| QL News |
Sir Clive: "We are a year ahead of the competition." |
Faced with a fading market image and indifferent Christmas sales, Sir Clive Sinclair gathered together those companies with QL products to present a miniature trade show for the machine in London on February 27.
Held at the London Hilton, the relaunch saw Sir Clive defending the QL against rumours that Atari's promised range of 16-bit micros would demolish QL sales.
"I don't rate Atari," he said, with something of the old Sinclair flamboyance. "We are a year ahead of them, and we have a cleverer machine, with the microdrives, for example."
Sir Clive went on to announce plans for the first waferchip product, a 0.5 megabyte storage medium which he said would be a viable alternative to Winchester drives. "Being solid state, it is more rugged than a Winchester," he said.
The product will be priced at under £300 and battery powered. It will retain data stored after the power has been switched off, and the batteries can be changed without a break in power continuity. As yet, said Sir Clive, there was no firm production schedule, but he hinted that it should be available by the end of the year.
New products displayed at the show included a C-compiler from GST, Cambridge LISP from Metacomco, and QL Home Finance and Entrepreneur from Buzzz Software and Tryptych Publishing respectively.
YET ANOTHER QL is on the way from Sinclair Research. The JS ROM includes a new series of SuperBasic commands centred around WHEN ... ERROR statements, as well as improved microdrives.
The command checks for errors and then, instead of simply crashing the program, activates another part of the program instead. One danger is that it is non-recursive, which means that if there is an error in the new routine, the program will keep nesting the errors until it crashes completely.
Knott adds that the new ROM is not considered to constitute a major change in the QL specifications, and those changes which are significant would only be of interest to highly skilled programmers.
HELP IS AT hand for budding QL programmers from Glasgow software house Talent.
A comprehensive graphics package has been released to enable full-screen or part-text graphics pictures to be drawn. The package includes facilities for 16x magnification of any part of the screen plus the ability to pan the magnified picture.
Other facilities include fill, routines for 'rubber' circles and ellipses, airbrush effects, reflection and rotation. The package costs £34.95, and comprises two microdrive cartridges.
Talent is also releasing a Microdrive Doctor utility, which will retrieve corrupted data from a damaged cartridge. It will apparently deal with cartridges where data has been corrupted by faulty saving and also where the tape has suffered physical damage. Whatever data can be salvaged is transferred to a new cartridge and the contents listed.
A spokesperson points out that commercially protected software cannot be copied using the utility. "It is not part of our policy to encourage piracy," she says. The product costs £21.95 and should be available as you read this magazine.
On a marginally lighter note, CP Software are among the first established games companies to produce conversions for the QL. The first program to be released is Bridge Player, based on the Amstrad version of the game. The game allows the use of Stayman, Blackwood and Gerber bidding conventions, and full facilities for play, including double-dummy play, and standard play. The game retails at £18.95.
ALL FOUR Psion programs running concurrently on a QL which walks and talks tall as an Apple Mac is the claim made by Medic Datasystems for its new 'Mac User Interface'.
The package will be included free to purchasers of the company's other products which include disk drives and RAM expansions.
According to managing director Christer Skoglund the product will turn the QL into something like an Apple Mac, with single keystroke entries and full multi-tasking.
"We wish to produce a system on which people can develop better software," says Mr Skoglund.
QLUB members will no longer be able to get the new versions of the Psion software packages as free upgrades. Instead, membership of the club is free but the packages will cost an extra £15.00 each or £50.00 for all four from Sinclair Research as a separate item.
"Even the early versions of the software were worth the money," says a spokesman for Sinclair Research.
"When you consider that the Psion Xchange suite for the IBM PC costs £475 and contains the same four programs as the new versions, £50.00 is still good value."
On the plus side, QLUB is providing a free telephone service which will operate from 9.30 am to 5.30 pm every weekday. Advice is promised on using printers and other peripherals, as well as help with Easel, Abacus, Archive and Quill. Members will still be able to buy selected QL products at discount prices.