#sinclairql — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #sinclairql, aggregated by home.social.
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As someone who has owned both, it’s obvious the #AtariST is the cooler looking machine than the #Amiga! Those sexy diagonal function keys, oh yeah. But in terms of 16 bit computing, the #SinclairQL has the #Atari beat, by quite some margin! #Sinclair’s designer, Rick Dickinson, is the king.
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The #SinclairQL sound system is really pretty bonkers. Documentation is vague and even the explainers I've found are missing stuff while some others are trying to guess. At least in an emulator one can create quite odd results by giving values which don't follow the guidelines.
What was fun was that one command created sound akin to a tune by #Ø, while adding another parameter resulted in a #noise tune by #PanSonic. Awesome!
Too bad it's only 1 channel...
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These are parts of code in Brataccas that may have been written originally targeting the 68008 processor of the Sinclair QL before they were ported to the Atari ST
After some cursory scanning of the Brataccas code, some patterns emerged:
Case 1: Bit-reversal lookup table
This seems unusual and suggests graphics conversion between platforms with different pixel bit-ordering. The QL stored pixels in a different bit order than the ST - this table appears to be useful to convert graphics assets that were originally in Sinclair QL format.
; Bit-Reversal Table (L00A0-L00A4)
L00A0:DS.W 128,0
L00A2:LEA L00A0(PC),A0
MOVE.W #$FF,D7
L00A3:MOVE.B D0,D1
MOVEQ #6,D2
ROXR.B #1,D1
ROXL.B #1,D4
L00A4:ROXR.B #1,D1
ROXL.BCase 2 Excessive byte operations
Throughout the code, there's an unusual preference for byte operations:
MOVE.B (A0)+,D0
MOVE.B (A0)+,D1On the 68000 (ST/Amiga/Mac), word operations are typically preferred for performance. But the QL's 68008 CPU had an 8-bit external bus - byte vs word operations had similar performance. This coding style hints at optimisation for the 68008, not the 68000.
The disassembly available at the Brataccas website seems to have been produced from a QL to Atari ST port, not the Amiga as I originally thought.
https://www.brataccas.com/Page28.phpThe first part of the code (first 1000-1500 lines or so) is a music tracker, and it's clearly a separate module from the rest, clearly designed to be reusable. There are hints that the I/O ports are Atari-specific and that the engine allows for developers to perform hot-editing of music notes via the MIDI port, which was something incredibly sophisticated for 1985. Some other parts of the code deal with vibrato, legato, and effects during realtime play.
After that block there's what seems to be a sprite blitting engine, but that's as far as I got.
To be continued...
#brataccas #retrocomputing #retrogaming #m68k #SinclairQL #QL #asm #assembler #m68008
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The irony is that the constraint that you're talking about went away in the early 1980s when processors with more than just a single accumulator register became popular.
Sinclair QDOS is another, roughly contemporary but a few years earlier, example. The 68008 had far more general-purpose registers than the Z80, so the system call TRAPs in QDOS uniformly return an error code in D0 and up to three results in D1, D2, and D3.
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GREAT! Joan Gayón has made a port of Jon Ritman's Batman to the #QL
Download it here:
https://sinclairqles.wordpress.com/2025/05/09/batmanql-descarga-download/Source:
https://www.elmundodelspectrum.com/bombazo-el-clasico-batman-de-jon-ritman-llega-al-sinclair-ql/ -
I think too few #SinclairQL demos use the #QL’s own rather eccentric sound chip, instead using the generic and boring #AY extension board!
Even finding exact specs of how the parameters affect sound output is a chore, with many missing spots. Sounds like an interesting challenge.
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Taking a look at ICE, a little known GUI for the Sinclair QL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dlu6yMa4H0I#retrocomputing #gui #sinclair #ql #sinclairql #zxspectrum #speccy #spectrum
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I was a little chary of the Amstrad form factor, I really didn't like the Amstrad CPC family, and I had to pick my nose and swallow my pride when Amstrad finally delivered a Spectrum with a floppy drive.
But if you think of it, the form factor was actually invented by Sinclair with the QL. Wrong storage device though!
#Sinclair #QL #SinclairQL #Amstrad #ZXSpectrum #Spectrum #Speccy #retrocomputing
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Repórter Retro 100
https://retropolis.com.br/2024/02/28/reporter-retro-100/
#ReprterRetro #1541 #1571 #AdrianBlack #AmstradCpc #Bendix #Borland #Calculadora #Centurion #Colossus #Comercial #Commodore128 #CPM #crime #Demo #Doom #DouglasEngelbart #Laptop #Macintosh #MSX #MSXVDP #NoelLlopis #Plasma #Robs #Samsung #SayakasDigitalAttic #SBC #SDMapper #SinclairQl #TByteCreator #TCPIP #Terminal #TheTaylorAndAmyShow #TurboPascal #UsagiElectric #vlvulas #Windows30 #ZilogZ80
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#TheRegister celebrates the 40th anniversary of the #SinclairQL, one of the most unique slices of computing history. Arguaby a more interesting machine than the #Spectrum +2 and 3 of #Amstrad era. I feel #Sinclair’s main mistake here was positioning the #QL as only a business machine. Not understanding the power of fun and creation. After all, that’s really what life is about.