Announcement from Andrew Rawnsley, 7th April, 2016.
No mention of eye of newt or toe of frog.
Fans of first person shooters should have a soft spot for Doom from id Software. While it wasn’t the first game of this type, it’s certainly one of the pioneer titles that helped popularise the genre, and led to a number of follow-ups and expansions. The game featured texture-mapped surfaces and varying room and level heights – a step up from the simpler Wolfenstein 3D, the previous game from the same company – as well as mood-setting MIDI music, and the ability to swap out the internal data files (WAD, which stands for “Where’s All the Data?”) with alternatives, featuring new levels.
The game engine was ported a number of platforms, including RISC OS, and a fully licensed commercial version was released and sold by R-Comp Interactive in 1998 – and last year the company released a new version of Final Doom, updated to work on modern RISC OS hardware, and benefiting from the option to use an MP3-based soundtrack rather than the original MIDI music. Continue reading »
It’s like a snippets post, but all for one developer!
Fat32FS, a filing system for USB mass storage devices, has been updated to version 1.40.
Announcing the update last week, developer Jeffrey Doggett explained that with this release the drive label can be changed from the menu, rather than having to use the command line, and that it also shows the partitions (if any) in use on the drive, and now partially supports extended partitions.
At the same time, Jeffrey announced version 1.11 of Doom, his port to RISC OS from the Linux sources of id Software’s classic first person shooter. This, explains Jeff, is to support the latest FreeDoom beta release. Continue reading »
The RISC OS Awards poll for 2016 was brought to a close on 29th February. As before, the results were processed and counted on a RISC OS computer (using a home-brewed program to turn the votes into a file for each category, ready to be loaded into Fireworkz), and initially announced on the @RISCOSitory Twitter feed. Those results are now online on the RISC OS Awards website and the various winners have been notified – where possible – by email. Continue reading »
Right, I’ve been up to Wakefield, had a cup of tea and a little walk, and now it’s… er, June!?
The annual trip to the North for RISC OS users – the Wakefield Acorn & RISC OS Computer Show – took place this year on 16th April, at the Cedar Court Hotel, Denby Dale, near Wakefield – the venue at which it originally started in 1996 before setting off for pastures new, and to where it returned some years ago and has remained ever since. Continue reading »
Organise it and they a handful of them will come.
It’s now been two weeks and a day since the Midlands Midsummer MUG Show 2013 took place, and people are telling me that it’s about time I sat down and wrote about it! Well, they aren’t, perhaps because I’ve already said in various places that I’m busy, but they’re probably thinking it. So here’s that report.
I’ve flicked a coin, and it told me to take an anti-clockwise tour around the show. Continue reading »
The Midlands Midsummer MUG show 2011 took place on Saturday 9th July, 2011, and was perhaps one of the quietest RISC OS shows I’ve attended in as long as I can remember, if not the quietest. However, in spite of the very small attendance by users, I did find myself reasonably busy for most of the day, having some fairly long chats with various people – mostly visitors, and some exhibitors, though often not about things RISC OS!
(For example, Martin Wuerthner and I discussed the joys of travelling down narrow country lanes; in my case often in my own car when venturing out for walks in the middle of nowhere, and having taken a wrong turn a couple of weeks ago and subsequently reversing quite a way before I could turn around, but trumped by Martin who was once a passenger on a coach whose driver had taken it down some wholly unsuitable lanes and had to somehow reverse it back out.)
Of course, this means that writing a show report is going to be somewhat challenging, with the only stand I can honestly write anything definitive about being my own – but that doesn’t mean I can’t try to write an interesting account of the day, so here goes!