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Midlands RISC OS Show

This Saturday sees the Midlands User Group Midlands Midsummer Mugshow in Kenilworth, Warwickshire. All the usual suspects will be there including [commence lazy cut and paste] RISCOS Ltd, ROOL, RComp, CJE, Drag 'n Drop, Soft Rock Software, Orpheus, Qercus, Steve Fryatt Software, Netsurf, MathMagical, Serious Statistical Software [end cut and paste] and of course the Midland User Group themselves.

Entrance fee is a pound, free to kids.

More info on the MUGs website - no, they really do call themselves MUG, it's not like I'm calling you saddos or something...

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RISC OS on The Register

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"?

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Wakefield 2010 photos and tweets

Thanks to the Wakefield RISC OS Computer Group for putting on another great show - the turnout was good and the atmosphere was relaxed and friendly. Sorry, there's no detailed show report from me this year, but to give you an idea of what went on here's a summary of the tweets that I posted throughout the day, interspersed with various comments from the peanut gallery Scroll down for my photos from the show (and Joel Rowbottom has uploaded more here).

Live tweets (as they happened)

9:14 AM - It's a lovely day, and I'm going to spend it stuck indoors looking at dusty old computers.
10:18 AM - There are train spotters on the table next to me. I have been outgeeked.
10:29 AM, Matthew Somerville - @monkeyson Thought I'd take a look at csa.misc for nostalgia sake. Doesn't appear that anything has changed
11:28 AM - Nice chat with Vince from SoftRock Software. Hope I've got the company name right, Vince! ;)
11:30 AM - Warning message from Windows on ROL's theatre Virtual PC about anti virus software not being installed. Marvellous.
11:34 AM - Debating what to do for the future. Apple may takeover ARM - may not supply chips to competitors?
11:36 AM - Questions about Virtual Acorn on iPad - won't happen because VA is for Intel. Would need to be native; can't get to the hardware.
11:37 AM - ROL not set up as a hardware company. Hardware partners must ask for platform to be supported.
11:39 AM - ROL target for now is VA, Risc PC, A7000 and A9home. Not for iyonix/netbook - would need heavily optimising.
11:42 AM - New in RISC OS 6.20 - sliding windows/menus. Task display with new sections and memory bars.
11:44 AM - This isn't a new version for the show - they were hoping to have something ready but it, er, isn't.
11:45 AM - System info tool draws pie charts. Uses Draw library for generating charts - API will be made available.
11:46 AM, John Hoare - @monkeyson *slow hand clap*
11:48 AM - Paul Middleton is showing off all the ways you can display a desktop wallpaper - stretch, fit, tile etc.
11:49 AM - Filer windows have toolbars and side panel preview. Configuration tool for installing additional toolbars.
11:52 AM - ROL planning to store caches of filer thumbnails. Internal debates about implementing hidden files (using a character prefix).
11:55 AM - Do people still use RISC OS for anything other than changing file types, looking at desktop clocks and reallocating system memory?
12:02 PM - Draw application doesn't have user interface for the back end charting facility. Instead we are shown how to resize a rectangle.
12:05 PM - That's it. The grand finale was a demo of keyboard navigation in the Filer and failing to play an incompatible MPEG.
12:07 PM, Matthew Somerville - @monkeyson Ooh, keyboard navigation in the filer. I needed that in 1999!
12:10 PM - Paul says that RO6 is being abstracted into standalone modules, RO5 is one big kernel. Not practical to merge the two.
12:11 PM - "Can you tell us what will be in the next version?" "No." People nodding and agreeing about bugs in the floating point emulator.
12:16 PM - Another groundbreaking feature: "Filer now shows incomplete files as DEAD rather than DEAD DEAD". #riscos
12:28 PM - VPod looks good - lots of colours, hi res desktops. If you buy/have RO6 for your RPC today get a VPod too :)
1:15 PM - http://twitpic.com/1i17fi RISC OS running on two tiny Beagleboards.
1:17 PM - ROOL are pleasantly surprised that there are new people interested in RISC OS. (Not lapsed ex-Acorn types - new ones!)
1:42 PM - Packed theatre for Martin's talk on ArtWorks. Good demo of the new features.
1:50 PM - Question from the audience about scaling shadows with objects. "Ah!" says Martin. "You have found the first bug!"
1:51 PM - Our radio mikes have been hijacked by a pirate wedding party on another floor!
1:52 PM - To the party: "If you can hear me but can't see me, why not come up to the board room for a really interesting talk on ArtWorks!"
1:54 PM - ArtWorks: Copy and paste of attributes (line colour, shadows, etc) from one element to the other looks really useful.
2:02 PM - And the disco is back sharing our radio mike! I hope they are pleased that Martin will implement selective attribute pasting later.
2:14 PM - Demo of the new Postscript3/PDF drivers. Much quicker and image quality is leagues ahead of the old Acorn driver. Looks perfect!
2:25 PM, Eric Rucker - @monkeyson Doubtful that govts. would allow Apple to buy ARM. ARM has said it's not happening, too.
2:25 PM, Eric Rucker - @monkeyson Not to mention that Apple doesn't allow apps that can run arbitrary code, including emulators.
2:56 PM - ROOL talking about optimised ARM media players for Android devices etc that could be leveraged for RISC OS.
3:00 PM - Netsurf team say it's dishonest to come to shows and ask for donations if they have nothing to offer in return.
3:01 PM - ROOL joke during their talk: "Here's a demo of using Draw [on RPCEmu] because that's all people seem to do on RISC OS." :)
3:03 PM - ROOL: we are stewards of the project. We need someone like Chris Evans to come along and package it as a product.
3:04 PM - ROOL: but that might not be sustainable. Also looking for sponsors to invest in new projects. Will discuss in their forums.
3:08 PM - John Cartmell talks about RISC OS 6 with an almost religious fervour. He is very enthusiastic about it!
3:11 PM - Next Qercus is out next month. Also talked to Paul Beverley and Jim Nagel about Archive and people leaving coke on their stand.
5:28 PM, Vince M Hudd - Grr. Bah humbug! ;) RT @monkeyson Nice chat with Vince from SoftRock Software. Hope I've got the company name right, Vince! ;)
6:01 PM - Back home. Thanks to Derek Baron for giving me a lift after I missed the last shuttle bus. :)
7:21 AM, Gavin Crawford - @monkeyson Thanks for all the tweets from wakefield 2010. It was like being there - but much less depressing!

