living in Yorkshire?


Cheers,
Norm.

mk79 wrote:Glad you like it. I'm a huge fan of version controlling my source code and this feature makes that sooo much easier.

And, mercifully, a feature that can be turned off! Thank you for that