What is this QPC?

QPC is a software-only emulator that can turn a PC into a machine compatible to an old Sinclair QL computer. It is however far more advanced than the original "black box" you see here:

The QL came out in 1984 and was (like the Atari, Amiga and Macintosh) based on the magnificent Motorola 68k processor series. It already had a graphics display and a very advanced operating system (QDOS) which included features like pre-emptive multitasking (PCs needed 10 more years to introduce that).

Tony Tebby, the original QDOS developer, did write a successor to the original QDOS system called SMSQ/E. While the first very early test versions of QPC were based on QDOS all official releases are based on SMSQ/E and profit hugely of its features like

• Highly efficient pre-emptive multitasking
• The popular SBasic programming language
• Higher screen resolution (up to 4096x4096 is supported)
• High colour (16 bit = 65536 colour) support
• Pointer environment windowing system
• Hotkey system
• Toolkit II built in
• Hard disc access (using a virtual hard disc file)
• Floppy disc access (QDOS, TOS and MS-DOS format)
• 8 serial ports with up to 115200 baud
• 4 printer ports

QPC does not use any SMSQ/E version for native hardware, instead I adapted SMSQ/E (including all drivers) to QPC's needs so that both can work together as smoothly as possible.

Furthermore there are some features I specifically added for QPC like

• Access to native PC drives ("DOS device")
• Synchronization of Windows clipboard and Scrap extension
• Control of audio CDs
• Support for the SMSQ/E sampled sound system.

The emulation used is highly optimized and thus very fast. QPC1 for example is written in 100% assembler code! This version, however, suffers under some limitations of compatibility. It cannot run directly under Win95, Win NT, OS/2 or whatever. It requires a special DOS environment to work properly.

The situation has changed with the release of QPC2. This is a native Win32 application that runs happily under Windows 9x, ME, NT, 2000 and XP:

I think if you want to know more about QPC it's best to check out the demo version in the downloads section.