The Sinclair QL Forum

I have had a look about at some programming manuals for the QL. So far I read two machine code books, "Machine Code Programming on the Sinclair QL" and "Assembly Language Programming on the Sinclair QL".

What's disappointing about these two is that they devote a lot of space to documenting the 68000 instruction set (I have a copy of Leventhal's book already) but they don't go into great detail when discussing the hardware or QDOS calls. So far I have learned that the QDOS system variables are in screen 2's address space (so no double buffering unless you kill QDOS, in which case, how are you going to save game states?) and the interrupt vector table is in ROM (what the heck??!!?? there must be a reason but I can't imagine what it is - "cost cutting" is not a good one).

Anyway, I begin to fear that SuperBasic books will be similar (insofar as they will devote space to BASIC tutorials which I don't really need). I have been singularly unsuccessful at divining meaning from the abysmal QL documentation that comes with the machine; there's not enough detail and the commands are not fully documented.

With this in mind, what are good reference books for SuperBasic / QDOS / hardware and machine code on the QL? I want to buy actual hard copies, although I'd judge them by reading downloaded PDFs.

Firstly, I strongly recommend that you grab yourself a copy of Minerva 1.97 or 1.98. It's going to resolve almost every issue you have with QDOS in one go, and will run on quite minimal hardware. a CPU upgrade, then SMSQ becomes an option too.

Second, Jan Jones' excellent book "QL SuperBASIC: The Definitive Handbook" goes into QDOS in a way a lot of other books don't, and is an essential read for anyone coding in SuperBASIC or assembly.

Thanks Dave - where to get a Minerva rom from? There's one on smr.com, it looks like a daughter board but I am not that impressed with the price!

JonB wrote:Thanks Dave - where to get a Minerva rom from? There's one on smr.com, it looks like a daughter board but I am not that impressed with the price!

There's images of the Minerva ROM on my website, if you can burn your own from that. http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/qlrom/index.html. I think a Minerva EPROM would need a small adaptor board, as the pinout would be slightly different for an EPROM (can't remember what differences, sorry).

As for books, try the QDOS Companion by Andy Pennell (Sunshine Publications). That's QDOS-specific and goes beyond just the instruction set. QL Advanced User Guide by Adrian Dickens (Adder Publishing), which is fairly along the same lines.Both well out of print, but second hand copies turn up from time to time.

There are some scanned books for QL at http://sinclairql.speccy.org/archivo/docs/docs.htm

World Of Spectrum have QL books too - search for "QL" on this page http://www.worldofspectrum.org/books.html - seems to be titles such as Advanced Programming With Sinclair QL (Hutchinson) , Advanced QL Machine Code (Duckworth), Artificial Intelligence QL (Sunshine), plus others.

There may be articles etc of interest on the Documentation parts of my website.

Dave wrote:Firstly, I strongly recommend that you grab yourself a copy of Minerva 1.97 or 1.98. It's going to resolve almost every issue you have with QDOS in one go, and will run on quite minimal hardware. a CPU upgrade, then SMSQ becomes an option too.

Second, Jan Jones' excellent book "QL SuperBASIC: The Definitive Handbook" goes into QDOS in a way a lot of other books don't, and is an essential read for anyone coding in SuperBASIC or assembly.

It's here if you are still interested http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/QL-SUPERBASIC ... 257ca34f92

I don't want to blow my own trumpet, but a lot of people think that the best reference for SuperBASIC is the SBASiC/SuperBASIC Reference Manual - see:

http://www.sellmyretro.com/offer/detail ... on-CD-2329

RWAP Master, what are the chances of a sample of text to entice the potential buyer?

RWAP wrote:I don't want to blow my own trumpet, but a lot of people think that the best reference for SuperBASIC is the SBASiC/SuperBASIC Reference Manual - see:

http://www.sellmyretro.com/offer/detail ... on-CD-2329

Must be dead tree version. I don't get on with digital copies for reference books. Novels, yes, because you are reading them front to back, but for bouncing around in a reference book, paper's the only way.

JonB wrote:

RWAP wrote:I don't want to blow my own trumpet, but a lot of people think that the best reference for SuperBASIC is the SBASiC/SuperBASIC Reference Manual - see:

http://www.sellmyretro.com/offer/detail ... on-CD-2329

Must be dead tree version. I don't get on with digital copies for reference books. Novels, yes, because you are reading them front to back, but for bouncing around in a reference book, paper's the only way.

Shame - we originally produced printed copies, but with over 1000 pages, it was too expensive to make and send anywhere!

Mr_Navigator wrote:RWAP Master, what are the chances of a sample of text to entice the potential buyer?

Good idea - see the attached description for the OPEN command - the zip file contains a PDF extract