QPC2

QPC II originated as an emulator for the Sinclair QL home computer, but is now the leading platform to run SMSQE, the successor of the Sinclair QDOS operating system. This emulator is written by Marcel Kilgus and it is the easier platform to use SMSQE if you already own an PC compatible computer.

Tony Tebby, the original QDOS developer, did write a successor to the original QDOS system called SMSQE. While the first very early test versions of QPC were based on QDOS all official releases are based on SMSQE 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 SMSQE version for native hardware, instead Marcel Kilgus have adapted SMSQE (including all drivers) to QPC's needs so that both can work together as smoothly as possible.

Furthermore there are some features Marcel 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 Windows 95, Windows 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, XP and Windows 10.

Linux users may also enjoy QPC2 as it runs perfectly under Wine apart from not being able to access floppy discs – inbuilt or USB – but it can read floppy _images_ created using qltools or the Linux dd utility.

Thanks to Marcel's innovative QPCPrint you can capture the printer output from QPC2 and easily print it from any connected Windows printer.