QLAY - Another QL Emulator for PC's Review by Timothy Swenson QLAY is a QL emulator for MS-DOS or Win95 recently released by Jan Venema. It was announced in the newsgroup comp.sys.sinclair. Once seeing the announcement, I quickly downloaded the program from Jan's web page. QLAY is freeware and may be freely distributed. The program comes as a ZIP file and is extracted using PKUNZIP. QLAY is at version 0.7 so it at the "proof of concept" stage of development. I first tried QLAY on a 386/33 with only 8 Megs of memory. It quickly failed. The short documentation that comes with QLAY says that the minimal configuration is a 386 with 16 Meg of memory. Next I tried it on a 486/66 with 16 Meg. Within a few seconds, there was the familiar F1/F2 screen. Using a VGA monitor, the aspect ratio was perfect. It looked just like the QL screen. The documentation said that a 486/66 runs the emulator at the speed of a standard QL. To get any speed equal to a Gold Card you will probably need a fairly fast Pentium. Like other QL emulators, namely QLEM, QLAY has the QL ROM stored in a separate file. This allows it to load in different ROMs. If you have the ToolKit II ROM code stored in a file, you can merge it with the QL ROM that comes with QLAY and get the full TKII extensions. The documentation details how this is done. QLAY only supports MDV_ for files or devices. It does not yet support SER, FLP, or NET. Microdrives are 178K MS-DOS files that QLAY can treat like a Microdrive. QLAY comes with three example MDV_ files; EXAMPLE.MDV, EMPTYDSK.MDV, and QUILL.MDV. If you need additional MDV files, just copy EMPTYDSK.MDV to another file and you have another "formated" Microdrive cartridge. You tell QLAY which MDV file to load when it starts. It supports up to 8 different MDV files. To load QLAY with the QUILL.MDV file and EXAMPLE.MDV, you execute QLAY this way: QLAY -1QUILL.MDV -2EXAMPLE.MDV QUILL.MDV becomes MDV1_ and EXAMPLE.MDV becomes MDV2_. You can also make the Microdrive file read-only (write- protected) by adding an R in -1RQUILL.MDV. QLAY supports both 128K and 768K versions of a QL. Adding the -S arguement runs QLAY in 768K mode. QLAY also supports different resolution modes using a -D arguement. Mode 1 gives the best aspect ratio, but is the slowest mode. The PC screen modes sizes are: Mode 0 320x200x256 Mode 1 350x640x16 Mode 2 400x640x256 Mode 3 480x640x256 Mode 4 800x600 The documentation says that QLAY may choose to ignore the mode settings you give it. Since QLAY comes with a Microdrive file with QUILL, I had to try this. I executed the program as: QLAY -1QUILL.MDV QLAY fired up and popped up the F1/F2 screen. I pressed F1 and withing a few seconds the QUILL loading screen came up. Then soon QUILL itself come up. It looked exactly as it does now as I'm typing this article into QUILL. QLAY does not come with any program to get a QDOS file into an MS-DOS .MDV file. I expect in the future it will. Since QLAY does not support SER devices, you can not print out what you type into QUILL. This means that QLAY is ready to be used an a fully working QL. This version of QLAY is not ready for prime-time. It is a good beta program that shows that the core part of the emulator has been written and works. The next step is to add the features that make QLAY usable as a QL. I don't see QLAY as a serious threat to QPC. I see QPC as a complete replacement of a (Super) Gold Card QL. Once QLAY is more developed, I see it as being equal to a QL with a Trump Card. With only 768K, you are not going to be running Ghostscript on QLAY. If QLAY continues develepment, it will be a good alterative to anybody that has a PC and only needs a Trump Card-level QL. With my Gold Card QL, QPC takes me into the future, QLAY takes me into the past. And being Freeware, you really can't beat the price of QLAY. QLAY is available from Jan Venema at http://www.inter.nl.net/hcc/A.Jaw.Venema