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Old games on new screens

Thu, 16 May 2013 15:42:00 GMT

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.

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New RISC OS news web site

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 18:16:00 GMT

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:

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.

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Mail client Pluto updated, open-sourced

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 10:39:00 GMT

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.

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Emulation roundup

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 10:05:00 GMT

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.

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3QD Developments acquire RISC OS from RISCOS Ltd

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 13:29:00 GMT

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

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Justin Fletcher's RISC OS Rambles

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 12:42:00 GMT

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.

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Newsround

Sat, 20 Oct 2012 17:30:00 GMT

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.

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Archimedes is 25!

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 07:53:00 GMT

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.

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Wakefield show reminder

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 00:17:00 GMT

This is a quick reminder that the 2012 Wakefield show is to be held next weekend, on Saturday the 28th of April. The show will be open between 10:30 and 4:30, at the usual venue of the The Cedar Court Hotel in Wakefield.

For more details, including a list of exhibitors, please see the show website.

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Newsround

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 19:00:00 GMT

RISC OS 5.18 released

RISC OS Open have announced the release of their latest stable release of RISC OS, version 5.18 to be precise. This update features no less than 340 improvements since the last official release and has been officially vetted by Castle Technology for the Iyonix PC and R-Comp Interactive for their ARMini.

The new ROM image should be able to upgrade all versions of RISC OS from version 5.07 or later and is provided with a flash programming tool (for Iyonix users), which also takes a backup of the previous version just incase you wish to go back.

The OMAP3 (i.e. ARMini) version of the operating system now supports hardware CMOS memory fitted on a carrier board plugged into one of the headers on the motherboard. This permits saving of common configuration settings which will be retained when the power is off. CMOS memory carrier boards are available now from the ROOL store and are suitable for use on the original Beagleboard, Beagleboard-xM, and Pandaboard.

As the ROMs now several new modules, some of the module location numbers have changed. Because the *UNPLUG settings only remember the module location numbers you may need to review any unplugged modules after the upgrade to ensure the desired ones are unplugged, and that crucial modules are not left unplugged by mistake.

For the full release notes and download/installation instructions, please see the ROOL press release.

Raspberry Pi released

The Raspberry Pi Foundation have launched their much anticipated, and dirt cheap computer, the Raspberry Pi. The machine is currently being sold through a number of electronic retailers, namely Farnell, RS Components, and Allied Electronics. However overwhelming demand for the device means that it may take a month or two for production to ramp-up and all backorders to be filled.

The Raspberry Pi is a single-board computer developed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The foundation plans to release two versions, priced at �16 and �22. The Raspberry Pi is intended to stimulate the teaching of basic computer science in schools and has been designed for use with the Linux operating system, although a port of RISC OS to the machine is already underway.

The design is based around a Broadcom BCM2835 SoC, which includes a 700MHz ARM1176JZF-S processor, VideoCore IV GPU, and 256 Megabytes of RAM. The design does not include a built-in hard disk or solid-state drive, instead relying on an SD card for booting and long-term storage.

MPlayer ported to RISC OS

Chris Gransden has ported the popular cross-platform media player and encoder MPlayer to RISC OS, this significant advancement means that RISC OS can now fully play MP4 and other mainstream video formats.

Chris� port is a direct build of the Linux sources and does not feature much RISC OS integration as of yet. It makes a good attempt at playing most MPEG, VOB, AVI and WMV formats, plus many others. You can expect reasonable frame rates up to 480p resolution on recent RISC OS hardware which currently includes Beagleboard and Pandaboard based machines.

Bundled along with the MPlayer download is MEncoder, which is a simple movie encoder, designed to encode MPlayer-playable movies.

You can download this latest version of MPlayer from the riscos.info website here.

Updates galore

Version 3.38 of OpenVector, OpenGridPro and DrawPlus has been released. These applications are all open-source enhancements to Draw, providing enhanced layering and object library capabilities as well as the ability to draw advanced grids and other object layouts. This release features improved compatibility with Cortex-A8 hardware such as the ARMini and BeagleBoard. Compressed drawfiles and libraries can now be loaded when alignment exceptions are enabled. Consistency of layered merging has also improved.

Version 1.71 of PlayIt, a disc-based engine for playing sound samples, has been released. It is used as a resource by several audio players including DigitalCD. This new update contains no new functionality but several significant bugfixes, increased 26/32bit neutrality, and changes for ARMv7 compatability.

BarFree from Bernard Veasey has been updated to work on RISC OS 5.18, BarFree copies revised �Messages� and �Templates� files to your �PreDesk� directory within its own directory called �Free� to enable different style Free Space windows.

Charm has been updated to version 2.5.3 to add support for 'new' and 'delete' keywords for allocating and releasing storage for records. Charm is a high level programming language with a compiler than generates efficient code with a small memory footprint.

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