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Help new QD owner

Posted: Thu Oct 15, 2020 6:51 pm
by Jo Even
My new MZ 800 comes with a QD and some disks. I know nothing about QD, and I found that most of the disks I got (including the original BASIC disk) are unreadable. How do I create a working BASIC disk? Somehow I must transfer the 800 QD BASIC to a real quickdisk, but how?

Re: Help new QD owner

Posted: Fri Oct 16, 2020 7:06 pm
by ysblokje
Hi Jo,

use QF to format a disk (side) and then use QX to load a program from tape that will then be copied to disk.

This should get you started. Also I used the black ribbon cable to jumper the pin of the cassette connection on the motherboard to be able to use the 3,5mm input jack to stream mzf /wav files to the machine in an effort to save the tapes from getting destroyed during my tests this summer.

Good luck!

Re: Help new QD owner

Posted: Sat Oct 17, 2020 6:43 pm
by Jo Even
Thanks! I now have a working BASIC disk :) I'm sure these QD commands are documented somewhere, but I could not find anything.

Re: Help new QD owner

Posted: Sat Oct 17, 2020 11:30 pm
by ysblokje
I did a quick check in the technical reference (page 121) :

QL : load
QS : save
QC : copy
QF : format
QX : transfer
QD: directory

And I rember putting flappy on disk 10 or 11 ;) I never got around to "restoring" the original disks.

Re: Help new QD owner

Posted: Sun Oct 18, 2020 8:27 am
by Jo Even
Indeed, Flappy and the assembler/debugger-disks were the only working ones. When looking more closely at the disks it's not hard to see why, most of the disks are heavily worn. I formatted the original BASIC disk and copied BASIC to it, but loading fails almost every time.

Geir - who has bought the QD off me but not collected it yet - has bought 40 NIB disks for it, so I guess this won't be a problem for him :)

Re: Help new QD owner

Posted: Sun Oct 18, 2020 9:25 pm
by ysblokje
Jo Even wrote: Sun Oct 18, 2020 8:27 am Geir - who has bought the QD off me but not collected it yet - has bought 40 NIB disks for it, so I guess this won't be a problem for him :)
Sheer madness! Did he eat some bad herring ;)
I was quite on the fence on buying either a unicard or building a QD emulator like was featured on the main site at some point or just taking out the QD mechanism and putting in a gotek (one of the reasons I wanted flashfloppy to work)
Instead I just bought a 3D printer on the cheapening and started learning some freecad.

Do enjoy the zooming / whining / clicking sound of the drive while you can :lol: