The Sinclair QL Forum

Hi all,

just wondering which is the best bitmap drawing application for the QL which I can use on Q-emulator. It should support the mouse, 8 and 4 colour modes and give acces to the full resolution, 256 x 256 or 512 x 256. Thanks for info

cheers,
T

Hi,
requirements 2, 3, 4, are easy to meet - 1 not so much.
To my knowledge there's no sophisticated QL pixel drawing program for the PE. (Except, maybe, the demo programs that came with QRAM and QPTR - But those are not exactly "sophisticated"). While that doesn't seem to be a large market niche these days, it's probably worth thinking about writing one

Some of the pre-PE drawing programs might support a mouse (most of them somehow did), but if that would work with "today's" mouses I'd be surprised.
The "real good ones" came up together with the upcoming QLs in the first few months of the QL's existance and were, (some examples)
- QDRAW (I think that was PSION sold under Sinclair label)
- GraphiQL (by Jochen Merz)
- ArtICE that came with the ICE mouse is one example of a proprietary mouse system
- CADPAK (I think that was Sandy)
- Eye-Q (That was DP)

Hope this helps,
tofro

Cheers,
Tobias

tofro wrote:Some of the pre-PE drawing programs might support a mouse (most of them somehow did), but if that would work with "today's" mouses I'd be surprised.
The "real good ones" came up together with the upcoming QLs in the first few months of the QL's existance and were, (some examples)
- QDRAW (I think that was PSION sold under Sinclair label)
- GraphiQL (by Jochen Merz)
- ArtICE that came with the ICE mouse is one example of a proprietary mouse system
- CADPAK (I think that was Sandy)
- Eye-Q (That was DP)

The five progs mentioned by Tobias are all 80s ware and were all released in the early years of the QL (1985/1986). To have history correct please note that QDRAW was published by PSION and not by Sinclair. This was due to the fact that Sinclair decided to release an upgraded version of GraphiQL (which was by Talent and not by Jochen Merz) called QL Paint under their silver label. After Sinclair sold its computer business to Amstrad and the QL was axed, Talent re-released QL Paint as GraphiQL+. Jochen Merz wrote Giga-Chrome which was published by Giga-Soft and distributed by Andreas Budde’s ABC Elektronik, Bielefeld/Germany. Sounds like a complicated story. There were many more non PE bitmap drawing (paint) programs for the QL.

There were some mouse driven bitmap drawing (paint) programs which supported the QJUMP pointer environment. To name a few:
- The Painter (1988/1990, IIRC last version was 4.01) by Joachim and Nathan van der Auwera (aka PROGS) from Belgium.
- QDesign (1990, IIRC last version was 4.02) by Jörg Schiemann, distributed by Krummrey, both in Berlin/Germany.

I should better stop here and update the QL Wiki http://www.rwapadventures.com/ql_wiki/ with such information

Cheers, Urs

PROGS did of course, also release LineDesign which is the only vector drawing program for the QL (it runs under the (now) public domain ProWeSs windowing system - which in turn runs under the pointer environment....

I quite like LineDesign for some things - although the fact that colours are not shown on screen can make it awkward for detailed work!

Thank you for the info! I could not find much info about Giga Chrome. Is there a description somewhere and is it still available?

Explaing a bit the background of all this: I tried to do some graphics work on Photoshop, mainly because I think also with 8 colours and low resolution (or 4 colours and higher resolution) it should be possible to create attractive graphics, sprites, ... whatever. Working with Photoshop I run into 2 problems. First I did not find out in which format I need to save the picture in order that I can open it with Q-emulator. Second, if I create a new picture in photoshop with 256 x 256 pixels it is clearly not a rectangle which would have the same relation between width and height and therefor it is quite impossible to draw sth. because afterwards whenever I should be able to save it in the right format - loading it into Q-emulator would stretch it ..... so my next idea was to look around for a painting application which I can run directly on Q-emulator ... despite the fact that I would prefer to work on Photoshop. Sounds all a bit like making easy things difficult ... some ideas?

cheers
T

Thank you for the detailed info!

Hi folks,

this (long) weekend is the QL meeting in Vienna, Austria. This year I couldn’t make it for several reasons. As I have an hour for QLing right now, I’m going to post this and some other postings on ql-users and qlforum. For those attending the meeting I wish you all a great time. Here in Switzerland it’s raining for two days now (heavy rain, floodings). As a kind of a virtual meeting here’s one of the videos of the 2010 show:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4Q7IUMKvRM

Last Wednesday late afternoon I was digging out the floppy disks of “The Painter”, “LineDesign” and “QDesign” and copied the files to my preservation QXL.WIN.

Based on this thread I’ve made some pictures and uploaded them to my web picture gallery.

Here you’ll find some pictures of the “The Painter”, “LineDesign” (see last 3 pics in gallery):
https://skydrive.live.com/?cid=C250D874 ... CE5A%21353

Here’s a picture of QDesign (see bottom left in last pic of gallery):
https://skydrive.live.com/?cid=C250D874 ... E5A%212295

Cheers, Urs