At work I develop an application that is employed in production plants all around the world. It can host a lot of different code modules from different developers, so the code it executes is pretty diverse. To be able to quickly react to any problems I implemented a crash-handler that makes a memory image of… Read More »
We’ve had some machines stop working with NI-MAX error 42HG08DD. Nothing found online on the error helped. I dug deeper into the binaries and found out it was a simple problem with file access rights. If you experience this, have a look at the access rights of the files under C:\ProgramData\National Instruments\Shared Memory. The MXSEventSharedMemory.tmp… Read More »
Both my QL-VGA2 and QL-SD ROM hardware use Xilinx chips and to program these I have a Xilinx USB JTAG cable model DLC9LP. After months of inactivity I dusted it off to update a few remaining QL-VGA boards but found that the cable didn’t work anymore with my main laptop: Code 39!? Drat. Googling that… Read More »
The QL-SD driver ROM is so full that every byte counts and during my search for superfluous bytes for v1.09 I removed one instruction too much. This results in a wrong value returned from the iof.rhdr call which is often not used anyway but can lead to subtle bugs in applications. Today I’ve uploaded a… Read More »
Background In Germany there was a famous commercial that starts with the sentence “The history of menstruation is a history full of misunderstandings” and the same can be said about QDOS file headers. So what’s it all about? On today’s PC file systems every file has some meta data associated with it. The main one… Read More »
After a long delay, partly because it took quite long to put SMSQ/E v3.38 together, a new QPC2 has finally been released. It took so long that my expensive code signing certificate has expired again, so it was actually only used for a single release 🙁 But I bought another one, so this release is… Read More »
A while ago I’ve sent pre-production QL-SD ROM samples to a few testers and now Dilwyn Jones has written a review of his, read it here. Thanks Dilwyn! Unfortunately I don’t currently have much time for QL stuff and what little time I recently had I’ve invested into making a NTSC compatible QL-VGA. But before… Read More »
After many happy customers Alex from the US was not impressed with the quality of QL-VGA’s picture quality and looking at what he sees this was completely understandable: It was soon clear that he owns one of the relatively rare original US NTSC QLs and QL-VGA was never tested with one of those. My working… Read More »
Hardware revisions I get asked a lot about the state of my new QL-SD, so here’s an update. The new external QL-SD variant (henceforth called “QL-SD ROM”) went through a lot of revisions: This series also exemplifies my progress as a PCB-designer. I’ve never formally learned to create PCBs, so it’s all learning by doing.… Read More »
As a developer I wouldn’t exactly say that I thrive on pressure but it certainly is an important element in getting stuff done. QPC2 v5 has been in the works for over three years and I wanted to release it for almost as long, but there has always been this one more bug to fix… Read More »