As you may or may not already know, over the past few weeks I've been working on improving the performance of RISC OS 5's USB mass storage drivers. Although RISC OS Open have yet to make an official announcement about the availability of the drivers, they are in fact available for download now from the ROOL website.
 
Read on for some brief benchmarks, and instructions on how to install the drivers on your Iyonix.
 
 

As most of you probably know by now, a few months ago I started work on porting RISC OS Open's RISC OS kernel to TI's OMAP3 platform - a group of SoC's (Systems on a Chip) which use ARM Cortex-A8 cores. To date, OMAP3 SoC's have been confirmed as being used in various products, including the Pandora handheld gaming console, the Touch Book convertible netbook/tablet, and the BeagleBoard development board. For years RISC OS users have been asking for a new portable RISC OS machine, and soon they may find that they have several available.
 
 

A while ago you may remember that I wrote an article about video conversion for RISC OS, and near the end raised the topic of video conversion on RISC OS using a port of ffmpeg. Although the version of ffmpeg I originally tried on RISC OS was old and broken, Christopher Martin obviously thinks there's some merit to this approach, as he has recently produced !FFmpeg, a working port of ffmpeg for RISC OS.
 
Once more in the interests of SCIENCE, I threw a few test videos at !FFmpeg and measured its performance against that of a similar version of ffmpeg running on my Windows PC.

 

If you've got a lot of TV programmes or other video clips on a PC, chances are you'll be wanting to be able to play them on RISC OS as well. This article will explain how to use free tools to convert them to a suitable format for playback on RISC OS. Furthermore the process can be fully automated, so is ideal for processing large collections.
 
 

A port of Firefox 2 for Castle Technology's IYONIX PC has been released by Peter Naulls. This release comes after users contributed the 1000 GBP that Peter had asked for to fund the development.
 
Peter would like to thank all those who contributed, but he is still after another 4000 GBP to release a further update with integration to RISC OS, and fixing some other issues. This release is targeted for Christmas day if the contributions meet the target.
 
A port for Advantage Six's A9home computer has not been ruled out subject to financial interest, and Peter is asking people interested in a port for any RISC OS platform to email him.
 
Update: Rob Kendrick has released a patch that allows the IYONIX Firefox port to run on the A9home by providing emulation for the XScale-specific instructions to a fudged copy of the Firefox executable.
 
Link:
RISC OS Firefox
 

News just in, Mozilla Firefox 2 is now working on the Iyonix and may be ready for release quite soon!
 
As before, donations totalling £1000 are required to fund the work that has been required to release this version which may lack HTTPS support.
This new version is apparently a bit faster and more stable than the last release (Firefox 1.5b5)
 
Also, subject to an extra £4000 funding on top of the above, further development can also be secured to give full RISC OS integration, including:

• Unicode fonts
• plug-in support
• RISC OS widget usage (?)
• Speed improvements

Lucky Iyonix users!
An A9 version is also being considered depending on the level of interest.
 
No other version is currently planned.
Full details can be found on the Firefox page at the RISC OS.info website.
 

Once again it's time for the Wakefield show, the 11th one to be exact. Just for you lucky punters, roughly 30 exhibitors will be attending the show this year, and as usual the theatre has a packed programme throughout the day. In addition to this, there's also a "RISC OS in action" section, manned by Ian Chamberlain and sponsored by Qercus, which will have a number of demonstrations of RISC OS in use on A9 and Iyonix computers doing various tasks.

Exhibitors this year include Castle Technology, Genesys Developments, MW Software and the NetSurf development team, who will be demonstrating the latest developments on the open source browser.

VirtualAcorn will also be present, demonstrating their latest addition to their product family, VirtualRPC-SA, which provides emulation of the StrongARM processor in addition to the Arm710 processor it previously supported.

The theatre programme for this year's show is as follows:

Parking at Thornes Park Athletics Stadium is free, and entry to the show costs £6, with under 5 year olds getting in free (I'd imagine that's physical age, not mental age!) The show is open from 10am until 5pm on Saturday 13th of May.

If you're going to the show this year and would like to share your thoughts of the show with us, please get in touch!

Source: Wakefield Show
 

Now here's something you don't see every day: RISC OS on TV! Take a look at the screen capture linked on the right - what operating system do you see Edgar Stiles from 24 using? Perhaps he has an Iyonix hidden under his desk.
 
And what about this one with Jack Bauer? Why is he using the RISC OS Task Manager? Somebody get him chopper command!
 
Following a conversation on IRC, it turns out that a certain Mr Paul Vigay is (indirectly) responsible. As a UFO consultant for the movie Signs, PV took the opportunity to promote the benefits of his Risc PC to several TV tech bods in the US - in particular, one Steven Lloyd, now a digital compositor working on several Fox TV shows, including 24. RISC OS has been used in TV and film production in the past, thanks to Uniqueway/RISCOS Ltd's Paul Middleton (listen to Podcast V for more details), often when "realistic" computer displays are needed (ie. not Windows). As RISC OS is completely unknown in America, it's easy to pass off the standard RISC OS desktop as something hi-tech!
 
If you've spotted RISC OS in the media, please get in touch.
 
Update: Spoilers.