Last month Alan Peters surprised everyone by announcing that TBA Software are back from the dead. Their back catalogue includes AXIS (which was awarded five stars by Acorn 32-Bit Gaming), Formula Two Thousand (FTT), Cyber Ape, Cobalt Seed, and BHP [Review].

TBA Software are sharing their progress on a new blog. Already they have released a 32-bit only version of their high performance image filing system, TBAFS.

They have started to produce a 32-bit version of their 3D graphics library and game runtime, TAG, and they are working on using extra features of modern ARMv7 CPUs to make it run even faster.

Another member of the TBA Software team, Martin Piper [Interview], has managed to render levels from BHP on Windows. Alan is hoping to get BHP running on the BeagleBoard XM in the near future.

In other news, the excellent RISC OS classic Inferno [Review] has been released for Apple iOS devices. There's no mention of support for Android devices. Paradise's website claims that Inferno is their "very first iPhone title", so perhaps we will see Overload [Review] and the long awaited Pocket Money / Toybox Dreams [Preview] make their way over to modern handheld devices too.

 

Tech-centric news site The Register have an article up that gives a brief overview of Acorn, the BeagleBoard, and the fact that RISC OS runs on it. Not exactly new news to the average RISC OS user, but the article is still worth a look just for to see the comments from old hands such as Eddie Edwards, Heyrick, and Hugo Tyson, and some extra trivia tidbits linked to by commenter jlocke.
 
Now, who wants to be the first to enlighten Peter Gathercole that adding (working) pre-emptive multitasking to RISC OS is in no way "trivial"?
 

There's an interesting article up here with Steve Furber, one of the designers of the BBC Micro and ARM processor. It's been linked to from Slashdot, which is where we came across it.
 
There's some background in there on the development of the original ARM designs, as well as the StrongARM and the current SpiNNaker project, an attempt to come up with a more biologically based style of computation.
 
All fascinating stuff, and especially so at the moment with the explosion of ARM-based computers out there.
 

The RISC OS user base has always been a bit schizophrenic. Even in the 90s - the period when the OS had its greatest mainstream success - RISC OS users were a diverse bunch. Most OSes had a clearly defined stereotypical user: Windows was for business-types, Macs for design gurus, Amigas/STs for gamers and Linux/UNIX for developers and academics. RISC OS never had a clear rationale. Many users came from the education sector, others from the scientific community, and a few were home computing enthusiasts.
 

This was going to be a pretty dry fluff piece about the gaming events going on in my home city, something I'd pop in to between renewing my travel pass and getting some new shoelaces.  Then something slightly surreal happened to me.
 
I've just spent around an hour in the company of one of the men partly responsible for getting me into computers in the first place.  And I didn't recognise him.
 

There has been much discussion in the forum about Micro Men, a short film written by Tony Saint that was shown on BBC4 last week. The film is based on real events, and tells of the rivalry between Sir Clive Sinclair and Acorn Computers in the 1980s.
 
Chris Williams of drobe.co.uk has written an excellent a review of the film, and interviewed the film's producer, Andrea Cornwell, to find out more about the show.
 
Link: Micro Men (on iPlayer, available until 21st October 2009)
 

Acorn World - now there's a name from the past. The final show was cancelled in 1998 when Acorn closed its workstations division - now it's back thanks to Dave Moore and the Retro Reunited team. The show, held over the weekend at the Cedar Court Hotel in Huddersfield, offered a range of vintage games consoles and bizarre Acorn hardware hacks. The Acorn scene was mostly 8-bit oriented although there was some RISC OS coverage too.
 

The 2009 Wakefield Show takes place today.

• Stuart Tyrrell Developments' have unveiled their VPod graphics accelerator. For £149, the podule card for the Risc PC range of computers features hardware acceleration and high resolutions such as 1680x1050 in 16 million colours.
• NetSurf 2.0 has been released and is available for download on the NetSurf website.
• RISC OS Open has been demonstrated running on a A7000 computer.

Link: Wakefield Show news (via Twitter)