Steve Harrison, the original developer of the tracker player Q The Music, has produced a new RISC OS module which allows games to be played on old Archimedes systems hooked up to modern monitors or televisions. LCDGameModes patches the screen modes that games use on the fly, such that they work correctly with a VGA or SVGA compatible screen. The effect of this is to prevent scrambled displays and fix the aspect ratio of "letter-boxed" games.

The software is currently in public beta, and is being discussed over on the stardot forums. One post shows Elite and Star Fighter 3000 starting up on a 40inch Samsung Telly.

 

Another new site has appeared to fill the void left by Drobe.
 
'risc/pi' is aiming to keep users abreast of all the developments in the RISC OS and Raspberry Pi worlds.
 
Other sites which do a better job of keeping up-to-date than us include:

• RISC OS Blog
• RISCOSitory

It's also worth keeping an eye on the Announcements section of the RISC OS Open forum and the news aggregation site, RISC OS News Network.
 

Jonathan Duddington, author of the RISC OS e-mail client Pluto, has announced that as of now, Pluto is available for free. The project has been open-sourced, enabling other developers to take over maintenance of the software. Jonathan has also updated the program for ARMv7 compatibility, enabling it to run on the most modern hardware.
 
Pluto is written in C and lets users to manage their e-mails and usenet (newsgroup) subscriptions. It has a fast and consistent user interface with many options for sorting and organising articles, a built in editor for composing e-mails or news postings, and a search facility amongst other features. Thanks to Jonathan for his generosity. The lack of a powerful and free Mail user agent was one of the platform's shortfalls.
 
Jonathan also announced an update for his eSpeak text-to-audio speech synthesizer, enabling it to run on modern ARMv7 hardware.
 

The popular open-source RiscPC emulator RPCEmu has had an update. Version 0.8.10 is available now. The changes since the last release include various bug fixes and extensive under-the-bonnet refactoring in preparation for future improvements.
 
More work has been done on RISC OS Open Limited's IOMD RISC OS ROM for RiscPC class hardware and emulators such as RPCEmu. The IOMD ROM is now mostly complete. In related news, benchmarking has shown that RISC OS 5 runs faster under emulation than 26-bit versions of the OS.
 
As for Archimedes emulation, the open-source Archimedes emulator ArcEm was updated to version 1.50 at the end of last year. (Yes, we're a bit late with that.) An extensive change log details what's changed since the previous release. The main improvement between this release and the earlier ArcEm 1.50-alpha was to fix operation on the Raspberry Pi.
 

3QD Developments have confirmed the acquisition of RISC OS from RISCOS Ltd. In a statement, Aaron Timbrell of 3QD Developments stated "3QD Developments Ltd has purchased the rights to all versions of RISC OS developed and marketed by RISCOS Ltd. This purchase has been made with the assistance of a number of RISCOS Ltd shareholders, customers and developers."
 
Aaron went on to confirm that it is "unlikely that RISCOS Ltd will be able to continue beyond the short term." The purchase of RISC OS by 3QD Developments will ensure the supply of products such as VirtualAcorn which relied on ROM Images from RISCOS Ltd.
 
Aaron moved to reassure current RISCOS Ltd customers, stating "The effective change for RISCOS Ltd customers should be zero and I had already discussed matters with the two other commercial customers before our purchase."
 
"Sales of physical stock, such as ROMS for RiscPC/A7000, books, upgrade CDs etc will be handled by APDL in London."
 
"Digital downloads will continue to be available from the riscos.com website."
 
Note: The acquisition of RISCOS Ltd's branch of RISC OS has no impact on the work of RISC OS Open Ltd's shared source version of RISC OS.
 
Links:

• RISCOS.com

 

Justin Fletcher has recently started posting some very in-depth and interesting articles on his website detailing various developments within RISC OS during his time as a developer for RISCOS Ltd. The articles cover a range of topics and offer a unique insight into some of the inner workings of both RISC OS and RISCOS Ltd. as well as some other RISC OS related topics, such as the RISC OS ports of the games Doom, Heretic and Hexen.
 
Currently, Justin is posting an article each weekday (and has been since the beginning of December).
 
You can take a look at the articles on Justin's website.
 

Here's a quick round up of some of the recent activities in the RISC OS world.

London Show reminder

Next weekend, Saturday the 27th of October, is the date for this years London show. The show is to be held at the usual location of the St Giles Hotel in Feltham, London, and will be open from 11AM to 5PM. Tickets cost £5 on the door.
 
Although the theatre presentation schedule isn't yet available, the exhibitor's list is. Apart from all the usual subjects you should also keep an eye out for ROOL's first official, stable release of RISC OS for the Raspberry Pi.

ROOL updates

As mentioned above, the first stable release of RISC OS for the Raspberry Pi is expected to be unveiled at this years London show. The port has come on a long way since it was first shown at last years show, and is now pretty much on par with the other platforms with regards to features and usability. The distribution is to be available in the form of an SD card complete with ROM image, !Boot sequence, and a selection of pre-installed software, based around the work Chris Hall and others have placed into the Pi alpha distro.
 
Other news from ROOL in recent months includes:

• The release of SDFS, an SD card filing system for all the modern machines (BeagleBoard/ARMini, PandaBoard, Raspberry Pi)
• The release of several 32bit compatible NIC drivers for the RiscPC/A7000 (previously the IOMD port of RISC OS 5 had no drivers available, except under emulation)
• Work on step one of the multi-stage filing system improvements bounty has begun
• There have also been several performance improvements over the past few months - faster remapping of memory and shorter drive mount times, resulting in significantly shorter boot times for modern machines, faster font plotting, and last but not least a SmartReflex driver to allow the BeagleBoard-xM/ARMini to run at its full speed of 1GHz instead of 800MHz.

GCC 4.1.2 release 2 released

Hot on the heels of release 1 of GCC 4.1.2, the RISC OS GCCSDK team have released release 2, with a focus on fixing the bugs that were found in the initial release.

Emulation news

• Aemulor Pro now freely available for ARMv7 machines
  A new version of Aemulor Pro, compatible with all the modern ARMv7 machines (BeagleBoard, ARMini, PandaBoard, etc.) is now available to download free of charge from the Spellings website at http://buyit.spellings.net/. A Raspberry Pi compatible version is expected to appear in due course.
• ArcEm 1.50 alpha available
  The ArcEm team are back with a new website and a new alpha release. Compared to the previous 1.00 release there have been many significant improvements. In particular the RISC OS version is now ARMv6/ARMv7 compatible, and fast enough to play most Arc games at full speed on an Iyonix. Members of R-Comp's ARMini/BeagleBoard/PandaLand support schemes also have access to a more polished version of the emulator, and several games to play on it, under the moniker !AcornMode.
• Atari emulator Hatari ported to RISC OS
  In recent weeks Franck Martinaux has released a RISC OS port of version 1.6.2 of the Atari ST emulator Hatari. The emulator is reported to run at full speed on BB-xM, and is available from Franck's website at http://www.norisc-nofun.co.uk/software.html.

 

The Register has a nice write-up charting the rise and fall of the Archimedes range. OK, so some of it was cribbed from Chris Whytehead's Acorns site (with credits), but it's nice to see a 4-page writeup on a major tech website.
 
We have cake here in the office, but apparently it's not for this, it's for something else going on next week.