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Wakefield Show this Weekend

The fifteenth Wakefield Show will take place this weekend in, er, Wakefield. It runs from 10.30am to 4pm this Saturday, and a ticket will set you back a fiver (free for children).

There are quite a few exhibitors confirmed, including both RISC OS Ltd and RISC OS Open. The former will have the latest versions of RISC OS SIX, while the latter will be demonstrating the latest builds of the open source Beagleboard port, and possibly even a Touchbook running RISC OS. Other highlights will (hopefully) include:

NetSurf 2.5, including all the latest improvements and fixes
Messenger Pro 6 - lots of updates to the leading commercial email client for RISC OS
Latest versions of MW Software's applications, including the new PostScript 3 printer drivers
Latest versions of CashBook, PrintPDF, Organizer 2, and other apps

There'll be theatre presentations from all the usual suspects, including ROOL, ROL, R-Comp and MW Software. For more information, head over to the website.

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Easier video playback on RISC OS?

Watching video on RISC OS isn't very easy. We've run an article here on how you can download and convert YouTube videos into a format RISC OS can understand. Though it's very clever, and the tools involved are actively developed, it's not as simple as clicking 'Play' in a browser window.

Improving this situation has been hampered up until now for two main reasons:

RISC OS hardware has been too slow to play back video at an acceptable rate;
RISC OS software hasn't supported popular codecs (formats), some of which are proprietary and expensive to license.

The first of these is already well on the way to being fixed. The Beagleboard is modestly powered in comparison to the average desktop PC, but it's perfectly capable of playing video at a decent rate. The diminutive boards have been shown running 720p video (a high-definition format) while running a Linux distribution - have a look here to see this in action.

The RISC OS port can't quite match that yet. All that might be about to change, though, due to the development of something called Theorarm. This is a library of routines to enable the playing of videos in the Ogg Theora format on ARM-based machines. Ogg Theora is a relatively new format, but it has some interesting features. Perhaps most importantly, it's entirely open source, so videos encoded using the technology can be played back by any suitably-written software. Moreover, Theora is one of the contenders for the [video] tag in the new HTML5 specification. That means that it may become a significant rival to the more common MPEG and Flash videos on the web.

Theorarm is interesting, as it's been optimised for newer ARM chips using hand-written assembly code. This makes it very fast. The developer, Robin Watts (of Warm Silence Software fame) has done some development work on the Beagleboard, with promising results: "With post processing disabled, I can play a PAL DVD sized film (720x576x25fps, 48kHz stereo audio track) in realtime with software YUV2RGB. The limited profiling I've done, along with some back-of-an-envelope maths suggests that we should just about be able to do 720p films if the YUV2RGB process is done by hardware." That means, in English, that DVD-quality film can be played back on a Beagleboard with decent audio too. If some of the complex conversions from YUV colour format to RGB could be carried out in hardware, then higher definition films could be played.

This is pretty exciting stuff for Beagleboard owners. If Theorarm is ported to RISC OS (and there's no reason, other than developer time and effort, why it couldn't be), then we'd have the basis of a fast, native video playback system. Some issues would require addressing, of course, since RISC OS can't handle the Beagleboard's YUV facility - see here for Jeffrey Lee's proposals to fix this - but these are all surmountable.

