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QL2K New version 0.1 Build 101 is now available here.
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on 2008-11-28.

QL2K - Sinclair QL Emulator for Windows 2000/XP


The design idea of QLAY is to fully support the Sinclair QL hardware and it can always be downloaded from http://web.inter.nl.net/hcc/A.Jaw.Venema/. QLAY was originally designed to be executed on Windows 95, DOS and Linux. Like so many other QL authors, Jan hasn’t found the time to continue his development on QLAY, so we haven’t see any new versions until today.

Now, QL2K will try to continue the work done on QLAY but aimed at new Windows machines such as Windows 2000 or Windows XP. It has been successfully tested on Windows Millenium too. In fact QL2K is not only a simple port, as there are some added features, such as DirectX support and it will try to give a following to the Jan Venema development. In the same spirit it will stay free of charge but registration is really needed to build a community of users. Why ? Because, if the development is done by only one person, QL2K will not be translated to other languages and will not support all the QL ROM versions that exist now and in the future. This new community will be able to communicate about issues they find and help the development of the product.

I admit that QL2K is definitively not the best QL emulator, probably the slowest one too, but as some of you tell me there is a call for it. In fact, QL2K and QLAY are very useful to migrate programs from QL Classic Black box to QPC or Q40, Q60 machines. This is due to the fact that these machines can be too fast to give a real compatible QL system. Whilst porting some of my old programs, I really appreciated the delay option that permits me to localise each piece of badly written code in order to rewrite it properly. So in some cases, QL2K should be a very good development environment. Or simply an excellent EDUCATIONAL environment to learn programming. QL2K is still in an early alpha version, debugging is in progress, but you can already use it. Corrections are made as quick as possible, and the next alpha, will support English, French, Spanish, German, Italian and Greek.
UI has been completely redone, and give the ability to configure these several settings :

Memory size ( 128 K, 256K, 384K, 512K, 640K, 896K ) as well as : ( 1M, 2M, 4M et 8M )
Screen size : 512x256, 512x341, 768x512, 1024x683, 1024x768, 1280x640, 1280x1024
Keyboard country (US, UK, FR, GE, IT)
Speed and Delay
Main ROM and 2 secondary expansion ROM.
Use of mouse.
ALT Key (now the QL ALT is reassigned to the ALT-GR on the PC keyboard (The PC ALT key is needed by Windows and the QL2K menu system.
Microdrives images (from MDV1_ to MDV8_) and WIN drives ( QLAY NFA ) (from WIN1_ to WIN8_)
DirectX ( DirectDraw ).

QL2K is hosted at Jadiam.org, and from here you can download it. On this same link you will find access to other pages such as projects in progress and soon there will be a FAQ section and some other QL2K support pages. I have already got some articles to publish on that section. Moreover, you can write to me at Jimmy MONTESINOS for anything concerning QL2K or simply the QL. And please, complete your registration form and send it to me in order to help QL2K from becoming “abandonware”.
QL2K was at the QL US Show 2003 with the kindness of Phoebus Dokos, and already has many links onto several QL Websites. It will be supplied on the QL Emulators CD which is available from RWAP Services and others.
Written by Jimmy Montesinos ( Article published in QLToday Vol.8 Issue 2 ), on 2003-08-16.