The irony is that the constraint that you're talking about went away in the early 1980s when processors with more than just a single accumulator register became popular.
Sinclair QDOS is another, roughly contemporary but a few years earlier, example. The 68008 had far more general-purpose registers than the Z80, so the system call TRAPs in QDOS uniformly return an error code in D0 and up to three results in D1, D2, and D3.
I'm talking about Europe here.
In the 80s there was a sucessful wave of 8bit computers: ZX Spectrum, Commodore C64, MSX, Amstrad CPC 664, some of them more succesfull than others, but the next 8bit wave IMHO was far from successful.: Spectrum 128/+2, Sinclair QL, Commodore C128, MSX2,... Any thoughts about this?
I just found my Sinclair QL lurking at the back of the garage. It's going to take a bit of work to get it going again.
I built it into a metal toolbox to sit beside my desk and used a separate keyboard, which was borrowed from a VT100 and rewired to work with the QL.
My QL had not the usual 128 K of RAM, nor was it expanded to only 640 K, but I had 656 K, with an extra 16 K battery backed on a board which I could also use as an EPROM emulator when doing things with other micros. That board also contains a Dallas clock chip, so I didn't have to set the time everytime that I booted the machine up.
The extra 16 K of RAM was actually in the slot usually reserved for a ROM cartridge so it usually contained the dongle from Metacomco's port of the Lattice C compiler alongside a bit of extra code of my own.
#RetroComputing #SinclairQL #SinclairResearch #mc68008 #MC68000
GREAT! Joan Gayón has made a port of Jon Ritman's Batman to the #QL
Download it here:
https://sinclairqles.wordpress.com/2025/05/09/batmanql-descarga-download/
Source:
https://www.elmundodelspectrum.com/bombazo-el-clasico-batman-de-jon-ritman-llega-al-sinclair-ql/
I think too few #SinclairQL demos use the #QL’s own rather eccentric sound chip, instead using the generic and boring #AY extension board!
Even finding exact specs of how the parameters affect sound output is a chore, with many missing spots. Sounds like an interesting challenge.
Our first #SinclairQL entry into the Games That Weren't archives, with Bar National. A 1980s night club life simulator by Swedish brothers Jens and Mattias Thorsen. Jens went on to work on the successful Backpacker series in Sweden during the mid-1990s.
Taking a look at ICE, a little known GUI for the Sinclair QL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dlu6yMa4H0I
This $2K mechanical keyboard seems familiar...
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/12/2100-mechanical-keyboard-has-800-holes-nyc-skyscraper-looks/
@hanshuebner @kolli can you explaun what you have connected? Looks interestind, especially the microdruve of the #SinclairQL :)
Today I learned about sQLux [1], an emulator which is an evolution of uQlx [2]… I’ll have a look at it later!
[1]: https://github.com/SinclairQL/sQLux
[2]: https://github.com/dkronst/uqlx-linux
In Memory of Sir Clive Marles Sinclair who left us in year 2021 
In Memory of Sir Clive Marles Sinclair who left us in year 2021
The COMMODORE community pays tribute to this Great Man!
In Memory of Sir Clive Marles Sinclair who left us in year 2021
In Memory of Sir Clive Marles Sinclair who left us in year 2021
In Memory of Sir Clive Marles Sinclair who left us in year 2021
The Sinclair C5 is a small one-person battery electric recumbent tricycle.
In Memory of Sir Clive Marles Sinclair who left us in year 2021
In Memory of Sir Clive Marles Sinclair who left us in year 2021
In Memory of Sir Clive Marles Sinclair who left us in year 2021
El SuperBASIC del #SinclairQL era tan distinto al BASIC que Sinclair estuvo tentado de cambiarle el nombre. No lo hizo por razones de márquetin.
I was a little chary of the Amstrad form factor, I really didn't like the Amstrad CPC family, and I had to pick my nose and swallow my pride when Amstrad finally delivered a Spectrum with a floppy drive.
But if you think of it, the form factor was actually invented by Sinclair with the QL. Wrong storage device though!