If anyone is interested in getting involved, then the ROOL project is the place to start. In particular, the proposals for working on the GraphicsV vector need attention from developers with the right level of experience, and the draft API on the ROOL site could do with some more exposure.

A few years ago, RISC OS lacked fast hardware, a half-capable browser and a media player capable of showing popular streaming video formats. The first two are being actively addressed - what are the chances that the last one will be as well?

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Software migrates to the Beagleboard

There's been a fair bit of effort to get RISC OS software working on ROOL's port of RISC OS to the Beagleboard and other OMAP-driven boards. The shift from software that works on the Iyonix to software that works on the OMAP family isn't as big as the shift to 32-bit of a few years ago, but there are still some issues. Most importantly, the OMAP family of processors use the 'ARMv7' specification, which means that certain instructions that work on the Iyonix's IOP processor (or earlier) fall over.

The ease of fixing a recalcitrant application depends on how it's been written. If the app's written in BASIC, then all should be well. If it's written in C, then a recompile with the latest version of the GCC or Norcroft tools should fix it. If you've got some hand-crafted assembler to cope with, then the process is a bit more involved. There's a full list of these technical issues here.

As time goes on, more and more software is having fixes applied to enable compatibility. Over the last few days, David Pilling's Ovation Pro and SparkFS have been updated to work with the new hardware. The text editor Zap has also been fixed, though there's not an official release of this yet. Apps like NetSurf, KinoAMP, ArtWorks and RDPClient already work, and there's some indication that EasiWriter and TechWriter will soon join the list.

More details on the applications that work on the new hardware platform can be found here. Hopefully this list will keep on growing. Meanwhile, at least one RISC OS user is happy with the experience of using the BeagleBoard...

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Hey, where's our cake?

We celebrated the 10th anniversary of our first article on March 10th. Where were you? Come to think of it, where were we? Yeah, we forgot about it too (but we are getting on a bit).

In fact we even forgot to renew the domain and didn't notice until this morning when some spammers called NUTFACE tried to hijack the site. Normal service has now been resumed, so expect our next article shortly before Christmas.

So then, thanks to everyone who contributed to TIB and Acorn Arcade over the years: Graham Allen, F. Antonides, Alasdair Bailey, Christopher Beesley, John Cartmell, Simon Challands, Graham Crockford, Harry Decker, Michael Drake, Andrew Duffell, Richard Foster, Tim Fountain, Marco Frissen, Glyn Furlong, Rob Gibson, Richard Goodwin, Jess Hampshire, Andrew Harmsworth, Jon Hall, John Hoare, Alex Holloway, Graham Howell, Peter Howkins, Tanya Jones, Lee Johnston, Jeffrey Lee, Alisdair McDiarmid, Keith McKillop, Phil Mellor, Mentat, Paul Middleton, Matt Nicholls, Max Palmer, Andrew Poole, Geoff Potter, Theodore Rimspoke, Jon Robinson, James Shaw, Alex Singleton, Dave Sloan, Matthew Somerville, Andy Spence, James Stevens, Musus Umbra, Paul Vigay, Chris Wraight, Chris Williams, Eddie Willson, Nathan Wrath and Nick Wright.

Apologies to anybody we missed, and a big thanks to both our readers and forum members too.

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APDL make their PD catalogue available for free download

APDL, long-time distributor of Public Domain and not-so Public Domain software, have taken the next logical step from distributing their PD/freeware collection on floppy disc or CD and have begun distributing it online instead. Apart from the obvious advantage to the end-user of being able to access the software immediately, APDL have also decided to forgoe charging any nominal download fees, making the archive truly free.

Of course the age of much of the software is likely to make its relevance somewhat limited (especially if it's not 32bit compatible, or even StrongARM compatible) - but by making the archive available free of charge APDL have given Acorn preservation enthusiasts a big helping hand, and for that this move should be applauded.

APDL point out that not all the software from their PD/freeware catalogue has found its way online yet, so some patience may be necessary if your favourite bit of software is missing.

Links

Newsgroup announcement
APDL's PD library main page
APDL's commercial software catalogue - much of which is also available for download (although not for free, obviously!)

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Furber talks ARMs

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.

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Lego Madness

Ever since Jeffrey Lee began work on porting RISC OS to developer boards such as the BeagleBoard and IGEPv2 there's been interest in putting a case around them to make them into proper computers. Both ports are still firmly in progress, so a finished-off A9-style computer isn't likely to appear for some time. That hasn't stopped some hobbyists having a go at making their own. This one looks particularly impressive:

There are more pics and description here on the ROOL forums. The nutBOX comes hot on the heels of Dave Thomas's lego housing for his IGEPv2 here, first reported on riscos.info.

There's still some way to go before the RISC OS OMAP port is stable enough to drive a general purpose computer suitable for everyday use, but in the meantime, plenty of people are having fun with what already exists...

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