Sinclair QL disks

I first learnt programming at around age 9 in the early 1990s, on a Sinclair QL. The native storage format for the QL was microdrive cassettes, which were notoriously unreliable, slow and had a tiny capacity. Fortunately, my QL was equipped with a trump card expansion card, providing additional memory and floppy disk storage.

Recently, I dumped the contents of some of my old floppy disks to files and wrote some scripts to decode the contents.

Filesystem format

The QL disk file system format is a modified version of the format used on the original microdrive cassettes. I have written about the filesystem format.

Scripts

Various scripts for extracting the contents of the disks. These are all written in Python.

Filesystem dumper. This reads QL disks that have been dumped using the Unix dd command, and extracts all of the files that it finds on the file system.
Image converter for image files in the QL screen format. This can be used to convert files stored using eg. SBYTES flp1_image, 131072, 32768 (which is used as an example in the QL manual) into PNG format files.

QL software

This is some software that I managed to extract from the disks:

arcade - Some kind of arcade game?
BOMBER
HARRY2 - "Hungry Harry", I seem to remember this was like pacman.
hunt - "Treasure Hunt, by Halvor Heuch"
startrek - A QL version of Star Trek
vampire - The Vampire's Castle Adventure
A disk of QL games including Psion Chess.

Raw disk images

Psion XChange office suite.
Various games (same contents as link above).

My own stuff

Various notable programs of my own creation

1ST - The first program I wrote
ai - Some kind of misguided attempt at artificial intelligence
house3 - Somewhat odd text adventure
qldos - An attempt at emulating MS/DOS!

Other stuff

A worm (I remember this program displayed a message saying "dedicated to new age music")